I posted
a few days ago about storage, and I realised that
the data from Notebookcheck I was looking at is both extensive enough, and easy enough to dump into a spreadsheet, that I could do a quick comparison between storage in the smartphone market today compared to how it was when the Switch launched.
For the comparison, I've taken the results of every phone in the dataset released in the past two years (228 phones) and compared it to every phone released within the two years prior to Switch's launch (212 phones). There are a handful of cases where I've had to fix obvious labelling errors (eg eMMC where it should state UFS and vice versa) and I got rid of a couple of results which had no capacity or storage type data, but otherwise the data was in pretty good shape.
First, on storage types, here's the situation in the two years prior to Switch's launch:
Code:
Type Percentage
eMMC 86.8%
UFS 2 8.0%
N/A 5.2%
There were a few cases where it's not specified (marked N/A here), but the market was overwhelmingly eMMC at the time, with only a handful of high-end phones moving to UFS 2.
Here's what it looks like for the most recent two years:
Code:
Type Percentage
eMMC 19.3%
UFS 2 37.7%
UFS 3 37.3%
UFS 4 5.7%
The situation has flipped, with 80.7% of the market now on UFS. UFS 4 occupies a similar position as UFS 2 did when Switch launched, being used on a smaller number of high-end devices.
For capacities, here's what it looked like for the two years prior to Switch's launch:
Code:
Capacity Percentage
4GB 3.3%
8GB 16.6%
16GB 39.3%
32GB 30.8%
64GB 7.6%
128GB 2.4%
The median capacity at the time was 16GB and the average was 25.3GB. Here's the distribution for the last two years:
Code:
Capacity Percentage
32GB 4.8%
64GB 16.7%
128GB 41.7%
256GB 29.8%
512GB 7.0%
The median capacity here is 128GB and the average is 177.8GB. It's interesting that this distribution tracks so closely to the one from 6 years prior; just multiply the pre-Switch capacities by 8 and it's pretty much the same distribution today.
In terms of speed, the average speed in the two years prior to Switch launching was 208MB/s, compared to 1,190MB/s in the last two years. I also took the speeds across a few percentiles to indicate how things have changed in different segments of the market. Here they are for the pre-Switch dataset:
Code:
Percentile Speed
25% 137.30 MB/s
50% 196.80 MB/s
75% 248.10 MB/s
And here are the percentiles for the last two years:
Code:
Percentile Speed
25% 498.53 MB/s
50% 975.05 MB/s
75% 1,817.10 MB/s
Notebookcheck do have price data in their reviews, but unfortunately they don't seem to provide any way to include it in their search. As a quick sense check to make sure the data is comparable in terms of price (ie that Notebookcheck haven't shifted to reviewing more expensive phones, which would skew the data), I compared the median phone in terms of storage speed in each of the datasets.
In the data for the two years prior to Switch, the median phone was the
LG X Power K220, which had 16GB of eMMC with read speeds of 196.8MB/s, and a listed price of €199. For the last two years, the median phone was the
Realme 9i, which had 128GB of UFS 2.1 with read speeds of 976MB/s and a listed price of €220. This is a bit lower than the inflation-adjusted price of the K220, which would suggest that the prices of phones being reviewed are pretty consistent across both datasets.
One final caveat to add; I chose a two year window to get a large number of phones and a representative dataset, but in the case of the last two years particularly that covers a rapidly changing market. Phones released during the start of that window were heavily impacted by the chip shortage and high flash prices, whereas flash is now over-supplied and prices have dropped by almost 50% in the last year. I don't think this will impact speeds very much, as that's more limited by what the SoC supports, but we may see a shift to higher capacity over this year as the drop in costs impacts design choices.
