iPhone 5s capacity/"other" storage question

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Level 1

4 points

iPhone 5s capacity/"other" storage question

I just purchased a 16GB iPhone 5s and had two quick questions:

1. I upgraded from a 16Gb iPhone 4, which had a capacity of around 14.5 GB according to iTunes. The total capacity 16GB iPhone 5s is listed by iTunes as 12.92 GB. I was wondering if this is normal, or if my particular unit has a lower than average capacity.

2. On the 5s, I decided to start from a clean slate and not restore from a backup. The first thing I did was to add some music (1.51 GB). This is the only content on my phone, but immedeately after adding the music, it also tacked on 1.15 GB of "other" storage. This seems excessive considering that there is no other content on the phone. Is there anything in the music files (metadata, album art, etc.) that could potentially be contributing to this "other" storage taking up space in my phone? More importantly, is there a way to get rid of it?

Any feedback would be greatly apreciated!

-P.

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4), 2.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i7

Posted on Sep 20, 2013 11:52 AM

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Answer 1

Sep 22, 2013 9:44 AM in response to PaBRO

I have a feeling 12.92GB is the actual storage space on the advertised 16gb device. Similar to how my iPad mini is advertised 32gb but it really only has 28.1GB.

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Answer 2

Sep 22, 2013 9:45 AM in response to PaBRO

The available storage is correct because the extracted version of iOS 7 is bigger than iOS 6.1.3. Syncing automatically to iTunes to add music instead of manually adding music. This creates a cache buffer which acts as a placeholder. No way that I have seen to really adjust this. But I could be wrong.

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Answer 3

PaBRO Author

Level 1

4 points

Sep 22, 2013 10:25 AM in response to Alibaba2k2

I called Apple Support immedeate;y when I noticed this. They said that the OS for the iPhone 5s is larger because of the software necessary for Touch ID. They did not know what was going on with the large amount of "other". Eventually, my call went up to the support person's manager, and then they brought the issue to the attention of the engineers. I have yet to hear back from them. They siggested that i restore my phone to see if adding music to the phone would result in the same issue. I restored my phone, and after doing so, iTunes said that there was about 565 MB of "other." To see if this amount would go up, I added ONE album (11 songs), and the amount of "other" on my phone grew to 1.05 GB. This does not seem normal. There is no way that any metadata/album artwork could take up this space (which aparently is stored in "documenta and data").

With regards to adding music using iTunes, are you saying that that buffer is only created when you sync automatically? If that's the case, I only add music manually, so would it be safe to say that the "other" space on my phone does not represent a buffer?

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Answer 4

Dec 3, 2013 6:11 PM in response to PaBRO

Hey,

I just wanted to let you know that I just got the iPhone 5s and I saw the same thing. After updating it adjusted to 14.91. Way more acceptable.

This is most likely old news but here it is for anyone new.

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