I tried to put emphasis on the personal nature of the question in the title. I’m not asking for myself or the average individual. I also mean ideal in the way where cost is still a factor. The iPhone 16 Pro has a 1TB model but it’s around $500 more expensive than the 128GB version.

I imagine answers are going to vary significantly depending on an individuals approach like relying on cloud storage, SD cards, or a Magsafe NVMe drive for example.

I found 1TB (512GB on the phone and on the SD card) was ideal for me. I could keep the things I wanted for “just in case scenarios” like the files needed for the source ports of Diablo, Half Life, and Morrowind in case I want to play a game or some ebooks if I have time to read. I never needed to uninstall applications and shuffle things. I even had plenty of breathing room.

Another question I’d be interested in hearing people’s answers to is what is the minimum storage capacity you would consider for a phone. I don’t think I would buy a device with less than 256GB of potential storage. If it has an SD card slot that opens up the potential a significantly.

  • My own usage is like 20-30GB in my experience (not including the OS and system stuff). So I’d say 128GB since the OS these days uses a ton of space.

    My ebooks all live on my kindle, but they really don’t use much space at all either way.

    If I needed to store stuff like games or something I’d just use a flash drive or portable SSD, much cheaper than buying a phone with more storage.

  • The ideal amount of storage is enough that I literally never need to think about it, never need to delete anything, and never need to use cloud services for things that could realistically be local.

    It’s hard to say what that would be because I’ve never had a phone that even came close.

    The largest phone I’ve owned was 256GB. That was “fine”, but it was NOT big enough that I could fundamentally change my habits. For example, I don’t carry my entire music collection on my phone. I don’t even do that on my laptop anymore since the advent of SSDs.

    I have a 128GB phone now and it sucks. I’ve set up a one-way copy to my home desktop with Syncthing so I can safely delete photos, videos, and screen recordings from my phone. I need to do this frequently.

    With the standard price-gouging in the industry, I will probably settle for 256 with my next phone. If prices were reasonable, I’d go for 1TB at least.

    I miss SD cards but there are no viable options with slots anymore.

  • I’ve currently got 60gb used on my phone, and I’ve been very lazy with keeping things tidy. So I think a 128gb device would facilitate all my storage needs from a phone.

    I guess I wouldn’t buy something with less than 128gb, to answer the second question.

    All my data hoarding happens on my desktop + NAS, I don’t consider my phone a safe place to keep anything I care about as it can be stolen or lost or broken so incredibly easily.

  • Really depends what you’re chasing. If you want overall performance then 256GB is the better choice. It’s quite a bit faster than 128GB in terms of actual physical chip performance. There are diminishing returns in performance once you go above 256GB.

  • I have a 256gb phone and the free space currently varies between 300 and 800mb.

    I’m very bad (too bored to do so) at deleting stuff on my phone (even if I have them backed up on my external drive), so the space fills up quickly. I have like ~100gb of camera files.🥲

    If I had an sd card I’d probably have some peace of mind and help me speed up the data transfers.

    I can’t exactly say how much space would be enough, but I think 256gb would be the minimum (or at least 128gb with an sd card option).

  •  56!   ( @56_@lemmy.ml ) 
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    111 hours ago

    I have 32 GB, which is completely filled up by photos and music. If it had an SD card slot, I think I’d be fine with it. I’m going to have to use cloud storage soon to offload my photos, though that means I can’t access them as easily anymore.

  • Depending on the needs. I have 32gb internal storage and its more than enough for me. But if I were recording lot of high quality videos and install lot of games, then this would be easily not enough anymore. But in today’s day and age a 512gb micro sd card is cheap. There is no problem for me being limited by space.

    It’s insane to me how expensive the new top phones like iPhone are and how much space they offer. Man 500 Dollar for a 1TB internal space is insanity. For 500 Dollar I could buy a Steam Deck or Switch or Playstation 5, if I was interested into gaming and still would have the same iphone 16 Pro with 128gb storage instead. Yes I know its not the same when comparing stuff like that, but this shows how insane the prices are. And Apple can keep the price this high, because they don’t give you the option to use micro sd cards and you support this buy buying the most expensive version. So they keep doing it.

    The maximum storage capacity for internal storage I would consider depends on the price. I would not limit myself to 32gb if the price for 1tb was the same. I’m not a heavy phone user and would consider 32gb with my next purchase, if it was considerably cheaper. But a micro sd card slot is required for that.

  • 256GB seems fine for me. I tend to have everything in the cloud in case I lose or damage my phone so actual use of the “hard drive” is fairly limited. I don’t really like playing such games on a phone and that’s the only scenario I can think of where I’d need so much space.

  •  peto (he/him)   ( @peto@lemm.ee ) 
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    113 hours ago

    I’m currently at a slim 132GB over the course of a year, and that includes a good size library of RPG pdfs. I should probably save more music to my phone to save on bandwidth. I feel kind of uncomfortable going bellow 512GB storage but I clearly don’t need most of that.

  • My phone has 256GB storage and 512GB microSD. I definitely wouldn’t buy one with less than that, and even so I usually try to store redundant data on the microSD, data that can easily be redownloaded if anything happens to it, as it is a more fragile storage mechanism. Ideally I’d want my next phone to have at least 512GB internal storage, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to find one like that that also has everything else I want.