Apple

Idunno if technically correct is the best route to go here. But sure, if you wanna defend more bs marketting from a huge ass company, you go.

Lemme explainw hy the rest of us find this a little dumb to see. Iphone is famous for being the best phone in the world at recording video, which is not nearly as small, especially at high resolutions.

For context, a 4k60fps video is 400MB per minute, which would fill up the phone in less than 5 and a half hours. You can record less than four of your kids soccer games with that. If you go with 4k24fps (135MBpm), you can get 948 minutes of video which is 11 soccer games. You'll probably get most of your kids soccer games, but you'll have to dump the video if they get to the playoffs.

If you got noticably shitty quality at 720p30fps, (why would you do that on the phone camera with the arguable best video recordings in the world?!) you get 53 hours of video recording time.

Look, its a lot compared to vhs, which could do up to 240 minutes, or vhs-c, (the mobile vhs) which could do up to 60 minutes of video.

It's a lot compared to phones from ten years ago, even. But it sure as fuck is not a lot when you compare it to literally any other phone from the same price bracket and age range. Thats the point. The storage is fucking average compared to competitors. If you use the phrase 'a lot of storage' you damn well better be doing at least twice what your competition is doing for me to agree with you.

Typical 12mp heif image is ~1mb

My photo library is like 300GB (although I suppose I take a significant amount of video). I also have 30GB of downloaded music. 128GB is really not enough.

Not so much for 4k60 video

The true problem is how hard to move your data out, or to able to choose your own cloud service

To be fair, the 5gig is free, and you can still back up your phone via a windows or Mac computer.

The 5 gigs of storage is really only good enough for things like system and device setting, and keeping preferences unified across devices. It’s not really a great solve for media or file backups. For that you either need to pay Apple, pay another cloud backup company, or backup locally to a computer.

Maybe I'm weird, but I feel entitled to significant storage (options) on my device, but I don't feel entitled to free cloud storage (of significant size)

This guy gets it.

I don’t think it is when cheap thumb drives are well above this and the phones are north of $1k.

Right? My Pixel is also 128GB. I've got like 5 or 6 thousand Spotify songs, 3 gigs in my pocket casts cache, about 10 gigs of emulated games and dozens of apps and games. If you're struggling with 128 gigs on your phone, clean some shit off there. I've still got 30 gigs free.

They even disable recording in prores on lower storage phones.

All I have is photos and music and I'm struggling to stay within 256gb

One hour of 360 video is roughly 60GB. Process that video and export it and you get a lot of data as well. I would not call it being super heavy on video to have one hour of source material on your phone, which you could not do right now.

360 photos are roughly 150MB each.

Storage is cheap, but sold at a very high mark-up.

I know you're being facetious but not gonna lie, the progression from a 5.25" 1.2MB floppy to a modern micro SD card with a practically infinitely bigger amount of storage is one of the things that blows my mind most about how much technology has evolved

Well, they don't want to because fans will gladly pay 200$ or more for extra 128GB and call them revolutionary.

It's those moving pictures that really get you. And our phones now have very high grade cameras on them, so it's very easy to exceed. Cloud storage fills quickly, or butchers the resolution.

OnePlus had 128gb as their base config until the 12 was released a few months ago. The specs for the OP 7 through 11 all had a base 128gb config.

A lot of phone manufacturers still have 128 as the base config (like Google). That said, they don’t charge $1000 for that base config. They’re usually $150 to $200 cheaper.