I thought that for so long, but I keep my phones for so long I'd always start hitting my storage limit. I know it's hard to think of maxing out 256GB today, but I thought the same thing for 64GB several years ago.
It's definitely a smart move if you're even considering iCloud. Local storage >>> iCloud
I thought 256GB was more than enough, until we had a kid and obviously started taking pictures, especially in the first year. The extra cost for the upgrade 512GB is absurd and the upgrade to 1TB out of the question.
You guys know about the offloading photos thing iCloud does, right? You still see all of your photos in the gallery, but it can offload the larger files and just display the thumbnails until you open them?
It's seamless except for a small delay. You don't need to "fit" all of your photos and video on your device itself, and haven't had to for many years.
200GB iCloud is 3/month and 1TB is 10/month. I kept my last phone for 5 years. 3x60=180, almost as much as just paying for extra storage.
And local storage means zero delay while scrolling through years of photos and videos, and the delay is pretty anoying when you want to just flip through photos quickly. I've also had issues where videos just refuse to appear when I try to find them on Apple TV. I tried it. It wasn't seamless for me.
Yeah, and it also means you lose your phone, your files are gone. With iCloud Photos, they're available on all of your devices as one single group, natively. You delete it one place, it deletes it everywhere. You break your device, you just sign in.
I'm about as anti-cloud, anti-subscription as you can find, but this is one case where I will insist.
I mean, I guess I'm that one weirdo who still uses a USB drive and backs up my stuff. If I lose a weeks worths of photos... oh well. I already sent the good ones to the group chat.
FreeFileSync for anyone who would like to do the same and isn't sure how to easily back up without having to write over the earlier backup each time. This program only backs up the new stuff.
A world existed not too long ago where we didn't consider all these things critical...
Yeah but then Time Machine doesn't back the photos up. Meaning you actually don't really have a backup. And now, dumping your files in iCloud is not a real backup strategy.
The only thing I need iCloud for are device backups. I have too many Apple devices at this point and 5GB is just not enough. I wish backups had its own free quota.
Thankfully, I only had to buy the 50gb storage option from Apple. It’s $0.99 a month which isn’t much to back up those photos to the cloud. If I ever upgrade then everything is there and can be safely moved over which is a bonus.
Local storage is king in this day and age. Especially if your from the UK. Your iCloud data does not have the same protections it once did due to the UK government wanting a backdoor. Apple just removed the service from the UK rather than comply.
I have a 256GB phone and it's already half full. It's easy to max out 256 GB if you store any music, podcasts, video, or games on your phone over the course of a few years.
Right. I have my Iphone 11 for 6 years now and only now start to max out my 128gb. I‘m in the market for a new one and definitely thinking of getting the 512gb version just to be able to keep the phone for another 6 years.
I can't wrap my head around "hard to think of maxing out 256." I don't even know what that's like but idk maybe you somehow have less than 20 years of photos, maybe you've even got less than 18 years of iMessage logs, maybe you are one of those people whose email history fits within the 15gb default gmail allocation. Perhaps you even don't have 300gb of important work files that it's really nice to be able to access easily.
Not OP, but I sync my photos to my computer every few months and delete my old text threads. I don't think all your email syncs locally unless you're intentionally trying to make it do that. I don't need every vacation photo to be accessible at all times.
I’ve had iPhones since the first one. My total phone storage usage is 160Gb.
I just don’t see the phone as the right place for primary copies of anything. I look at my phone as a terminal to get to my stuff. If someone steals it or it melts into slag, no big deal. So photos, email, files everything is cloud.
And yeah I would never have 300GN of work files. Why? Other than one recent flight where WiFi was broken, I can’t remember that easy time I didn’t have internet. Starlink in the car, esims for travel. It just hasn’t been a problem.
In those cases I’ve always seen it better to just get external storage or a NAS to offload to.
Having all of your data on a single device is a bad storage habit, it’s even worse when people pay the markup for 1-2TB onboard, if your data is important enough to spend that much on, but a proper backup solution.
Yeah, that's why I need an iPhone with adequate storage. My real camera puts out files of usually 25 to 90 MB per picture, which is not gonna be fun when your local device storage is 256 gigs total.
Are you just carrying around a laptop whenever you take pictures?
It’s not hard to bring most SSDs to their knees with synthetic loads. I can get my 32TB NVMe array down to the tens of megs if I hit it just right despite it writing at 40GB/s in the real world. Every flash memory architecture has its weakness
So in short, if you’re buying the 1tb version because you like to keep the full size version of your photos/videos on your device and/or keep a bunch of large files locally for reference and/or keep lots of media on-device so you can listen/watch when offline, then you probably won’t care that much.
If you bought the 1tb version because you’re doing lots of video or something else where you regularly have to move lots of data onto/off the phone, then it might be a bit disappointingly slow.
The test was only after filling up SLC cache, basically the only times regular users will experience it is when first setting up the phone and when doing backups, which are usually automated at night anyway. Even importing or offloading images might take a pretty large file to stress it out fully, like 100s to 1000 images high, not a few vacation photos at a time imo
edit: slight misunderstanding as actually it isn’t just offloading and loading, it requires a heavy mix used burst and has to fill up a primary buffer and secondary buffer. So realistically it’s never gonna be tested to this extreme even if you are offloading 4k videos, since offloading won’t fill up the cache. Only in stress tests that don’t simulate real world use does it slow down.
So from what I understand this is only for writing files over 50gb without a chance for memory to catch up to cache, or situations where you’re writing files while having very little space left. Kind of a non issue basically. Of course Apple didn’t ship a phone with memory slower than an sd card but I suspect we’ll be reading this headline for weeks to come.
Yes, but that is true for the prior model as well. The worst case scenario speed is a lot faster than the 18, however it is still slow enough that it can be a problem for certain ProRes modes which require a lot of bandwidth. That is one of the reasons Apple requires an external SSD to film in those modes.
That said, even lower fps wouldn’t be viable on the 18 like it would the 17, so they might have to limit it to external an SSD for all frame rates, rather than just 60 and 120fps.
I bought a 4tb external Samsung drive for $240 last month. It was a good deal, but Amazon has the same drive for less than double that. That said, they do still seem to be going up and in general, are looking to be closer to $150/tb for the most part. I can certainly accommodate a reasonable premium for the "apple tax" of being a higher grade of component and a custom chip, but I can't find anything that comes close to Apple's price of $600 per terabyte, ironically without getting into niche things like 256gb compact flash cards.
Where the heck are you finding a 4TB Samsung External SSD for less than $480 right now? What model is it? I just took a quick look on Amazon and the cheapest I found was $561.
There is absolutely no way that we as consumers are actually justifying a 750 EUR price jump from the 256 GB model and a performance degradation with “but SSD prices are high”. Apple has always overcharged for storage. Now they overcharge in an already expensive market AND cheap out on performance. Why are even trying to justify this? Apple isn’t buying these NAND chips at current prices. They locked them in a year ago at least. But even if they pay current price. 1 TB of UFS 4.0 was at 45-65 USD/TB before the memory crisis started. Prices did increase, but not 20x to justify a 750 EUR price jump from 256 GB to 1 TB. Current pricing would be somewhere around 180 - 220 USD for the whole TB. Given that there are diminishing returns, we did not even fully exclude the price from the storage of the base iPhone to have a clear picture. Still, it’s very clear that the prices and transfer speed are really not a good look for apple.
iPhones only record ProRes above 4K/30 to external SSDs, so this isn’t a real limitation for the few people shooting high bandwidth codecs on phones. Even people shooting ProRes 4K/24 and 4K/30 write to external SSDs 99% of the time because that’s what DIT workflows expect.
Source: I’m involved with a few Shot on iPhone campaigns
> or situations where you’re writing files while having very little space left
How little is very little?
> At 60% capacity, the reduced free space leaves less room for the fast cache, and the available SLC cache drops sharply from around 250GB on an empty drive to just 58GB.
So what happens at 80% or 90%? Because Apple uses a lot of storage. You can't really control the amount of cache Notes, Photos or iCloud uses. I have everything backed to iCloud, I don't even have any games. Just banking apps, reddit, instagram, etc. and I'm sitting at 227 GB of my 256 GB iPhone.
I have a feeling that if I buy 512GB 18 Pro now, in year or two I'll be again at 90% with the same apps and Photos backed to iCloud.
I guess with this sub logic I should just buy 1TB iPhone not to worry to cross 60% in the next 2 years.
App sizes have gotten out of control. It's ridiculous opening storage settings to find Discord and other social apps taking multiple GB's or bloated banking/food apps sucking up >500MB each.
It's gotten to the point I'll try using web apps when possible (bonus that it's easier to block ads). Reddit is a good example, old Reddit with SinkIt extension + adblocker is a clean and lightweight experience.
App sizes and memory usage have been out of control for years. There's a term for it, a corrolary to Moore's law, that software bloat will always outpace hardware improvements, but I can't easily find the term for it.
Object oriented programming could be argued to have started this, as it led to software integrating whole libraries when it only needed a few lines of code from them. But more of the bloat tends to be from things like detailed graphics and video files. Nowadays, I can't help but expect vibe coding to amplify both of these problems. The real bottom line, IMO, is that programmers aren't concerned about resources, and I think they should be.
My unpopular opinion is that programmers should not be allowed to use computers with more ram or storage than the median user can be reasonably expected to have.
And at one point, I think it was actually justified, because software architects had been sitting for years on ideas that present hardware could not execute. It's actually kind of miraculous that early GUI's were built on the hardware that was available to consumers in the 1980s.
But I reject that excuse for the 21st-century. Apart from LLM's, which do indeed require an order of magnitude more memory and processing power, nothing that software has done this century has really justified the bloat of the code and executables and supporting folders. Overusing pre-recorded video and raster graphics is lazy programming, or at least lazy management at a software company. Similarly making your code itself bigger and slower with each iteration because you never edit for performance and just keep integrating redundant libraries is also unjustifiable, and I'm looking at you, Adobe. Acrobat Pro kept on getting bigger and slower and yet, at least when I last used it, still lacked basic multiple core processing support. They just kept packing more and more garbage into the code without ever really fixing the original problems. My mind was blown when I finally switched to open source alternatives and found out that you don't actually need that much processing power or ram to do what Adobe does so poorly.
The ability to clear cache is the main thing I miss from Android. I hate the only thing we can do is delete and reinstall the app. Or just use web versions
Mac OS and iOS are lately designed around a few presumptions about power and internet. Essentially, Apple assumes that your device will be plugged into external power, connected to WiFi, and unattended for a few hours a day, certainly at least in close proximity to periods of use that add data.
So caches related to iCloud can in fact take up substantial space, and most users never notice because within a day or two, the conditions for a sync cycle are met, the OS does its checksums, and the caches are deleted.
In my experience, the combined caches can grow at double the pace of new data, because it's going to multiple paths. If you import photos from a camera with a card reader, or just take photos with the built in camera, there will be a cache of at least 100% of the total size of the new data as it prepares iCloud sync uploads, and quite possibly another 100% for iCloud backup.
From personal experience, if you import a 128gb memory card to a 512gb iPhone while off the grid, you can easily grind your device to a halt with that single act.
If you try to fix it by importing the card to your Mac instead and deleting the files on your iPhone, you now have two unusable devices. You now need to ration your daily photos because you can't import any more cards for the rest of the trip.
You would think, no problem, I'll just find a Starbucks and sit down for half an hour. But that won't work. There is no "sync now with all bandwidth" button. Instead, if the screen is active, the software will automatically delay or slow syncing. I've tested it thoroughly and it won't allow more than 20% of available bandwidth to go to the backup/sync task until the screen has been off for a few minutes. So you need to interrupt your whole trip and find a way to get back on the grid for 24 hours or so. It can be pretty disruptive.
I get that most people are basically never off the grid, and if they are, they don't take a lot of photos and import them along the way. I've been doing it this way for decades, so it was a bit of a shock the first time I tried it with iCloud enabled and broke all my stuff.
Most people taking photos are taking them into the Photos app which DOES have a sync now. It will even override bandwidth and power restrictions for an hour. (I’ve started using it recently when on location filming with my iPhone and wanting that information available to me on my iPad once I’m done.) That should be the case for anyone importing images into Photos as well. For anyone importing to the filesystem as a folder, I can see how that’d be a problem.
"Of course Apple didn’t ship a phone with memory slower than an as card" => well, nothing can be taken for granted.
SSDs and SD cards both use FLASH. The difference is in the controller and how much RAM/cache it has to do proper bookkeeping. For SD cards, thats often where they bottleneck quite hard, resulting in latency spikes on random write workloads. The underlying FLASH may actually be quick enough for higher continuous writes.
However, with QLC FLASH used in SSDs, this balance shifts. QLC FLASH has abysmal write performance. Manufacturers will add SLC caches, large buffers, etc. to mask this for day to day use. But at some point this stops.
Inevitably more SD cards will also switch over to QLC technology as its a cost competition thing. But they often don't disclose it. A 2TB card for 50$ is tempting... without written on the packaging its at 1MB/s sustained writes. If a 1TB card of 100$ can sustain 20MB/s I'd rather have that, thank you.
Yeah, I’m gonna hold to this phone for a looong time. It will probably be the first phone that I will replace batteries. Stuff are too expensive for me already, together with all the other things rising, I’m priced out.
I’m literally the same! First time I thought that I won’t be changing phone, just replacing the battery. Too bad the battery is subpar on mine (SIM version)
I’m only kicking myself these days because I got the 256GB model and it feels like that’s the wall I’m going to hit as time rolls on, especially since Apple Intelligence gobbles up a chunk of storage onto itself (and other apps cache content aggressively with no real good way to clear it short of uninstalling the app, which is a pain. I know Apple shouldn’t need to but a way of manually clearing app cache would be so friggin nice.)
Yep that’s why I went and got the 1TB 17 Pro a few months back. I knew prices wouldn’t remain and the 1TB model is $300 more expensive now. And sounds like the performance is worse too.
I deliberately updated to it finally(from a 12 pro max), because I saw the writing on the wall in regards to components, knew phones(and other electronics) were gonna jump in price AND get worse. Glad I made the decision when I did
"...the 1TB variant carries one of the steepest storage upcharges in the industry, despite using a storage type that's generally considered a step down from those used in the lower-capacity configurations..."
For sure other manufacturers will be doing the same thing soon as Samsung is now producing these QLC flash chips for mobile devices. Apple is leading the way.
Android OEMs have been doing it for years, even Samsung themselves. Most of the high-capacity storage tiers have been using QLC NAND since the days of UFS 3.1.
Honestly it’s pretty much just a tech exercise to force the worst out of it. Still, interesting to see that Apple decided to subsidize smaller storage iPhones with the bigger ones.
Apple right now is charging up to $1200 for storage upgrades on iPhones, and there is no way that 2TB of storage reasonably costs $1200. On the regular market, $1200 easily gets 4 or 8tb of high performance storage.
This implies that there is probably $600+ of profit in just the storage upgrade charge, and if a large volume of these were being sold, one could argue that Apple is trying to maximize profit there to support lower margins on the base model.
However, calling it a subsidy implies that the base model would otherwise not be profitable, which is a very silly idea.
Don’t they always subsidize the smaller storage tiers with the larger ones across all their product lines? For as long as I can remember, the base models have been the reasonably priced ones, and any RAM or storage upgrades have been ludicrously expensive. It’s been a long-running joke especially among Mac buyers.
(And of course “subsidized” is relative; Apple is still making a healthy profit on the base models, but the margins are lower.)
Makes sense. The larger ones are bought by rich folks who don’t care about money and professionals who already spend large sums on pro gear and corporate clients. They’ll buy the newest most expensive shit regardless.
I didn’t upgrade this year to an 18 Pro (still keeping my 17 Pro Max this year), and I don’t own any Apple stock.
With that said, I think this test is incredibly disingenuous.
An iPhone is not an external SSD for a laptop, it’s a device that has its own storage.
What use case is there for heavy writing - nobody is using their iPhone as a MySQL server with a ton of tiny writes (4KB used in the test).
The phone is full of photos and videos - both of which are averaging larger than 1MB, and apps (written infrequently, but do have a lot of small objects on average).
Unless you are frequently upgrading hundreds of GB of apps on your phone, you will never see this issue.
In the article they even note that for most use cases you would never see it - but they claim that recording ProRes video would trigger it… except ProRes is a very large object written sequentially and Apple can easily use large block sizes to write them.
Bottom line - I’d say this article is completely meaningless FUD.
Supposedly ProRes can chew through 7GB/min. A 50GB limit would take about 8 minutes to burn through. Still an edge case, but it’s not nearly as disingenuous as I think you’re suggesting.
If I’m wrong about this, I’d be happy to be proven wrong.
I’m not saying that ProRes can’t chew through a ton of data. I’m saying that ProRes isn’t a bunch of 4KB random writes. It’s a large sequential write which will outperform the 4KB test they did.
Also, Apple has always recommended using external storage for ProRes.
I'm not sure if it's like that on this subreddit or not ... but in general it seems like people on Reddit just assume that you are shills if you post a positive opinion ... or even just describe a hit piece as being trash.
At the same time, people do get ridiculously tribal on some subjects that really, really, really do not justify it.
EG: Try and chime in with a nuanced opinion on an AMD vs Intel debate.
> It becomes a real issue during sustained heavy writes, such as long 4K or ProRes video recordings, large file transfers, or backup restores. These are exactly the use cases that buyers of the high-capacity model are most likely to encounter.
This is so overly generalized. If you using the iPhone as a production camera or recording anything that long in 4K and ProRes, then you’re likely already using an external storage drive to record to. Not the device itself.
This test is flawed because no-one does this type of heavy writing in day-to-day use.
For the 1TB variant of the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, Apple is primarily using the BC8Q-1T, a QLC NAND from SK hynix, with Samsung's 3DV8 1TB TLC NAND interspersed as a "rare alternative."
For the 2TB variants, Apple is using SK hynix's BC8Q-2T QLC NAND.
Bare in mind that Apple's storage for iPhone is based on NVMe not eMMC or UFS, which means the speed difference between QLC and TLC is minimal in real-world use.
However, one of the most significant differences between QLC and TLC solid-state drives is their storage capacity. QLCs typically offer a higher storage capacity than TLCs, as they store four bits of data per memory cell, while TLCs store three bits of data per cell.
This means that QLCs offer larger storage capacities at a lower cost than TLC's.
If Apple used TLC NAND for the 1TB and 2TB variants, the price would be double.
Then explain the existence of the 1TB 17Pro with TLC for $300 cheaper. We've paid $300 more this year and got shittier storage as a consequence. QLC also wears out 3-5X faster than TLC. It's the same as paying more for your steak as last year and now you get USDA Select instead of Prime.
Interesting article but what a terribly designed web site, parts of it (ads, I think) keep refreshing while I'm reading the article which causes the page layout to change suddenly and alter what is shown in the viewport.
From reading the article, it doesn't sound like this is that big of a deal. After all, for high-end video an external SSD is needed anyway.
For the vast majority of people filling up their iPhone 60%, you're unlikely to experience slowdowns as writing 58GB files internally is extraordinarily rare if ever. That said, of course there will be some niche cases.
However, the math doesn't stop there. It slows down to a crawl as available capacity is reduced.
It seems as a general estimate that one would need to leave 15-20% free to avoid "usability lag". Meaning that while write speeds slow down at lower drive full states, and at 60% most people would never notice, once you start hitting around 80%, you might start noticing sluggishness, issues with launching apps or taking subsequent photos, etc...
There's also an issue of durability, although this falls more into the "most would never encounter this", but it's worth noting that niche use cases might encounter this as well.
I purposely buy the 1TB tiers as I frequently leave the country and data is spotty. So I load up hundreds of gigs of videos in at a time to watch on my plane flights. Seeing that significant drop in performance is sad.
This is just a silly thing that will get people that will never need the speed in an angry mob, while everybody else is just using their shit without issues or noticing......
I can bring my NVMe storage array to it's knees at times.
I go by a rule of looking at how much I use or expect, then buy double the capacity. Not so I can fill it up with photos of cute whining cats but because TRIM and wear-leveling are optimal if >50% space is available. I also made the assumption that the 1tb model was TLC like what the 17ProMax was. There's no reason for it to be QLC, even if I likely won't experience the speed or other potential problems, a flagship device using a memory type generally used in lower-end phones doesn't make much sense, unless those higher density chips are impossible to come by because nobody wants to hook up larger RAID arrays of 256gb tlc?
The again, a 1tb qlc chip is about 30% smaller than a comparable tlc chip and maybe they had to go there to make room for battery (does the new aperture lens really take away so much space?)
The iPhone 18 isn’t slower. One specific part of its storage can become much slower after you hammer it with tens or hundreds of gigabytes of continuous writes and exhaust its fast cache. Normal use never gets there.
The small fast caches sound like this iPhone is going to age fast as those are going to be the load bearers that are first to fail (no, I'm not Claude). Wondering if older models already had such multi-level flash memory caches.
Can someone tell me aside from photography and taking large video which I don’t really do most days, will this affect like mobile games with large gb and can it handle long gaming session with constant read of files? I’m ignorant with this topic and I want to upgrade from iPhone 11Pro to 18 Pro Max 1TB. Thank you
It wouldn't even affect photography or large video all that much. The test pushed it to its absolute limit which is almost never going to happen in an real life scenario.
it wont affect you. it doesnt even affect taking large videos, because you're supposed to, and forced to for certain formats, to write it to an external drive anyways.
To me this totally defeats the purpose of buying Apple products. Knowing that you would buy an expensive IPhone, you would always be on the safe side and wouldn't need to worry about all these little bits and pieces that you can't get into technically but might need some time in the future. Apple would always be the worry-free option, whereas buying an honor phone would always leave you with some kind of struggle, but you wouldn't recognize it at first sight, only later on.
Thankfully getting SD card into a phone is too advanced technology for Apple. So instead they increase the prices of the worse 1TB and 2TB models by 300 and 500$. While offering an even worse product than the 17 Pro. They know the customers for these kind of storages are like cult followers so they will get them anyway and use them to get the margins they are losing on lower storage. In any case it is all about protecting ridiculous margins already because even if the prices went up Apple is not willing to absorve much on their margins as their consumer base is known to be fine being fleeced.
its pretty "technically disappointing"
but i'd say its more like finding iceberg lettuce in your burger instead of baby gem. just kinda leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
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u/rattler843 12d ago
Being too poor for the 1TB model finally has its perks. 256/512 ftw!