iPhone 5s storage capacity

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Level 1

4 points

iPhone 5s storage capacity

I have recently bought a 32GB iPhone 5s and realised that i had storage capacity of 27.53GB before installing any applications. i know im new to the iPhone 5s and iOS7, but the difference of about 4.5GB that goes unaccounted was quiet striking to me. so what i would like to find out from the community is whether it is normal to lose such memory (about 15% on the initial set up, operating system, etc.), when i would expect to have memory somewhere around 30GB? is this normal or do i have a legitimate concern? because i cant help but wonder how much memory i would have foregone had i bought a 16GB phone. somebody please help.

iPhone 5s, iOS 7.0.4

Posted on Nov 28, 2013 2:34 PM

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Answer 1

stedman1

Level 10

265,312 points

Nov 28, 2013 2:35 PM in response to Loungo

The Apple article below may help explain.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2419?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

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Answer 2

Nov 28, 2013 2:58 PM in response to Loungo

stedman's link explains it exactly.

But the gist of it is: 32Gb as advertised by manufacturers is 32000000000 (thirty two billion) metric bytes.

But 32 billion metric bytes really equals 28.9GB in real computer storage. Minus apps and iOS you really are only loosing about 1.5GB which is very normal.

And this is not exclusive to Apple or iPhones. it happens with all computer storage. Hard drives, memory cards USB cards etc.. suffer the same fate. The larger the number you start with the larger the difference is going to be. That's why 1TB hard drives only ever have about 930GB of actual space.

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Answer 3

Nov 28, 2013 3:13 PM in response to Johnathan Burger

No. I mean Metric. Advertisers measure space in metric bytes 1000 bytes = 1KB. 32 billion bytes = 32GB.

In Binary: 1024 bytes = 1KB 32 billion bytes = 29.8 GB. roughly.

That's the difference. That's why you get less space than advertised.

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Answer 4

Nov 29, 2013 7:19 AM in response to Johnathan Burger

Its a figure of speech. The Metric system is a Base 10 measurement system (ie all metric measurements are a multiple of ten) . Having Bytes measured in mutiples of 10 i.e 1000 bytes = 1KB. makes them "metric".

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Answer 5

KC7GNM

Level 4

2,904 points

Nov 28, 2013 2:41 PM in response to Loungo

iOS and the built in apps do use some of that space up. I have a 64 GB phone and it reports 57 GB storage space if nothing was on the phone. Also Stedman1's post explains it as well.

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Answer 6

Nov 28, 2013 2:59 PM in response to Phil0124

Metric bytes?

Do you mean binary?

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Answer 7

Nov 28, 2013 3:33 PM in response to Phil0124

I have never heard of metric bytes.

There is binary or base 10.

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