Lmao. Last year I bought a 512GB Kingston canvas go plus for like 40 dollars, now it’s 105, shit’s fucked everywhere.
Yeah I have a 1TB card in my steam deck and was looking to do the same for my SW2 and yikes that cost doubled.
Tbh, specifically microSD cards - I don’t miss.
The only time I used one, it failed after like a year and I was lucky I had backups because I couldn’t recover anything. No idea why the hell everything on it became unreadable and nothing on the internet helped.
If you get your phone from a carrier, you’re going to get the kind of phone they want. Android or Apple.
My phone was new last year and runs modern android. It has a headphone jack, SD card slot, and even FM radio. It also has enough battery to last 10 days of moderately heavy use. Niche phones exist if you look outside what’s sold by carriers.
I’m rocking a phone from Sony right now, after a decade with Samsung Galaxy devices. I bought it specifically for the microSD card and for a headphone jack.
See this is my issue with privacy ROMS is that they’re not always built alongside pro-consumer, right to repair friendly hardware. They’re often built for flagship phones, which has its advantages, but leaves the hardware experience locked down.
I really am so excited for functioning Linux phones. I LOVE GrapheneOS, but mobile Linux is being built around those ease of repair and tinkering phones more often .
What phone do you have? I’m still holding onto an old S20 just because of the SD card slot but it’s battery is fading.
A Ulefone Armor 34 pro. It’s a ridiculous 2lb brick with nightvision, a fucking projector, and 25,500mAh of battery.
But there are a LOT of phones that check off a few less of those those boxes. Reasonable phones with only twice as much battery as any Samsung. GSMArena has a filterable search function, just filter for phones that work with the bands your country/carrier uses. No phone is compatible with all countries networks!
yes ffs, I’d just get a 256 Moto Fold and slap a 1TB in there for media
i have an outdoors phone ,older Nokia X20, has 128 but has an SD card with 512 in it.
Like that’s ever going to happen.
When the trucklefuck have our need ever mattered?
Too late, Apple already has complete control in most markets. Not just in terms of market share, but also leadership - everyone else takes their cues from Apple. The larger population is also completely brainwashed at this point and worships Apple no matter how high the prices are jacked or how many features are removed. iPhones are status symbols, particularly among younger generations, and if you don’t have one then you’re seen as cheap or a loser.
microSD still exists for niche brands and the low cost segment of the market, but it’s never coming back for the phones we are talking about here. Everyone gleefully bought into the subscription lifestyle where they have zero control or ownership when it was affordable, and now they’re all crying about enshittification even though they were repeatedly told at the time that this is how it would go. It’s hard not to feel some level of schadenfreude watching these absolute morons struggling with the rising costs associated with their idiotic lifestyle choices.
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.
As much as I miss user-replacable batteries, I’d argue, for your example, a non-device specific power bank (or five) is simply a better, more practical and less wasteful option. Especial if rechargable with standard usb-c and some sort of QI built in. I do miss microSD for a lot of reasons though.
Nah. Even with QI, a power bank is an ongoing concern for proper alignment, even with magsafe. If not, fumbling with wire. The battery cost was so low, you would easily have 2-3 spares (charged prior on an equally cheap battery charger). And again, can’t stress this enough, in the time it takes to unwrap a stick of gum and put it in your mouth, you were at 100℅ and no more thought. And even on the most taxing day ever, you never really used more than a second battery while out.
Does 3 percent or 100 really matter? If it does, I am wrong. Does it have downsides? Sure as shit. Everything does. I’m trying to wheigh upsides and downsides evenly. I agree, I miss some things. But easy of use, comparability, transferability, easability… Nothing is perfect. SDcard, head-phone jack… No fair alternative so far.
Not sure what you mean with the 3 percent or 100 comment? Power matters, especially during travel. Being able to, without concern, simultaneously use GPS, take constant high resolution photo/video, translation, research reviews, grab confirmation numbers, mobile pay and play music if solo turns a stressful new situation into something you can enjoy and stay fully immersed in.
When you do these things, does it matter to you if your battery sits at 3 percent (charging from a power bank) or 100 percent (switched in a new battery). Again, I’m not saying either is perfect but they both have advantages and I’d (personally) take the power bank over powering my device off, switching in a semi-proprietry battery I’m, turning the device on and getting a (presumed) 100 percent right away.
Once you switch device, those proprietary batteries are useless while the power bank travels with you. Again, neither is perfect. I’d like both options available.
On the bright side, I am happy that internet speeds and availability is good enough now that I pretty much never have to worry about storing music on my phone because unless I’m on vacation, streaming will work pretty much anyone I go.
Twenty years ago, this level of internet access was only possible in my dreams. Teenager me would be absolutely ecstatic to find out that in just a couple of decades, I will be able to go online anywhere I want without being tethered to a PC, and my phone bill will actually decrease over time too. I never thought I’d see the day where I could get unlimited talk, text, and 50 whole gigabytes of data for half as much as I’m paying for 300 minutes, 500 texts, and data that is charged by the megabyte in the 2000s. That’s one good thing about the modern era; phone bills have never been lower.
You seem to have a titanic blindspot in the form of a fundamental unawareness about the stability of your indefinite access to the media you can stream. Research some of the modern conversion around owned media. The point is that we didn’t even have to think about it be we weren’t beholden to a company. Expandable storage capacity was already to the point where I had it all with me and I could listen in the middle of nowhere and again, was never even a thought otherwise.
Dress it up however you’d like, it’s lesser in many ways.
Hey, not arguing anything you said; in fact, I agree with all of it.
It’s just that there’s so much negativity in the world that I thought I’d point out the bright side of things.
It’s a nice thought, but in this case that can really read as covering for bad folks doing bad things. The old saying is to plant trees that you will never be able to enjoy the shade of - meaning trying to focus on our positive today “this works great for me now” does nothing for the kids that will come up after us. We focus on, not positive or negative, but on reality for them, today.
And the reality is, the strategy is get us to full cloud, no owned media, and then make access gated to the wealthy, censor/alter content after release and monitor consumption of media for several nefarious reasons.
It’s real and it’s active, speak about it.
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”
🤣
Guess who’s battery is not goin to drain while listening music!
Lmao whaaaat?! The kids are clearly not okay.
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.
…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
Nah, you can buy them just fine. But everything needs to be lightspeed transfer rates all the time.
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.
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.
Bought a pinfor a decent price recently, came with a 256gb sd in it.
Micro sd cards aren’t all that cheap right now either .
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.
No, but I have dozens of them just lying around from playing with Raspberry Pis.
But those cards can carry you between phones.
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.
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
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.
Also, they blatantly copied the presentation and style from Kurzgesagt
You must be fun at parties.
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
