When you buy a new phone, you expect most of the available space to be available to you the first time you turn it on. However, if you’re buying the new Galaxy S23, you might be in for a surprise.
In accordance with numerous reports, Samsung eats up as much as 60 GB for the system partition for the One UI 5.1 operating system and various applications. Some of these apps are made by Samsung, others will be paid ads from Facebook, Netflix, Microsoft, and others, depending on where you buy your phones.
Some apps can be uninstalled, but most people who buy the S23 with 128GB of storage won’t even know 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, many S23 users will run out of space before they’re ready to turn in their phones.
Compare that to the new iPhone, which will use 12GB to 17GB of space, according to Apple’s datasheet. Apple is also telling users that up to 4.5GB of space can be reclaimed by deleting some stock apps that come preinstalled on all new iPhones. Heck, that’s twice as much as macOS Ventura. And if you want to compare apples to apples, Google only takes up 15GB of space on the Pixel 7.
Samsung makes no such guarantees. The S23 tech specs just state that “part of the memory is occupied by existing content” without stating that it will be half of your available storage. Perhaps that’s why Samsung increased the initial capacity to 256GB on the S23+ and S23 Ultra.