Apple could give the iPhone 14 a whopping 2TB of storage, double that of the maximum 1TB of onboard storage the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max can be equipped with.
This rumor comes via the Chinese site MyDrivers, which adds that Apple will be switching to QLC flash storage to allow the change. Given Apple has been stingy in the past with storage, with the new iPad mini 6 only coming with 64GB of storage at its base spec, we're a tad skeptical about this information tidbit.
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However, the rumors around the iPhone 13 getting 1TB of storage ended up being true, at least for the Pro models. So perhaps there's a nugget of truth here.
DigiTimes agrees wit the rumor that Apple is looking to switch to “cost-effective QLC NAND flash solutions," but stops short of repeating the 2TB claim.
MyDrivers doesn’t provide an explanation as to why Apple would be increasing capacities so dramatically, other than the fact that QLC flash storage is cheaper than what it uses now. Still, Apple could probably justify the move with the support for ProRes video files on the Pro models that will chew through internal storage once enabled.
How likely is a 2TB iPhone 14?
All the same, 2TB sounds like a stretch to us just a year on from the adoption of 1TB.
Apple is a cautious company when it comes to phone iterations, and it would seem enormously unlikely for it to plough ahead with a 2TB model when the 1TB iPhone 13 Pro Max has only been on sale for eight days. Just over a week of sales’ data is hardly enough to justify doubling the storage given Apple handsets topped out at 512GB for the three years between the iPhone Xs and iPhone 12.
It’s also illustrative to look at the opposition. Samsung introduced 1TB models with the Galaxy S10 Plus and Galaxy Note 10 Plus, but the company reverted to 512GB for the Galaxy S20 and Galaxy 21. Reading between the lines, you have to assume the reasoning was that they simply weren’t selling. At the time of writing, only a handful of Android phones have 1TB of internal storage, and none hit the 2TB mark that Apple is supposedly targeting in 2022.
Of course, there is a key difference here: Android devices often support microSD storage expansion, while no iPhone ever has. All the same, while the direction of travel is undoubtedly towards more and more internal storage, we’d be very surprised if the iPhone 14 was the first handset to hit 2TB. Maybe in 2023.
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