Apple Faces Lawsuit Over iOS 8 Storage Hogging

Two Florida men are suing Apple over what they claim is a misrepresentation of how much storage space the iOS 8 operating system uses on iPhones, iPads, and iPods.

Paul Orshan and Christopher Endara filed their class-action complaint on Tuesday in a California federal court, Bloomberg reported. PCMag has also obtained a copy of the filing.

The plaintiffs are seeking $5 million from Apple to distribute among class-action participants.

The suit states that Apple "fails to disclose to consumers that as much as 23.1 percent of the advertised storage capacity of the Devices will be consumed by iOS 8 and unavailable for consumers when consumers purchase Devices that have iOS 8 installed. Reasonable consumers, such as Plaintiff, do not expect this marked discrepancy between the advertised level of capacity and the available capacity of the Devices, as the operating system and other storage space unavailable to consumers occupies an extraordinary percentage of their Devices' limited storage capacity."

The complaint also links the limited unused storage space on devices running iOS 8 with Apple's marketing of its iCloud storage service.

"To compound the harm to consumers, after Defendant provides materially less than the advertised capacity on the Devices, Defendant aggressively markets a monthly fee-based storage system called iCloud," the lawsuit states. "Using these sharp business tactics, Defendant gives less storage capacity than advertised, only to offer to sell that capacity in a desperate moment, e.g., when a consumer is trying to record or take photos at a child or grandchild's recital, basketball game or wedding. To put this in context, each gigabyte of storage Apple shortchanges its customers amounts to approximately 400-500 high resolution photographs."

It's not clear how far Orshan and Endara will get with this case. Apple accurately represents the total storage capacity of the devices it sells, but the software that runs them must necessarily take up at least some of that capacity. Other device makers advertise the storage capacity of their products similarly, listing the total capacity instead of what's available after the OS and other pre-loaded software is installed.

In 2012, Microsoft faced a similar suit over storage on its Surface tablet. The following year, a judge granted Microsoft's request for arbitration.

:story: PC Magazine