Something happened on the way to me not caring about the iPhone jumping to sixteen gigabytes. For awhile now I’ve considered eight gigabytes to be the ideal capacity for me and my iPod/iPhone endeavors. Sure, we all want limitless capacity, but at some point you’ve got to make the tradeoff of capacity vs. physical size. I spent a few years trying to get comfy within the four gigs provided by the early iPod nano, and while I made it work for me, it never felt comfortable. My sync playlist of eight or nine hundred songs (less than a fifth of my collection) nearly filled the device, meaning that if I wanted to add a new song or album, something would need to be removed right then and there to make room – and forget about having room for podcasts or more than a handful of photos.
But then the iPhone came along at eight gigs, and I finally felt that the digital living room I was being confined to was plenty big, so to speak. My sync playlist has grown to about fifteen hundred songs and yet I can still fit new music onto the device whenever I want to. There’s enough room for the latest episodes of my six or seven favorite podcasts, and even room for a few hundred photos and a music video or two to boot. In fact I was so pleased with eight gigs that when it came time to acquire an iPod touch for testing purposes (a device I admittedly knew I wouldn’t use much), I opted for the eight gig model despite the fact that a sixteen gig iPod touch was already available at the time.
Accordingly, all throughout my seven-plus months as an iPhone user, I was all set to dismiss – at least for me personally – the sixteen gig iPhone we all knew was eventually coming. But along the way I realized a few things. For starters, I spent a bit of time with both my iPod classic and my video iPod (80 and 30 gigs, respectively), and I remembered that I like having all of my music with me. Certainly not enough to resort to carrying an outdated, oversized iPod alongside my iPhone, but you know what? It wouldn’t kill me to have a little bit more of my music collection on my iPhone. But the real moment of pause came when I rented a full-length movie from iTunes, just over a gigabyte in size, and realized – gasp – it wouldn’t fit on my iPhone unless I removed some existing music. Sheesh, I thought those days were over with.
So although I’m definitely not going to rush out and replace my eight gig iPhone with a new sixteen gig model any time soon, and I don’t expect a whole heck of a lot of other existing iPhone users to do so either, today just might represent a bigger breakthrough in terms of ushering more folks into the iPhone/touch era than it may initially appear. We all know a few users who are still clutching their aging thirty gig video iPod, saying “not until I can fit all my music onto a new-school iPod!” Well guess what? The new iPod touch holds thirty-two gigs. And while the new iPhone still only holds half that much, Apple’s flagship handheld device just might have moved a little closer to being a true mainstream product today…if only by virtue of inching closer to what we thought was the standard in capacity all the way back in 2006.
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