Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rjbrock 3916 days ago
16gb and 32gb? Why is storage always so low?
6 comments

Because most people don't need that much, especially with the new auto-delete of photos that have been copied to the cloud in Google Photo, love this feature.
I listen to music on my (underground, subway) commute to work, so I really need that storage.
Half the memory of the basic model is enough to hold about 100 albums. Is that not enough? Maybe you could listen to some of them twice.
If I had absolutely nothing else on my phone - no apps, no photos, no videos, sure.
That's why I said half the memory.. The other half would be for apps and stuff.

It'd be very interesting to see how much music people store on their phone when they use services like Spotify. I use it on a Nexus 4 and I've never had a problem with running out of space, but I don't have lots of games or anything on there. I honestly doubt it's much more than 2 or 3GB.

just because you personally don't have a need to store more things in the phone, doesn't mean other people won't have usage for these.

I don't like fragile cloud solutions, so my music is offline. I find it amazingly stupid to tell other people to "just delete some of it, because you probably won't listen to it twice". My offline car navigation takes more than 10 GB, and no thank you, I won't use google maps which are not that accurate in places I go, and require constant connectivity (which makes them useless in foreign countries, or in mountains). My DCIM folder is cca 5 GB after 1 year of usage, and I shoot almost no videos which would make it explode.

FFS, it's almost end of 2015, having 32 GB model as your highest offering is... pathetic.

Agreed. I have a 64 GB iPhone 6 and over 1k songs synced to mobile on rdio. Rdio only takes up 8.4 GB, but total I have 31.1 GB used. I would have to go back to the radio if I didn't have that space, as I would probably be out of my 4 GB data plan half way through the month.
That's cool until you go to a place that doesn't have cell phone coverage or wifi. Then you are completely screwed.
That's pretty niche though. Even in that scenario, you could always offload to external storage.

It seems reasonable that their phones are expected to mostly behave as phones, and not as a large photo/video repository.

> That's pretty niche though.

Not really. Do you ever travel? Have you ever been on a road trip? Have you ever been on a plane? Have you ever gone camping?

Yes, but I don't fill up my phone's storage during those activities.

The issue comes up if you use your phone solely as a camera without an accompanying connection for long enough to fill up internal storage without some way to offload it.

It's a situation that won't come up ever for most users of the phone, and as Wifi and Data coverage increases will become even more obscure.

It's typical in Europe to go abroad on holiday so the only coverage is via expensive roaming - I usually take lots of photos on holiday and like to use my phone to play music in my room or by the pool. Hotel WiFi is often expensive.

It's especially a problem while cruising - onboard WiFi is slow and expensive, buying a sim per country wastes time.

simply no. one example - in europe, there are still roaming charges. in mountains, there are still places with no internet at all (and it might surprise people like you, but no wifi either).
> new auto-delete of photos that have been copied to the cloud in Google Photo

Source on that?

I tend to listen to my music away from wi-fi and I'd soak up my monthly limit inside of a day easy.
Where can I turn on this feature?
Slide to the assistant, if your phones is full, it will suggest deleting photos that have been copied to the cloud already.
To get you to use cloud services.
That would be great if my cell provider didn't charge me 10 bucks per GB.
Compared to couple of GBs Android phones came with just 3 or so years ago, 32GB is a lot.

For anything except Video content (or the need for several months of offline music) 32GB is plenty.

This thing claims it shoots 4K video. That means at 32 GB you can shoot 30 minutes of uncompressed video or around an 60 minutes of compressed video (depending on a lot of factors, including compression ratio, format, etc).

The thing will likely overheat or run out of battery before 60 minutes of 4K video, but still the point stands, something that is featuring 4K video but then limits you to only 32 GB of storage is kind of contradictory.

I feel like this device is saying: "We support 4K video* (*but don't actually try to use it)."

PS - My point about overheat/battery is based on previous phones which claimed they supported 4K video. If you tried to use it the camera would switch off after a few minutes due to overheating, and the battery consumption would go through the roof.

I'd prefer my entire audio collection on the same device, not because I want to listen to several months of music without interruption, but to be able to choose that particular album or track that perfectly fits my mood now.
This is what Spotify is for.
Online music works nice as long as you're in a covered area (and the data traffic is of no concern). This is true for California highways but is often false for New York subway. This can also be an issue if you happen to travel abroad.
> This can also be an issue if you happen to travel abroad.

Data abroad is dirt cheap compared to North America. $1.40 for 150mb when I lived in Vietnam. $30 for 3GB in Mexico. Much faster than Canada too.

Spotify does not have a quarter of my music collection.
How hard is for some people to understand that whatever suits you, doesn't necessarily suits every single living person on this planet??? get out of your tiny little bubble for once, please.

I don't see any value for me in spotify, for example. In circles around me, spotify & co penetration is well below 50%, albeit most know about it.

Meanwhile, I got a base model Iphone 3gs back in 2009 that had 16GB minimum storage.

And 32GB is plenty except for X Y and Z (where Y is large app collections of games [Hearthstone alone is like 1.5GB on mobile] and Z is music collections where you don't want to spend $50 a month in data fees for things you have on your home hard drive) which precludes anyone using those from buying these devices.

All the cell companies are in a ruckus about how nobody bought 2015 flagships, but when the best storage you can get is 128GB on an S6 without a removable battery or SD slot for an insane like $200 premium over the minimum model you might want to stop price gouging as much if you want customers.

The iPhone 6 still starts from 16 GB, which I found very odd, as these days the minimum should be 32 GB. Like the Nexus 6 had, so now we are talking about a regression in the Nexus line.
I use cloud, even 16G is ok for me (I do not play games).
Because apparently the cameras are so bad that nobody records video on them. Do you want to store your music and apps or record your kid's birthday? Tough choice.
Google (and other companies) would very much like to sell you some cloud (gawd, I hate that word) storage.