Apple has made 64GB the base storage for all iPhones from the iPhone X in 2017 until 2025
For eight years, Apple has sold iPhones starting at 64GB to hit a price point, but Apple Intelligence has made it accept what we all knew already — 128GB is the real minimum.
Back in 2017, the iPhone X brought us features that we wouldn’t be without today, like Face ID and an edge-to-edge screen. None of this may ever go away, and certainly the thousand bucks price tag isn’t going to shrink, but one thing has changed.
The iPhone X, along with the same year’s iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, introduced 64GB as the starting storage capacity. There had been 64GB configurations before, starting with the iPhone 4S, but it was that 2011 model’s maximum capacity.
Then there were oddities like the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, the year before the iPhone X. Those did not offer 64GB, but that was because they started with 32GB and skipped to 128GB and 257GB.
From the iPhone X, though, 64GB was the minimum. While it may have seemed cramped to some users, it was a lot compared to the then-current iPads.
In 2017, the 5th-generation iPad started at 32GB. Only that year’s iPad Pro started at 64GB.
Times change
There weren’t any widespread complaints about the 64GB capacity at first. But we never stop taking photos and we hardly ever remove them, so with larger image sizes, more video, and a larger iOS footprint, 64GB can be cramped, especially if you don’t subscribe to larger iCloud storage tiers.
Apple tried to address this with iOS 11 in 2017, that introduced the ability to automatically offload apps to save some space. But speaking of iOS, users complain Apple’s iPhone operating system still requires more space during installation than it does afterwards.
So you could find yourself having to delete gigabytes of data just to update your iPhone or iPad. And the offloading of apps is a great idea, but only if you always have perfect internet connections.
That’s because the offloading worked by determining which apps were the largest and had not been used recently. It was clever, but not practical.
For instance, if you only travel to a city like London every few months, iOS would offload apps like London Underground map and route-finding ones. And you wouldn’t realize until you were in the city and couldn’t get a good cell signal to re-download them.
No more 64GB options
With the launch of the latest iPad Air, and the iPhone 16e before it, Apple has dropped 64GB from all of its devices. With the exception of the iPad Pro which starts at 256GB, all iPhones and iPads start at 128GB — including the base model, the 10th generation iPad.
No question, providing more SSD storage space at least used to hit Apple’s bottom line. As larger capacities become more common, though, it’s possible that Apple has phased out 64GB because that smaller size is no longer economic, given the vagaries of chip production and the commodity markets.
But it’s more likely that Apple has run the numbers decided it’s worth increasing the storage capacity in order to have Apple Intelligence run on all of its devices. All bar the latest base iPad, as that now has the storage capacity, but not the processing power for Apple Intelligence.
When the first beta versions of iOS and macOS with Apple Intelligence were released, users had to download Apple’s Large Language Model, and it was just over a 3GB download. Now Apple says that Apple Intelligence requires 7GB of storage space to operate.
So including Apple Intelligence, iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, now have markedly increased storage requirements. It all cuts into the user’s space, and brings people closer to that frustration of running out of room.
That said, there can’t be an iCloud user who isn’t frustrated by Apple’s miserly storage offering there. While it’s been eight years since 64GB first became the starting storage capacity for iPhones, but its 14 years since iCloud first offered 5GB for free.
