Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
Just got an iphone 5c, supposedly 8g phone from Verizon. When I go in and check "about" it only shows that I have 5.4g capacity and 4g available. Same with my wife's phone and we have not put anything on it yet. When I check the "usage" it says 4g available and 1.3 used. Did or do I really have an 8g phone? I seem to be missing 3g somewhere-does the system usage not record in usage or capacity?
Thanks,
Glen
iPhone 5c, iOS 8.0.2
I have the same phone the apple 5c and I use to have 90 plus photos 3 or 4 apps like Groupon, Netflix, Ibotta, and a couple of game apps! Now I have eight photos and only the one game app! I have deleted all the other apps, emptied all my pics except those 8, and a bunch of apps that came on the phone. It tells me my storage is full! I have so much less on the phone now then when I bought it so I don't think I've lost all my storage due to their apps and such. It's so frustrating though! Any help would be nice!
Hi glen,
The operating system and pre installed apps all do take up space on your devices so this is why you will be missing '3gb' of room it is not a fault with your device. 🙂
Cheers,
iSolve
iSolve,
Thanks for answering my question: but I still question why the iphone does not then show that the "total capacity" of the phone is 8g (like a 8g hard drive, not a 5.4g hard drive) instead of reporting it (the capacity) as only 5.4 g's (like my iMac does-no matter how much memory is used, including the operating system, it still has a certain gigabyte capacity) Is that different with iphones?
I don't do social media, music, video's and limited pictures, so I guess I should be fine but just curious.
Thanks,
Glen
It's also in part due to how the iPhone reports its size. Any space used up by the OS and related apps is subtracted but not show as space used - for a computer, it would still show that space as being used.
So at least some of your space is the OS plus the built-in apps (my guess is around 2GB total, could be up to 3).
iOS subtracts that number from the capacity and shows you what's left as available for use (5.4). Mac OS will just show you how much space the computer's drive has in total, along with how much space is used and is free.
Does that make sense?
~Lyssa
Can you take it back and get one with 32G 8 G is no good if you like Apps/photos/ music. Bsydd uk
Lyssa,
Thank you, I just did not understand the iOS usage.
Glen
Here's Apple's attempt to explain the differences: How OS X and iOS report storage capacity
Even that isn't completely clear. Yes, iOS uses a lot of space. But there's also an annoying difference in how GB are calculated. The spec (8 GB) is decimal; the amount reported on the phone is binary GB, where 1 KB = 1024 bytes and thus 1 GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes. So 8 GB in decimal notation is 8,000,000,000 / 1,073,741,824 = 7.45 GB in binary notation. It is still 8 GB, but it is reported as 7.45 GB on the device itself. And your 5.4 GB (base 2) is actually 5.8 GB (base 10).
Thank you, Lawrence, for that bit - I knew that was factored in but I couldn't figure out how to explain it very well.
~Lyssa
In essence, it's 'marketing' logic for calculation compared to 'technical' logic for calculation. It's always been an issue, but gets more prominent the larger storage capacities get over time.
Thanks to everyone for the time and thought.
Glen
iphone 5c only shows 5g available storage
