Alleged packaging for the new, less expensive iPhone that's expected to be announced next week recently leaked on the Chinese social media site Weibo.
According to the leak, the iPhone will indeed be called the iPhone SE and it will come with NFC, allowing people to use Apple Pay, the mobile payments system.
But the leak also confirmed one particularly disturbing detail: The base model of the new iPhone will apparently come with only 16 gigabytes of storage.
This is something I have written about before, but it's worth repeating: A phone with only 16 gigabytes of storage is simply not enough capacity for most people.
Between apps, photos, videos, and games, not to mention the operating system required just to use the device, 16 gigabytes will fill up very quickly.
Add Live Photos, the new feature that was introduced last fall with the iPhone 6s — it adds short video and sound to photos, and they're large — and you'll potentially fill up that iPhone the first day you start using it.
Yet Apple still insists on keeping its base model at 16 gigabytes.
It's slightly more justifiable for Apple to make a 16-gigabyte version of this phone than it is for the company to make a 16-gigabyte version of its flagship phone, which we're expecting to see in September. After all, this is a smaller and less expensive iPhone meant to appeal to people who don't need to have the latest and greatest tech. But that doesn't mean it's friendly to consumers, or that most people should buy it.
Those who already know the pain of owning a phone with not enough storage are familiar with this notification: It's a move that's friendly to shareholders, though, because it's great for Apple's bottom line. A phone with only 16 gigs of storage is a great way to upsell people to the larger capacity phone, which will almost certainly cost $100 more. That extra bit of storage is inexpensive for Apple to buy, so the company makes more profit off the phone with more storage.
Apple has continued to offer a 16 gigabytes in the base model of every iPhone since the iPhone 5 was introduced in 2012. But even Apple's competitors like Samsung, LG, and HTC no longer offer their flagship phones with a 16 gigabytes of storage — they all start with 32 gigabytes.
Apple's marketing boss Phil Schiller has defended the the company's choice of sticking with 16 gigabytes, saying that people can rely on the cloud for much of their storage needs, and phones with this level of storage are a good option for many people. But as we've previously explained, that's not actually a very good argument.
Hopefully Apple will finally stray from this pattern when it launches the so-called iPhone 7 in September. But it appears to be too late to change this aspect of the iPhone SE.
