5 ms·

What'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 ev

by lowkey 2y ago

What'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 ago
I 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 ago
  My 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 ago
    provided 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 ago
      It 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 ago
I also find this irritating, and it makes sense it's challenging to have the a storage card slot be properly water resistant.
- cubefox 2y ago
  It's not challenging, phones had them for years. It's just an additional rubber ring. The new HTC phone actually has it again.
  - metadat 2y ago
    Phones you could take for a dunk? Actually, you're right. My old Samsung s10e has a microSD card slot beside the SIM card. It was nicer. What's wrong with manufacturers? How could Apple, Samsung, Motorola, and Google all drop the ball and be so consumer-unfriendly? Between this and eSIMs, it's almost like they want us to be at their mercy.
    - idle_zealot 2y ago
      The market does not optimize for high ideals like consumer-friendliness.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      Apple doesn't want customization or third party parts. Google hated storage space from day 1 with Pixels. Motorola I haven't looked at in a while, they were a mess last time I did. Samsung realized they could remove microSD from their flagships and charge more to anyone that didn't go down a tier. And most of those phones still have SIM slots. Putting microSD inside the same slot as the SIM is a solved problem.
      - nfriedly 2y ago
        I'm on a Moto g100, which is a mid-range phone from a few years back. It has expandable storage and a headphone jack, two day battery life, 8GB RAM, and a good-enough-for-me Snapdragon 870 CPU. They also make it easy to unlock the bootloader, so I've been running LineageOS since shortly after buying it. I intended for this phone to be a stopgap until I got another flagship, but I like it so much that I'v just stick with it for the last couple of years. The only complaints I have are that it's kind of big, and it's not at all waterproof. (Although being able to get a replacement for $1-200 somewhat negates the last issue.) I was on a Pixel before this, and I kept running out of storage and also got screwed by Google locking the bootloader when I sent it in for a repair of a broken USB-C port.
cubefox 2y ago
The Android phone market has intense competition, so there are generally cheap alternative phones with a lot of storage and RAM. Especially from Chinese manufacturers. Overcharging for memory is mostly a problem with Apple.
jwells89 2y ago
Don’t know if Sony counts as a “tier 1” manufacturer, but Xperias still have SD card slots as well as headphone jacks.
sherry-sherry 2y ago
The speeds and reliability suck compared to the built-in SSDs, and users will blame slow speeds on the phone. Some Android device makers would not allow apps to be installed in the microSD to combat this, of course users complained. This card in particular has theoretical speeds of 104 MB/s, the internal SSD on the iPhone 14 Pro SSD is a real-world 1400 MB/s and higher.
- ndriscoll 2y ago
  As long as it has decent IOPS, that should be fine? 100 MB/s is 5x UHD Blu-ray for example. For something like a decent camera, you need more, but I'd expect phones would be fine. Most of the apps I have on my phone are in the 15-30 MB range, so a couple hundred ms if you had to read the whole thing to load. Seems reasonable to blame the app if it's slow. With more space, you could also e.g. keep all of Wikipedia and all of your music on your phone, which will obviously be much faster than web services.
  - The_Colonel 2y ago
    SD card speed is fine for photos, video, music, movies and such, but potentially bad for e. g. apps where you need a lot of random access. You can certainly use SD cards effectively, but you need some knowledge.
- dzhiurgis 2y ago
  iCloud is slower than a SSD card
- anal_reactor 2y ago
  I am convinced that phonemakers deliberately make SD card support in phones suck, and then they say "See? SD cards suck. Now pay up for our expensive storage". I bought a good SD card and on my phone it indeed works like ass. But then I plug it into my PC using a cheap Chinese reader and suddenly same card works much, much better. Sure, when you run a benchmark you'll see "Ah-ha! It cannot handle twenty instances of Postgres running at once" but if you try booting Linux from it and doing normal everyday tasks you'll see that the performance is more than enough.

by lowkey 2y ago

beoberha 2y ago

I 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 ago
My 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 ago
  provided 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 ago
    It 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 ago

I also find this irritating, and it makes sense it's challenging to have the a storage card slot be properly water resistant.

cubefox 2y ago
It's not challenging, phones had them for years. It's just an additional rubber ring. The new HTC phone actually has it again.
- metadat 2y ago
  Phones you could take for a dunk? Actually, you're right. My old Samsung s10e has a microSD card slot beside the SIM card. It was nicer. What's wrong with manufacturers? How could Apple, Samsung, Motorola, and Google all drop the ball and be so consumer-unfriendly? Between this and eSIMs, it's almost like they want us to be at their mercy.
  - idle_zealot 2y ago
    The market does not optimize for high ideals like consumer-friendliness.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    Apple doesn't want customization or third party parts. Google hated storage space from day 1 with Pixels. Motorola I haven't looked at in a while, they were a mess last time I did. Samsung realized they could remove microSD from their flagships and charge more to anyone that didn't go down a tier. And most of those phones still have SIM slots. Putting microSD inside the same slot as the SIM is a solved problem.
    - nfriedly 2y ago
      I'm on a Moto g100, which is a mid-range phone from a few years back. It has expandable storage and a headphone jack, two day battery life, 8GB RAM, and a good-enough-for-me Snapdragon 870 CPU. They also make it easy to unlock the bootloader, so I've been running LineageOS since shortly after buying it. I intended for this phone to be a stopgap until I got another flagship, but I like it so much that I'v just stick with it for the last couple of years. The only complaints I have are that it's kind of big, and it's not at all waterproof. (Although being able to get a replacement for $1-200 somewhat negates the last issue.) I was on a Pixel before this, and I kept running out of storage and also got screwed by Google locking the bootloader when I sent it in for a repair of a broken USB-C port.

cubefox 2y ago

The Android phone market has intense competition, so there are generally cheap alternative phones with a lot of storage and RAM. Especially from Chinese manufacturers. Overcharging for memory is mostly a problem with Apple.

jwells89 2y ago

Don’t know if Sony counts as a “tier 1” manufacturer, but Xperias still have SD card slots as well as headphone jacks.

sherry-sherry 2y ago

The speeds and reliability suck compared to the built-in SSDs, and users will blame slow speeds on the phone. Some Android device makers would not allow apps to be installed in the microSD to combat this, of course users complained. This card in particular has theoretical speeds of 104 MB/s, the internal SSD on the iPhone 14 Pro SSD is a real-world 1400 MB/s and higher.

ndriscoll 2y ago
As long as it has decent IOPS, that should be fine? 100 MB/s is 5x UHD Blu-ray for example. For something like a decent camera, you need more, but I'd expect phones would be fine. Most of the apps I have on my phone are in the 15-30 MB range, so a couple hundred ms if you had to read the whole thing to load. Seems reasonable to blame the app if it's slow. With more space, you could also e.g. keep all of Wikipedia and all of your music on your phone, which will obviously be much faster than web services.
- The_Colonel 2y ago
  SD card speed is fine for photos, video, music, movies and such, but potentially bad for e. g. apps where you need a lot of random access. You can certainly use SD cards effectively, but you need some knowledge.
dzhiurgis 2y ago
iCloud is slower than a SSD card
anal_reactor 2y ago
I am convinced that phonemakers deliberately make SD card support in phones suck, and then they say "See? SD cards suck. Now pay up for our expensive storage". I bought a good SD card and on my phone it indeed works like ass. But then I plug it into my PC using a cheap Chinese reader and suddenly same card works much, much better. Sure, when you run a benchmark you'll see "Ah-ha! It cannot handle twenty instances of Postgres running at once" but if you try booting Linux from it and doing normal everyday tasks you'll see that the performance is more than enough.