Other They Stuck with 64gb Base Option

[aFlockaCgulz]

People keep quoting MANUFACTURER prices. What the effect on the phone price would be RETAIL price. I guess you want to buy an iPhone for $250?

No, I was just fleshing out a more substantial argument than others just saying "128GB could cost Apple the same as 64GB or it might not," or, that Apple sets the base price first and then sees what they can get away with. There's not a really good reason for Apple do go ahead and make the base storage 128GB, at this time.

I understand that more goes into the retail price of a product than just the BOM. It's the others that you're having to argue against, not me.

 

[ilikewhey]

How many millions of units of iPhones does Apple manufacture?
How much extra would it cost Apple to double the size of the storage from 64GB to 128GB for all iPhone Pros?
Let's run some numbers, using the iPhone XS family, since the iPhone Pro 11 is the direct successor to the XS.

https://www.businesstoday.in/techno...208-to-q2-2019-says-canalys/story/378376.html


https://news.ihsmarkit.com/press-re...ore-materials-last-years-smaller-iphone-x-ihs
View attachment 858154
From IHS Markit's BOM for the base 64GB iPhone XS Max, we can see that the phone had $40.75 in costs for both RAM and NAND. Assuming that the 4GB of LPDDR4x RAM costs $20, that means 64GB of storage is $20.75, or $0.324 per GB of storage. Doubling the storage from a base of 64GB to a base of 128 would cost an additional $20.736. Suppose that half of the 48 million XS phones were the "base" 64GB model. At an additional $20.736 per phone, times 24 million units, increasing storage in the base model from 64GB to 128GB means that it would cost Apple an additional $497,664,000. To Apple, that is like a rounding error. So, sure, they could do it, but why would they, when the vast majority of their customers are happy with their current offerings? $500 million is a lot of money that could be used for R&D for more iNnOvAtIvE products down the line, instead of giving customers storage that they'll never use on a device that they'll replace in a few years' time.

And that's not even raising the question if the companies that Apple sources NAND from would be able to fulfill that kind of order in a timely manner. An extra 64GB for 24 million units is an extra 1,536,000,000 GB, or an additional 1,500 petabytes.

There are lots of factors that needs to be taken into account before claiming that Apple is just stiffing customers with 64GB of storage. I'm sure that the legions of engineers and accounting and supply chain management has given this careful thought, and while it evidently pisses off a few people for whatever reason, what they're currently offering is the best balance between customer satisfaction, profit margins (because they are a business), and sourcing from suppliers.



Sure, NAND prices may be trending towards a record low, but I'd wager that companies like Apple do most of their purchasing under contract. If they signed a contract last year for last year's prices, then they're obligated to pay that price, unless the contract allows for price adjustments.

NAND price has been trending low for awhile now, what you said about under contract makes sense to me, but if they did not have a price adjustment clause in the contract they need to hire better attorneys, and based on economy of scale i don't think they have a fixed price contract clause.

 

[aneftp]

Exactly. Users should be given the choice of different storage options. I don't want a 128GB option if it's going to cost me more money at the expense of a cheaper 64GB option.

Yes for the iphone 11/xr 64 to 128 is a consumer choice

But Apple has been gaming the profit game big time forcing user to chose 64 to 256GB when 128GB is the sweet spot for past couple of years.

Prior to that it was 32GB and than no 64GB mid option.

It's still cheaper to get the base model and add 50gb of iCloud of if you need a little extra. Keeping your iPhone for 5 years would equal a total of $60 in iCloud vs paying an upfront $150 to get to 256gb.

u cannot compare iCloud usage vs having physical storage readily available on phone.

That 10 hour airplane ride. Nope. Can’t access iCloud. U need that storage physically available.

Personally I find iCloud useless. Because I’ve always manually backed up to iTunes on my Portable hard drive. And backup photos on the portable drive as well

Apple does a disservice to themselves by but allowing enough “free iCloud storage”. The common person doesn’t know how to disable x so to save space to perform just the critical iCloud system setting backup. Apple does this on purpose to annoy people cause they know people will hit the 5gb limit quickly and upsell. But the vast majority of people I know hit the limit. And still don’t want to pay for iCloud. And Apple doesn’t give them any tips to manually disable certain features of iCloud so they can fit the 5gb limit. Again. It’s the user experience and Apple does this on purpose to upsell. They can easily say

These are the options to free iCloud space
1. “delete old backup”
2. “Disable photos backup”
3. Or how about this.....use third party google photos to backup images though not full size but good enough and it’s free and most importantly frees up space

 

[aFlockaCgulz]

NAND price has been trending low for awhile now, what you said about under contract makes sense to me, but if they did not have a price adjustment clause in the contract they need to hire better attorneys, and based on economy of scale i don't think they have a fixed price contract clause.

Perhaps. But this is Apple, due to their size who knows what really goes on behind the scenes.

Remember earlier this year when Apple had to pay Samsung because they had a contract to purchase a certain number of screens but ended up not holding their end?

https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-apple-display-penalty-1001280/

 

[ilikewhey]

Perhaps. But this is Apple, due to their size who knows what really goes on behind the scenes.

Remember earlier this year when Apple had to pay Samsung because they had a contract to purchase a certain number of screens but ended up not holding their end?

https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-apple-display-penalty-1001280/

ha yeah, alot of apple fanboys got mad about it. but that was about not buying enough, not overbuying.

typically apple being so large, they source their NAND from several supplies, toshiba, samsung(probably not anymore) and others. and with their purchasing power i'm pretty sure they get even lower manufacturing price.

 

[russell_314]

No, I was just fleshing out a more substantial argument than others just saying "128GB could cost Apple the same as 64GB or it might not," or, that Apple sets the base price first and then sees what they can get away with. There's not a really good reason for Apple do go ahead and make the base storage 128GB, at this time.

I understand that more goes into the retail price of a product than just the BOM. It's the others that you're having to argue against, not me.

Well I don’t think anyone here knows the retail price but I was just using the $50 as example because it’s about what they charge for 64 GB when you upgrade to the 256 GB. In reality people are either going to buy an iPhone or not. No one is going to say well I wanted an iPhone Pro but since the base model doesn't have enough storage I'm going to get something else. I'm waiting for people to see how the regular iPhone 11 is vs the Pro before I spend my money. I expect YouTube videos to be out as soon as it ships.

 

[Geert76]

haha...10 pages later and nearly all options are described to justify just 64Gb storage in a $1000+ smartphone.

I am sure Tim Cook is proud of this topic, his marketing around this louzy base storage in 2019 worked for 110%

 

[cap7ainclu7ch]

I’m going from a 256GB iPhone X to a 64GB iPhone 11. I was going to go for 128GB until I checked my storage usage. I’m using 20GB of my 256, it’s insane how little I’m using and how little space everything takes up these days. Most people really don’t need more than 64GB as base, this isn’t a 16GB base situation.

I’m a very heavy user and I would still have 40GB free if I was using a 64GB. Unless you’re really doing a lot of stuff that uses tons of space I think 256GB is probably overkill on a phone.

I have a 256GB iPad Pro and use all of it but there’s zero point for me to have both and I don’t think I’m in the minority.

Yeah I'm going from a 256gb XS to a 64gb Pro after realizing just how powerful iCloud is for storage optimization. I wasn't planning on upgrading this year so I figured I'd save the $150 and try it out for a year. The base models are usually the best for resale value anyways. Should be able to sell the 11 Pro for at least $750 in a year.

I do think that the base Pro should undoubtably be 128gb but this is still Apple at the end of the day.

 

[Marcellus]

I have had an iPhone 7 Plus for two years. It has 128 GB. I have used 28GB. I use it mostly for email, texts, Internet and taking photos. (I have over 9000 photos and a handful of videos). Now I am upgrading to the iPhone 11. Do you think 128 GB will be enough? Or should I spend the extra $100 for 256 GB? Thank you.

 

[UnrealWhale]

This thread is a doozy.

Watching people attempt to justify greed is bonkers to me. Was the internet meant for this? For corporate apologists to come in and defend a trillion dollar company?

"people shouldn't be forced to purchase higher memory if they want 64gb" : wow, people here so used to Apple fisting them that they think this is the norm, when in fact every other manufacturer with a $1000 phone gives you more memory.

"use icloud": when apple only gives you 5gb free to use across ALL DEVICES with no real folder management system lol.

"most people i know only have 64gb" : yes because no one wants to add more memory because it is expensive. Its a sad state of reality for most iphone customers. They're already spending a lot on the phone, they trick themselves into believing "ok i don't need more space i'll just empty my phone out every so often" because they're already squeezed. Then a few months later they are scrambling to delete photos before a vacation or whatever lol

My god.... there's NO EXCUSE TO PUT 64gb into a base model $1000 PHONE


For reference:

Samsung Galaxy note 10 : $1099 256gb
Samsung Galaxy S10: $999 128gb
Oneplus 7 Pro (which has insane options and screen) : $699 $128gb (and this is with 6gb of ram)

Shall i go on?

This is absurd what Apple does.

EDIT: and please don't come at me with "yeah ok but android" yeah we know, android can't compare to IOS in a lot of ways but that doesn't make it an excuse for Apple to stick it to their loyal fanbase because we're talking about hardware here, not software.

 

[ilikewhey]

This thread is a doozy.

Watching people attempt to justify greed is bonkers to me. Was the internet meant for this? For corporate apologists to come in and defend a trillion dollar company?

"people shouldn't be forced to purchase higher memory if they want 64gb" : wow, people here so used to Apple fisting them that they think this is the norm, when in fact every other manufacturer with a $1000 phone gives you more memory.

"use icloud": when apple only gives you 5gb free to use across ALL DEVICES with no real folder management system lol.

"most people i know only have 64gb" : yes because no one wants to add more memory because it is expensive. Its a sad state of reality for most iphone customers. They're already spending a lot on the phone, they trick themselves into believing "ok i don't need more space i'll just empty my phone out every so often" because they're already squeezed. Then a few months later they are scrambling to delete photos before a vacation or whatever lol

My god.... there's NO EXCUSE TO PUT 64gb into a base model $1000 PHONE


For reference:

Samsung Galaxy note 10 : $1099 256gb
Samsung Galaxy S10: $999 128gb
Oneplus 7 Pro (which has insane options and screen) : $699 $128gb (and this is with 6gb of ram)

Shall i go on?

This is absurd what Apple does.

EDIT: and please don't come at me with "yeah ok but android" yeah we know, android can't compare to IOS in a lot of ways but that doesn't make it an excuse for Apple to stick it to their loyal fanbase because we're talking about hardware here, not software.

careful, someone might come along and accuse you of wanting something for nothing

 

[UnrealWhale]

careful, someone might come along and accuse you of wanting something for nothing

Man, i forgot about that one. Something for nothing after spending $1000 (without applecare). LOL

Corporate Brands as Identity.

 

[jamesschmidtke]

I use less than 64 and shoot 4K on filmic a lot, but keeping the low end at a higher gb than the pro is definitely more trick than treat. Tbh as an X lover I’m just happy the reg pro wasn’t lessened in specs like the xs

 

[mrochester]

Yes for the iphone 11/xr 64 to 128 is a consumer choice

But Apple has been gaming the profit game big time forcing user to chose 64 to 256GB when 128GB is the sweet spot for past couple of years.

Prior to that it was 32GB and than no 64GB mid option.


u cannot compare iCloud usage vs having physical storage readily available on phone.

That 10 hour airplane ride. Nope. Can’t access iCloud. U need that storage physically available.

Personally I find iCloud useless. Because I’ve always manually backed up to iTunes on my Portable hard drive. And backup photos on the portable drive as well

Apple does a disservice to themselves by but allowing enough “free iCloud storage”. The common person doesn’t know how to disable x so to save space to perform just the critical iCloud system setting backup. Apple does this on purpose to annoy people cause they know people will hit the 5gb limit quickly and upsell. But the vast majority of people I know hit the limit. And still don’t want to pay for iCloud. And Apple doesn’t give them any tips to manually disable certain features of iCloud so they can fit the 5gb limit. Again. It’s the user experience and Apple does this on purpose to upsell. They can easily say

These are the options to free iCloud space
1. “delete old backup”
2. “Disable photos backup”
3. Or how about this.....use third party google photos to backup images though not full size but good enough and it’s free and most importantly frees up space

I’d say 64gb is the current sweet spot.
[doublepost=1568438556][/doublepost]

This thread is a doozy.

Watching people attempt to justify greed is bonkers to me. Was the internet meant for this? For corporate apologists to come in and defend a trillion dollar company?

"people shouldn't be forced to purchase higher memory if they want 64gb" : wow, people here so used to Apple fisting them that they think this is the norm, when in fact every other manufacturer with a $1000 phone gives you more memory.

"use icloud": when apple only gives you 5gb free to use across ALL DEVICES with no real folder management system lol.

"most people i know only have 64gb" : yes because no one wants to add more memory because it is expensive. Its a sad state of reality for most iphone customers. They're already spending a lot on the phone, they trick themselves into believing "ok i don't need more space i'll just empty my phone out every so often" because they're already squeezed. Then a few months later they are scrambling to delete photos before a vacation or whatever lol

My god.... there's NO EXCUSE TO PUT 64gb into a base model $1000 PHONE


For reference:

Samsung Galaxy note 10 : $1099 256gb
Samsung Galaxy S10: $999 128gb
Oneplus 7 Pro (which has insane options and screen) : $699 $128gb (and this is with 6gb of ram)

Shall i go on?

This is absurd what Apple does.

EDIT: and please don't come at me with "yeah ok but android" yeah we know, android can't compare to IOS in a lot of ways but that doesn't make it an excuse for Apple to stick it to their loyal fanbase because we're talking about hardware here, not software.

64gb is plenty for the base 11 pro.

 

[Flappy Dunk]

I have a 64 11 and have 25 gb free and I'll bet that most iPhone users are fine with 64 - not the people on this forum. My wife has 10 apps - no videos, a few pictures and that is all. I bet she is a very typical user. As someone said Apple's vision is everything in the cloud so you don't need much iPhone storage

10 apps? 99.999999999% of iPhone users have more than that.
No videos? 99.999999999999999999% of iPhone users have at least 1 video.
A few pictures? 99.99999999% of iPhone users have more than that.
VERY UN-TYPICAL USE CASE.

 

[cynics]

Yes for the iphone 11/xr 64 to 128 is a consumer choice

But Apple has been gaming the profit game big time forcing user to chose 64 to 256GB when 128GB is the sweet spot for past couple of years.

Prior to that it was 32GB and than no 64GB mid option.


u cannot compare iCloud usage vs having physical storage readily available on phone.

That 10 hour airplane ride. Nope. Can’t access iCloud. U need that storage physically available.

Personally I find iCloud useless. Because I’ve always manually backed up to iTunes on my Portable hard drive. And backup photos on the portable drive as well

Apple does a disservice to themselves by but allowing enough “free iCloud storage”. The common person doesn’t know how to disable x so to save space to perform just the critical iCloud system setting backup. Apple does this on purpose to annoy people cause they know people will hit the 5gb limit quickly and upsell. But the vast majority of people I know hit the limit. And still don’t want to pay for iCloud. And Apple doesn’t give them any tips to manually disable certain features of iCloud so they can fit the 5gb limit. Again. It’s the user experience and Apple does this on purpose to upsell. They can easily say

These are the options to free iCloud space
1. “delete old backup”
2. “Disable photos backup”
3. Or how about this.....use third party google photos to backup images though not full size but good enough and it’s free and most importantly frees up space

I had to sit and think about this for a while because I use iCloud to its fullest and often have long flights (well I used too).

Assuming a 10 hour flight snuck up on me and I didn't have my laptop to actually be productive the negative impact of being heavily invested into iCloud with no data is such a minor inconvenience I didn't even realize it was a thing I've been dealing with.

I wouldn't be able to take a walk down memory lane and look at all my old text message images. Also I wouldn't be able to see the full resolution of my photo library on images I haven't looked at for a while. I do have access to them though, unlike if I was using a competing cloud service where I wouldn't have access to even a low res version. I'm sure there has to be something else but I can't think of anything.

I'd still have the couple movies I put on the phone. I'd still have the optimized storage 5gb of music (more than 10 hours). I'd still have my audiobooks. I'd still have my recent documents if I wanted to try to work on something (the reason I bring a laptop).

Also confusing, you don't need to use optimize storage' on your devices if you want the data locally. That is what I do with my iMac, a few seconds/minutes after I take a picture with my iPhone my iMac at home is downloading the original from iCloud to the photos library. If I edit/delete/whatever the photo the changes are sync'd to the iMac. Every hour the iMac is backed up to a NAS using RAID 0

All cloud storage services are designed to up sell. Google offers unlimited as long as you don't mind them using lossy compression on your highest quality and likely most important media (16mb photos and 1080p video max). 15gb is the max you get free if you want to keep the original quality. After that their prices are the same as Apple with a minor variation in size at 50 and 100gb packages.

For me its about convenience. iPhones aren't sold with large enough storage for all my data anyway. My video collection alone exceeds the largest iPhone storage space.



With the mechanisms in place to eliminate the need to micromanage your data upgrading iCloud storage just made sense to me. And since I'm using it I just turned on optimize storage on my mobile devices an went from need a 256gb device to using 30gb of 64. The alternative is paying a different services OR losing all my RAW photos and 4k videos OR storing them at home completely inaccessible to me, and instead of literally doing nothing I would have to be involved in the back up process.

Obviously everyone has different opinions and preferences, what works for me doesn't work for you and vice versa, I get that. But I don't think there is a right answer, you like your way I like mine.

 

[steelhauler34]

Good never used much over 32 in my life. Who cares anyway if you want 128 buy the damn thing lmao. Let’s just say for a second that Apple started the model at 128 base. Do you really think it would be the same price as what the 64 is going to be?? Absolutely not so they make the lower memory option for those of us that only need that but low and behold all others can choose more. Makes perfect sense.

 

[Ladybug]

The 64gb iPhones are made for people like me. After 2 and a half years I am still only using 17.5gb out of the 64. Having extra space is nice but I don’t want to have to pay extra for something I will never use.

 

[russell_314]

The 64gb iPhones are made for people like me. After 2 and a half years I am still only using 17.5gb out of the 64. Having extra space is nice but I don’t want to have to pay extra for something I will never use.

Exactly this. If there is still a large group of people not needing more than 64 GB then I feel Apple shouldn't force the upgrade. Now if this is a very small minority then it's probably going to happen. Only Apple knows this

 

[44267547]

The 64gb iPhones are made for people like me. After 2 and a half years I am still only using 17.5gb out of the 64. Having extra space is nice but I don’t want to have to pay extra for something I will never use.

It’s funny, because I think I could still survive on 32 GB if I wanted to. I have very little media, I don’t have any gaming applications, I use my phone strictly primarily for business and simple emails/calls/texts. I think there’s a huge misconception that 64 GB should be nonexistent, but there is a demographic of users who are not intensive with consumption and we just need our phone for every day tasking.

 

[danny842003]

It’s funny, because I think I could still survive on 32 GB if I wanted to. I have very little media, I don’t have any gaming applications, I use my phone strictly primarily for business and simple emails/calls/texts. I think there’s a huge misconception that 64 GB should be nonexistent, but there is a demographic of users who are not intensive with consumption and we just need our phone for every day tasking.

But you wouldn’t be in anyway disadvantaged in having 128gb. The only reason Apple chooses not to do it is to force those that do need it to pay an inflated upgrade charge. In terms of components and at the scale Apple are producing them the cost would be negligible.

 

[russell_314]

But you wouldn’t be in anyway disadvantaged in having 128gb. The only reason Apple chooses not to do it is to force those that do need it to pay an inflated upgrade charge. In terms of components and at the scale Apple are producing them the cost would be negligible.

You wouldn't be disadvantaged at having a base of 512 GB either except for the extra cost when you bought it. With that logic we could argue that no "base model" is needed so just have the high end one.

 

[danny842003]

You wouldn't be disadvantaged at having a base of 512 GB either except for the extra cost when you bought it. With that logic we could argue that no "base model" is needed so just have the high end one.

The difference is at 128gb there no need for any extra cost at purchase, the cost to Apple would be totally negligible. The cost of memory isn’t linear so the higher up you go the cost would increase although probably not by a lot.
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You wouldn't be disadvantaged at having a base of 512 GB either except for the extra cost when you bought it. With that logic we could argue that no "base model" is needed so just have the high end one.

The difference is at 128gb there no need for any extra cost at purchase, the cost to Apple would be totally negligible. The cost of memory isn’t linear so the higher up you go the cost would increase although probably not by a lot.

 

[russell_314]

The difference is at 128gb there no need for any extra cost at purchase, the cost to Apple would be totally negligible. The cost of memory isn’t linear so the higher up you go the cost would increase although probably not by a lot.
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The difference is at 128gb there no need for any extra cost at purchase, the cost to Apple would be totally negligible. The cost of memory isn’t linear so the higher up you go the cost would increase although probably not by a lot.

Oh well since you feel it should be free then why stop at 128? I mean a trillion dollar company like Apple should at least give 512 GB. While they're at it let's just forget about the regular iPhone 11 altogether and make the Pro Max for the same price. I mean why not? I love free!

Now lets get back to reality out of this dream world. If Apple sees that a majority of people using the 64 GB model need more storage then they'll likely upgrade the base model. If they look and see most are using 40 GB then they're not going to add something that costs money and doesn't help those customers.

 

[mrochester]

The difference is at 128gb there no need for any extra cost at purchase, the cost to Apple would be totally negligible. The cost of memory isn’t linear so the higher up you go the cost would increase although probably not by a lot.
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The difference is at 128gb there no need for any extra cost at purchase, the cost to Apple would be totally negligible. The cost of memory isn’t linear so the higher up you go the cost would increase although probably not by a lot.

You're assuming that the base storage being 128gb would not cost any extra than the current 64gb base.