The Curious Case of the Slow, Tiny iPhone

Windows PCs are "known" to suffer from bitrot, an ailment where a computer over time becomes—real or perceived—slower and slower, typically as more software is installed. Every so often, perhaps once a year, faithful PC caretakers would backup their machines, reinstall Windows from scratch, and then reinstall just the software they needed. And with that arduous ritual complete, the PC would miraculously be healed—at least for the moment.

We're 8 years into the Post PC era, since the iPhone rocked onto the scene and promised us that computers would never have to be as difficult to use again. An app here, a notification there, and you'd rarely need to touch your PC again. A tiny supercomputer in your pocket could be your camera, your iPod, your GPS, your books and newspapers, your everything. Throw in a cell connection or Wifi, and you'd never lack for anything again.

Except for space, that is. As phones have come with ever-better cameras and larger Retina displays that require larger graphics to look nice, the standard storage space in base-model phones has been stuck at 16GB (or 8 for more budget phones) for years. iCloud every other online file storage service don't really alleviate the problem—they're simply another place to keep your files backed up, and except for rare cases (aka iCloud Photo Library when it works well) they don't offload your phone's own storage seamlessly. Apps aren't smart, either: Facebook and so many other apps will keep far too much in their app cache, holding onto images and more in case you want to see them even when your phone's running out of space.

And so, the longer you stick with the same phone—installing updates, downloading new apps, syncing streaming music for your flight, and snapping more pictures than ever—the more likely your phone is to run out of space. You could copy photos off, but that keeps you from being able to scroll back through years of photos as Apple likes to showcase in Keynotes. There's always an app to delete, but it's hard to let go and remove stuff you might want to use again.

Back on a PC, you'd just wipe everything and reinstall Windows every so often. Which is almost what I did to my iPhone 5 recently. Its 16GB of storage had been maxed out for too long, despite telling iCloud to optimize my local photo storage and deleting most of my downloaded music. It wasn't just that I couldn't download more stuff—it's that my phone got slower and slower that was so annoying. Apparently every time something needed storage, iOS tried to figure out what it could delete—and I was left waiting.

No longer. I could have deleted individual apps and deleted-then-reinstalled apps like Facebook to hard-clear their cache, but instead I took the nuclear option.

A quick trip to Settings -> General -> Reset -> Erase All Content and Settings, then setting up my phone as a new phone and installing only just what I had to have, and my phone was back to feeling snappy as iOS 8 would let it. It's still a several year old phone, but with some storage breathing room it's not a half-bad device.

But it's crazy it takes that. For all the promise of better cameras and more online storage and everything else annual keynotes promise, one of the original problems of tech is back to being an issue: storage space. That, of all things, shouldn't be what's holding smartphones back today. If Apple wants to celebrate the amazing apps in the App Store and the newest versions of iOS, it needs to make sure our devices have enough storage to handle them—whether through smart cloud services that offload files you rarely need to the cloud, or simply through adding far more storage to base models of iPhones.

There's an Apple announcement this week for what we presume will be called the iPhone 6S, and since I'm due for an update, I'll likely get it regardless of what new is added. I'll also likely spring for more storage space this time, simply because it's annoying to live with less. But even still, it's time to bump the storage levels—drastically. 16GB isn't nearly enough to get by with in 2015.

Until then, it's time to wipe your smart devices once a year again.

Thoughts? @reply me on Twitter.