Cloud storage do not help you sharing that old photo album with friends spending the night in a cabin far from the closest cell phone coverage.

Also, cloud service typically move your older stuff to colder/slower storage which are painfully slow to retrieve whenever you decides to do it. I realized this when browsing some old pictures before closing a google account I had not been using for years except emptying the gmail inbox every few months.

I personally prefer having a local copy of my files and syncthing them to my NAS at home (which is itself backuped in a storage in the cloud).

Both third party developers and Apple have increasingly become terrible at respecting the user’s disk space. Recently my iPhone started crashing as it ran out of space. I found that Apple Maps was using twenty gigs. Fortunately the fix is simple as the issue is widespread and it has become the first search result. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256084682?sortBy=rank

If you have 512GB I don’t think you really experience the worst of it. A lot of bugs are just Apple creating humongous temporary files before they are deleted as they age. Unless you check every day you don’t really know how much is really being used. You don’t really experience these crashes, and you have no skin in the game to make an informed comment.

I have a 64 GB iPhone and I’ve never come close to using all the storage space in many years. I’ve got thousands of photos and videos but like you say, they are automatically backed up to the cloud and then the local version is optimized away until I need it.

I don't think it's inherently impossible, but Apple at least seems to do a really poor job at local cache management on iOS for Photos and Messages attachments. I am constantly amazed to find my non-tech-savvy relatives deleting stuff from their phones to free up local storage.

I've had at least 256GB on my phones for the last couple of generations after having had to deal with storage issues beforehand, and it's been much nicer.

But I picked up a 16e for my son a few months ago, with 128GB, and yes, we're running into issues with storage space when it comes time to do an OS update. Between local music and photos storage, base storage, and the image for the new update, two or three times now we've had to delete stuff temporarily in order to get the update going. So I'm happy the new base is 256GB, at least that will probably last us a couple more generations before ~~640KB~~ 256GB is enough for everyone.

Unfortunately yes. Some mobile games are 30+ GB (and this is probably the major reason for increasing minimum storage), high-res videos take any amount of space and are slow to sync with cloud, in-app downloaded data caches are routinely 2-5 GB each in addition to apps themselves.

Downloading videos to play without using data. For families on road trips.

If you've never used an iPhone near it's storage limit, I wouldn't wish it on you.

Performance nosedives, then it starts bootlooping randomly, and eventually you can't even delete stuff because there's no space to delete things.

You resort to randomly trying to remove apps, but sometimes that fails because of the stability issues.

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The only reason I replaced my 12 Pro was storage, and I made up my mind never to skimp on storage again.

That phone lasted me 5 years and could easily have gone several more, so I see it as an extremely cheap investment across the lifetime of the phone.

Cloud backups are great for keeping your photos long-term, but if you want those photos on your phone so you can show them to people or share them, you need to download them anyway.

I need storage because Honkai: Star Rail is 32gb and I like being able to have more than one game on my phone.