The Storage Scam: How Apple, Google and Samsung overcharge you for storage

Phone Arena

05-05-2025

It was a beautiful early May weekend in the Polish capital of Warsaw and just as I was taking yet another video from a rooftop bar with stunning views, I got the message that storage has once again run out on the iPhone 15 Pro I was using.
Ah! No better feeling that cleaning up storage on my phone during my vacation, right?
Sarcasm aside, I kind of accepted that in that moment as an inevitable fact of life and it only clicked in my mind a couple of days later that life... doesn't really need to be this hard!
The iPhone 15 Pro I was using was the base 128GB model, purchased for a cool $1,000 in 2024. No matter which way you look at it, $1,000 is a lot of money. It should have bought me a stress-free phone for the next few years.
As all good things in life, my vacation was soon over, and I was back at the PhoneArena headquarters engulfed in new phone releases on my reviewer's desk. The two most recent ones right next to me were the CMF Phone 2 Pro and the Motorola Edge 60.
And it hit me: the CMF Phone 2 Pro is a $280 dirt cheap phone and EVEN THAT has twice as much storage as my iPhone! That doesn't seem right!
The CMF Phone 2 Pro costs less than $300 and has double the storage my $1,000 iPhone has
I then quickly checked the specs of the Motorola Edge 60 (a beautiful phone that is unfortunately not coming to the US). And what do you know — that $400 phone had 512GB of storage!
I didn't just get angry. I levelled up. I suddenly felt like my $1,000 iPhone was that packet of chips, you open it and it's 85% air.
Yeah... Looking at it this way, flagship phone pricing looks like, well, a scam.
Maybe not legally (phone makers are way too smart for that!). You are technically getting exactly what is advertized and the prices are transparent, so you have no grounds to sue anyone. But knowing that the real cost difference between 128GB of storage and 512GB of storage is around $10 and you are asked to pay $250... well, this type of profiteering feels like it SHOULD NOT BE LEGAL.
Heck, remember when the European Union banned the Lightning cable for a good reason? We all cheered that. Now, maybe we can have some legal limits on profiteering off of storage prices too. Please?
Honestly, I wish we could.
But phone makers have made one clever calculation that makes this impossible.
See, the phone manufacturers are well aware of the main reason why people buy expensive phones and they are guarding that premium feature very carefully, not letting it arrive to cheaper devices. And that secret sauce is all about the camera. Look at all the budget phones around you, do you notice the common thread? None of them has a great camera!
Also, almost no budget phone has a telephoto camera. It's no coincidence. Again, a telephoto camera is not an expensive component, it is not there ON PURPOSE.
This basically allows flagships to always stand out, no matter their cost. Want a good camera? Get a premium flagship. Want a telephoto camera? Come to the dark side and spend at least a $1,000.
And what do you do when you satisfy the most pressing user need (good camera quality)? That's right — you "maximize profits" once again.
So when you arrive at phones-with-good-cameras territory, you suddenly see that all of them are suddenly deprived of... storage. An artificial scarcity to squeeze even more out of those users that are willing to pay more for a camera phone.
We know that Trump's favorite word is "tariffs", but I bet phone maker CEOs far prefer "maximizing profits".
The sad part of all this is that we could have had a perfect camera phone for well under $500 for decades now. But instead of phone pricing falling to a more sensible level, we see this agreement across the industry to preserve profits, maximize them and overcharge customers a bit more every year.
And the only way to avoid that is sadly just to... pay up for a good amount of storage! And then keep your phone for as long as possible. But do let me know if you have better ideas in the comments, I certainly wouldn't mind hearing them.