Why has Micro SD seemingly disappeared?

I just don't buy they remove things to sell other things (mainly talking 3.5mm jack). I'm sure they're aware they will lose some device sales for some people that want the jack and are we sure BT headphones are hugely more profitable than corded ones? The user still needs them. Do all phone manufacturers that have done this even sell headphones?

I think it's just progressing through technological advances like we're been doing for years. As said, less ports makes life easier. Yes, they can waterproof a 3.5mm jack but I think it makes life more difficult for them.
 
A USB c to 3.5mm adapter is real.
I don't even see how this is an issue but it's not in my field of interest or knowledge on how good it is at sound reproduction.

SD cards.. hmm. Well again after using them all my digital life, 128gb integrated storage is not even ever going to be filled by me, almost everything is cloud/streaming and 128gb is enough for me if I'm off grid.

I am probably representing 98% of customers.

They cut their costs, upsell, no one cares :p
 
I like having all my media on MicroSD cards. Phone replacement due to age or failure, well just put the card in another phone and there's everything ready to go. With 300gb on a 512gb microsd card, it'd take quite a while to copy the whole lot to the internal storage of a new phone.

As for the removal of 3.5mm... Bah. Bluetooth headphones are just future e-waste waiting to happen. Once the battery starts failing, they'll be dumped. I don't buy the 'it's for waterproofing' at all, after all, they still have the MicroUSB/USB C ports and they're a lot more sensitive. It's for profit. If they can sell a crap set of wireless buds for £100 with them, then ker-ching!

And while I'm in this mood, not suppling chargers anymore. Supplying the phone with a USB A to C cable, fine. Probably don't need a charger with that. Most people buying a new phone will have something with an USB A port on it so it can be charged. But new phones with only a C-C cable? Chuck a basic C charger in the box. Doesn't have to be a super fast charger, but a 10w charger would be fine. Still, won't be long until they start to drop the USB C port entirely and just have wireless charging.
 
I think the SD requirement was a big thing back when phone storage was only like 8/16Gb. It was surprising how big the Android OS was. Or how big some apps were (especially how much cache they consumed).

Now most flagship phones start at 256Gb capacity, and the OS hasn't grown that significantly. Also I would guess people are storing less media on phones in favour of streaming them.

I've had my phone coming upto 18 months and barely have done any cleanup and I'm using 97Gb of 128Gb. I bet a good 10Gb is eaten up by cache too.
 
Efour said:
A USB c to 3.5mm adapter is real.
I don't even see how this is an issue but it's not in my field of interest or knowledge on how good it is at sound reproduction.

SD cards.. hmm. Well again after using them all my digital life, 128gb integrated storage is not even ever going to be filled by me, almost everything is cloud/streaming and 128gb is enough for me if I'm off grid.

I am probably representing 98% of customers.

They cut their costs, upsell, no one cares :p
Click to expand...

But then the adapter is an extra thing to have - I keep 3.5mm headphones in a few places so I can just plug them in if needed - sure could try to keep an adapter with each pair but it is a big step backwards really on something where one of the advantages is the sheer simplicity and just working.

Personally I like to not rely on the cloud and have a fair bit of use for the extra capabilities an SD card brings including a handy place to have an extra backup of important files.

Flibster said:
As for the removal of 3.5mm... Bah. Bluetooth headphones are just future e-waste waiting to happen. Once the battery starts failing, they'll be dumped. I don't buy the 'it's for waterproofing' at all, after all, they still have the MicroUSB/USB C ports and they're a lot more sensitive. It's for profit. If they can sell a crap set of wireless buds for £100 with them, then ker-ching!
Click to expand...

You can get 3.5mm sockets which are shorter than the normal ones, partially using the case to secure the plug, and trivial to waterproof so space and waterproofing aren't really good reasons.
 
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I like having and still use a phone with a microsd, as I don't like streaming my media/music (for battery life and quality mainly), and it's a lot easier to be able to move my entire media library quickly from device to device in seconds compared to having to re-copy everything from scratch. Granted I don't do it all that often, but it still saves me the potential hassle.
 
I'm surprised more of you aren't filling up internal storage. For me with a young family, it means many photos and videos at 4k - several GB/month. I also have a few GoPro's which footage gets proceed through the phone - again chews up a lot of storage.

Am I weird that my phone has every photo I've ever taken on it? Since around 2004 which I first got a "smart phone". It's archived in folders yearly/monthly so can be easily and quickly accessed.

So for me I like having a lot of capacity, microSD card is great for this kind of storage, keeps everything together. The whole phone and microSD is periodically backed up to my main PC, kids photos backed up to our Synology cloud.

What is the alternative? I like Synology but it's slow compared to microSD, especially when out and about.

Maybe I just need/want way more storage than the "normal" person.
 
not all of us have families or familes that areyou so not snapping all the memories :/

to be honest i dont really see the usb-c port going. it will still be there if for no other reason than to flash the phone from factory, it just might be hidden inside more likely. change case and diy it back.
you can see omn some of the tear downs were the 3.5mm jack was planned to be on some phones, maybe from a board design re-use or new design were the feture was dropped part way through the process.

wireless charging isnt perfect, slow and inefficant and not every phone currently supports it either so the swap isnt any time soon i feel.

i can see the microSD stoage going in next 10 years as flash memory goes down and gets bigger, with cloud storage & Sync options being readerly available. like others have said but its maybe 5-10years away.
Az_GTi said:
Am I weird that my phone has every photo I've ever taken on it? Since around 2004 which I first got a "smart phone". It's archived in folders yearly/monthly so can be easily and quickly accessed.
Click to expand...
No, just more organised than the rest of us :D
:cry:
 
Emo_hug said:
just more organised than the rest of us :D
Click to expand...

Well, tbf Google Photos does that organising a lot better, so I don't know why I would do it manually like that tbh. Search is so good, either by person or by description, you can find things so quickly. (Or scroll to the date if you want) I can do that from any device I'm on, PC, tablet, phone... to me it's just a much better way to do it.
 
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