Users Find Renting a Movie On iTunes Frees Up Space On iPhone, iPad 68
An anonymous reader writes: Many, if not all, believe that 16GB storage on their iPhone and iPad is not sufficient. Apple insists that users with 16GB variant iDevice can always save files to the cloud. At any rate, several users have found an interesting way to free up storage space on their iPhone and iPad. The trick is to rent a movie from iTunes (on your mobile device) that is larger than the storage you have available. If you have 500MB free, for instance, you could try and rent Bridge of Spies, which is a 5.79GB download, according to an article on BetaNews. "When you click Rent, a loading symbol will appear but then you'll receive a message informing you that "there is not enough available storage" to download the film, and you'll be given the option of managing your storage in Settings. Tap the Settings button, and -- ta-da! -- you should see the amount of free storage you now have is much greater than before. Repeating the process will free up even more space."
Memory (Score:3)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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dying androids (Score:1)
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They assume that if the phone comes with 16Gb and has no expandability, that 16Gb is probably "good enough" because what manufacturer would come out with an explicitly crippled device that cannot be upgraded, not even for cold hard cash?
Bullshit. They buy a 16GB device because that's what they want to buy. Don't blame the manufacturer because you can't imagine a use case for their product. Sure, other use cases fit other products better, but one size certainly does not fit all.
I know someone who bought the smallest iPhone available at the time, because he doesn't have any need for large storage. He uses the phone for phone calls, email, a few apps, and the ability to have access to online references wherever he is. It was also a convenien
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"They buy a 16GB device because that's what they want to buy"
To quote you, "Bullshit"
What's Behind Apple's Epic Memory Markup :
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/... [bloomberg.com]
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I'd have absolutely no use for 16 GB of extra space on my phone and I do have a smart phone. I just don't load up a bunch of apps. I make phone calls, email, text, browse, and that's about it. I believe I have a 64 GB SD card in my phone. I'm pretty sure I'm using less than 200 MB of it. The internal storage still has plenty of room. If I take photos/video with it then I move that off the phone and onto something more suitable. I have my own 'cloud', VPN, VPS, NAS, and all that. I have real backup solutions
Re: Memory (Score:1)
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The minimum-spec iPhones are also fairly popular for corporate and government customers, which buy them in bulk, put them in MDM with the official approves apps, and issue them to employees. Often they'll have additional restrictions. No room for your personal photos? Tough. It's a work device, not personal. But thanks for reminding us. The camera will be disabled in the next profile update.
The minimum-sped iPad? What do you think is attacked to all of the Square terminals you see in small stores, an
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That "fusing" is a iffy.
When you do so, you basically lose out on the ability to move the content of the card between devices.
This because Android will format and encrypt the FS on it with a key only that phone has.
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Performance will take a hit as well. I put the fastest SD card I could find in my phone and ran a disk read/write speed test on internal storage and then on the SD card, and the internal came out 2-3x quicker
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Not at all surprising, actually. eMMC is pretty poky at 30-40MB/sec throughput, even in "fast" 8-bit mode, but SD cards and controllers they put on them can be far worse - usually they don't really use the high speed modes so you end up with 10MB/sec speeds.
And internal memory speeds are increasing - UF
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It's not "reportedly". I can tell you that my M9 that is happily running with Marshmallow works great with my 128GB SD card "formatted as internal storage". Works great. I've had zero problems.
The only downside I can think of is that the SD card is effectively unformatted storage if the phone breaks. Most people store backups and things on their SD card so that if/when their phone breaks they can pop the SD card in the next phone and do a restore. You can't do that when the SD card is formatted as internal
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." Hello world"
It's of course apt to have a code example from probably the most compact programming language (binary wise) in history when talking about how many gigabytes of memory you've already filled up, and it's still not enough! :-)
Brings me right back though. Maybe I should try and wrestle the phones away from my kids long enough to bring the Jupiter Ace out of the basement and show them what "computing" was like when I was their age. 3kB can last a lot longer than you think! :-)
But for it to count as a hello-worl
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Why do people buy 16Gb devices and then assume it will be good for anything beyond that 16Gb?
Most people are not techies. They just want an iPhone. When they figured out the limitations of a 16GB iPhone, they may upgrade to a better model depending on their needs. According to my friend who works at a Sprint store, they sell a lot of 16GB iPhones.
run upgrade. you will get wasted memory back. (Score:2)
Apple's still using compilers from the BSD v4 era? they fixed that memory clear function long ago.
Huh? Deleting unnecessary files? (Score:2)
Yeap, just keeps deleting all those unnecessary files you have: music, photos, documents and such. After all, they're all backed up in the cloud, so why on Earth you'd keep them on your phone?
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Yeap, just keeps deleting all those unnecessary files you have: music, photos, documents and such.
I used to do that with my 20MB hard drive back in the day. Of course, I backed them up to floppy disks. We didn't have a cloud back then.
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Erm ... are you kidding?
They are not all backed up in the cloud. Free cloud storage is 5GB, how do you back up with that 20GB of pictures is beyond me.
Most who use cloud back ups have set it to Wifi/Wlan only, otherwise it would wreck their data plan. So all new stuff snci your last Wifi connection is not backed up.
AFAIK if you delete something from the phone it is deleted from the cloud, too!
Your idea is pretty silly!
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Oh, sorry, I forgot the tag.
Of course I'm fucking kidding. TFA says "According to this Reddit post, it seems what the device is doing is deleting unnecessary files from installed apps in an effort to free up the room you need to install the movie."
Who rents this stuff? (Score:2)
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VHS cassettes, properly licensed to rent, were anywhere from about $300 to $600 each. That was in the 80s - a buddy owned a store and got a discount because he was part of a franchise. In other words, it was more expensive for the little stores. Lots of those little stores did not properly license them. Some were caught and taken to court. When they were no longer new releases, the prices would go down to the $80 to $120 range. :/
Like you say, the ones to rent are MUCH more expensive for physical media. I s
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ding ding ding! This is correct.
I recently had my wife saying she couldn't take any pictures because there was no more free storage.
So, go to the storage settings and just check what's using it all, right?
Wrong. It doesn't even show you how much is actually being used. It tells you a number M that is in use, a number L that's free (in this case: 0MB), yet somehow advertised storage capacity N is much greater than the M it gives you - and you can't even make sense of it by thinking it must be the OS.
So yo
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For the same price of these digital rentals, you can buy a used physical copy within a week of release, and guess what? You can lend or resell it later!
It's called "Convenience". Lets compare the two solutions:
Buy Physical movie:
1. Decide on what you want to watch
2. Locate store/person who has said physical copy
3. Travel to that location or have it sent to you.
4. Rip said movie and copy to your device
5. Store physical copy in safe place
6. Advertise movie for sale
7. Deal with public who wants to:
a. Beat you down on price
b. Burden you with weird shipping requirements
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I occasionally rent a movie from iTunes if I need some entertainment on a flight or long ride.
Re: Who rents this stuff? (Score:2)
That's not how real life works. The reason that Redbox can rent a DVD for $2 is that once they buy it, they can rent the same DVD out as many times as they want. They don't have to make any deals with the studios.
With streaming, the content is licensed and the retailer has to pay the studio each time it is streamed.
This is the stupidest solution I have ever heard. (Score:1)
Why can't we just have admin access to the devices we own so that we can do this ourselves, rather than using using these stupid workarounds? It is ridiculous that one should have to pay hundreds for a device and then not be able to manage storage space except via operating system bugs. Believe that Apple is going to remove this 'feature' as soon as they release how people are using it.
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Let me get this straight. You think that just because you bought something, you own it? You sir, are not a 20th century man.
And if you think Apple is a problem, wait 'til your $25000(US) car won't let you take it to work until you make an appointment with the nearest dealer to have the ashtrays cleaned at a cost of $399.98
You can't just free the cache?^ (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously? There is no way to do that without buying shit? Truly an innovative company.
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Consider the average smartphone user doesn't know the difference between hard drive "memory" and RAM "memory" on a computer.
Clearing caches causes apps to discard downloaded and pre-calculated resources to free local storage space. These resources can be recovered when needed later by either redownloading them (probably costing $ for data usage) or recalculating them, probably using battery. I'm sure we all know iPhone users who obsessively "quit" their apps by double-tap-home & swiping them, under th
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Well the next question is why isn't this an option in the little storage space app.
Re: You can't just free the cache?^ (Score:2)
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Why would you want to manually free a cache when the system apparently manages it quite well (as evidenced by this whole story)? There's literally zero advantage to having free storage unless you have plans for it, and big downsides to blowing away, well, cache just because you like seeing a bigger number in the "free" column.
There are lots of things my computer doesn't let me manually manage by default. When was the last time you manually set your hard drive RAM buffer size? I thought so.
Easy come, Easy go (Score:4, Interesting)
Very expensive garbage collection? (Score:2)
Big shock to iOS Users (Score:1)
Can verify this works (Score:5, Funny)
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They could just buy a real phone that lets you manage your storage yourself whenever you want, perhaps even let you install a 128G SD card.
I must be doing something wrong. I got a 16GB iPhone with 8GB free.
Re: Or (Score:2)
Yes and you get a 128GB ad card that you can't use to store apps on.
bizarre (Score:2)
What's almost certainly going on (Score:1)
Every app on iOS is allowed to have its own private temporary directory. However, despite documentation stating that the contents of the directory may be deleted by the operating system, this very rarely happens. The only time I've ever seen it happen is when the device doesn't have enough space for some new content. When that happens, it appears that iOS goes through non-running apps and deletes the contents of their temp directories (probably starting with the app with the biggest temp directory, but mayb