Apple put out a press release Monday saying they'd sold over 13 million iPhone 6s and 6s Plus units over the launch weekend. New record, they said, beating last year's 6 and 6 Plus numbers. Fine, I believe it, the lines outside the Fifth Avenue store looked the same as always when I walked past on Saturday, guy in a lawn chair with a blanket and everything. What I can't get over, and I complained about this exact thing when the 6 came out too, is that the base model is still 16 gigabytes.
Sixteen. In 2015. My laptop from 2011 has more storage than that in cache.
Here's the thing that gets me: iOS itself, with a couple of default apps and the inevitable software update sitting there waiting to install, eats something like 4-5 GB before you've added a single photo. Then you take a few dozen pictures at a birthday party, maybe a slow-motion video because 3D Touch and Live Photos are apparently not enough new toys to play with this year, and suddenly you're staring at that gray "Storage Almost Full" alert while trying to update Instagram. My sister texted me Sunday night, less than 48 hours after picking hers up at the store, asking how to delete apps she'd already downloaded because there wasn't room for anything else. That's not a hypothetical, that happened to a real person I'm related to, on day two.
Apple wants you to pay $100 to jump from 16GB to 64GB. Which, fine, that's the business, upsell the storage since the margins on flash memory are apparently obscene and everybody knows it. But 16GB isn't a real product tier anymore, it's a bait price designed to get you into the store and then talked into the 64 once the salesperson pulls up your photo library estimate on their iPad. I don't think that's some hot take, I think most people who've bought one of these phones in the last three launch cycles have had basically this exact experience.
I'm sitting this one out anyway, for what it's worth. Still on my 5s, which is now two years old and, sure, the battery sags by 4pm if I've been on Twitter too much, but it does everything I actually need a phone to do. 3D Touch looks like a neat parlor trick in the demo videos, peek-and-pop, pressure-sensitive home screen shortcuts, but I've used pressure-sensitive UI on a stylus tablet for design work and I'm skeptical it translates well to a screen you're jabbing at with your thumb on a subway platform. Maybe I'll eat those words in six months. Wouldn't be the first time.
The other thing nobody's really talking about is what happens to all the 6 and 6 Plus units that just got traded in or handed down. My mom's getting my sister's old 6 once she's fully moved onto the 6s, which honestly is a pretty good deal for her, better camera than her 5c and she doesn't need 3D Touch or the new rose gold finish to check her email and look at pictures of my nephew. There's a whole quiet secondhand economy that happens every September that the sales-number press releases never mention, hand-me-down phones traveling one generation down the family tree while Apple's PR team is busy counting the new ones out the door.
Anyway. Rose gold, if you're wondering, does look nicer in person than it did in the renders, I'll give them that much. Less "why does my phone look like a Pepto bottle" and more a muted champagne kind of thing. My sister's is that color and it's genuinely pretty next to the space gray one I've had forever. Doesn't change my math on the storage thing though. Congratulations on the 13 million, Apple, now sell people a phone where the entry-level version can actually hold their own photos without a lecture from a salesperson about upgrading.