I’m excited to see pixel grow but why are we accepting this storage bullshit? 128GB in 2023? Why do we tolerate this storage extortion. Hard drive space costs almost nothing.

I’m not arguing against your point at all because that seems like a personal matter. However, I am interested in knowing how the typical person uses more than 128GB of storage space. Aside from people with interests that require more space (eg a photographer or traveler), what do people have on their phones that take up more than 128GB of storage space?

Photos (I like to shoot RAW+JPEG), videos and music. Pixels don’t come with micro SD card slots, and other manufacturers have been getting rid of it as well.

Even apps these days are at least 100-200 MB.

Interesting! How do phones typically encode their files, and what are the benefits of shooting RAW+JPEG?

RAW files contain the raw, unprocessed information from the camera’s sensor, whereas the JPEGs have the device manufacturer’s processing on them. RAW images provide a lot of flexibility when editing in applications like Adobe Lightroom. You can recover a lot of detail you otherwise might lose in JPEGs. After processing them you export them as JPEGs.

Here’s a good example I found online:

They take up a lot of space. A picture of my housemate’s cat was 3.2 MB in JPEG and 16.6 MB in RAW.