IPhone – Is a 16GB iPhone supposed to only have 11GBs available

iphone

I have a iPhone 5S and it's reporting a capacity of 11.8GB. I would have thought that 16GB would mean 16GB?

enter image description here

Best Answer

You can check on Apple's storage capacity guide here, but in short may be caused by two factors:

  1. The system reserves a portion of your storage for itself, system files, system partitions, buffer, metadata, etc. Regarding this, I am not entirely sure how much capacity this stuff uses, but you cannot delete it; iOS needs it to run.

  2. When they say that the phone includes a 16GB flash drive, they mean 16000000000 bytes (decimal system), which is about 14,89 GB in binary system (1024*1024*1024=1GB). As the guide says:

The way decimal and binary numeral systems measure a GB is what causes a 32 GB storage device to appear as approximately 28 GB when detailed by its operating system, even though the storage device still has 32 billion bytes (not 28 billion bytes), as reported.

Related Question