16 GB Capacity says 14 GB?

Oh and if you read the back of the box it says and I quote "1gb = 1 billion bytes; actual compactly less"

Oh and read product info before you buy

Richard, sorry for opening an old thread again but your answer interested me. I have a 5s (16GB) and I only use it for phone calls and text. I have no music or other added stuff except two small apps. when i got the phone 12 months ago it showed about 15.1GB free. 12 months later with no additions, it is telling me I only have 9.63GB free.

Since I have not added anything in 12 months, I am wondering why my free space keeps dwindling? Surely the 8.1.3 IOS couldnt be nearly 7GB in size?

Look in Settings>General>Usage>Manage Storage.

What does it say is taking up all the space?

Plug it into your computer running iTunes. Look at the usage bar in the summary. Do you see a very large block of "Other"? That can indicate corruption.

Thank you very much for answering so quickly. I checked the phone and nothing unusual but your tip to look at iTunes showed a large "Other" block on the Summary page. I always wondered what that was. I will have that looked at and thank you once again for your help!

Regarding general hard drive and iPhone and what have you storage devices showing less than their manufacturer-stated capacity, the reason for the difference in the numbers is very, very simple. The reason has to do with marketing, and with simplicity in storage device manufacturers labeling their products. Here it is:

All computer devices are manufactured for, & operate using, the binary numbering system; i.e., the Base 2 numbering system; i.e., 1's and 0's. However, for simplicity's sake more than for any other reason I suppose, manufacturers *report and advertise* their storage devices' capacities in the "normal" everyday-use decimal numbering system; i.e., the Base 10 numbering system.

So when a memory storage manufacturer builds an iPhone's memory for 32GB, or a desktop or laptop hard drive for, say, 1TB, then the resulting Base 10/Base 2 storage capacity calculates out to, for the 32GB iPhone, as 32,000,000GB total stated Base 10 amount ÷ 1,048,576GB of similarly close Base 2 amount per Gigabyte = 30.517578125GB. For the 1TB hard drive, that'd be 1,000,000,000GB (Base 10) ÷ 1,048,576 (Base 2) = 953.67431640625GB real, actual storage space amount.

Partitioning and formatting reduces that "real, actual storage space amount" just a bit more.

So there it is..... Marketing, a difference in the Base 10 "human" numbering system and in the "computer" numbering system, and simplicity in labeling.

Kevin Kendall

Ol' tried & true & still good 7,1 2.4GHz white Macbook / 1TB HDD / 16GB RAM / Sierra beta4 with Siri (yayyy!!) / Windows 7 & 10 via VMWare 7

Thank you for resurrecting a thread that's been dormant for over a year with an explanation that was given in this thread about five years ago.

2nd time he's made the same redundant post to an old thread.

@pardthemonster That is right because it takes about 2gb for the IOS that is present on the phone so basically the storage available for you to use is about 14 gb of the space.

Lawrence Finch wrote:

2nd time he's made the same redundant post to an old thread.

Actually, I think they did the same thing in about four threads.

When I started writing this I wasn't looking to throw a wrench into anyones reasoning.

The iPhone listed capacity in iTunes, just like the capacity of any Computer hard drive should reflect actual capacity not capacity after the system software has been installed. This is regardless of the definition of the word Gigabyte. An iPhone Capacity of 14 GB as listed on a computer equates to 14 x (1024³ or 2³⁰).
This is 15.03 Gigabytes. My iPhone capacity in iTunes is 113.99 GB Which equates to 122.4 GB. So what definition of Gigabyte are they using.

Now to really throw a wrench in to the works: on my MacBook Pro in with the latest version of MacOS (OS X 10.11.6), it says "Used: 557,166,607,867 bytes (557.17 GB on disk)". Notice the information given on the SSD is now in the 1000³ definition not the 1024³ the definition. At least it is clear what definition is being used in this case. I cannot determine anywhere else what the units represent.

From Apple: "In Mac OS X v10.6 and later, storage capacity is displayed as per product specifications using the decimal system (base 10)."

This is due to updating your iphone which makes ur amount of space on your iphone go down.

Troy.jr wrote:

This is due to updating your iphone which makes ur amount of space on your iphone go down.

No, that was not the reason six years ago when that person posted and it's not the reason now. Please read the thread for the real answer.

Lawrence Finch wrote:

2nd time he's made the same redundant post to an old thread.

Actually, I think they did the same thing in about four threads.

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Yep, to both of ya. Is that a real big frikkin problem or something??

Chill out man....... gawd....... Find something important to make scathing comments about.....

KK

The issue is when you post to a long-dormant thread, it brings it to the top, and others jump in as though it were something new (as you probably noticed). As you are knowledgeable and want to help, I suggest responding to new posts and recent threads. For one thing, that's the only way to get points 😉