tl;dr: No
Even if you barely create content like taking photos and videos, you should consider avoid having the lowest storage capacity device. 128GB may be the lowest capacity these days for phones and some laptops. I understand that some people are really tight on their tech budget.
You might ask yourself: “Should I pay an extra $70 more for an additional 128GB? Is that worth it? $0.55 per GB. Isn’t that expensive?🤔” You can’t think of pricing storage that way. “$70 is a lot for me to double the capacity.” Actually, you get a LOT more than double. Let me explain.
Going from 128GB to 256GB is actually more than double the space if you consider that the phone’s system and applications files use the same space. So buying a 128GB phone with a decent amount of apps installed may take up 50GB of space to begin with. You now realize that your phone only has 78GB of free space left. If you had a 256GB phone, the apps and system files will still take 50GB, but you now have 206GB of free space which is closer to 2.6x the useable space.
You also need to consider that long ago are the days where phones can have their capacity upgraded with external SD card data storage. Once you have your 128GB device, it can never be more than that.
When is 128GB good enough? Many people don’t take photos other than to post on social media and don’t want to keep a library of image and video files. Also, they don’t install a lot of big games that can also take up multiple gigabytes. Streaming content also doesn’t need storage capacity. If that is their way, then 128GB will be enough for the next few years to come. Bill Gates once claimed that 640KB is all anyone would ever need.😂
What about system memory? For similar reasons, going from 16GB to 32GB of RAM will have more than double the effectiveness because the system OS and programs will take up a somewhat fixed amount of RAM. Someone who uses a lot of tabs in their web browser could feel the effects of a system with limited RAM. Even if system memory is not being fully utilized, unused space is used for storage caching to improve drive file access and various other performance boosts.
For some archaic marketing reason, tech products still advertise products with data capacities following base 2 values, like 16, 32, 64, etc. When it comes to system memory, there is actual computer architecture that makes these values ideal. But when it comes to storage, storage isn’t actually technically bound to “ideal” values like that. Desktop hard drives come in various sizes like 3TB, 14TB, etc., not just the usual 2TB, 4TB, 8TB. It’s all for marketing. Drives mainly use base 10 values which is not really the focus of this article. There’s nothing stopping phone manufactures from making phones with 750GB or 1.5TB, etc..