And there's good reason for the OS not being on a microSD card. Run a Raspberry Pi without locking the storage and see how fast it'll corrupt itself. Most SD cards have pretty miserable reliability compared to the storage on-board. Imagine if you had to re-image your device every few weeks after your storage device corrupted itself again. Not really a great experience.
There's unfortunately slightly different issue here: if the phone vendor puts the OS on an user-replaceable SD card, then the UX quality and reliability of the device depends on the SD card vendor, which is a bad position to be in, given how much fraud is happening in this space.
Today, Apple/Google could design a phone with (a) a user-replacable battery & (b) no flash, only RAM + removable SD storage + long-life EEPROM.
Boot loader, SD validator, and minimal image retrieval goes in EEPROM. Storage contents continually backed up, encrypted, to cloud with delta updates. Customer prompted to replace SD card and device reimagined whenever there's an issue.
Apple/Google sell cloud storage subscriptions.
Aka the cockroach phone.
That they aren't even interested in that model is because they're in a Faustian bargain with cellular carriers to drive device renewals and post-paid plans.
And integrated batteries and flash memory happen to be a convenient "Oh well, we can't possibly design it any other way" excuse.
Compared to 5 years of good on board storage performance, with no little bits to accidentally lose. And a gradually degradation of performance after that.
They could possibly design a phone the way you outlined, but people won't buy it.
There are options; NVMe and CFExpress cards exist. But they're large and create inefficiencies in the phone shell (even M.2 2230, when you take into account the mounting mechanism), and I doubt that people are going to pay that kind of money even when they currently pay it for onboard storage.
An industrial SD card plus a few software changes would largely solve the problem, but I'm not sure it could be done in a backwards-compatible way, some apps might not work if you stopped letting people hammer the disk with crap.
Even with a standard card, phones don't have any issues with FTL firmware level corruption due to power loss, they have a builtin UPS.
But with phone-scale production there's no reason they couldn't define a new SD variant that had SMART diagnostics and guaranteed reliability properties for similar cost to eMMC.
That said, unlike Pixels and OnePlus once the bootloader is unlocked you lose functionality and it's not relockable. It also almost always has some software quirks and I most recently found out that the Xperia 5 I've been eyeing will after 2-3 years of use randomly break and show vertical green or pink lines.
There you have another "well" manufactured phone with external storage that becomes almost unusable faster than the storage degrades without the user being responsible for it.
I realize it's mandatory from a marketing perspective, but how often is it used?
Accidentally jumping in the pool/ocean/lake with your phone. But past that, I'm not often in submerged situations.
It's been a long, long time since I couldn't fit all the apps I wanted on the phone storage. My SD card is mainly for multimedia files, and it's plenty fast for that purpose.
The only performance limit I've hit in recent times was because it was exFAT, not because it was an SD card.
> There are options; NVMe and CFExpress cards exist. But they're large
Ignoring SD Express as a failure to launch, UHS SD cards can be plenty fast if they're designed to be. A hundred megabytes per second is not a significant bottleneck if individual IO operations are fast and it can do many of them.
Also there was that XFMEXPRESS form factor if manufacturers wanted to put an SSD socket into a phone. "card size is 18x14x1.4mm, slightly larger and thicker than a microSD card. It mounts into a latching socket that increases the footprint up to 22.2x17.75x2.2mm."
> and I doubt that people are going to pay that kind of money even when they currently pay it for onboard storage.
That's the real killer incentive, that you can charge huge amounts per terabyte and also force people to buy higher-end phones just to get the ability to buy more storage.
As opposed to the user spending $40 for a 512GB sandisk extreme, and giving the phone maker no extra money.
i've yet to be so unfortunate, but i've met a lot of people with a 'I dropped my phone in the toilet so it's in a bag of rice' story.
let's hope they throw that rice out at the end of the process.
I live in an area where's it very humid and rains a lot. My phones get wet, a lot, just due to nature. I had one die after I got caught in a massive squall line at an outdoor concert on what was supposed to be a sunny day.
I like your idea but in the US at least most mobile carriers actually don't encourage yearly upgrades as they force you into a multiyear contract for your phone to get "the best deal". In fact, currently both verizon and AT&T have 30+ month payment plans for phones so you're locked into at least 2.5 years. consequently, most people hold on to their phone for 3 years now.
So yeah I would have needed a new phone tomorrow if it wasn't for my phone being waterproof. This kind of stuff happens all the time. I've lost many things from water damage. So many people used to complain about Apple denying warranty claims from water damage from the device just being in a humid area for a long time, now that just doesn't happen.
Microsd's used to suck(had plenty fail years ago) but it seems like they have gotten pretty good these days.
I never once lost a phone to water damage, despite most of the phones I've owned not being waterproof.
My pocket made of regular fabric seems to be sufficient protection.
You have to remember that a current microsd cards is just a general purpose micro-controller and some (probably SPI) flash in a plastic case.
Screen on the phone died.
I see the point of waterproofing phones after that.
This is the main use case, but it's not to be dismissed considering this is a very common cause of phone failure. If this doubles the lifespan of your phone then it effectively ~halves the cost. Which is a big deal when phones are as expensive as they are.
Also, generally people spend an awful lot of money on things out of vanity and social pressure, regardless of their needs and if it is a good decision. Look at new cars prices and how most vehicles purchases are usually overkill for everyone. The most sold car in the US are the Ford F series , Chevy Silverado and Dodge Ram trucks before a number of high end SUV. Sure people are free to buy whatever they want but a Honda Fit would be enough for large majority of them and be a smarter financial decision[2]. They mostly do it because they can, not because they need.
[1] which has become fairly decent for anyone accross all ranges in the last few years.
[2] I am not sure it is still sold in the US but I could have chosen another example of a smaller and more affordable vehicle.
Low end Android phones just plain suck when it comes to performance and battery life. Not to mention they rarely get operating system updates.
If you did force me to buy an Android phone, it would be the Pixel.
How did they talk on their phone for an hour without realizing their phone was underwater?
As mentioned, random I/O tends to fail, but the other tradeoff here is that fast microSD card slots tend to get extremely hot. Not necessarily "failure" hot (stuff like the ROG had issues from other parts), but uncomfortable to hold, depending on where the thing is going to go.
> As opposed to the user spending $40 for a 512GB sandisk extreme, and giving the phone maker no extra money.
The thing is, price anchoring is a thing, and people are going to look at a phone that costs $400 and needs a $40 Extra Thing and a $500 phone and go "the latter is easier".
nor does she care about operating system updates.
The customer was probably talking on their landline phone for the hour.
Oh definitely. I would too. I dream of the price being only $200/TB.
The biggest storage upgrade for a normal iPhone is +384GB for $300 (Oof). If you upgrade to the Max model you can get +768GB for $400.
A Galaxy S23 can get +128GB for $60, a Galaxy S23+ can get +256GB for $120, and a Galaxy S23 Ultra can get +768GB for $420.
A Pixel 8 can get +128GB for $60, and a Pixel 8 Pro can get +896GB for $400.
If you include the price increase of better base models, to get access to bigger options, then $700/TB is a good ballpark figure.
I think this pricing is a little bit better than when I last looked, but it's still very bad.
The availability of >512GB is growing but still flaky and usually requires extra expensive base models. While in comparison microsd has had cheap 1TB for a good while, and 1.5TB for $150 becomes available later this month.