Apple has been offering its base iPhone models with 16GB of storage for several years now, and despite the fact that it bumped its two top-end iPhones 6 to 64GB and 128GB, it kept the base iPhone 6 model at 16GB this year. Now Apple is facing a lawsuit for what many may perceive as storage stinginess.
A lawsuit has been filed against Apple in the northern district of California claiming that the Cupertino firm is guilty of fraudulent advertising and committing deceptive business actions. The plaintiffs say that Apple falsely advertises the amount of storage that its iPhones, iPads, and iPods include because iOS 8 takes up such a large amount of the devices’ internal storage.
Jonas Mann, attorney for the plaintiffs, explains that “nothing close to the advertised capacity” of Apple’s iDevices are available to consumers. Mann goes on to say that the difference between the storage capacity that’s advertised and the capacity that’s actually available is “beyond any possible reasonable expectation.”
The plaintiffs are also bothered by how hard Apple pushes iCloud, which lets users store their content in the cloud, but only offers 5GB of free storage. Users must pay for any storage that they want beyond 5GB.
The lawsuit includes a table that shows how much storage is actually available to users with iOS devices right out of the box. For example, the 16GB iPhone 6 Plus offers 12.7GB, meaning that 3.3GB (20.6 percent of the total storage) is unavailable to the user. The 16GB iPad Air has 3.4GB of unusable storage, or 21.3 percent of its total storage.
Apple has caught a lot of flak for offering 8GB and 16GB iPhone devices in recent years, especially when users are unable to install over the air software updates because their phones don’t have enough storage. It seems kind of strange that Apple didn’t bump the base iPhone 6 up to 32GB of storage when it increased the other two, but it didn’t, whether it decided not to because of costs or some other reason. Now the company is facing a lawsuit, and it’ll be interesting to see how the whole thing plays out.
Apple declined to comment on the lawsuit
