ZDNET Analysis: When Buying a Smartphone, Think in Dollars per Gigabyte

ZDNET argues that a more useful figure is the marginal cost, or the extra price paid for each additional gigabyte when moving up a storage tier. Upgrading from 256GB to 512GB costs $200 for 256 additional gigabytes, or about $0.78 per gigabyte. Stepping up from 512GB to 1TB costs another $200 for 512GB, or $0.39 per gigabyte, and moving from 1TB to 2TB costs $400 for 1,024GB, which also works out to $0.39 per gigabyte. Applying that same marginal-cost logic to the base 256GB model gives $0.78 per gigabyte as well, the report says.

The analysis explains that modern smartphones, with soldered storage and no microSD card slot, make it easy for manufacturers to create buyer anxiety about running out of space. Companies can profit twice: once when the device is sold and again when users pay for cloud storage to back up files they have not cleaned out. ZDNET notes that the same dynamic applies to laptops, although external storage is easier to add to those devices.

To put per-gigabyte costs in perspective, ZDNET estimates that a single gigabyte holds about 300 lower-resolution photos, 150 high-quality photos, or as few as a dozen pro-grade RAW images. Video is even more storage-hungry: a gigabyte stores about 15 minutes of 1080p video at the lowest quality, but less than two minutes once the settings are raised, and even less if professional RAW formats are selected.

ZDNET concludes that each gigabyte of phone storage can cost close to a dollar, before accounting for any backup or cloud subscription. The report recommends weighing the price per gigabyte, not the total gigabyte count, when deciding whether to pay for a storage upgrade.