macolyte.net

Friday I will be upgrading my iPhone to the fancy new 3G version. And I’m not ponying up the extra $100 for the 16GB.  Here’s why.

I rarely use the iPod functions of my phone so I don’t need the extra storage space. My current iPhone has 8GB and at present I have over 5GB free. Since my entire music library is about 30GB, I wouldn’t be able to fit it all in there anyway and going through and selecting “the best” stuff is just something I don’t have the desire to do (I also don’t keep my music library on the Mac I sync my phone with).  If I want to listen to music, I have an 80GB 5th gen iPod that works perfectly fine.

Having extra space for video is a more compelling argument, but 97.3% of the time I have my MacBook with me, so there goes that one.  Besides, 16GB of storage is roughly 8-10 full-length movies.  I’d never get through that many without having to recharge the battery.  While recharging, I could simply swap out movies I’ve watched with new ones.  I don’t take multi-hour plane flights so taking that approach is really a non-issue.

The only thing that would make me seriously reconsider my decision is if 3rd party apps had access to that 16GB of storage.  Unfortunately my sources tell me that they won’t. And even if they do, I have 5GB free on my current iPhone.  If I were to fill that up with 3rd party stuff, then I have a big problem.

In the end, I’m not spending $100 on storage space I’ll probably never use. This has the double advantage of saving me money and keeping peace in my house. And since everyone else will be wanting the 16GB, I suspect actually finding an 8GB model will be much easier (although this isn’t something I’m really worried about for reasons I won’t go into here). I’m not saying this is the right choice for everybody, but it’s the right choice for me.