I got the 512GB model and have been using it without any regard for storage for a couple of years. All my music is downloaded locally in lossless formats. I keep full-res versions of all my vacation pictures/videos and I also download a ton of crap, from videogames to movies.

I'm at 285GB right now.

The breakdown is 81GB for music, 56GB for pictures, ~40GB of download content on TV/Youtube/Audible and ~23GB of games.

I could _easily_ cut down on that. There's games I haven't played in a while, movies I've already watched, or even music I don't really listen to frequently enough to have it downloaded.

Safe to say I'll go for 256GB next time

I'm at 166 GB out of 256 GB. Every time I upgrade my iPhone (average every 5 years), I get the most storage available (after learning my lesson on the iPhone 4) and it ends up being 4x bigger than before.

iPod touch (32GB), if you ignore this

iPhone 4 (16GB), 2010

iPhone 6 (64GB), 2014

iPhone SE 2nd gen (256GB), 2020

iPhone 16 (1 TB)?, 2024

Every time, I think "that's probably way more than I'll need", but I guess in 6 years or so I'll upgrade to the 4 TB model. Or wait for next year's model, maybe another SE will come out...

I wonder if storage needs have a very bimodal distribution.

Both my parents barely use the 64GB on their phone. The one that does photography, probably can't store all their photos on any iPhone, because it measures in the multi-TB.

I usually overbuy storage but after three years, I'm removing things like music and podcasts because it's completely full.

> bimodal

Those who go heavy on the video vs those who don't.

I'm at 67/256GB, I don't know why I even went with 256GB

Every time I upgrade, I go and look at my storage and see that I’m close to my 256 limit, then I take a closer look and realize it’s my audiobook in podcast app taking up 40 to 50 gigs each. That plus a bunch of apps that I don’t actually use and could easily delete off my phone.

> they have more information about usage patterns than we do.

They, unlike us, also know what 256GB of storage actually costs but somehow that's not reflected in the price difference either

Ahh you need is kids to see that storage be laughable.

I'm going to downvote you because I don't know what you're talking about. My kids have 128GB phones and don't have any issues at all. They're also on our family plan with Google One for shared storage and we're still -- as a family of five where I personally have contributed about 100,000 photos (and some videos) over the past 15 years -- only at 1.2TB of consumed storage.

What are your kids doing that consumes so much local storage?

I see it was clear enough. We, my wife and I take many pictures and videos (4K 30fps) of our kids. My kids don’t use phones at their age. So our phone storage is always scary high.

They do cute things that I want to take a video or photo of and never delete from my phone

Here is a data point. We went on a one-week family vacation, my teens created a shared album which contains 3,000 photos and 100 videos.

Yep. I'm in my early 40's, recently self-hosted Immich, imported the archive of photos and videos my wife and I have created since 2000, and we're sitting at 216,000 photos, 5000 videos, 650gb+ of data. 2000-2011ish was point-and-shoot digital + DSLR, then 2012-2024 has been the output of TWO CELL PHONES.

We aren't photographers, we just goof around, and our almost-teenaged son doesn't factor into those numbers.

The sheer volume of data created is just .. it's nuts. And there's another 300gb of data generated from all the metadata, sidecar, smart search, face detection! Imagine all that plus much more that Apple Intelligence generates.

Long gone are the days of just putting JPGs into a folder!

But since it’s a shared album, most of that lives in the cloud and not locally cached.

If I was betting, most people likely pay for a cloud storage solution and don’t use the majority of their device storage.