Apple sued for ‘deceiving’ people about iPhone storage

It has become common practice for manufacturers around the world to sell phones and tablets with less storage space than is advertised on the box. And while many users are happy to put up with this discrepancy, two iPhone owners have decided to take Apple to task about it.

In a suit filed in Miami, the pair accuses the tech giant of ‘concealing, omitting and failing to disclose’ that on 16GB versions of iPhones, more than 20 per cent of the advertised space isn’t available.

“Namely, that when using iOS 8, as much as 3.7GB of the represented storage capacity on a device represented to have 16GB of storage capacity is, in fact, not available to the purchaser for storage.”

And a chart contained within the files shows that this discrepancy doesn’t just apply to the latest models of the device.

Older models that update to iOS 8 similarly suffer. For example, storage space on the iPhone 5S drops by 18.8 per cent, the iPad Air drops by 21.3 per cent, and the iPod by as much as 23.1 per cent, in comparison to advertised

. space.

The files continued: “Apple fails to disclose that upgrading from iOS 7 to iOS 8 will cost a device user between 600 MB and 1.3 GB of storage space - a result that no consumer could reasonably anticipate.

“To put this in context, each gigabyte of storage Apple shortchanges its customers amounts to approximately 400-500 high resolution photographs.”