Comment by pzo

> Videos and photos are already compressed to an efficiency sweet spot.

For you its a sweet spot for me not. Again let people have options and decide. Gaining 30-50% of my space is satisfying for me.

> You can sync iPhones with a cable to a computer like the iPod day

I mentioned already most people don't have Mac even most iphone users don't have Mac. latest iTunes on windows maybe improved (haven't tested recently) but 1 year ago it was still useless.

> You can also advise your mum not to make the dumb upgrade of going from an iPhone X to an iPhone XS with smaller storage.

I mentioned she is not tech savvy and doesn't require advanced phone. Upgrade is because, iphone X loosing support, face id is broken, iphone xs has esim that will be helpful for here when travelling. In this case it's not dump upgrade

> It would be better pick up a used iPhone 11-13 with upgraded storage at a very reasonable price, should be under $400 > Or you could get a phone like a Samsung A series with a microSD slot and pay under $400 for it

Again even better to use older phone from her son or daughter if they still work and are good enough. Maybe it's cultural but I grew up with a view that if something is broken you try to fix it first instead of throw away (not only electronics).

> You can obviously use an entirely different photos application than what Apple provides

Other apps won't be as good as apple one since we all 3rd party devs have to live in apple walled garden with their artificial API limitations.

> your mum is depending on local phone storage to keep data safe

I do manual backups at least once a year of all my devices and my mum and sister when I visit them during summer. if Apple let have a fair 3rd party API access to iPhones then we gonna have a better solution of 3rd party apps to have similar sync options as Apple to make backups locally or when connecting to external hdd.

> However, there is some point where the user is responsible for having a brain making a sensible decision.

This is apple trap. Their iCloud pricing options is: 50GB, 200GB ... and then 2TB. WTF? Why I cannot get 500GB or even 1TB? Why I have to pay for 2TB for few years if I know there is no way I'm not use it that much? My sister opted out for 200GB afer few years she is at 170GB usage - sneaaky Apple the predicted that for most people they will have no choice but to upgrade to 2TB.

> “I don’t want to buy a phone with big storage, I don’t want to buy a phone that has a microSD slot, actually I don’t want to buy a phone at all I’ll just use yours when you’re done with it, but why can’t this stupid phone hold all my photos? What do you mean backup? Are you saying I lost my photos!? Apple/Google/Samsung are a scam!!”

No I don't have complaing to Android much except they also most high-end phones don't have microsd support. My complain is for apple for both not having microsd, for so many years having only USB 2.0 with lightning connect that is super slow for transfer data and these days only iPhone 15 pro has USB-3 speed, having (or had) shitty iTunes app for windows, not having good option to mount data as android, limiting API for 3rd parties.

I think we overall have to agree to disagree on this. Yes Android provide better choices and most likely I will be switching to it - I'm iOS developer so obviously transition will take longer to pickup other tech stack.