iOS 11 might save you $100 dollars? iOS 11 HEIF/HEVC vs. JPEG/MP4 comparison
I’m always a big fan of saving money. Especially when it comes to my chronic spending on iOS devices. When it comes to storage, my biggest issue is not having enough of it even though I’m quite good at deleting stuff. But I’m guessing most of you are like me who still keep 100’s of photos for really no good reason. Apple claims that iOS 11 is going to help alleviate our storage woes.
Now to get around storage woes, I could buy a bigger iPhone but as you guys have heard me rant about, it just means I get to keep more crap on my iPhone before I run out of space again. It’s like moving into a bigger house, you end up getting stuff you really don’t need just to fill it up.
Now what does this have to do with iOS 11 saving you a few bucks? Apple announced that iOS 11 will be storing photos using new format called HEIF for photos and HEVC for videos. Which replaces the current JPEG and MP4 formats with iOS 10. I’m still on the fence on how to pronounce the new formats…
In general, that means all your iOS 11 photos are going to 50% smaller in size while maintaining the same quality as the old formats. Which is a pretty big deal because, again I’m guessing for most people, the biggest crutch to your iPhone storage is videos and photos. But are actually going to notice the difference? I’m always a critic of those giant numbers they put up in presentations, 50x faster, which is great but it doesn’t necessarily translate to a big difference to the end user.
To see what savings I could get, I loaded one iPhone 7 plus with iOS 11 and the other with regular, boring iOS 10. I filmed a kettle boil for 10 minutes and used an app called Investigator to read the metadata. On iOS 11, the 10+ minute video was 605 MB in size whereas the iOS 10 version was close to 1200MB. That’s quite significant.
I also took a bunch of photos of the same subject with both iOS’s, this set included a photo of Monty showing his FOMO from the front door, a hanging plant, a robin’s nest, a box of Alexa compatible plugs, stinky lily’s and my Budu case. This group of photos on average was 46% smaller in iOS 11 than iOS 10. On average, each photo was about 1.1 MB in iOS11 and 2 MB in iOS 10.
The smallest difference I noticed was for live photos where it was only 35% smaller.
I will note that I did shoot a slo-mo video of Monty showing off his mid-air blueberry snatching ability but the Investigator app didn’t show me the file size for the slo-mo video which was disappointing.
With with this small sample, the average saving size was about 46%. Which means the current 7 GB’s of photos on my current iPhone 7 Plus with iOS 10 is going to be 4.75 GB’s in iOS 11. I’m sure that photo intensive apps like Instagram, Facebook and iMessages will be trimmed down in size as well.
So with iOS 11, the ~50% savings in image sizes might allow you to save a $100 bucks by going with a smaller iPhone. So that’s it for this video. I’ll do a couple more of things I found useful in iOS 11 over the next couple of weeks. I tried doing one on the do not disturb while driving but apparently it doesn’t work. Which is odd since everybody has written about it but apparently none of them tried using it? Real uSage, Real Reviews AMIRTE?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subscribe to stay in the loop! We release 2-3 videos a week so there's going to be something new every week. We're all about helping you get the most out of iOS so click Subscribe!
WEBSITE: http://www.mobilereviews-eh.ca
T-SHIRTS: http://mobilereviewseh.spreadshirt.com
PATREON: / mobilereviewseh
TUMBLR: / mobilereviewseh
INSTAGRAM: / mobilereviewseh
TWITTER: / mobilereviewseh
AARON: / aaron_the_ho
FACEBOOK: / mobilereviewseh
GOOGLE +: http://bit.ly/GplusMobileReviewsEh