Sure, but music isn't really the sticking point anymore.
Infinity Blade 3 is 1.7 GB. A single photo takes up more space than a song from an album. 40 minutes worth of 4k video maxes out the device (and that's optimistically assuming the apps that come with the phone don't take up any space).
For people like me who have no video, no games, and minimal music on their phones it's perfectly fine. I mostly just use a few messaging apps, instagram, snapchat, facebook, etc. The audience on HackerNews probably utilizes the space on their phones much more than the average consumer.
You think that the average consumer has no videos, games, or music on their phone? (And we forgetting photos and various other types of apps.)
You sound like when data plan providers say "Our average customer doesn't use that much data." Of course they don't. They try to stay within the ridiculous limits providers give them.
iOS 9 alone takes up a few GBs. The only reason the 16 GB option is the base option is because it anchors the price of iPhones. iPhones have an absurdly large profit margin, and price anchoring just provides the average consumer a psychological "out".
I don't want just 24 hours of music, I want a comprehensive sample of my entire music library. In my case it exceeds the 16gb (or whatever it's available after iOS + other apps) easily.
The problem with me is that I want high quality music on my phone (and I listen to it with high quality headphones all the time). Like, nothing except 320 kbps MP3 files and occasional lossless files that randomly find its way to my library. I have an Android smartphone that only supports memory cards up to 32 GB in size. It's a pain. I can't even get 1500 songs properly (keep in mind that the music is not the only thing that I have on the SD card, there's also my book library and some photos).
Streaming them in that quality for two to three hours in per day on average would take a lot of data.
Storage is one of the reasons why I could never get used to using my phone as a music player.
I keep my 50GB+ music collection on a separate device (FiiO X3), which allows me to stick to the lowest storage tier for any phone I'm interested in, and not have to worry about expandable storage (which seems to be on the way out as a trend, unfortunately).
Also, I'm a rather heavy user and my phone tends to only barely last the entire workday and commute before running out (if it lasts at all). Having a separate device for music means I don't need to feel guilty about wasting phone battery when listening to music.
The downside is you end up having to carry 2 devices instead of one, which can honestly be annoying at times, but I'm willing to make that compromise. YMMV of course.
I have an S4, and am planning to upgrade to an S5 when the price drops from the S7 sales. The only reason I use Samsung phones is for removable batteries and expandable storage. I have a 128GB sd card in my phone with 60GB of music and 40GB of movies on it.
I could never fathom using a phone without reasonable storage capacity. 16GB was bad in 2000. In 2016, anything less than 256GB is a joke, and the joke is really no laughing matter anymore. It has not been for at least a half decade in the mobile space.
Me, I'm the type of guy to have 10gb of music, photos and apps, and offload a lot of stuff to my PC and stream increasingly more. I'm okay with 16.
Is 16 a bit silly? Sure, but it's an easy way to pad the margins a bit and there's just plenty of people for whom 16 is just fine, to the extent that the upgrade option is a decent solution.
e.g. my entire office is on iPhones and they use it for mail and some other stuff, 80% of their storage is unused, will be unused forever, and it makes sense not to pad that even more and increase the base price.
I wish the price bump was a bit smaller if you want to increase your 16gb, more in line with their cost price, but... I'm not at all opposed to the notion that a 16gb base model exists.
At least for all them youngins, we all use soundcloud of bandcamp for the most part. Depedent on data? Yes, but with that you get live updates of new songs or reposts from your favorite artists.
I know this is the case for many people but I'm not a big fan of streaming media to my phone. It's expensive, unnecessary (for my use case) and too unreliable to my liking. I sometimes do it but I just don't rely on it.
It might be a YMMV thing. For a lot of edm, soundcloud+bandcamp is more than enough. It's reliable enough for people with good bandwidth (I am lucky enough to be in that group), not to mention the collection is endless and well beyond anything I could fit on my phone...and it's fresher, as in when my favorite DJ/producer has a new song, I see it immediately, like it, comment to tell him/her directly, and so forth. This works well for EDM which doesn't quite follow the traditional "let's sit in a room and write 8 songs and release an album over a couple of months to years" production model. For EDM, where the rate of production is much quicker, streaming + the community makes a large part of the experience, so much so that without those social aspects, you're almost missing out.
Moreover, as many have noticed here, there are only so many minutes in a day, so the actually amount of data you'll download is limited anyway, and the fact that its SC gives you the variety, so I find myself missing very little.
However, for genres where the SC model doesn't work (or at least it isn't present), this doesn't help. When I want to listen to doom metal or psychedelic music, I'm left out and having to resort to what you do. And since I hate poor quality recordings and use flac when I can, my phone runs out of space quickly when I resort to carrying around a music collection.
Depends on your use case. I use Dropbox for storing photos, since my network connection is generally good enough for it to be fast and seamless (I guess they send resized photos). I do keep music on my phone, but I don't need my > 500 album collection, just some new stuff that I change every couple of weeks.
Among computer illiterates in my family it also doesn't seem to be a problem. My mother has been using 16GB iPads and iPod Touches for years and never ran out of storage.
Sure, if you play lot's of > 1GB games (which seems to be typical these days), you don't want a 16GB model.
It's cheaper to get the $100 upgrade to 64G. Bigger data plans get expensive in a hurry here. Given that you're using a phone for at least a couple of years, paying an extra $40/month for the big data plan vs. $100 up front for enough storage not to need the upgrade just doesn't make sense.
Of course if Apple didn't have to skimp so badly on the base phone the upgrade wouldn't be necessary. Shame so many Android phones are also 16GB. My experience with using microSD cards for more storage is a bit less than spectacular as well with so many of the stupid cards dying suddenly and without warning.
Also apps using sd for storage is on an app by app basis. So say if Google turns that off for Play Music - as it seems they just did - well, now I have to cancel my subscription for that service and find something else to use my 64gb sd for. ffs.
Infinity Blade 3 is 1.7 GB. A single photo takes up more space than a song from an album. 40 minutes worth of 4k video maxes out the device (and that's optimistically assuming the apps that come with the phone don't take up any space).