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.

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.

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. Voting with your wallet isn't a real option.

So what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about all the comforts of modernity being stolen from you as its weight and terror and heat come crashing down? You can't go back. There is no back, not with the planet like this. Not that you survive. What are you gonna do about it?

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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 I have dozens of them just lying around from playing with Raspberry Pis.

Google wants you using their cloud

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.

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 .