I tried to put emphasis on the personal nature of the question in the title. I’m not asking for myself or the average individual. I also mean ideal in the way where cost is still a factor. The iPhone 16 Pro has a 1TB model but it’s around $500 more expensive than the 128GB version.
I imagine answers are going to vary significantly depending on an individuals approach like relying on cloud storage, SD cards, or a Magsafe NVMe drive for example.
I found 1TB (512GB on the phone and on the SD card) was ideal for me. I could keep the things I wanted for “just in case scenarios” like the files needed for the source ports of Diablo, Half Life, and Morrowind in case I want to play a game or some ebooks if I have time to read. I never needed to uninstall applications and shuffle things. I even had plenty of breathing room.
Another question I’d be interested in hearing people’s answers to is what is the minimum storage capacity you would consider for a phone. I don’t think I would buy a device with less than 256GB of potential storage. If it has an SD card slot that opens up the potential a significantly.
I had a 256GB phone and after 1 year had used less than half the space, without ever deleting anything, so when i upgraded this time I saved money and got the 128GB model. I sync my photos/videos to my NAS so can purge those from my phone at any time to save space. That’s really the only thing that takes up any significant storage.
The answer, is that I want the Galaxy S Ultra line to have an SD card slot.
I’m currently at a slim 132GB over the course of a year, and that includes a good size library of RPG pdfs. I should probably save more music to my phone to save on bandwidth. I feel kind of uncomfortable going bellow 512GB storage but I clearly don’t need most of that.