When you buy a new phone, you expect to have the most space available to you when you first turn it on. However, if you buy a new Galaxy S23, you may be in for a surprise.
According to numerous reports, Samsung gobbles up a whopping 60 GB for the system partition for the One UI 5.1 operating system and various apps. Some of those apps are made by Samsung, others are 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 an S23 with 128GB of storage don’t even know their phone is already half full when they buy it. Since it’s not hard to fill 60GB of storage on a smartphone these days, more than a few S23 users will run out of space before they’re ready to hand in their phone.
Compare that to 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 4.5 GB of space can be reclaimed by removing some stock apps that come pre-installed 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 15 GB of space on the Pixel 7.
Samsung makes no such guarantees. The S23’s technical specs only state that a “part of the memory will be occupied by existing content”, without specifying that it will be half of your available storage space. Perhaps that’s why Samsung increased the starting capacity to 256 GB on the S23+ and S23 Ultra.
