Apple put out a press release this morning bragging that they sold over 10 million iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus units over the weekend. Records broken, blah blah. Every tech site on the planet has that number in a headline right now so I'm not going to rehash it. What I actually want to complain about is the thing nobody's leading with: they're still selling the base model with 16GB of storage. In 2014. For $199 on contract.
Think about that for a second. This is a phone whose big marketing hook is the camera: 1080p video at 60fps if you want it, slow-mo at 240fps, panoramas that eat storage like nothing else. And the entry-level tier gives you sixteen gigs to work with, after iOS 8 and the stock apps have already carved out a couple gigs before you've installed a single thing yourself. I know a guy (one of the devs I sit near) who upgraded from his 5s this weekend and by Sunday night he was already deleting apps to fit photos from a wedding he shot on it. That's not an edge case. That's Tuesday for a lot of people.
The maddening part is the tier structure itself. They dropped the 32GB option entirely and jumped straight to 64GB for the next step up, which is $100 more. So your real choice is "uncomfortably small" or "pay Apple an extra hundred bucks to get an amount of storage that used to be the mid-tier two years ago." There's no reasonable middle option anymore. I get that flash storage isn't free, but the actual cost difference between a 16GB chip and a 64GB chip is nowhere near what they're charging for the jump, and everyone doing teardown cost estimates has said as much for years now. It's margin, not materials.
I didn't wait in line for one, for what it's worth. I've got a 5s that's a year old and does everything I need, and standing outside the Apple Store on Walnut Street for four hours has never once sounded appealing to me, even back when I was younger and had more patience for that sort of thing. A friend of mine did the line thing though: got there around 5am Friday, phone in hand by 9, back at his desk by 10:30 like nothing happened. Dedication, I guess.
Separately, and I promise this is related in spirit if not in subject: the U2 album is still sitting in my iTunes library uninvited. Songs of Innocence, auto-added to something like five hundred million accounts a couple weeks back, and Apple had to build an actual removal tool because so many people were furious about music showing up on their devices that they never asked for. I deleted mine the day the tool went live and I still see people complaining about it showing back up after a sync. Free is not always a gift.
And look, I'd be lying if I said the bigger story of the week wasn't Alibaba going public on Friday: biggest IPO ever, by a wide margin, priced at $68 and popping to the $90s on day one. That's the kind of number that makes the iPhone weekend look almost quaint by comparison, dollar for dollar. But that story's been covered from nine different angles by people who actually understand equity markets better than I do, so I'll leave it there.
Anyway. If you bought the 16GB iPhone 6 this weekend because it was the "free" upgrade price on your carrier, do yourself a favor and turn off Photo Stream burst mode and go check your storage settings before you're the guy at Thanksgiving deleting old texts to take one more picture. Ask me how I know that particular flavor of frustration — my 5s has been at that point since about March and I still haven't fixed it, mostly out of stubbornness.