People have lots of photos/videos, and when your phone runs out of space, it kindly prompts you to buy iCloud storage. I have several family members who have done this, without understanding what it really meant.
If they understood what the backup was, would they want to pay for it? My guess here is that most people do want the backups and so the on-device storage doesn’t matter that much for photos. Maybe people want to use google photos and avoid iCloud backups and that requires more storage on device? I don’t know about that
The point of this thread is that storage costs have gone down, and Apple has maintained its nominal prices by being chintzy with the onboard storage. Whether it's good for Apple to be paternalistic by pushing iCloud on people is a separate issue. Someone who already backs up to a computer doesn't need it, but is confused by the messages that appear when their phone fills up.
Also note that photos/videos taken on new phones are much, much larger than on older phones, effectively meaning that you can store way fewer photos/videos than before.
FWIW I tried to restore my iPhone backup from my Mac last week, and it totally failed. If I hadn't had iCloud, I'd be SOL.
(This is not a defence of Apple btw - it's unforgivable that they lock down the phone so you can only use their backup feature, and it doesn't actually work).
“One is none, two is one” when it comes to backups. If you have a service like Microsoft 365, OneDrive comes with 1TB of data and can backup photos. You can also use Google and Amazon. There’s even option like Nextcloud and Owncloud for a self hosted solution.
I do have back up of the photos and videos, but the rest of the phone can only be backed up using iCloud or Finder/iTunes on Windows. Both methods are actually impossible to test without a spare phone.
Yes it was. I've kept it in case there is some way to fix/restore it in future, but since I had all the important photos/videos on iCloud, I don't really have a pressing need.
