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.
My next phone is going to be a clamshell. I barely use mine for anything but phone calls and texts anymore. The only reason I even have a smartphone now is because my school switched away from sms for login security and the app requires Android or iOS.
I want a tricorder, fat and gives me extra powers.
So many useful features lost in service to slim and waterproof theoretically. Replaceable batteries, external storage, 3.5mm jack…
My phone has an underwater photography mode. It also has a micro SD card slot, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The battery is unfortunately sealed, but it’s 10,000mAh so should be able to handle some capacity loss.
It’s perfectly possible to do most of those at once.
My phone is as thin as I’m comfortable with it being, I have grabbed a snorkel and watched movies underwater, and it takes an sdcard.
It also has a headphone jack, but I’m not comfy using that underwater and had to use BT headphones for that.
You didn’t sacrifice for shit. It was stolen from you.
Sony literally has one of the most waterproof phones.
It is IP68 AND IP 65 rated (submersion and jets) which pretty much no other phones have.
Headphone jack and SD card.
It is a complete lie for profit. Just like getting rid of chargers without lowering the price.
It is IP68 AND IP 65 rated (submersion and jets)
What does that mean?
They are two different ratings, 6 to 8 is submersion (changing length of time in water and depth) I think while up to 5 is water jets / splashes (while 9 is fancy hot water jet)
A lot of the newer Chinese phones are rated for IP68, IP68, and IP69!
hi, sorry, which phone?
They’re referring to the Xperia line from Sony. They’re water resistant while offering headphone jacks and micro SD slots.
They can get expensive pretty quickly though, depending on the model.
Water RESISTANT.
Which one is that? If it’s not bloated up with crapware it sounds like one on a future considerations list.
Their Xperia line all have microSD + jack + good front speakers (so no cutout/notch). Their software is generally clean (nothing like the Samsung, Xiaomi, etc. with loads of bloat), and many of their devices support LineageOS (like the Xperia 1 series up to V and the Xperia 10 VII)
Negative. It was all bullshit to upscale with phones. Remove an sd slot that takes up virtually no space and then charge an extra $300 for a phone with more space when the storage chip in the phone costs $20. Same for the headphone jack. Now people are buying branded earbuds every few years for hundreds of dollars. phone storage sizes haven’t increased for the past like 8 years because they want you forced into paying for cloud storage.
I have a phone right now from China with a headphone jack, cooling fan, and 1 tb storage, and it was less than a thousand bucks. It’s waterproof and plenty slim with a 7500mah battery.
All the shitty things about Samsung and apple… all the things they removed were all so they could turn around and sell you more. It has nothing to do with size constraints or waterproofing.
worst part about the SD card thing is just how incredibly useful it is, with other features i can understand that most people don’t think they’re worth the tradeoffs, but having a single fucking SD card slot not only immediately lets you have A TERABYTE of storage if you so wish but also lets you fill the card with photos or whatever and then switch to another one!!!
like if SD cards could only give you 32 gigs extra storage i could understand not bothering with them, but you can fucking quintuple your god damn storage with them, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Two huge reasons. They want to charge you an extra $400 for phone storage that costs them $30 in hardware, Then also, if you have all the storage you need on your phone, you won’t feel like you have to pay for all that cloud storage every single month, essentially forever.
Exactly, it was a lie to begin with.
We need to hold companies and people accountable.
what phone do you have with a cooling fan?
Nubia Red Magic 11pro.
Android $1000. 1TB hard drive, 7500mah battery, 24GB of the fastest ram in any phone, best processor\apu of any android, built in cooling fan, and (mainly a gimmick, but looks cool) liquid cooling for the battery, invisible front camera, ir blaster to control TVs, headphone jack, and two touch buttons on top for gaming.Phone is really awesome.
Bad parts are a locked bootloader, only 2 or 3 years of updates, and the only carrier that it works well with is t mobile, due to missing frequency bands other carriers use, and the cameras aren’t as good as any flagship phones from the last several years.
These are all lies made by tech companies to spend less on engineering and production costs while selling products at the same (or higher) price.
Yep I had a waterproof android 2.3 phone that had a removable battery, microSD slot, headphone jack, and FM radio all included. There were seals around the battery door-flap and rubber plugs for the USB and headphone jacks to keep water out. Another phone I had had all those features minus the FM radio, but it had an IR blaster to control TVs and shit. Smartphones used to be more serious multi-tools, and now they’re just fancy computer tablets with cameras.
I miss phones being real tools.
I had an HTC phone many years ago, with a headphone jack. The official instructions, for cleaning the screen, were to run it under the tap and give it a wipe lol.
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
When the trucklefuck have our need ever mattered?
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
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.
Micro sd cards aren’t all that cheap right now either .
But those cards can carry you between phones.
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 we all have a dozen laying around the house we can use.
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 I have dozens of them just lying around from playing with Raspberry Pis.
the market did not care about jacks, removeable batteries, sd cards, and everyone just bought the new shiny thing. it is your fault, not the manufacturers.
What market. Nobody asked them to remove features.
They all pretty much unilaterraly axed these features around the same time so your “choice” in the high-end segment went from having these things to not having these things at all in the entire segment within the timespan of like a year.
So your choice back then was to take the hit or buy a mid-range phone that still packed those features. But it’s not like these things are the only thing that matter. Phones are complex devices. Buying lower end you forego other stuff like memory(speed) processing power, camera quality, build quality, screen quality, software support period, etc.
These things didn’t stop because there’s no market for them. These things stopped because they can make more money selling you repairs, their own storage variations and bluetooth gear.
What are you talking about? People screamed about every one of those things, but they got rid of them anyway. Nobody cares what the consumer wants.
The only objective is to make the McGuffin profitable. Functionality, consumer satisfaction, reliability, repairability, flexibility, etc. aren’t relevant. The rubes will buy what we offer them, or they get nothing.
totally agree. however…
consumers don’t care. they just want to be angry and will just buy the next bullshit filled with empty promises.
I haven’t bought a new laptop since 2013. I just keep buying parts to repair the one I have.
my phone can be disassembled and repaired. the battery can be replaced.
my car is also from 2013.
I refuse to buy new products because they are designed to fail, and designed to invade my privacy.
fuck capitalism.
Like that’s ever going to happen.
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.
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.
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.
256 GB SD card already costs like a new phone.
…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
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.
I think the article is referring to devices like phones which mostly are not sold with microSD slots anymore.
Nah, you can buy them just fine. But everything needs to be lightspeed transfer rates all the time.
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.
