Why a 16GB iPhone is All You Need

Yes – you can buy the cheapest iPhone without having to sacrifice on storage. A common worry for those considering buying a 16GB iPhone is running out of storage space – but with the trend of moving almost everything to the cloud, those 16GBs can go a lot further than it ever has before. Today, 16GBs can be more than enough storage for most iPhone users – here’s how.

Typically, most of the space used up on the iPhone comes from Music and Photos. We’ll tackle these one at a time.

Music ?

The question you have to ask yourself is: Do you even need to have your own music on your phone?

Music streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify are becoming more popular – if this is the primary way you’re listening to music anyway, you can ditch the songs stored on your iPhone without noticing a difference.

If streaming isn’t your thing, then you’ll just need to make a point of only loading the songs you need onto your iPhone. You probably don’t need your entire music collection with you at all times – to put it into perspective, keeping only 2GBs of music on your phone will give you over 30 hours of music to enjoy.

For those of you that buy most of your music on iTunes, you’ll be able to access even more of your music over iCloud, letting you swap out playlists without ever even connecting to a computer.

Photos ?

You may want to have easy access to all of your photos – but that doesn’t mean you need to store them on your device all of the time. That’s where iCloud Photo Library comes in.

iCloud Photo Library offloads photos from your phone’s memory to (you guessed it) iCloud. The camera on the iPhone is great – but with great photos comes large file sizes. If you snap a lot, you can easily use up your storage if you keep them on your phone. To put it into perspective – I personally have about 2500 photos saved on my phone, which takes up close to 8GB.

If you use iCloud Photo Library, you can choose to optimize your phone’s storage in the settings, freeing up the space on your phone. Your photos will still be accessible through the photos app like normal, but must be re-downloaded if you want to see a specific one. As an added benefit, photos are also available to view on any other Apple device you own, as well as on iCloud.com.

The only catch – you may need to upgrade your iCloud storage. But don’t fear, it could actually save you money while potentially giving you some other benefits as well – such as giving you enough space for a full iPhone backup.

What’s this about saving money?

A brand new 16GB iPhone 6 costs $899 while the 64GB iPhone costs $1,029 – or $130 more. If you instead spend your money on iCloud storage, it can go a lot further:

Option A:

50GB of iCloud storage costs only $1.29/month (about $15/year). This is more than enough space to cover your photo storage needs.

If you opt for the 50GB option – even if you didn’t upgrade your phone for 3 years – you would save $94.

Option B:

200GB of iCloud storage costs only $4/month (about $48/year). This is easily enough space to cover your photo storage, and let you keep a full backup of your iPhone and iPad, with plenty of space left over to use in your iCloud Drive.

It would take 33 months to spend more on 200GB of iCloud storage than the price of the larger iPhone, which only gives you an extra 48GB (and let’s be honest, you’ll probably want to upgrade before that anyway).

Putting it all together

With your music in check and photos off-loaded to Apple’s servers, your 16GBs will go a long way towards storing apps and other data without running into any trouble.

Only you can decide if a 16GB iPhone is enough for you – but we’re not writing it off yet.