When I jumped from an iPhone 6S – with 16 GB of storage filled to the brim – to an iPhone 13 Pro, its 128 GB seemed almost too much space at the time.
Of course that was naive thinking, especially given how notoriously expensive and strict Apple are with storage. No doubt they foresaw that people would quick quickly struggle with that base amount.
And so it has been with my iPhone 15 Pro (128 GB) this year. It’s hovered around 120 GB full for a while now, which has meant upgrading the OS, even to dot releases, had become difficult. The classic pop-up error message: “Cannot Download Update. There is not enough available storage to download iOS. You can manage your storage in Settings.” was a familiar sight.
This is an issue many are facing, for a couple of wide-spread reasons. For full disclosure, I do have around 30 GB of podcasts taking up space, but very little other media stored locally.
The rest is two-fold, and very common. Firstly, general app bloat accounts for a huge amount – the likes of Duolingo, Reddit and Instagram regularly sit over 1 GB thanks to non-existent iOS cache management, and many other (often poorly optimised) apps are between 300-500 MB each, which quickly adds up.
But it is the OS itself (13.5 GB + 19 GB System Data), and now Apple Intelligence weighing in at an extra 6 GB which has tipped the scales. For the record, that’s over 30% of the advertised space. Add in iCloud Photos at 14 GB and soon there’s very little wriggle room.
Of course, it’s a Catch-22 – with such little space the OS can’t perform any of its optimisations properly, let alone have enough for a System Update. And while it does offer to ‘Offload Unused Apps’, that can actually be a bit of a false economy if you end up spending hours having to sort out re-logging in to various services.
Having bought the new Apple Watch Ultra 3, my hand was forced though – as I’d need iOS 26 to match it for setup. It was at that point that I suddenly recalled the days we all used to update our iPhones on our Macs through iTunes. It was even a practice I’d carried on in the early OTA days, as it was so much safer in terms of backups and downloads.
To my surprise, I quickly confirmed it was still thing these days, albeit through Finder. And so, with 126.8 GB of 128 GB spent, I took the plunge.
To my surprise, the whole experience was excellent, and done within an hour, with all the heavy downloaded done on the Mac’s side. The UI is polished (far more than System Settings), and has useful settings and progress bars – that still bore some of the hallmarks of the iTunes days. The option to ‘Backup to this Mac’ even remains, which is useful is you want a full contingency strategy.
If you are struggling for space to update your iPhone I can safely recommend it – no apps were removed or offloaded, and literally nothing altered apart from the OS. It’s a genuinely nice user experience, and much better than wrestling with storage space on the device itself.
There were two mini ‘gotchas’ that are worth noting, both on the iPhone after updating:
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You’ll need to accept iCloud’s new Terms and Conditions from the iPhone Settings menu (iCloud section) – I believe you would normally do this as part of the upgrade, but it didn’t trigger via the Mac. Without this, nothing iCloud related will sync.
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Secondly, the whole Photos app took a very long time to repopulate (presumably due to the lack of space to work with). On first view it appeared completely empty in both the Library and Collections tabs – which was quite alarming until everything synced back up. Obviously it’s best to do this while charging and connected to Wi-Fi.