Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, February 27th. I'm Katie Dayton for The Wall Street Journal. How many times have you opened your smartphone camera ready to capture a perfect moment, only to be told you're out of storage? Today, we're looking into how to prevent that from happening once and for all. Then, we're taking a snapshot of software stocks.
Shares of companies like Salesforce, Adobe and Intuit have been hit hard by the arrival of newer AI-powered rivals. We analyze what's happening to an industry that was once a sure bet for investors. But first, almost nothing in this digital age is more annoying than that storage full notification.
Apple and Google have for years now been charging users for extra cloud storage once their standard allocation has been filled with photos, videos, and other precious memories. But very few of us have tried to do something about those ever-increasing fees. Enter WSJ personal tech columnist, Nicole Nguyen, who's been looking into what else can be done when it comes to smartphone storage.
Nicole, let me start by asking you about some of your own cloud storage experiences. How often have you been burned by that storage full notification?
I hadn't for a while. And then I had a kid and there are certain milestones in life where your photo intake just explodes. I feel like new baby, new pet, bird watching hobby, whatever. And so this September, I did get that dreaded storage full notification from Google and I had run out of my 200 gigabytes. So I had to upgrade. Right.
Because you're not going to delete pictures of your precious baby.
No. And I know that 40% of those pictures are not good, but I am not willing to spend the time to go through my library and actually cull.
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Chapter 2: What are some tips to avoid smartphone storage issues?
So let's talk about some of those solutions to this problem, other than simply paying more and more for storage every single month. You mentioned the idea of triaging your cloud account. What does that involve?
The first step, if you are always running into that storage full notification, or if you just refuse to pay more to these cloud providers is is to look at what is taking up space in the cloud. Most of these providers have tools where you can see a breakdown of exactly what apps, what files are taking up the most amount of gigabytes and how each family member is using up that storage.
And have you discovered any tricks for keeping storage down as you were accruing it?
Yeah, so the biggest thing that you can do right now is to make sure that when you take photos and videos, it's being saved as a high efficiency file. It's called HEIC for photos and HEVC for videos. There's a setting in your camera settings to turn on high efficiency capture. And this is on by default for most iPhones. And on Android phones, you probably have to turn this on.
Another thing that you can do is...
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Chapter 3: How have software stocks been affected by AI competition?
selectively use live photos. So live photos can double the size of an image because it's also taking this multi-second video clip. And there's a toggle in the camera app for iPhones and Android phones where you can turn it on and off.
Chapter 4: What factors led to the decline of software stock values?
A good reminder. There is a way to escape the cloud altogether and rely on a good old-fashioned local drive. What are some of the pros and cons of doing it that way?
So local drives are the nuclear option if you want to escape the cloud altogether. They can also be a good option if you want a backup to the cloud. It's always a good idea to have a local physical backup. There are two types, a solid state drive and a hard disk drive.
I recommend solid state drives because there are no moving parts, they're less prone to failure, and they also have very fast data transfer speeds. I will say though, that if you choose this option, you regularly have to make sure that you're backing up your media because it won't happen automatically. And you might miss out on some of,
the newfangled features coming to cloud storage providers, especially as it relates to photos. So like facial recognition search or photo editing in the cloud. That said, there is software that you can download or use to manage your files locally, like Apple Photos. So it will save you money in the long run for sure, but it will be more an investment in your time.
That was WSJ personal technology columnist Nicole Nguyen. Do you have any other tricks for reducing the amount of stuff on your phone? If you're a listener on Spotify, leave us a comment with your thoughts. Coming up, it was once one of the 21st century's hottest sectors. Now, it's looking like a market albatross. Find out what's happened to software stocks after the break.
Software companies that make billions from selling their apps to businesses and consumers are in trouble. Over a trillion dollars of trouble. Investors are questioning whether firms like Salesforce and Adobe can withstand competition from AI-powered rivals, leading to a 20% drop in State Street's software ETF this calendar year alone.
Our markets reporter, Jack Pitcher, is here to make sense of it all. So, Jack, when did this downslide in software stocks begin?
This is a trade we've seen going on for a little over a year with some of the biggest software stocks, companies like Salesforce and Adobe. They've been getting hit from concerns about how AI could impact their business long term. But then in 2026, we've really seen an acceleration and a broadening of the number of software companies whose stock prices are getting hit.
It got kicked off with advancements in some of these AI models, especially the ones from Anthropic. People are realizing that these models are getting very good at writing software code, and that's spooked some investors in software companies.
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