Smartphones have never been more expensive than they are today. Depending on which brand and model you decide to buy, you can spend over $2,000 which may be the most expensive purchase you make this year.
When you’re trying to save money on a new phone, most of us look at the model number. Should I get an iPhone 15, or save $100 by getting the iPhone 14?
That’s not the best way to save money. There’s another number you should consider: the number of Gigabytes. Choosing the wrong amount of storage can cost you hundreds of dollars more for something you’ll never use.
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For example, a 128 GB iPhone 15 is $800, 256 gigs is $100 more, and 512 gigs is $1100. The new Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5 starts at 256 GB for $1,800 while a terabyte of storage is $360 more.
You can save up to $350 by not paying for more storage than you need.
So, how do you know how much storage you should have? Open your settings app and look at how much storage you’re currently using. Recording 4K video takes up the most storage followed by RAW photos, music, games, and apps. Even if you record a lot of video, take a lot of photos, and listen to a lot of music, you still may not need 512 gigabytes of storage.
I’ve had a 256 GB iPhone 14 Pro for a year. I shoot a ton of videos and download a lot of apps for our app of the day segment. Despite all of the work I do with the phone, I’m still a good 68 GB under the 256 gigs of storage I purchased. About 52 GB of that is used by music I downloaded for a vacation when I couldn’t connect to the internet for streaming Apple Music or Spotify. 16 GB of storage is video I’ve recorded while another 3 GB is taken up from 2 games in Apple Arcade.
If you stream the music you listen to on Spotify, and stream video from YouTube, Netflix, or Amazon Prime, and use cloud storage for photos and video, and you don’t have a handful of video games installed, there’s no way you’ll use 256 GB of storage or more.
According to SAMSUNG, a phone with 128GB can store, an hour of 4k video, a thousand songs, 100 apps, 20 movies, and 900 photos.
Here’s another reason not to pay for more storage than you need. When you trade in the phone, the companies don’t take into account the amount of storage it has. So a 1 terabyte smartphone has the same trade-in value as a 128 gigabyte version of the same phone, even if you spend $300 more for the extra storage.
You wouldn’t rent a storage unit across town if you didn’t have stuff to put in it. Don’t pay for storage you don’t need. To save even more storage space, connect your phone to a computer and download all of the photos and videos you’ve taken. Reinstall Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and other apps that store data. You’ll likely find that even 128 GB is more than you need.
What the Tech blog: www.whatthetech.tv
