Games can easily kill 16GB of storage, no matter what other media you might have on the device, and apps in general are bigger than they used to be with Retina resources. And "the cloud" really does me no good on a plane or a road trip or anywhere else fast wifi may not be available.

16GB is small enough to require active storage management, even for fairly casual users. It's becoming a real issue.

…hence why larger sizes are available?

If Boeing made a jet that everyone over 4' tall had to bend in half to sit in, would you say "hence why larger sizes are available"?

16GB iPads are a poor (or at least mediocre) user experience, even for ordinary users. It's contrary to Apple's ethos to continue making them at all.

It's even sillier when you consider that everything else about the baseline $499 model has been drastically improved several times over since 2010, and Apple has taken steps that clearly reduced the utility of the 16GB baseline (retina graphics, full HD video).

32GB should be the new $499 baseline. It's way past time.

Ahah, the mythical ordinary user.

I know some users. I don't know if they are ordinary. I think they are. My parents in their 50's. A grandmother of 80. Some friends which are 30 with a very average computer literacy.

Every one of them took fast with the iPad (that's how Apple is good), but no one of 'em'll fill 16gb of space.

I have a similar set of "ordinary users".

They've all had storage issues on 16GB.

Anecdotes are such an awesome way to evaluate market data.

It's not data that fills the iPad, it's the all those 2048x1536 resources.

Retina apps are big, and are the reason why my iPad 2 is stuck on iOS 5 and that I've not upgraded a lot of apps. They're too big.

Yes, it's 2013 and both Verizon and ATT are still charging $50/month for 5GB. Until unlimited plans at reasonable prices become available, cloud+mobile is useless to me and it'd be more affordable to store media on my device instead of streaming it.

T-Mobile may work for your use case (if you're in a coverage zone), with 5GB of their 4G and unlimited EDGE (it was good enough for the original iPhone which relied exclusively on HTML5 apps, right?) for $30/mo prepaid. I don't know how well the iPad works on T-Mobile's network though, YMMV.

Yeah, I'd love T-Mobile, but pretty much every friend/coworker who uses T-Mobile complains about coverage. It's apparently pretty dismal in my area (North Jersey/Hudson Valley.)

Stream a couple HD movies. There goes your 5GB.

So god forbid you watch your movies on the go in SD in order to eke out a few extra showings. 5GB is still worlds better than AT&T offers, and there's still unlimited EDGE.

Stream 3 SD movies and there goes your 5GB.

EDGE is not remotely useful in the context of this conversation, I have no idea why you keep bringing it up. The only thing you might possibly hope to stream at EDGE speeds is audio, video is simply not an option. And (re-)installing apps of any substantive size is likewise impractical.

I am in no way ignorant of the mobile data options available to me in the United States. I simply know them to be an utterly inadequate to substitute for adequate local storage, and I can't even begin to understand how you consider them to be otherwise. Feels like you're just here to shill for T-Mobile.

Which why it's awesome that it's 2013 and anywhere worth being has WIFI.