I am in the process of looking between repairing my phone or switching to a new one. And the no brainer evolution to the OnePlus 7 Pro I have is a Pixel phone. Pixel Phones are definitely not perfect, I know that the battery would fall faster than other phones but hey, that's ok, google chip in it, possibility to go GrapheneOs, all good.
But the A versions only having 128 GB, and needing to pay 100 extra Euro on the Normal and Pro phone for 256GB is ridiculous, and not allowing me to add a SD card for that! Is insane I restarted my phone in December fresh from zero, and in the last 9 months I used 163 GB of memory. 48GB of it is my music on Deezer, for which I pay to be able to download "HIFI" files which I am not willing to trade for using less space on my phone, I work in a place with no 4G, I've got a few playlist I switch between. The rest is 25 GB of Pictures, 7GB of games. 44GB of apps.
Now the answer to this is "Well now with your Pixel phone you can use the Google Cloud, Google Docs blablabla". Something insights by Google offering 3 month of Google one and 3 month of YouTube premium when you buy a Pixel phone. So much cloud that's soo cool! And you can just redownload things when you need it. Well I don't want to redownload my musics everyday when I listen to them, I don't want to trade and limit what I would call normal use. I know not everyone will resonate with this, but the carbon impact on bandwidth used from cloud in 4G is important.
Normalise SD cards, Normalise not using the Cloud as a solution for everything
Update 2 Days later
Hey, writting here because this post has brought a lot of people to talk about storage of data on phone, which is quite nice. I am writting here just because a lot of comments are repeating certain points and It wouldn't be useful answering to all of them if after their will be more comments saying the same thing.
I am not saying Cloud = Bad. It's great we have a place out there where we can Store Data in case anything happens. I simply wish either brand gave us more choice on data capacity, seeing a Pixel 7a only at 128 gb ain't cool, let me make a choice. Seing a Pixel & with 128gb or having to pay an extra 100€ for 256gb when a sd card is 30€ is not cool.
A personal server is in my plans, and it's one of the projects I'm the most impatient to have.
I understand that I have a different use of phones then the average, I simply want to be able to adapt the tools I use to my different use.
I have taken the step to take a look at the storage in my phone by curiosity and to look with a different eye my consomption of Storage, and have deleted 3gb of games, and 3gb of apps that where useless. I've also started looking into my photos and took out 3gb of photos I had which where useless. And I think there is more photos I'll delete, I am not done on that of course
My signal discussion are important to me, I am in a Long Distance Relationship, and discussions I have with my SO on Signal are the major part of my relationship, and I cherish them. I have set up signal so that it makes when charging at night a copy of my discussions, and when I have Sincthing, it loads the conv to a HDD Drive on my PC. That being said, in the floders I found bugged temp file from saves that did not end, for a total of 20 gb of Signal discussions (oof lol) which where deleted too. How ridiculus was it? Well in Storage>Files the weight of total files dropped from 20,68gb to 0,68gb
Anyway, I am now at 132gb :D! I'm not writting this because I am feeling attacked or to defend myself, just as a small update and because these are reocuring comment that's all, i'm still anwering here and there if you arrive a bit latter to the post, it's impressive from lemmy I feel to still be receiving comments and have a discussion that continues 2 day after a post. Usually on Reddit posts would die in 6 hours, and their where no dick's in the chat. I've read every single message, and answers other people did
I think for the majority of people 128 is plenty. If you need more than that you need to buy a phone with an SD slot. I've never had a phone without one personally.
What decent phones come with SD slots?
I currently have a Fairphone, and of course it includes a micro-SD slot. You're supposed to use it for 5+ years, it'd be daft if you cannot expand it.
I'm writing this on a Samsung A54, 256gb version, with an additional microSD slot. I fail to understand how people need more complex and expensive phones than this. Besides maybe wireless charging (which can be argued as a gimmick on its own), this phone has everything.
I lost my A52 5g and replaced it with a 7a. I miss the Galaxy, it was a much better all rounder. Better battery, didn't overheat, SD card, headphone jack. Only things I don't miss are the galaxy store, default apps and the hoops you jump through to avoid crap like the shitty preinstalled games. Updates were great too.
It doesn’t have “everything” if you want a flagship device, especially the cameras.
Yeah, everything is very subjective. I've never had much of a use of super high-end cameras.
What other flagship features are there?
Performance, screen tech, build quality.
All right, that's fair. I guess I'm not the target audience, as all of these are perfectly fine for me on mid-range phones. (I've had flagships before, but these differences never mattered to me personally.)
If it had a headphone jack, I'd be fine with that phone. That's a critical omission, though.
My bedside charging setup (single dock for phone, watch and headphones, no spider nest of cables my son could pull on when he was younger) would disagree.
Sounds cool
The problem with these phones is they show their age quick because they're built with outdated hardware. Yours is less than 6 months old, but you'd need to buy 2-3 replacement phones in the time that it'd take for a flagship specced phone to slow to the same level (provided we were still allowed to buy 'flagship' phones with power features like expandable storage among others).