128GB storage space is just too little in 2021
128GB. A few years ago it seemed infinite. The 2015 iPhone 6S wasn’t even sold with more storage. However, our perception of ‘a lot’ has changed considerably in 2021: the cheapest iPhone 13 Pro now comes with 128GB of storage. And that’s too little.
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We use our smartphones every day for all kinds of different things. We take hundreds – no, thousands of photos, videos, screenshots and screenshots. Our photo galleries are bulging and our home screens are full of useless apps that we use at most three times a year. We simply don’t feel like having to constantly clean things up.
Is that lazy? Ah, maybe. It is especially nice not to have to worry about the amount of storage space you have available. You might just look for that one photo from three years ago and find that you deleted it a while back due to lack of storage. Luxury problems, but very irritating.
You may be familiar with the infamous “not enough storage space available” message. Unfortunately I know him very well and in the past I saw him regularly. Fortunately that is now a thing of the past. Of the available 256GB on my iPhone 13 Pro Max, I filled about 160GB. Now I never have to think about my storage space; it is (still) always enough. 128GB is no longer that for me, however.
ProRes video: All You Can Eat restaurant for gigabytes
The iPhone 13 Pro gets a new feature in iOS 15.1: shooting ProRes videos. ProRes is an Apple-developed video editing codec. Do you film in ProRes? Then the quality is a lot higher. The colors are better, the dynamic range is greater, the videos have more detail, there is less noise and post-processing is much easier.
However, ProRes comes with a big caveat: 1 minute of 4K ProRes video already takes up about 5.3GB. Are you filming 1 hour of material? Then you need no less than 318GB. Apple therefore chose to let the iPhone 13 Pro with 128GB of storage only record ProRes videos with a full HD resolution. 4K images in ProRes are only reserved for the Pro models with 256GB storage or more.
Apple itself is well aware that 128GB is not enough to allow users to fully enjoy their brand new, expensive iPhone 13 Pro or 13 Pro Max. And that’s a shame. For the money you pay and the extensive marketing in which ProRes is regularly discussed, you as an avid Apple user expect a bit more.
And if ProRes doesn’t interest you?
128GB is too little for the true Pro user. The content creator, the film lover, the photographer. Don’t you think all these things are so important? Then you might still be fine in 2021 with 128GB of storage space. There’s also iCloud, of course, – Apple’s magical online storage, which can fill you up quite a bit for a few bucks a month.
Have you been using an iPhone for years and plan to use your brand new iPhone 13 Pro for years to come? Then there is a chance that that cursed ‘not enough storage space available’ message will not leave you alone in the coming years.
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