Apple quietly did something truly consumer-friendly with the iPhone 17: It made 256GB the baseline. This one tweak may prove more influential than any new camera trick or faster chip, because it finally brings flagship storage in line with the way we actually use our phones. It’s now up to Samsung and Google to do the same.
This isn’t about brand one-upmanship. It’s about unclogging an arbitrary bottleneck that shackles big ticket features — the cameras, the on-device AI, the console-grade games — that phone makers use to sell these devices in the first place. Some of its greatest competition don’t come with a storage cap that you’ll hit within just several months.
Why starting at 256GB changes everything
Modern phones are content machines. As it turns out, a single minute of 4K HDR video can consume hundreds of megabytes; pro-grade codecs can ingest gigabytes per minute. Photos taken in RAW or high-efficiency computation formats bloat and their multi-lens bursts blow up that footprint all at once.
Then there’s the software. Popular games such as Genshin Impact or Call of Duty can take up more than 10GB each once assets and patches are accounted for. On-device AI models — for summarization, cropping an image or enabling new voice commands — regularly require many gigabytes, and that’s only likely to expand as hardware vendors cram in more features.
Factor in the OS, duplicated partitions for updating seamlessly (from my understanding), cached media as well as YEARS of app data and that 128 is looking pretty small.
That’s about when the “storage full” alerts begin prodding you toward cloud uploads, awkward deletions or a pricier storage tier that you were trying to avoid.
The economics don’t support 128GB in premium phones
Storage upsells continue to occur, because they are profitable, not because they are necessary. Every teardown from TechInsights or Omdia has consistently shown that increasing from 128 GB to 256GB adds only single-digit dollars to a flagship bill of materials, particularly on mature NAND processes and UFS 4. x controllers.
Market tracking firms like TrendForce have reported long-term downward trends in cost per gigabyte even with the cyclical fluctuations in pricing. But customers are typically force-fed another $50 to $100 for the 256GB version, a margin amplifier that has nothing to do with user benefit. And by going 256GB standard, it would be cutting an artificial tax out of what is one of the features all both brands love to hawk.
There’s also a performance angle. NAND with higher capacity usually provides greater parallelism and can maintain faster writes when used in bursts — just what you want, say, when shooting extended high-bitrate video or running intense AI pipelines on-device. Capacity is not just about headroom; it helps keep the machine feeling fast under load.
Android flagships have the most to gain
Samsung’s high-end phones record 8K video, take huge 200MP photos and boast desktop-class gaming. Google’s reliance on on-device AI for photo magic, voice features and summarization. Those are valid strengths — but they’re hobbled if base models ask you to manage storage below that 128GB level from day one.
Another factor: People are holding onto their phones longer. Analysts at Counterpoint Research have observed long replacement cycles, requiring storage to hold years of photos, apps and updates. A 256GB floor matches that reality and cuts down the friction which results in nudges to “perform a clean-up” and anxious offloading.
There’s also a portfolio-simplification upside. A 256GB base gives you a cleaner marketing message, less carrier confusion, and a clear path for forecasting regional SKUs. Little in the way of sacrifices can be a good thing at this price tier, something always helpful in a mature market where experience is more important than specifications.
No, the cloud is not a panacea
Cloud storage is good for backup and sharing, but it doesn’t stand in for local space when you’re filming atop a mountain, cutting footage offline on an airplane or gaming on mobile broadband. Network quality, as well as how much data is allowed to stream on those networks, varies widely — a fact that measurement firms have shown time and again, so “just upload it” is also not an all-encompassing answer.
Privacy-conscious individuals also prefer to keep sensitive information on-device. That predilection fits neatly with the trend in the industry to run more AI locally, both for latency and security reasons. Better on-device models means more gigabytes — and more reason to stop skimping on the base option.
A straightforward, user-first correction Samsung and Google can do
Make 256GB your default on the next Galaxy S and Pixel lines in all core markets. Keep higher tiers for power users, but drop 128GB at premium price points. The cost delta is negligible, the user benefit is immediate and the message — that you’ve got a flagship ready for all of those things it’s advertising that it can do — is potent.
Apple just reset the bar. It would demonstrate that Samsung and Google are listening to the way people really use their phones by matching iPhone 17’s baseline. If you’re going to sell devices on delivering better cameras, smarter AI and all-day creativity then give those features the room to breathe they deserve.