And apparently, that's not enough. We've reached the point where people are now questioning the efficacy of having 64GB of storage in an Android phone in 2018. That seems crazy.

It wasn't long ago we were talking about whether 8GB of internal storage was still acceptable on the Nexus 4 , particularly in light of its lack of an SD card slot. And it didn't take long before we slowly ratcheted through 16 and 32GB up to modern high-end phones regularly having 64GB internally. Even most of today's mid-range phones offer 32GB without breaking the bank.

So why would you need more than 64GB of storage? Well, it starts with understanding how much free space you actually get out of that. After formatting and installing the operating system, a 64GB Galaxy S8 has 40GB available to use as you wish. Still, how do you fill up 40GB of storage? Typical concerns fall into three categories: big games, 4K video recordings, and local music/video storage.

Most people can fit into 40GB just fine, with plenty of room to spare.

Yup, games are big. If you're an avid gamer, installing perhaps five games at 2GB each (or more likely 10 at 1GB each) at any given time, that's 10GB right there. 4K video recording is a concern, filling up about 5MB per second recorded. Quibbles aside about whether you should record in 4K versus using stabilized 1080p, how many 1-minute (300MB) clips are you going to save on your phone at any given time? Let's be audacious and say you record 20, that's 6GB in total. (Also, please back up your video — the phone itself is the least safe place for it to be.)

Now, audio and video. Unlike Vlad Savov over at The Verge, the average user doesn't have 24GB of local music — or anywhere near that. We use streaming music apps. Even with local caching on those apps to save on data usage, we'll maybe save 5GB of music at any given time. Avid podcast listeners may have 1GB of audio saved. TV show episodes on Netflix are about 100MB each — let's say you download 10 at a time to get through on your lunch breaks, totaling 1GB.

Then you add in apps. I'm not a mobile gamer, and have 110 apps installed — and let's be honest, about a dozen haven't been touched in months. Still, they total only 7GB. Half of that is just four apps: Google Chrome, Netflix, Pocket Casts and Google Photos. (Of course, Netflix and Pocket Casts are already accounted for above, but I'll toss you a bone.)

In sum: 10GB games + 6GB 4K video + 5GB music + 1GB podcasts + 1GB video + 7GB apps. Total: 30GB, leaving you with 10GB free for anything you wish, even though by this calculation your phone is already well-appointed with my apps, games, media, and data. And that's the case on a Samsung phone, notorious for having a very large system partition leaving you with less free storage than most.

Don't blame your data packrat tendencies on your phone's internal storage size.

So maybe it turns out you don't need more than 64GB right now, or even in the near future. Streaming media apps and cloud-based services have reduced our dependency on internal storage, while the typical size of an app, photo or video file hasn't dramatically increased in the past couple of years. And yet, typical internal storage on phones has doubled in that time period.

Naturally, there will be edge cases where people feel they need far more than this amount of data on their phone. But again, I'm not addressing edge cases. I'm talking about the bulk of the market. If you're not willing to do some storage management, nothing short of 500GB will be "enough" for you. At some point, every phone is going to require you evaluate what to keep and what to delete or store elsewhere. I feel that for 2018, 64GB of internal storage is a sufficient amount so that all but fringe cases can easily fit into it.