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Apple giveth, and Apple taketh ($50) away

The new iPhones—both the 8/8 Plus and X—now come with either 64GB or 256GB of storage space. On the low end, the move from 32GB to 64GB is long overdue, and makes a ton of sense. Most iPhone users I know who have 32GB phones are always bumping up against the storage limits, so thank you Apple.

However, on the other end, the move from 128GB to 256GB is harder to understand, especially in a phone. 256GB is a lot of apps and videos and music and photos. I've yet to meet someone who said "I wish my iPhone had more than 128GB of RAM." My personal phone is a 128GB model, and even after a year, I've yet to come close to filling it up—it's at roughly 90GB today. But I've always got over 64GB of stuff on it, so the small phone isn't an option.

The bad news is that the now-192GB step up (vs 96GB before) from the small to large capacity means you'll be paying $150 for the upgrade, instead of the old $100 charge. I understand Apple has higher costs for this, and on a cost per gigabyte basis, the new upgrade is much cheaper than the old ($0.78/GB vs $1.04/GB). But I dislike paying an extra $50 for space I'll more than likely never use, so this strikes me as nothing more than a move by Apple to drive up their average selling price.

What's the answer? I really would have liked to see Apple keep the 128GB option; it's the perfect size for many iPhone customers…and the cynic in me says that's why they killed it, so they can drive all those consumers to spend an additional $150 on their next phones.

2 thoughts on “Apple giveth, and Apple taketh ($50) away”

  1. Totally agree. It is why we won't be upgrading from our three 7 phones to the 8 even being on the up-to-date plan. None of us wants or needs the extra space, 64 is too small and the $50 plus more sales tax is too much. Without the extra fee we might have considered updating at least one or two of them just for the camera improvements.

  2. On the other hand, 256GB is better for 150$ than still paying 150$ to get 128GB. Believe me, I would totally expect Apple to do that, charge 150$ for 128GB.

    All memory storage is getting expensive this year, even the iPad Pros went up 50$ yesterday for same storage.

    People said the same thing many years ago about 32GB that we’re saying about 64GB. I still have my iPhone 5S and given that if I get 8 or X, I would be keeping it for 4-5 years, so 256GB is not a bad thing. I definitely will reach that limit with the large photos and videos (4K60p has to eat a lot of space).

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