The storage crisis doesn’t only affect built-in storage but also external one. The only thing different might be that with a memory card you kinda have the choice of what class of card to get.
…microSD cards went away? Honestly didn’t know that, but at the same time I’m mostly using repaired +8yo tech and doing just fine
I think the article is referring to devices like phones which mostly are not sold with microSD slots anymore.
Low read speeds and saving to cloud has driven consumer’s demand down.
And big Tech’s greed took over, charging multiple times the cost for phones with bigger saving space and removing microSD so you have no option.
You’re a lot more optimistic about the motives than I am.
I’m convinced big tech being able to make more money selling you other storage options instead of allowing you to just expand it yourself with a much cheaper SD card is at least 90 percent of why sd cards stopped being a thing on phones.
Cloud storage will have had some effect on demand but read/write speeds are not a variable if you just store a bunch of music and photo’s on the SD card. Read write speeds to the cloud are also trash compared to internal storage.
Same story with the headphone jack. It’s not that people didn’t use it, there was definately still an audience for it and it’s a part that costs pennies. But axing it boosts the sale of Bluetooth gear.
It’s not a coincidence that Apple and Samsung led the charge here, they sell tons of accessoires.
It’s not that I’m optimistic, it’s just that people didn’t take notice because of the lower demand. Especially when the base phones were at 128GB.
I mean I personally haven’t thought of microSD the past 10 years. Old phone had 64GB and now 128GB.
The only way to get limited is by installing large games or software that microSD maybe suck at compared to internal storage.
Cloud took a portion of used space and made your phone to have more space than before, not that is faster or anything.
Companies just took advantage to skyrocket profits as always.
Many of you will never know the freedom of a micro SD, headphone jack and tool less user-swappable battery. You’d set out for a day’s adventure prepared and just wouldn’t think about your phone at all. You’d use it as a tool as needed, without hesitation. Casually carrying all your music, some movies if trapped somewhere, effectively unlimited stotage space and zero dongles. Bluetooth headphones as default, wired earbuds as backup and you could move from zero to 100% battery in the 23 seconds it took to remove phone back and swap a fresh battery. And technically all things needed as “backup” fit in a pocket or purse.
It was perfect and they broke it to drive cloud storage, bluetooth headphone sales and to increase “anxiety” that your phone is old/failing as you get storage full notifications and the same old battery runs thousands of cycles without simple replacement path and holds charge less and less.
Fuck Apple and Apple devotees.
But but but muh waterproof (that really isn’t).
Yeah but all the apple users and idiot kids told me that nobody uses SD cards, just use the cloud!
Apparently the normies love paying tons of extra money for less space and less privacy and security, not to mention less access to your data should your network drop.
My favorite was “nobody downloads music anymore”
🤣
Lmao whaaaat?! The kids are clearly not okay.
So many useful features lost in service to slim and waterproof theoretically. Replaceable batteries, external storage, 3.5mm jack…
My phone has an underwater photography mode. It also has a micro SD card slot, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The battery is unfortunately sealed, but it’s 10,000mAh so should be able to handle some capacity loss.
It’s perfectly possible to do most of those at once.
These are all lies made by tech companies to spend less on engineering and production costs while selling products at the same (or higher) price.
Yep I had a waterproof android 2.3 phone that had a removable battery, microSD slot, headphone jack, and FM radio all included. There were seals around the battery door-flap and rubber plugs for the USB and headphone jacks to keep water out. Another phone I had had all those features minus the FM radio, but it had an IR blaster to control TVs and shit. Smartphones used to be more serious multi-tools, and now they’re just fancy computer tablets with cameras.
I had an HTC phone many years ago, with a headphone jack. The official instructions, for cleaning the screen, were to run it under the tap and give it a wipe lol.
I miss phones being real tools.
Negative. It was all bullshit to upscale with phones. Remove an sd slot that takes up virtually no space and then charge an extra $300 for a phone with more space when the storage chip in the phone costs $20. Same for the headphone jack. Now people are buying branded earbuds every few years for hundreds of dollars. phone storage sizes haven’t increased for the past like 8 years because they want you forced into paying for cloud storage.
I have a phone right now from China with a headphone jack, cooling fan, and 1 tb storage, and it was less than a thousand bucks. It’s waterproof and plenty slim with a 7500mah battery.
All the shitty things about Samsung and apple… all the things they removed were all so they could turn around and sell you more. It has nothing to do with size constraints or waterproofing.
what phone do you have with a cooling fan?
Nubia Red Magic 11pro.
Android $1000. 1TB hard drive, 7500mah battery, 24GB of the fastest ram in any phone, best processor\apu of any android, built in cooling fan, and (mainly a gimmick, but looks cool) liquid cooling for the battery, invisible front camera, ir blaster to control TVs, headphone jack, and two touch buttons on top for gaming.Phone is really awesome.
Bad parts are a locked bootloader, only 2 or 3 years of updates, and the only carrier that it works well with is t mobile, due to missing frequency bands other carriers use, and the cameras aren’t as good as any flagship phones from the last several years.
Exactly, it was a lie to begin with.
We need to hold companies and people accountable.
Sony literally has one of the most waterproof phones.
It is IP68 AND IP 65 rated (submersion and jets) which pretty much no other phones have.
Headphone jack and SD card.
It is a complete lie for profit. Just like getting rid of chargers without lowering the price.
Exactly this! As someone who owns a Sony Xperia 1 VI, it’s worth pointing out too that Sony managed to achieve this level of waterproof with a tool-less SIM/SD card tray too, which you can simply pull out the card tray with your finger, without having to use a pin. Sony likely chose this design because they wanted to market the Xperia phones to photography enthusiasts (as can be seen in their marketing), so they wanted make it quick and simple to swap the SD card between the phone and a PC for transferring photos, like when you’re using a proper DLSR camera. And they’ve been using this tool-less tray design since the 2nd gen model that came out 6 years ago, it’s a proven reliable design.
So yeah waterproofing a phone really wasn’t as hard as some of those manufecturers tried to suggest.
There are many other companies who made waterproof phones with replaceable battery too with good IP rating.it was never a technology problem.
It is IP68 AND IP 65 rated (submersion and jets)
What does that mean? As far as I understand, IP ratings don’t work like that. It’s either IP65 or it’s IP68. It can’t be both.
They are two different ratings, 6 to 8 is submersion (changing length of time in water and depth) I think while up to 5 is water jets / splashes (while 9 is fancy hot water jet)
A lot of the newer Chinese phones are rated for IP68, IP68, and IP69!
Which one is that? If it’s not bloated up with crapware it sounds like one on a future considerations list.
Their Xperia line all have microSD + jack + good front speakers (so no cutout/notch). Their software is generally clean (nothing like the Samsung, Xiaomi, etc. with loads of bloat), and many of their devices support LineageOS (like the Xperia 1 series up to V and the Xperia 10 VII)
Water RESISTANT.
hi, sorry, which phone?
My phone is as thin as I’m comfortable with it being, I have grabbed a snorkel and watched movies underwater, and it takes an sdcard.
It also has a headphone jack, but I’m not comfy using that underwater and had to use BT headphones for that.
You didn’t sacrifice for shit. It was stolen from you. Voting with your wallet isn’t a real option.
So what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about all the comforts of modernity being stolen from you as its weight and terror and heat come crashing down? You can’t go back. There is no back, not with the planet like this. Not that you survive. What are you gonna do about it?
Losing the microSD card slot has put me off of buying flagship devices.
My 6 year old phone does more than the modern ones.
I want to want a new phone. I just don’t.
Fairphone. No headphone jack, but at least a microSD card slot.
I used to say Sony but fuck them. They still have both though.
Motorola also has both on many models.
No interesting phones. Nowadays the most interesting phones are the ones you can secure and degoogle the most (too bad pixels have no SD card, no headphone jack, and tiny storage)
There are a number of niche brands out there that still cater to us old farts. Check out Ulefone, Oukitel, Unihertz, Doogee, iiif150, etc. Each company has normal models, but they all also dabble in unusual experimental models as well, some that are ultra small, other that have blackberry style keypads, or feature projectors, floodlights, uhf radios, thermal cameras, multiple screens, etc etc.
Most models still retain SD card slots, headphone jacks, some still have IR emitters and other older i/o as well.
They’re all Chinese companies though, funny how all the consumer tech innovation is happening in communist countries.
Theres been a few Chinese models I found appealing, but using a Chinese phone in the States seems like a huge hassle from what I’ve heard
yeah, tmobile (and mvno’s that use their network) is the only US carrier that it’s easily doable on, and you’ve gotta make sure the phone has the 4g/5g bands/antennas that match their network.
An elegant device from a more civilized age.
I’ve since upgraded with a NAS - if something happens to my phone everything is synced to my server anyway, so the only real loss is the hardware. Kind of like folk that subscribe to a cloud service. My phone has 512GB of storage to toy with, so I’m really not missing the microSD cards.
Looks like android authority watched “the infographics show” on YouTube yesterday.
*Edit: video I’m referencing- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEiOV6JL2bg
no idea what that is but expandable (standardized) storage is always a good thing
Here you go. This guy puts out quite a bunch of pretty good vids. He voices his shit so well that people kept thinking it was all AI generated shit, so several months ago he started showing himself speaking at the beginning of all of them to prove he’s a person.
“This guy”? There’s a video a day, so even with extensive AI this is a massive team. Every few days they a single 3 hours video.
BTW, you can clone voices with AI, so who knows what’s the reality.
You must be fun at parties.
Also, they blatantly copied the presentation and style from Kurzgesagt
Micro sd cards aren’t all that cheap right now either .
No, but I have dozens of them just lying around from playing with Raspberry Pis.
You don’t need a new one each time you swap a phone. Many of us have old ones laying around. Plenty enough speed for photos and video.
Still WAY cheaper than phone manufacturer upgrades though.
For example, on the Pixel 10 Pro it’ll cost you $120 to add 256 GB of storage (going from the 256 GB option to 512 GB option), and on the iPhone 17 it’ll cost you $200 for the same jump.
A name-brand Sandisk 256 GB micro SD card costs about 60 bucks right now, or anywhere from half to less than third of the upgrade price. You could buy a 1 TERABYTE Micro SD card from Sandisk for less than Apple charges for 256 GB, and even if the $120 price from Google was your limit, you could still buy 512 GB of additional storage and have money left over.
And of course as someone else already mentioned, you don’t have to get rid of your old storage media when you swap phones if it’s on a portable Micro SD card, so you don’t have to pay more money for storage every single time you get a new phone. Not only is it cheaper on its own, but it’s also a less frequent purchase.
The onboard storage should be faster, which is obviously why it costs more, but I’m with you just give me some bulk cheap bulk storage for videos, photos and stuff
If a modern high speed SD card is good enough for 60fps 4k done footage, or whatever they’re shooting now, it’s probably fast enough for whatever you’re doing on your phone.
But those cards can carry you between phones.
No but we all have a dozen laying around the house we can use.
They shrunk massive storage down to a tiny usable convenient size and then said, okay we’re not going to use it anymore. fuck the cloud
the market did not care about jacks, removeable batteries, sd cards, and everyone just bought the new shiny thing. it is your fault, not the manufacturers.
What are you talking about? People screamed about every one of those things, but they got rid of them anyway. Nobody cares what the consumer wants.
The only objective is to make the McGuffin profitable. Functionality, consumer satisfaction, reliability, repairability, flexibility, etc. aren’t relevant. The rubes will buy what we offer them, or they get nothing.
What market. Nobody asked them to remove features.
They all pretty much unilaterraly axed these features around the same time so your “choice” in the high-end segment went from having these things to not having these things, at all, in the entire segment, within the timespan of like a year.
So your choice back then was to take the hit or buy a mid-range phone that still packed those features. But it’s not like these things are the only thing that matter. Phones are complex devices. Buying lower end you forego other stuff like memory(speed) processing power, camera quality, build quality, screen quality, software support period, etc.
These things didn’t stop because there’s no market for them. These things stopped because they can get away with removing them to make more money selling you repairs, their own storage variations and bluetooth gear.
You don’t get rid of a car because you don’t like the buttons on your dashboard, if the rest of the car is up to your demands. People now having phones without headphone jacks or sd card trays doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have preferred otherwise.
totally agree. however…
consumers don’t care. they just want to be angry and will just buy the next bullshit filled with empty promises.
I haven’t bought a new laptop since 2013. I just keep buying parts to repair the one I have.
my phone can be disassembled and repaired. the battery can be replaced.
my car is also from 2013.
I refuse to buy new products because they are designed to fail, and designed to invade my privacy.
fuck capitalism.
There really is a place for phones having slower, but cheaper and bigger storage. Some photos or your music really do not need that fast speeds.
Google wants you using their cloud
laughs in german 5g coverage
My Spotify offline library takes up more than 128gb alone
256 GB SD card already costs like a new phone.
My next phone is going to be a clamshell. I barely use mine for anything but phone calls and texts anymore. The only reason I even have a smartphone now is because my school switched away from sms for login security and the app requires Android or iOS.
I want a tricorder, fat and gives me extra powers.
