Court throws out lawsuit over storage on iPhones, iPads

The district court in San Jose, California, threw out the proposed class-action suit on Wednesday after Apple filed a motion saying the plaintiffs failed to back up their arguments. The case was dismissed with prejudice, meaning the plaintiffs can't sue Apple again for the same thing.

In the suit, filed last December, Paul Orshan and Christopher Endara charged that Apple misled consumers about how much of the storage on iPhones and iPads was taken up by the OS. For example, they said a 16GB iPhone 6 really had just 13GB of capacity available.

Orshan and Endara never claimed they expected to get the full 16GB of storage, only that iOS 8 took up more room than expected. Apple said the plaintiffs never specified what made them think the OS would take up less space. The company also said information about the size of iOS 8 and the amount of available storage on the devices was widely available from media and other sources.

Apple also slammed the plaintiffs' allegation that Apple shortchanged users on storage so it could charge them for iCloud capacity. Every iPhone and iPad owner gets 5GB of free storage on iCloud.

"Thus, consumers who bought an 8 or 16 GB device were actually provided with more than 8 or 16 GB to store their personal data," Apple said in its motion. The company also countered the allegation that it blocked customers from using competing cloud storage services. The iTunes App Store includes apps for many of those, Apple told the court.

Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com