The iPhone 6S’s cool video features have a big catch

When Apple unveiled its new iPhone 6S and 6S Plus handsets last week, it showed off all sorts of new features. 3D touch! 4K video! Live photos! But what Apple didn’t say explicitly, and what some Apple users might not realize, is that those features come with a catch: they require a lot more memory.

4K video

Let’s take 4K video, for example. As Apple itself points out, 4K video has over eight million pixels, making a single 4K frame four times larger than a 1080p video frame. That leads to stunning image resolution, but it also leads to massive file sizes – if the video resolution is four times larger than 1080p, then you could theoretically expect it to take up four times as much space on your hard drive.

Apple claims the real number is lower, but even if Apple’s numbers are accurate (and that would mean the 4K video is pretty compressed), you still could only fit less than 40 minutes of 4K video onto a 16 GB iPhone 6S.

And that’s assuming you have nothing installed beyond iOS 9 – no extra apps, no music, and no photos. If, like a normal person, you’ve got a bunch of extra apps, some music and podcasts, and a lot of photos on your phone, then you might not have space for more than a minute or two of 4K video. Even a 64 GB model probably won’t be enough for video enthusiasts unless you’re willing to dump your videos onto a PC and delete them off your phone quite frequently.

(Of course, whether it’s actually worth shooting 4K video is another question, since very few devices have the 4K screens required to take advantage of it right now anyway.)

“Live Photos” (aka more video)

But of course, photos on the iPhone 6S are going to take up extra space too, at least if you enable Apple’s new Live Photos feature. Don’t buy into the hype – so-called Live Photos are just quick videos that Apple’s new device will automatically shoot and then tack on to your photos so that you get a little slice of motion and sound when you’re scrolling through your camera roll. It’s a very cool effect, but of of course it also means that a second or two of sound and video has to be stored for every photo you take with the feature on.

Apple says that Live Photos are efficiently compressed. But no matter how good the compression is, they’re still going to take up more space on your phone than a singular photo would. And of course, since the iPhone 6S now features a 12-megapixel front camera and a 5-megapixel selfie camera, even not-so-live photos will be taking up more storage space than users may be used to. The iPhone 6 only had an 8-megapixel camera, so 6S users will find that regular photos take more than 33 percent more storage space each even with the Live Photos feature turned off.

iPhone storage prices are a ripoff

All of this is probably obvious – of course higher quality requires higher storage space! To many users, the trade-off in storage space will be worth the increase in quality. But the change is worth mentioning because the premium Apple puts on storage is ridiculous. Or to put it another way: Apple’s iPhone storage prices are an insane ripoff.

In the US, for example, upgrading from a 16 GB iPhone 6S to a 128 GB iPhone 6S will cost you US$200. That’s $200 for 112 GB of storage space, or about US$1.79 per gigabyte. By comparison, you can get an average 128 GB USB flash drive on Amazon for about twenty bucks. That’s a cost of US$0.15 per gigabyte, meaning that buying your flash storage from Apple in the form of a higher-capacity iPhone is about twelve times more expensive than it needs to be.

Now, obviously Apple is entitled to charge whatever it wants for its phones. The Cupertino company has been charging borderline-criminal prices on extra storage for years (just look at what a few extra GB costs you on its laptops and desktops compared to the price per GB of buying a new laptop or desktop HDD or SSD separately for PC). In the high-end smartphone game it is far from alone. Samsung’s markup on storage space for the Galaxy S6, for example, is actually even worse than Apple’s.

But since Apple’s the company that’s pushing 4K video recording and higher-res photos with video and sound attached to them, this seems like an issue worth at least being aware of. The new iPhone 6S can do some very cool things, but it’ll need to eat a lot more of your hard drive space than you might expect to pull them off. And since storage on an iPhone comes at such a premium, that means users who could get by with a 16 GB or 32 GB iPhone in the past may be forced to pay more for higher-storage models this time around if they want to take full advantage of the new features.

But there’s some good news