iPads and the 32GB bottleneck... FIXED (for a year or two!)

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32GB is quite a lot, really. 32,000 Megabytes, or 32,000,000,000 bytes of information. give or take some rounding errors. But it's actually a problem in the iPad world. 

You see, iPads are kept far longer than iPhones. It's not unusual for someone's main iPad to be five or six years old, they just carry on doing the job they've done for so long. So keeping the software updated year on year is a larger project than on phones, where people normally upgrade after three or four years.

Over The Air updates are wonderful, of course. No need to do anything except say 'Install' when Apple auto-downloads and offers the iPadOS update. Except in the modern era, when iPadOS 26 minor updates can still "need up to 12.5GB" in order to unpack and install in-place, on the iPad directly.

With a modern iPad with 128GB or 256GB of storage, this isn't a problem. But for iPads of a certain age, in this case six years (2020), launched with a 32GB storage option, these large updates are a very real issue. I know because I have one!

I don't keep huge amounts of media on it, but I do have a few dozen apps, mainly to do with media or creativity, and I run it with about 5GB free, i.e. iPadOS and my apps/data use about 27GB. And this all seems reasonable. Until update time.

(after offloading everything I could and pruning things savagely, I STILL couldn't get enough free space to update 'Over The Air'!)

All of a sudden, for Over The Air updating (over Wifi), I need 12.5GB free and that's almost impossible. I tried. By 'offloading' all my apps, I still couldn't get 12.5GB free. So I ended up:

  1. making sure my iCloud backups were up to date
  2. hard resetting the iPad
  3. setting it up without restoring data
  4. performing the OTA update to (e.g. iPadOS 26.4)
  5. hard resetting again(!)
  6. setting up for real and choosing to restore my iCloud backup/data

Phew! This can't go on. I mused selling or simply giving the iPad away and buying a new one. But, while this may happen in a year or so's time anyway, I then had a brainwave. iPadOS updates don't need 12.5GB free if done via a desktop computer. 

Now, I'll document this in more statistical detail when it happens, but the theory is that by hooking up the iPad to my (also six year old) MacBook, I can update it from Finder on the Mac. Which means that the Mac does the update download, the Mac does the unzipping of the file, and the Mac handles flashing the OS partition on the iPad. So only a few GB free are needed on the latter!

Which will extend the life of an aged iPad like mine significantly. It's on the very latest all-singing, all-dancing iPadOS version and now I have a way of updating it without the hard reset dance. Why the flipping heck didn't I think of this before?(!)

So, yes, if you have access to any Mac or Windows PC - so that's almost everyone - then you can update a 32GB storage-bottlenecked iPad in-place using either Finder (on the Mac) or 'Apple Devices' (on Windows) using a simple USB connection. And that should save many people time and money, I reckon!

PS. If you like my work then think about buying me a beer at paypal.me/stevelitchfield - thanks!

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