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Who uses SD card anyway? I mean seriously pretty much everything is cloud hosted now days, so 64-128GB is not enough?
by Thaxll 10y ago
Who uses SD card anyway? I mean seriously pretty much everything is cloud hosted now days, so 64-128GB is not enough?
- Zikes 10y agoThe Pixel is 32 & 128, and +$100 for the 128GB option. A MicroSD card does not cost $100, and offers far more space.
- Thaxll 10y agoWhat do you need the space for?
- mgkimsal 10y agopictures? music? not everyone wants to pay hundreds of dollars to host stuff someplace else, wait for it to sync, run the risk of being lost/destroyed, and paying even more if/when data caps are broken (or paying even more for 'unlimited' data).
- dspillett 10y agoPhotos, videos, maps, and other data, all accessible while not online as in some places being reliably online with a fast enough link is expensive or completely impossible. You could carry a laptop to archive the data off to I suppose, but that makes the arrangement a lot less conveniently portable if you didn't already have to cart that with you for other reasons.
- AdmiralAsshat 10y agoI have over 1 TB of music, and on my current HTC One M9, I keep a 128GB SD card in it, onto which I've thrown about 90 gigs of my most listened to music. It's still not quite enough for everything I'd like to have in there, but I just bought a 200 GB card that was on sale yesterday, so that should help. Photos would be another reason. Particularly since Google has been ranting about how high quality their camera is.
- blisterpeanuts 10y agoI'd love to have my 60-70 gigs of music on board my phone and available at all times, not just when I have good cell coverage or wifi. Also, when I visit Canada, data is suddenly super expensive. What's more, I'd like to have all my GPS maps available offline. It's very difficult situation when I've traveled to some out of the way place where I have no reception, and can't load any maps to navigate me home.
- x0x0 10y agoKeep in mind that the OS eats, IIRC, 10g-ish of that supposed 32. And you'd better keep another couple g free for OTA updates. So you're now down to more like 20g of useable space. On a phone that shoots hd video. Me personally: a 4g spotify cache so I don't burn through data, cached maps, lots of pics and video, and I'm constantly dealing with out of space warnings.
- post_break 10y agoMicroSD card is also extremely slow compared to phone memory. I would have paid $100 to get my Samsung phone with 128gb if they offered it vs the 128gb sd card I have.
- blisterpeanuts 10y agoAren't modern type 10 MicroSD cards plenty fast enough to serve up video? How much faster do they need to be, and what applications would require it? I thought RAM (typically 2 or 4 gigs these days on most phones) is where the fast computation takes place, whereas the non volatile memory merely emulates disk storage.
- post_break 10y agoThey are worlds slower than phone memory. It's like usb stick vs Sata 3 SSD.
- pjmlp 10y agoAlmost everyone that I know that isn't comfortable putting private data available for the world to see when there are security exploits. Also, not all of us live in areas where the Internet is available 100% of the time at cheap connection rates.
- jimktrains2 10y ago> I mean seriously pretty much everything is cloud hosted now days You're really OK with cloud hosting? Why? Do you have a quota? I do. 2GB a month. > 64-128GB is not enough No? Not really? Not when some apps think it's OK to be 10s to 100s of MB in size? Not when I care around detailed off-line maps of a majority of the US. Not when I care around a a good portion of wikipedia offline. Not when I use my phone as an impromptu camera. Not when I want to carry around a large variety of music so that I can listen to what when I'm in the mood. I mean 128GB is getting there, but it would be nice to be able to expand that, or start with a budget phone and expand it. Or, be able to swap cards if I'm on a long trip with various documents on one or the other.
- justin66 10y agoI can compress my music collection down to mp3 and get almost all of it onto a 128GB SD card. It's nice to have.
- 1024core 10y agoMP3 works out to about 1MB/minute. That's 128,000 minutes of music, or about 2133 hours, or 133 days if you listen to music 16 hours/day, every day. Are you sure you want that much music to lug around?
- justin66 10y agoIt doesn't weigh any more. The point is that it's nice having the full selection available, and to not have to worry about streaming and compression quality, which I don't always have control over. Deciding which music should or shouldn't be on the phone is a task I'd like to minimize, as well.
- e12e 10y agoI have some 50 cds in lossy ogg atm, but just because I haven't gotten around to break out my backup hds and get the rest on there. There are few things more annoying than audio stuttering and stopping due to intermitted wifi/4g coverage - having the option of a 128gb sd card (presumably one that I can double in a few months if needed) is great. Sure, when you have access to good wifi, with a good back-end connection, "the cloud" is nice. But try living a week without wifi, with spotty 4g, and all that old resentment to having the only copy of your data somewhere you can't easily get at it comes flooding back. Not to mention if you go somewhere without 4g, but still want some music in the evenings.
- jasonkostempski 10y agoCan't tell if you being sarcastic. If not: A) Charging an extra $100 for a little extra local storage is the biggest scam in technology right now, some are worse than others, but anything less than a TB for $100 is infuriating. B) 64-128GB is not nearly enough for the ridiculous resolution the cameras work at, especially video. C) Not everyone wants their stuff in the cloud.
- mcphage 10y ago> but anything less than a TB for $100 is infuriating. 1 TB SSD cards cost ~$300, and at that price I don't think they'd even fit in a smartphone. So if you get infuriated that you don't get 1 TB for your $100, you really need to work on your expectations & anger level.
- victorhooi 10y agoNearly all manufacturers are moving away from removable storage in phones. For the majority of users, it complicates things, and can lead to nasty edge cases if they don't understand it. Note that iPhones have never offered removable storage. Also, SD cards can often be of dubious quality. Even good quality ones would never be as good as the NVMe (or similar) SSDs now used in high-end phones. Put it this way - for your laptop, would you rather a NVMe SSD, or a MicroSD card you bought from Amazon? One is going to have much more predictable write performance under varying conditions, and you know will last. The other, well...I know what I'm trusting my data to.
- shostack 10y agoThere's definitely a contingent (perhaps even larger so outside the US) where SD storage is important. The question is whether that group is large enough to create sufficient demand for a removable storage phone beyond the desire of these companies to drive adoption and lock in with their respective cloud services.
- robocat 10y agoI used to agree. Less keen after losing all photos due to an SD card failure (SD card was a reputable brand from a reputable supplier).
- detaro 10y agoUntil I get unlimited LTE traffic for free/very cheap, available all over the world, having my data cloud hosted is a lot more expensive and annoying than having it locally. Even if I shell out for a plan with a lot of included data, I still can't rely on actually having useable reception.
- fragmede 10y agoGoogle and Apple both charge $100 for an upgrade from 32 to 128 GB of storage, but a 128 GB microSD card is only $40, and prices will only go down on that with time. Five years from now, a $20 microSD card is likely to far exceed 256 GB, but smartphones with no microSD card slot are doomed to be stuck at their original size. If you've fully bought into the consumer mindset and always have to have the latest and greatest, great, but some people are still on iPhone 4s'. The cloud (around harddrive island) is great and all, but for those times when you're out of internet range, the local mp3 collection you can actually listen to is far superior, and some people have amassed sizable collections over the years.
- kitsunesoba 10y agoI don't know if it's true for the Pixel phone as well, but the iPhone has been using flash storage that's more like an SSD than traditional flash since the iPhone 6S and the iPad Pro 9.7" - they even use a miniaturized MacBook NVMe controller - and it's a great deal faster than an SD card. Most 128GB consumer SSDs sit at the ~$90 price range, which makes the upgrade price make a little more sense. Of course the speed boost vs. an SD card might not matter to you but that's another subject.
- ianburrell 10y agoPixel uses UFS storage which is significantly faster than the flash storage in most phones. The Samsung S7 also has UFS. But not as fast the NVMe interface in recent iPhones.
- tinus_hn 10y agoThe whole point of the different sizes is to have differentiation. It allows Apple to have a cheaper and a more expensive model. That way they have a reasonably affordable model for customers that are more price sensitive and an expensive model for people who don't really care. These prices are not really related to flash memory prices. You pay more to have a phone that you can enjoy more.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- newscracker 10y agoDepending on the country, SD cards may be used to share media, like photos, music, videos, etc., and to also copy media from others and play them on one's phone. Yes, it's very slow, but many people who use them don't know and don't care as much about the speed. SD cards are also not very reliable, but again, many people who use them don't consider that to be critically important.