If AI is Google’s future for Pixel, 128GB of storage is simply unacceptable

It’s iPhone 17 review week, and word on the street is the base model is the one to buy this year. Pitting platforms against each other, Apple has a pretty distinct advantage over the Pixel 10 from the jump, with the iPhone 17 arriving with 256GB in its base $800 configuration, while Google delivers just 128GB for the same price. It’s easy enough to see this as a miscalculation on Google’s part — one it can rectify with next year’s Pixel 11 — but the Pixel 10’s status as a device “designed for AI” really feels at odds with this single decision.

The base Pixel 10 ships with 128GB of UFS 3.1 storage (as does the base Pixel 10 Pro) — not the faster UFS 4.0 storage found in the 256GB models. Around 11GB of that is taken up by Android, while another chunk (7GB, in my case) is reserved for cache and other temporary system files. That leaves users with around 110GB of usable storage, the bulk of which is taken up by apps and their associated data.

Except, not really. What’s taking up the most space on my Pixel 10 isn’t some big mobile game, nor is it a massive collection of photos and videos or my entire streaming music library. At the moment, it’s AICore, the local LLM component necessary to power all of those AI-based tools that amount to the vast majority of Google’s advertised exclusive features. It weighs in at nearly 7GB of space, and while that might not sound massive on paper, it’s more than 6% of this Pixel’s total usable storage and, presumably, will only grow as necessary to power even more AI tools.

The good news, of course, is that you can remove AICore from your phone, effectively opting out of most of the recent Pixel-exclusive features that make Google’s smartphone lineup stand out from the crowd in the first place. That gets you your 7GB of data back — again, not a particularly small amount of storage space — but, as you’d expect, it comes at the cost of sacrificed features.

I’m really of two minds here. I actually think that, at the moment, most users are better off uninstalling AICore and taking back their storage space, effectively saying goodbye to tools like Magic Cue, Pixel Screenshots, and a whole bunch of other abilities. Frankly, most of these are neither reliable enough or fully baked enough for me to recommend anyone sacrifice a serious chunk of on-board storage that could contain several movies at 1080p, or dozens of hours of podcasts.

But users shouldn’t have to make that choice. I may not find a lot of utility in something like Google’s AI-generated weather reports, but if you do, you’re going to need to sacrifice 7GB worth of space to use it. There’s no piecemealing here; if you like Magic Cue but don’t care about Pixel Studio, disabling the latter doesn’t actually give you any storage back. You are either all-in or all-out on Google’s AI initiative, despite the fact that not every aspect of what AICore powers might catch your interest.

And that brings us back to that starting 128GB configuration. By Google’s own definition, this device is built from the ground up to provide all the power necessary to AI-powered tools. Even in its fifth generation, Tensor is still well behind the competition when it comes to raw horsepower — all to focus specifically on local LLM optimization, according to Google itself. So to see the Pixel 10 (and 10 Pro) ship out the door with a massive amount of its already-limited storage filled by the necessary components to power those tools, well, it leaves me scratching my head at this decision. Cheaping out on storage just doesn’t line up with Google’s own mobile ambitions.

I really like my Pixel 10. It’s the cooler, more power-efficient Pixel 9 I was hoping Google would make, and built-in Qi2 support is the cherry on top. But if it weren’t for my job, I wouldn’t hesitate trading AICore away for more raw storage space, and I wouldn’t be surprised if plenty of other Android fans — especially non-enthusiasts — do exactly. Google clearly has a vision for what it wants its mobile platform to be, but if it really wants to reach that mark, its phones need to be premium in all the right ways. After all, these are the exact sorts of slip-ups the competition is hoping Google will make.

As it stands, the only thing that keeps the iPhone 17 from being local AI-ready is Apple’s own mistakes. Next-gen Siri could be on its way for next year, though who knows how much of the functionality shown at WWDC 2024 will actually make its way into the real world. Whatever does ship will feel far more at home on a 256GB iPhone 17, with users likely feeling a lot less pressured to take back that same 7GB from Apple Intelligence than anyone with a base model Pixel 10. That might not be a big problem for Google today, but it’s bound to create a much more forgiving audience of iPhone users than Pixel users when it comes to AI experiments. Fingers crossed the Pixel 11 doesn’t fall face-first into the same trap.