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16GB Is a Bad User Experience

david-smith.org

31–40 of 92 posts

Re: 16GB Is a Bad User Experience

#31

I ran into this recently. The 16 GB is an outright lie. First, a bunch is reserved for the OS and similar. The phone might only start out with 12 GB for the user. Second, a bunch just "disappears". Attach a phone to iTunes and it claims perhaps 2 GB free. But view the free space within the phone itself and it might only show 500 MB free. Huge discrepancies are inevitable, and it doesn't seem possible to find out how…

Honestly, that at least has improved significantly.

Re: 16GB Is a Bad User Experience

#33
post #3

He bought an iphone 6s as a testing device that would spend most of its life in a desk drawer! I hope this was a company expense or something? One of those would be like a weeks wages for me. I can't understand why people pay so much for smart phones anyway. And if your idiotic phone runs out of memory at the top of some mountain, "the moment isn't missed forever", the moment gets missed because you're mucking about…

"because you're mucking about with a stupid phone instead of enjoying the moment with your family." This, a thousand times over. Was at the beach last week, there was a seal sunbathing on a rock 50m from shore... Around me I could hear people complaining they couldn't see it properly - because all weren't looking at it, rather at the crappy digital zoom on their phones. I just looked at the fucking thing, these eye t…

I'd rather be present and use my meat-based memory than have a "memory" on my phone of an event I viewed through a glass, darkly.

Neal Stephenson, writing in 1999:

I was in Disney World recently, specifically the part of it called the Magic Kingdom, walking up Main Street USA. This is a perfect gingerbready Victorian small town that culminates in a Disney castle. It was very crowded; we shuffled rather than walked. Directly in front of me was a man with a camcorder. It was one of the new breed of camcorders where instead of peering through a viewfinder you gaze at a flat-panel color screen about the size of a playing card, which televises live coverage of whatever the camcorder is seeing. He was holding the appliance close to his face, so that it obstructed his view. Rather than go see a real small town for free, he had paid money to see a pretend one, and rather than see it with the naked eye he was watching it on television.

And rather than stay home and read a book, I was watching him.

Americans' preference for mediated experiences is obvious enough, and I'm not going to keep pounding it into the ground. I'm not even going to make snotty comments about it--after all, I was at Disney World as a paying customer.

Re: 16GB Is a Bad User Experience

#34
post #19

This would all be trivially solved if Apple would just put a goddamn SD card slot in it. Storage size as sole model differentiation is sooo 2001. At this point it genuinely makes Apple look out of touch in a market where every other flagship quality model doesn't bother with it and includes an SD slot, partly I suspect because it's just saner from a production and inventory standpoint even besides the consumer benefi…

It's worth noting that the Galaxy S6 / Edge / Active and the Note 5 have no SD slot. Apple definitely isn't alone in looking out of touch.

I stand corrected. I actually thought Samsung had ditched that "feature" a while ago.

Re: 16GB Is a Bad User Experience

#35
Of course 16Gb is an "uncomfortable" user experience. It's supposed to be.

It's about market segmentation.

It's not cost. 32gb memory units in bulk are like $1 maybe. Apple charges an extra $100 because they are using that easy-to-understand difference to segment the market and collect an extra $100 profit from those that can afford that price point.

Re: 16GB Is a Bad User Experience

#36
post #3

He bought an iphone 6s as a testing device that would spend most of its life in a desk drawer! I hope this was a company expense or something? One of those would be like a weeks wages for me. I can't understand why people pay so much for smart phones anyway. And if your idiotic phone runs out of memory at the top of some mountain, "the moment isn't missed forever", the moment gets missed because you're mucking about…

David Smith is a very successful independent iOS developer - so yes, this would be a business expense.

Re: 16GB Is a Bad User Experience

#37
Bad user experience depends on the user. Personally I very much enjoy the somewhat lower price of less-beefy models of smartphones and tablets — as I'm not obsessed with taking pictures, don't play blockbuster video games on mobile, and prefer my books as text, instead of audio files.

The title of the post is similar to saying e.g. "ARM CPU is bad UX", and complain that you can't mine Bitcoin effectively on ARM.

Re: 16GB Is a Bad User Experience

#38
post #4

Just write a script that would move all the videos and photos off the device when docked each night or each week. 1G a day for photo's and 3 video's should be enough for everybody, you don't have the time to rewatch them anyway. Less is more. Or just get an Android device with a microsd port; 128G is cheap.

I do have an Android device with 16G main memory and a 64G SD card. Despite having plenty of free space on the card, I pretty routinely run out of space on the 16G. That's because most apps can only install there, and many apps can't use the SD card for storing their data. Case in point, last week I discovered I had 2.3G of Audible files. I could find no obvious way of transferring them over to the free space on the SD card...

Re: 16GB Is a Bad User Experience

#39

Bad user experience depends on the user. Personally I very much enjoy the somewhat lower price of less-beefy models of smartphones and tablets — as I'm not obsessed with taking pictures, don't play blockbuster video games on mobile, and prefer my books as text, instead of audio files. The title of the post is similar to saying e.g. "ARM CPU is bad UX", and complain that you can't mine Bitcoin effectively on ARM.

The counterargument would be that your usage patterns are the niche ones. I suppose that's an empirical question. Does anyone have any numbers either way?

Re: 16GB Is a Bad User Experience

#40
One can't both consider that one's primary use of the iphone is to record pictures and videos and at the same time go for the model with the smallest possible disk size and then complain about the lack of space.

The premium Apple charges for larger disk space is ridiculously uncorrelated with the cost of the components but the solution to this is better competition.

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