Android

No SD card, no 3.5mm connector, no purchase

If there is no expandable storage, you have to buy the 2x expensive phone with more internal storage. That's the game they are playing.

Forcing you on to "The Cloud" (i.e. other peoples disk space) so your data can be rummaged through. I don't like it.

Sounds like the EU needs to mandate user expandable storage next.

Put it alongside the USB-C and replaceable battery rules.

I'm still pissed about the this and morons over on Reddit actually defended it saying "NoBoDy UsEs SD CaRdS. UsE tHe cLoUd"

Yeah ok buddy, like I want to pay infinite dollars for a $50 SD card? What about shit I don't want on somebody else's computer? What about if I'm in an area with low coverage? What if I want root my device and have an emergency firmware to recover from?

Eventually the smarter people showed up, but fuck the onslaught of idiots that tried saying cloud storage was better than SD. The future is fucked if the current generation is this brain-dead.

I agree not having micro SD cards is pretty frustrating. The way I have worked around it is to "self-host" the things that take up lots of storage space on a separate PC, and connect to that with my phone when I want to access it.

For example, instead of loading a bunch of movies onto my phone, all my movies/tv are on my plex server. When I want to watch something I just open the Plex app and go. The videos don't take up any space on my phone (unless i will be out of service, then I can download them via the app for offline viewing).

I do the same thing for music, pictures, and other things. A benefit of this is all my stuff is accessible from all my devices (phone, tablet/pc/laptop/tv) without me having to manually load it on each device.

It takes work to get setup, and it's important to make sure you have good data backup practices incase you have drives that fail. But once you have it setup it's quite liberating not having to rely on all the BS cloud services that big tech tries to sell us.

While I would still prefer to have a micro sd card slot, this setup makes me miss them less.

Cool. More phones I won't buy.

Just get a Motorola phone, the stylus 5g has a micro SD and headphones jack for $250 on sale. I got one after I broke my last Samsung phone, and I was pleasantly surprised coming from S and Z series phones.

I agree that the future is bleak. I also agree that it makes life more difficult for those of us who don't conform to this "I own nothing and pay a subscription for everything" lifestyle that people seem to be blindly moving in the direction of. I don't pay for Spotify or any other streaming service (not that they even have all the music I listen to, I always hate it when people justify their existence with the "iT hAs EvErYtHiNG" line), I have my own music collection that I've curated over decades which is entirely offline. It won't fit on a smartphone unless I pay a ridiculous amount of money for a model with tons of storage or convert my entire library to inferior quality. Ultimately it's not a deal breaker feature for me so I do use a modern phone without external storage. I am fortunate that I own an MP3 player and multiple older phones with microSD support, including an XZ1 Compact which is what I currently use for portable music instead. It would be more convenient if I could just have everything on a single device like I used to, though.

I haven't felt the need for one in years, probably ever. My current 128gb phone is less than half full.

Most of my music is streamed on Spotify, and my personal library is available on Jellyfin. I could make a local copy if I really needed to, but I don't really need to. I have one or two Spotify playlists that I regularly listen to and those are cached.

I don't watch movies on my phone, the screen is too small. Again, Jellyfin, on my laptop, desktop, or TV.

I do take a bunch of pictures, and I use Google Photos, but even if I didn't, I'd offload them periodically instead of letting them fill up my phone.

Stuff like backups or large file transfers I do over USB anyway.

Nintendo Switch 2 just got it’s 1tb MicroSD Express (1gbps write / 3 gbps read) card announced so I see a bright future for MicroSD technology.

Not having microSD isn't a trend I like, since expandable storage with less reliance on cloud services and not being upcharged to move up a tier on internal storage is ideal. It is sad to see it is mostly dead over the years.

But, one good thing I do look forward to is the EU requiring user-replaceable batteries by 2027 that will hopefully make replacing batteries much easier than it is now. I miss the days when batteries could be popped out and swapped on the spot.

Unfortunately us techies on niche platforms like Lemmy aren't who these manufacturers make their money from. People buy whatever shit is put out in droves, and they haven't been punished for removing things like the SD card slot and headphone jack.

Cling onto your old phone for as long as you can, because we are screwed in that department.

I use syncthing to a second drive on my pc in case my phone gets lost or stolen. It just syncs when I connect to wifi. This sucks for people who take or store a lot of videos.

I might be an outlier on this one, but what was SD cards good for? Hear me out :-) It was good because you had a phone with 32GB storage (11.3GB free!). It also was good for swapping photos and films and such in/out of the phone.

I have a meager 128GB Storage space on my old phone, if I had to buy a new one (I buy used when I can) I'd opt for 512GB just to not nedding to care any more. I also have a ten dollar 64GB USB-A/USB-C key that I use to transfer stuff to and from the phone. I'm too lazy to set up a shared folder on my PC and maybe that's a bit technical for some people but that could make things even more smooth.

So what's your use case that absolutely needs an SD card nowadays?

Side note: they can try to pry the 3.5 jack from my dead hands though.

I need a slot but my phone doesnt have one. I keep having to offload videos to my computer extremely slowly via bluetooth. Slots matter. You WILL run out of space if you use your phone for more than calling texting and web browsing. Heck cant install giant games either unless i delete the others.

For the foreseeable future, Sony is holding on to both the microSD card slot and the 3.5mm headphone jack.

Its beyond bleak – dead.

Samsung A series were the last hope. Now, that they are dead – and stuck on 256gb. Your only options are portable SSD/micosdcard with type C support, buying a phone with 512gb/1TB storage.

Honestly, the A56 makes literally no sense. You could just get the S24fe since it lost the one defining feature which would've made it worth Samsung's asking price.

I haven't really thought about extra storage in awhile, when most phones are 256GB or more it's hard to fill up that much space. At most I keep my music (maybe 30GB or so), some offline shows when traveling, photos, etc.. I'm barely at 60GB of usage on mine.

All I ever remember with SD cards in phones was how slow they are, how often they would randomly break and corrupt the data somehow, and how annoying it was to get stuff to properly work with content on an SD card.

My pixel also does not have it. I don't like it. The only slot is usc c.

I like SD slots for all kinds of reasons, never had a single one die on me... As for subscription based stuff, even/especially apps, etc, they're just a money drain and, let's face it, a lot are not worth what they demand and are plain exploitative...