Apple's Base 128GB iPhone Storage Tier Needs to Go

[fabbydabby1]

The rant is all wrong! The problem is not the base memory amount. There are lots of people that don’t need more than 128 GB in a phone including me.

The problem is the amount Apple charges for upgrades.

Apple charges $100 for 128 GB of storage that costs them less than $5.

How do you think they make their money

 

[turbineseaplane]

How do you think they make their money

Under-speccing, overcharging for upgrades and hooking people on iCloud subscription revenue

"Services" is their massive growth area the last few years

 

[fabbydabby1]

Under-speccing, overcharging for upgrades and hooking people on iCloud subscription revenue

"Services" is their massive growth area the last few years

I was responding to the previous comment

 

[taliz]

I still have plenty of space on my 64gb XR and iPad 9.
iCloud though...

 

[JosephAW]

Still waiting for Apple to release an iPhone that doesn’t have any storage locally, everything is stored on the cloud.
Maybe the iPhone 17 lite will accomplish this.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Still waiting for Apple to release an iPhone that doesn’t have any storage locally, everything is stored on the cloud.
Maybe the iPhone 17 lite will accomplish this.

Hey, maybe that's what the "Air" part of "iPhone 17 Air" means!

It's SUPER thin ... so thin, we didn't have room for internal media storage!

oh well... there's always an iCloud subscription!

 

[macdaddy43]

There is 0% chance the new SE comes with more than 128GB standard.

 

[ghostface147]

The original iPhone had 8GB of storage

4.

 

[turbineseaplane]

4.

Both ....
4GB & 8GB were the options at launch

 

[fuchsdh]

...They could also just include more storage and charge less for upgrades and none of your entire 2nd paragraph would be needed

It's a wildly better product and experience to not be forcing folks to jockey around trying to figure out what to delete and/or how to do it

This is blatantly untrue. There's always going to be users who are going to max however much storage they have in their devices, partially because how much they use it is a function of how much storage they have.

Wait, what? I can delete attachments, photos, in a text message and still keep the message. There is a whole area where attachments and photos etc, for each person you have a text string with are all separated from the actual text. You can go in and delete individual ones or bulk delete, keeping all the actual texts. I do it often.

What I mean is that if I delete, say, a photo of a relative in the group chat I saved off but that everyone was responding to, it's gone and there's no indication any of the subsequent messages about the photos were relating to it. The context of "hey there was an image here" gets removed, not just the image itself.

 

[johnsc3]

I disagree. A lot of people can easily get by with 128GB.

I agree. To add, business by these phones at the small amount and use them as on-call phones and/ or issues the team a phone for business only.

 

[turbineseaplane]

I agree. To add, business by these phones at the small amount and use them as on-call phones and/ or issues the team a phone for business only.

Those usages should honestly even have iPhones with removable memory so they can physically ensure sensitive data security when decommissioning the devices

 

[JWD]

Old news, Apple has been overly greedy on storage pricing forever. I will never get the base model again though. The experience buying a base model with future updates and offloading content is detrimental to the overall experience. Always buy the next step, even though you think you can manage it for busy people it’s just too time consuming and stressful. The base model is basically only good for seniors who aren’t tech savvy.

 

[turbineseaplane]

The base model is basically only good for seniors who aren’t tech savvy.

Even that is a crap shoot

I've had to personally deal with this, with my older relatives running up against "out of storage, what do we do?" issues several times.

The experience of that BLOWS

 

[navaira]

I have 128GB on my iPhone 15 Pro, 1/3 of it free, the rest almost exclusively downloaded music. I save photos in HEIC format, I record videos sometimes, and, and… I offload those videos and I keep my backups local because my 200 GB paid iCloud storage is already 75% full, but that’s unrelated…

 

[rjp1]

Siri needs to go first.

There is no music currently playing.

 

[turbineseaplane]

There is no music currently playing.

"you need to unlock your phone first"

 

[MacRazySwe]

Wow -- that's quite a flipped narrative, I have to admit

Apple being super cheap, stingy and wildly overcharging for upgrades ...
...and folks being vocal and unhappy about it means they are "spoilt"?

Wow.. Just wow
🤯

That's basically Stockholm Syndrome thinking if being honest

Seems a bit overly dramatic if I'm honest...

Genuine question, as I'm looking to understand where you're coming from - how do you use your phone and what takes up the majority of your storage?

 

[Elusi]

Lol I have 20GB left of my 64, though I don't use mine for games nor general storage of stuff.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Seems a bit overly dramatic if I'm honest...

Genuine question, as I'm looking to understand where you're coming from - how do you use your phone and what takes up the majority of your storage?

Local music, full resolution Photo library, podcasts, audiobooks, youtube downloads, sometimes a local plex download or two, some ROMs, loads of messages & attachments, often times locally stored iCloud documents ... while still comfortably leaving lots of room for anything that might come up and iOS updates

It's a little odd to me that so many are saying "I don't need storage, I just constantly offload my phone all the time and subscribe to XYZ paid iCloud tier"

A. that sucks.. lol

B. that means you DO need storage, you're just having to shuffle stuff around all the time to where you have some room

 

[spazzcat]

That will cost you a monthly fee 😬

It also backed them up money well spent.

 

[satchmo]

Just keep the 128gb tier but make it cheaper.

Options are good so people who don’t require 256gb won’t have to pay more.

 

[GUNSTAR1]

Im over here wanting 2TB.... I think Apple was blindsided by OpenAI and the gold rush it brought to the market that Apple threw together a partnership to try and revive Siri. The demands 'AI' needs to function smoothly are simply not in this gen of phones.

 

[airwalk331]

There is no music currently playing.

🤣🤣 “I found this on the web for (insert basic Siri request here)”

 

[Mainsail]

The base model is basically only good for seniors who aren’t tech savvy.

This is a pretty sweeping generalization. I have three kids with base models; Public Health Doctoral student, Econ Phd candidate, and a school teacher. They are all pretty tech savvy. None of them have a problem with 128GB base storage. We have a family iCloud+ 2TB plan, so everyone optimizes their storage with the cloud.

Now if you define "tech savvy" as needing storage for social media apps, games, and downloading cat videos.....yeah sure, I get it. But, for many people (certainly not all) that use their phones for work, navigation, and daily communication, the base storage really isn't a problem.