Because most people don't need that much, especially with the new auto-delete of photos that have been copied to the cloud in Google Photo, love this feature.
It'd be very interesting to see how much music people store on their phone when they use services like Spotify. I use it on a Nexus 4 and I've never had a problem with running out of space, but I don't have lots of games or anything on there. I honestly doubt it's much more than 2 or 3GB.
I don't like fragile cloud solutions, so my music is offline. I find it amazingly stupid to tell other people to "just delete some of it, because you probably won't listen to it twice". My offline car navigation takes more than 10 GB, and no thank you, I won't use google maps which are not that accurate in places I go, and require constant connectivity (which makes them useless in foreign countries, or in mountains). My DCIM folder is cca 5 GB after 1 year of usage, and I shoot almost no videos which would make it explode.
FFS, it's almost end of 2015, having 32 GB model as your highest offering is... pathetic.
It seems reasonable that their phones are expected to mostly behave as phones, and not as a large photo/video repository.
Not really. Do you ever travel? Have you ever been on a road trip? Have you ever been on a plane? Have you ever gone camping?
The issue comes up if you use your phone solely as a camera without an accompanying connection for long enough to fill up internal storage without some way to offload it.
It's a situation that won't come up ever for most users of the phone, and as Wifi and Data coverage increases will become even more obscure.
It's especially a problem while cruising - onboard WiFi is slow and expensive, buying a sim per country wastes time.
Source on that?