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Its crazy my iPhone only has 128gb of storage. Its also crazy storing a file on in the cloud is typically $0.01 per gb/month (for R2 at least, iCloud is even mo
by parhamn 2y ago
Its crazy my iPhone only has 128gb of storage. Its also crazy storing a file on in the cloud is typically $0.01 per gb/month (for R2 at least, iCloud is even more). Someone needs to figure out how to prevent submarket/subproduct price fixing from the major platforms.
- Dylan16807 2y agoYeah, it's $300 to go from 128GB to 512GB builtin storage from Apple, which is probably about the same price as these 4TB cards will be.
- cptskippy 2y agoIn their defense, they soldered the flash to the main board so you can't upgrade it at all. So you're basically a captive audience to be exploited.
- idle_zealot 2y agoThat's... in their defense?
- keanebean86 2y agoThey could 3d stack it with the SoC so if the flash dies (from all that SoC heat) you have to replace all the chips. Or buy a whole new phone.
- lowkey 2y agoWhat's really crazy is that your iPhone, well every iPhone, every Pixel - basically every high-end smartphone made by any tier 1 manufacturer - doesn't offer even the option of a built-in microSD card reader. My conspiracy hat is tingling, but in this case it isn't setting off explicit collusion vibes, but instead - we can't overcharge for extra storage or cloud storage if the customer can just drop in a new card whenever they need one. More like a conspiracy to maximize profit by not offering what customers really want /end-rant
- beoberha 2y agoI think that is definitely a part of the thinking. But also SD cards are not known for their reliability. I’m sure there is a conscious decision to prevent the poor user experience of having their phone’s SD card crap out on them.
- cam_l 2y agoMy experience with having SD cards on all of my devices over the last 10+ years, is that provided I limit writes, they are very reliable. Hell I used a 256gb card on a very poorly provisioned surface pro as my main storage for a few years (f u m s, why do you need 40 or 50gb just for the os on a 64gb machine). As with anything, there are always lots of 'reasons', that are not the reason.
- userbinator 2y agoprovided I limit writes, they are very reliable Not surprising, as flash has a limited number of write cycles, and the FTL for SD cards probably optimises for unexpected power loss instead of low write amplification or performance --- they have almost no cache RAM, after all.
- lowkey 2y agoIt is all about use case. SD cards are a bad idea for a swap heavy primary storage solution but a great solution for storing large amounts of data that you write rarely but read often - like a music, video or other media collection. Something tells me the reason they don’t appear on regular phones is similar to the reason Apple started soldering RAM onto motherboards, and many other PC makers followed. i.e. the reason they tell you is the reason isn’t the real reason.
- metadat 2y agoI also find this irritating, and it makes sense it's challenging to have the a storage card slot be properly water resistant.
- gjsman-1000 2y agoReminder that your phone’s SSD blows the pants off this microSD in reliability, speed, and thermal tolerance. That’s not cheap or directly comparable.
- beoberha 2y agoCorrect. There’s a reason they don’t just solder an SD card inside the phone
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- geor9e 2y agoAndroid does manage SD Cards as storage expansion very well though. The OS is only ~4GB and will run off the fast UFS, primarily because it would crash if you were able to disconnect it, but it will pop up and offer to move app data, photos, and videos to the SD card at various points to help manage space. I love smartphones with SD card slots.
- Dylan16807 2y agoIf I'm vastly increasing the storage I should be able to get the same speed even with cheaper flash. The controller is a big factor but I already paid for the good controller in my phone. If a microSD is QLC we can knock off 25% of the capacity to pretend the phone version is TLC. And we can reserve an extra 10% for reliability. That still leaves a vast gulf in capability per dollar. Am I wrong to expect the combination of those factors to give me good reliability and speed? For temperature, a $110 1.5TB Sandisk Ultra card promises to operate up to 85°C. A phone should be well under that limit. Also real SSDs are a similar price to SD cards. I don't think there's any real justification for phone storage prices other than lack of competition that lets them get away with it.
- userbinator 2y agoeMMC is not really comparable to a standard PC SSD; in fact it's very close in protocol to SD.
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- talldayo 2y ago> Someone needs to figure out how to prevent submarket/subproduct price fixing from the major platforms. Bring the Digital Service Act worldwide. Make it illegal for Apple to design cloud storage APIs for themselves and not people that want to self-host or use a competing service. This isn't an absurd ask, it's a reprisal of control over computers we own. Otherwise you will own nothing and be happy.
- imtringued 2y agoWhat I don't get is that hardware has gotten so cheap that even a $5 dollar server instance should get you 50GB and 2GB RAM. Sure, CPU cores are expensive and you end up sharing them with other people, but RAM and storage? I recently upgraded to a 2TB NVMe SSD for a hundred dollars, which is two years worth of cloud fees, but all you get is 10 GB.
- supertrope 2y agoCPU cycles can be more easily over-committed than RAM. CPU load is bursty. Memory usage is much more constant. Cloud typically bundles very high reliability using multiples of the nominal capacity in enterprise SSDs. If the entry-level product gave you much more it would cannibalize higher priced products.
- cesarb 2y ago> Its crazy my iPhone only has 128gb of storage. It's crazy to me that the word "only" can be applied to 128 gigabytes of storage. It's over a thousand times more storage than what I had on my first computer, and the whole phone is physically smaller than just the storage of that computer. To use a more modern comparison: 128 gigabytes is around 200 standard-sized CDs, which would be a pile of disks nearly a quarter of a meter high. I don't even want to calculate how tall the corresponding pile of floppy disks would be.
- userbinator 2y ago...and it's crazy that flash storage only costs around $0.10/GB now.
- slau 2y ago> I don't even want to calculate how tall the corresponding pile of floppy disks would be. I do! Assuming 3.5” floppies with 1.44MB capacity, and ignoring the split container overhead. 128GiB / 1.41MiB = 92960 92960 * 3.3mm = 307m That’s just 7GiB away from being as tall as the Eiffel Tower!
- cosmotic 2y agoAlso consider the size of apps have dramatically increased, as have the size of photos and videos. Maybe it would be better to measure how 'crazy' something is by looking at how many normal users are hitting 'disk full' status after normal use.
- AbstractH24 2y agoI still don’t understand why all but a relatively small subset of people need that much storage on their cell phone rather than in the cloud. Not saying use cases don’t exist. Just seem to be edge cases in the grand scheme of things.
- Lammy 2y agoIf you build it, they will come.
- junon 2y agoSimple: I don't want my whole life on the cloud.
- AbstractH24 2y agoI'd put you in in the small subset
- The_Colonel 2y agoSome people have poor / expensive cellular internet. Some people watch pirated movies. Some people watch have curated FLAC music. Some people are too poor / cheap to afford cloud services. (children are a huge demographic without a lot of money) Some people play a lot of games which adds up. Some people take a lot of videos in 4K. Many people are some combination of the points above.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- votepaunchy 2y ago> Its also crazy storing a file on in the cloud is typically $0.01 per gb/month (for R2 at least, iCloud is even more). iCloud is $10 for 2 TB per month, which is $0.005 per GB/month, though it’s a bucket rather than pay-per-byte.