Phone storage: like battery life and screen resolution, you can never get enough. And even though iPhone 12 owners, with their baseline 64GB, live in luxury compared to the 8GB or 16GB that iPhone owners were managing on within relatively recent memory, many have expressed the wish that Apple would bump up its storage tiers for the next generation.
There have been credible rumours, in fact – starting in October, and reiterated in January – that for the iPhone 13 this autumn Apple would double the maximum storage space from 512GB to 1TB. But that now seems to have been a pipe dream.
According to a new report from the Taiwanese research firm TrendForce, Apple will stick to 512GB as its top storage tier for at least another year, something that will come as a disappointment for those who want to be able to store more photos, videos, apps and games on their iPhone.
(Technically TrendForce predicts in its report that the new iPhones – which it refers to as the iPhone 12s generation – will have the same allocation of memory as the current models. That threw us for a moment, as within the industry the word “memory” is generally used to refer to RAM. But the preceding comments about pricing tiers indicate that the firm is talking in this case about storage.)
The maximum storage allocation has been 512GB since the iPhone XS and XS Max were launched three years ago, so it would be logical to expect the firm to increase it relatively soon. (The iPad Pros have offered 1TB since 2018, and actually go as high as 2TB these days.) Maybe iPhone buyers will get lucky in 2022.
Catch up with the latest rumours with our regularly updated iPhone 13 news hub. Or grab a bargain for Prime Day with our guide to the best iPhone deals.
This article originally appeared on Macworld Sweden. Translation and additional reporting by David Price.