The 8GB iPhone 5c is proof that Apple cannot admit defeat

The launch of the cut-price 8GB iPhone 5c is a major disruption for Apple, and one that clearly signals a weakening of the company's previously impenetrable attitude with regards to its product strategy. First of all, it comes in the middle of a product lifecycle, which has never happened before. Second, it's a crippling reduction of the capabilities of a product that's already considered undesirable. Third, the discount itself is half-hearted at best, showing Apple's inability to decide whether to continue isolating itself in the premium space as it used to, or embrace the mass market once and for all.

8GB is simply not enough space for a phone at this price point. Even 16GB is a compromise. Applecontinues to advertise the 5c as a fun product, capable of functioning as a video camera, music player and game console, amongst other things. 8GB won't be enough to store more than a small handful of apps and games, let alone music, photos or videos.

Breaking it down
The 16GB iPhone 5c offers users 13.3GB of actual usable space, while the 32GB version gives users a little over 27GB. That means buyers of the 8GB version will be lucky to get 6GB of usable space. Apple's own iWork apps; Pages, Numbers and Keynote, weigh in at 253MB, 223MB and 444MB respectively in the App Store, which is nearly 1GB gone right there. Garage Band alone is 582MB, and that's without any of the downloadable sound packs. They occupy far more space when installed.

Apps are far larger than they used to be, largely thanks to the use of high-resolution graphics. Taking a look at today's most popular ones, we can see that Facebook is listed in the App Store at 60MB, but it happily takes up 107MB on an iPhone 5c, with an additional 61MB of "documents and data". Twitter is listed as 14.7MB, though it needs around 27MB, with an additional "documents and data" cache which can easily balloon to twice that amount. Apps that depend heavily on data hosted on remote servers also aggressively cache data to your phone. Rather than the 11.4MB claimed by Google Maps in the App Store, you'll have to set aside at least 50MB once you start using it.

Games, with their detailed visuals and audio, are of course much heavier. Mirror's Edge, a popular title that's at least a few years old now, requires 120MB. Temple Run 2 takes the same amount of space, and Pivvot, a more recent casual title, takes a whopping 243MB.

Photos taken with an iPhone 5c are at least 1.5MB in size each, and video weighs in at about 1.5MB per second. This means you'll have to manually empty out your phone after each special occasion, and won't have those memorable shots on hand when you want to show them off. Both videos and photos can be compressed on demand when you try to share them by email or post to social networks, and they're still taking up space on your phone. Photo Stream mitigates this to a certain extent, but it isn't perfect.

Albums purchased from the iTunes store can easily exceed 100MB each, and let's not even get started on HD movies.

One recurring complaint that Apple seems to have done nothing about is the amount of space occupied by the Messages app. There's no easy way to go back in time and delete messages older than a certain point in time, or for that matter photos and video clips attached to iMessages. In fact, because of Apple's closed file system, photos you take and then send to anyone are duplicated in the Camera Roll and Messages' storage pool.

All these factors already make life difficult for owners of 16GB iOS devices, and so anyone who buys an 8GB iPhone 5c (and wants to use it for anything beyond basic phone calls and text messages) should expect to face regular warnings about low space. If you want to have even a handful of apps on you, plus a reasonable amount of music, this is absolutely the wrong phone to buy.

Considering the power of its processor, quality of its screen and various other attributes, it's infuriating to see Apple basically cut this phone off at the knees. The whole idea that people will pay more for an iPhone just because it's an iPhone falls apart here - sure, it looks and feels like it, but it can't do half the things an iPhone should.