No, the 32 GB iPhone isn’t ’slow’ (or, how storage works!)
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Smaller capacity devices are slower than higher capacity devices, not just for iPhones, but for everything. Because parallelism.
Rene Ritchie has been covering Apple and the personal technology industry for almost a decade. Editorial director for Mobile Nations, analyst for iMore, video and podcast host, you can follow him on Snapchat, Instagram, or Twitter @reneritchie.
There are a few stories going around, some grossly sensationalized, some genuinely curious, about the 32 GB iPhone 7 exhibiting slower storage speeds when compared to the 128 GB or 256 GB iPhone 7. Some of the stories, and many of the re-blogs actually include at least a partial reason as to why that's to be expected, but they also bury it as far away from the attention-grabbing headline as possible. That's good for business but terrible for readers.
I do not think that means what you think it means
To start with, to double the storage in iPhone 7, Apple didn't add twice as many NAND Flash chips. They doubled the density of the existing number of chips.
To go from 32 GB to 128 GB, and from 128 GB to 256 GB, though, that requires more chips. When you add more chips, they don't work sequentially, they work in parallel. In other words, the more chips you add, the faster the performance becomes.
That's not just true of iPhone, of course. It's true of any device that uses direct storage. It's something that's so well known by anyone and everyone involved in storage architecture that it's a miracle we haven't seen this pop up, and get debunked, sooner. But, iPhone. So, headlines.
It's not my fault I'm the biggest and the strongest, I don't even exercise!
To make an incredibly crude analogy, if you have to transport 8 people, two 4-seater cars are "faster" than one because you can move all those people in a single trip using both cars rather than having to make two trips using a single car. Likewise, if you can take two bites out of a cookie at a time, even if their only as fast as taking a single bite, the cookie will still be eaten twice as fast.
Now, there are a lot of other factors that can affect overall speed, including the type of NAND Flash used. Synthetic tests can also produce wacky results, depending on how, what, and when they draw their data.
Here's the important thing to remember: When Apple sets performance targets for iPhone, they're set for all models of iPhone.
That means every model, with every capacity, has to hit those targets. That the higher capacities can exceed the targets by virtue of having more chips working in parallel is simply a benefit of how storage works. (And a good one, given higher capacities have more space to fill.)
The cliffs of insanity!
Bottom line, if you see or hear anyone stressing about their 32 GB iPhone 7 being slow, please put their mind at ease. Their 32 GB iPhone 7 is as fast as the technology Apple's currently using allows.
About the only thing that could improve it would be Apple bring that ultra-fast USB 3-speed storage controller from the 12.9-inch iPad Pro to the rest of the iOS line. Here's hoping that happens in the near future.