I'm not even a phone power user, and I have over 300GB used on my phone. I only have a couple games. A lot of the data is probably offline storage of cloud backups and downloaded music and movies. But I use a phone with an actual SD card slot, so I freely download things offline because of that.

> so I freely download things offline because of that.

I'm sorry to say but if you download things offline you are a power user.

I mean, it's a checkbox setting in like two apps (Spotify and Prime Video).

I’m sorry to say, but with a phone, if you change the settings, you’re a power user.

Take any pictures or video using the built in cameras and you’ll feel how tiny that storage is really fast. Not all of us are still working at 640x480.

Yeah, this hits hard if one is shooting videos in 4K (and why would one not use the highest resolution that’s supported?).

Photos, unless chosen to be shot in RAW and the highest resolution at all times, are comparatively not as big a deal on space used with the HEIC format (choose High Efficiency as the format in the camera settings).

Since most people tend to keep all or most of the photos they ever shot over the years on their phones, it just adds up.

It’s true. On the plus side, it’s only a couple hundred gig for multiple hour 4K recordings. The compression is pretty good.

Size/cost/quality wise, that’s so much better than old school VHS/camcorders it makes my head hurt.

Pretty awesome for sure. Still no free lunch though.

Then how do you transfer those large 4k videos? From reading the comments here I feel weird because I always use USB3 to transfer my videos from my (Android) phone to my PC.

What do iPhone users do to get all that data off their phones and onto their macbooks?

Yeah, I keep reading people saying who transfers files by USB these days, nobody needs that speed! Meanwhile, I'm quietly doing that here right now in the corner thinking I'm a weirdo because all these HN people say so. Thanks for the reality check, bubble popped

It automatically appears on my Mac devices (and iPads for that matter) via iCloud.

Hell, nowadays it does the same for photos and videos taken by my SO if they took the photo/video while I was with them.

Now that I think about it, I’ve got “Optimize Storage” enabled on my devices, so if storage is running low it should keep a lower resolution instead of the original stored locally. But I suppose they must use a FIFO logic, because my most recent stuff is always available locally in full resolution.

If I need the older stuff for a project I click export on it and it’ll download the full resolution, which doesn’t take more than a few seconds because I’ve got 1Gbit fiber connection.

I guess the closest thing that comes to a manual transfer would be AirDrop where it would transfer it via a 5Ghz ad-hoc WiFi connection (or via LAN if the extra hop via the router would be faster with an ethernet connected Mac in the olden days).

In practice it reaches about 1Gbps, but I rarely to use it because by the time I need it it’s already synced. I only use it a few times a year when I’ve shot B-roll with the iPhone at my desk and immediately jump into editing.

I haven’t used a cable to transfer data to/from my iPhone in probably more than a decade with the sole exception being when I push out builds from Xcode to the iPhone.

I think apple made it basically a non-issue with how they implement iCloud and it's hard to justify buying higher capacity phones. I'm one of those weirdos who like to keep all the pictures I take on my phone locally and not in the cloud so my personal phone is 512GB and I kinda regret not buying the 1TB option, but that must be super rare among the user base.

So we pay almost $1000 for phone and then we should pay subscription for cloud storage and be happy because UX is ok and we didn't have to pay for extremely overpriced piece of NAND storage to avoid subscription.

Modern customers stray further from God every day.

I did the math.

It’s cheaper to pay for the 2TB iCloud for 2 years than it would be to upgrade to larger storage on the phone. It’s actually even less because my whole family uses the same quota together.

That's because on-device storage is overpriced in order to make your math work :-)

Then it's easy decision to throw in a few more dollars for streaming service and you are nice recurring revenue instead one-time sell.

Also it's probably cheaper only if you consider only Apple ecosystem. Other mid-range device comparable to base iPhone with bigger storage is probably cheaper.

I might be weird but I specifically don't want my media and data to live only in a terabyte of storage I carry with me.

I want to upload it all to the cloud as fast as possible so it won't get lost if the device is stolen/breaks/gets lost.

I guess we’re both of bunch of weirdos because I’m reading through some of these comments and am wondering if there’s some sort of Luddite convention that I’m unaware of.

The idea that all of my media would be stuck on one device and at risk or that I would have to go through the laborious process of manually syncing it all regularly by hooking up my devices is a nightmare.

Everything automatically syncs to all my devices, including photos and videos me and my SO take in each other’s presence, all recent media is immediately available at the highest native resolutions and I never have to worry about anything.

I’ve got terabytes full of stuff going back years and for good measure I’ve got an automated backup running to a NAS.

Out of an old fashioned mindset I’ve got a moderately upgraded iPhone with 256GB, but 200GB of it is apps because I tend to download apps from fellow developers.

A fraction of that is spend on photos and videos because of automatic storage optimization and a fraction is used for music and podcasts that’s also automatically managed for when I’m traveling.

I’ve got professional cameras and by far the most annoying part is transferring media despite having access to the highest theoretical transfer speeds available on the market today.

It also provides you backup which if you value your photos you'd have anyway.....so presumably if you didn't pay it to apple you would pay it to someone else, but with worse UX and integration.

Like, there is a value in what Apple is offering. It means someone like my mum never ever has to think about storage or backing up anything, when she lost her phone she got a new one out of a box, signed in and all of her stuff was there without having to do anything. As a power user, could you achieve the same for less? Sure, but for average user the value is there.

Or buyers, across all of time, experience utility differently person to person, and hence end up with different utility per dollar calculations and hence different purchasing decisions.

And most importantly with different price of solid state storage chip, which quickly changes depending if it's inside or outside of the smartphone :-)

Once the chip is inside the smartphone, the price is not for the solid state storage chip. The price is for the phone.

Yeah, but if you can order identical guacamole with one pinch of salt for $5 and guacamole with two pinches of salt for $20 without feeling a little screwed you probably need some guac rechab :-)

> Am I the only one who feels that 128GB is a huge amount of storage for a phone?

Do you think your feelings might vary depending on how you use the device?

if 128GB sounds like a huge amount, then 1TB must be truly frightening!