Intuitively you shouldn't even need to ask this question though. There are a billion and a half iPhone users out there. Numbers at this scale can be tricky to c

Intuitively you shouldn't even need to ask this question though. There are a billion and a half iPhone users out there. Numbers at this scale can be tricky to comprehend, but the takeaway should be that even if just 10% of users want the option (an extremely conservative estimate), that's still 150 million people with a need. That's more people than there are HN viewers (not just users) there are per day, several times over, so this is absolutely not a need only floated by "HN nerds." Hell, even 1% of the iPhone userbase vastly outnumbers HN by every metric. There is obviously demand, and I mean popular, non-nerd demand. Ask your friends or parents if they would like more space on their iPhone or if they have ever had to delete an app to make space for another or if they have ever been reluctant to install an app because it was too big. A very common one I see especially with older folks is that they take too many pictures and agonize over deleting some to get more space, and yes, they could use iCloud, but they're very old and hardly understand software, much less as a subscription service. Much easier for their grandkid to pop in a 2 TB micro SD and call it a day (not to mention several times cheaper, but let's get to that next!). This is not up for debate, demand absolutely exists at a massive scale. You are right however that "manufacturers [specifically Apple] aren't going to be feeling much pressure" to change their design because right now they are absolutely gouging the general public and making hundreds of millions of dollars off of it. An iPhone 16 Pro 128 GB is $1000, and a TB is $1500. They are selling less than a terabyte of space for five hundred dollars, over five times the cost of a gold standard 1 TB micro SD which costs under $100. If you opt for iCloud you pay almost a thousand dollars a year, well over 10x as much as a micro SD. Of course there is no pressure to divert from their current model: They're getting away with highway robbery. Scale that to the 150 million or so people with a valid need for storage (again, this is an extremely conservative estimate) and you have numbers in the billions. They will ABSOLUTELY ignore a valid need and never fix the problem of not offering a reasonable storage method if their insane storage method results in so much money.