zlacker

What is the evidence of this claim?

My wife just got to a place where her iPhone got unusable because it's running out of space - mainly having to do with her massive Messages history and photos/videos. We didn't even know until I checked, her phone is the iPhone X which was released 6 years ago and technically nothing is stopping her from using it longer except the lack of desire to prune her message history/photos/vids.

My wife is someone who's not going to suffer with a poorly functioning piece of technology nor someone who is going to work hard to optimize it or prolong its life, so the fact that her 6 year old phone works just fine is a good sign that it can, in the average case.

>>xyzele+(OP)
As another data point, I've a tendency to not store too many photos and messages for long term. I think thats the reason why my 7 plus is still running like new after all these years. The only reason I'll upgrade will be 5G.

>>throwa+ub
I do that too, recently for the first time enabled cloud sync (had a 1 TB of OneDrive storage sitting unused anyway), so most photos delete themselves from the phone eventually. But that's compensating for tech deficiency, though.

What is the point of me having 256 GB of storage on the phone, if the phone starts slowing down wholesale once I take 50% of it? I get that there needs to be some buffer for swap and flash magic and whatnot, but I'd thought it would be closer to PC / Windows, where everything is fine until ~90% storage being used.

That's on top of bloated software doing background magic. Can't speak for other phones and brands, but my experience with Samsung flagships (S4, S7, wife's S9, now S22) is that the camera and gallery app are bloated, and their performance degrades rapidly with the amount of photos you take - around 50% worth of storage is when camera starts having delays on the order of seconds, interfering with its core purpose of taking photos.

(And it's not that it couldn't be better - Samsung just isn't investing effort in making core system apps performant enough. It's hard to find efficient apps these days on the Play Store, but there are rare exceptions, like e.g. Aves gallery, which is FLOSS and manages to be leaner, faster and significantly more feature-full than just about anything else, stock or third-party.)

>>xyzele+(OP)
This is why I invest in Apple. They have made a bet, that the majority is too unwilling to forgo useless data like messages and photos and videos. If you want to save a picture or a video, why not download the photo and store it somewhere permanent? I think Apple knows most people will not manage/backup their own data. So instead of warning users or educating users, they have come up with a paid solution. iCloud storage. In the future, I can imagine most Apple users paying Apple a monthly fee to store all of their data. I suspect that Apple's profit will continue to grow with every new 8k video created and saved on their servers.