When you buy a new phone, you expect to have most of the space available to you when you turn it on for the first time. If you’re buying a new Galaxy S23, however, you might be in for a surprise.
According to numerous reports, Samsung is gobbling up as much as 60GB for the system partition for the One UI 5.1 operating system and various apps. Some of those apps are made by Samsung, others will be paid ads from Facebook, Netflix, Microsoft, and others, depending on where you buy your phones.
Some of the apps can be deleted, but most people who buy an S23 with 128GB of storage won’t even know that their phone is already half-full when they buy it. Since it’s not hard to fill up 60GB of storage on a smartphone these days, more than a few S23 users are going to be running out of space before they’re ready to turn in their phones.
Compare that with a new iPhone, which will use between 12GB and 17GB of space, according to Apple’s tech specs. Apple also informs users that up to 4.5GB of space can be recovered by deleting some of the stock apps that are pre-installed on all new iPhones. Heck, that’s twice as much as Apple recommends for macOS Ventura. And if you want to compare apples to apples, Google only takes up 15GB of space on the Pixel 7.
Samsung offers no such assurances. The S23 tech specs merely state that a “portion of memory is occupied by existing content,” with no indication that it will be half of your available storage. Maybe that’s why Samsung upped the starting capacity to 256GB on the S23+ and S23 Ultra.
Author: Michael Simon, Executive Editor
Michael Simon has been covering Apple since the iPod was the iWalk. His obsession with technology goes back to his first PC—the IBM Thinkpad with the lift-up keyboard for swapping out the drive. He's still waiting for that to come back in style tbh.