A2-class microSD cards offer no better performance for the Raspberry Pi

Perhaps you have never dropped your phone, but in my experience, on a dropped phone the battery cover and the battery often go flying.

Phone batteries die, and the battery remaining percentages are only an estimate so writing code to react to that condition can be fickle.

With A2, so far I have not seen any way any consumer (or anyone, really) could achieve 2000/4000 IOPS.

That would be like selling a SATA 2400 drive for 2x the cost of an SATA 600 drive... but not selling any kind of controller that could use more than SATA 600 bandwidth.

FWIW I have several Pis running 24x7 and have not had a single SD card failure. I usually buy high end cards but I also buy cheap cards (4GB cards)and a few Micro-Center house brand, for which I don't know the quality.

I've had one that has been running years, I think. Drives a monitor, looping a video where my wife works.

The only SD card failure I have experiences was in a camera.

Early iterations of the RPi boards apparently had some bad design choices in the power circuitry, which makes the problem worse.

I have three RPis in abusive conditions, and they haven't had a single SD card issue. Two RPi 3b's running as a car entertainment system, with no form of battery backup/safe shutdown. They are on the ignition power, and once the car turns off, they hard shut down. These have been in place for nearly 2 years with the same Samsung Evo 16GB cards.

The other is attached to a digital signage with less frequent hard shut downs, but still has at least one per week, and been in place since late 2017. Also running a Samsung Evo card (I think it's a 32GB since that's what I had on hand).

Both have high quality power supplies, which may help. The in-car systems have Anker car USB chargers that have been de-cased and soldered in place, while the signage one has an Anker wall charger and a standard micro-b cable.

(Or actually even supported, IIRC)

I have not had any problems when using a reliable power supply. I'm guessing the 'endurance' or 'industrial' cards some people claim are lifesavers are just doing something to guard against flaky power input when doing reads and writes, so it masks the issue.

Fun engineering decisions: It can use RAM from the hosting computer to store its logical block mapping tables so it doesn’t have to have DRAM onboard for that. That’s a clever way to use what the host has in abundance to avoid putting it on the price and volume constrained microSD card.

Now… how you are going to get the heat out of it when it is running at 1GB/sec. I wonder if we will see new microSD sockets with integrated heat sinks.

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/2/25/18239558/m...

just because the overall package is large doesn't mean the embedded designers are allocated a large portion of that.

and the upstream suppliers are always going to be pushing to be a bit smaller, so they can fit into more things, and get more sales.

What you'll actually get is determined by factors entirely out of their control. Whether that's an install engineer using a reel of Cat5e because that's what was in the truck even though the work order said crappy Category 3 phone cable would do, or even the neighbours are all using the most expensive package and that causes electrical interference that reduces everybody's bandwidth.

You can measure your actual characteristics, and the ISP will offer to do a half decent estimate of that, that's useful to at least decide which service to buy but the average is essentially worthless.

If the UK had deployed fit-for-purpose tech like Fibre-To-The-Home (FTTH), there would be much less need for the UK's advertising regulations. (Obviously speeds are never guaranteed on residential connections, but advertised fibre speeds are a much more accurate predictor of internet experience than DSL or cable.)

"But", you might say, "that BT page is advertising 'Superfast Fibre'!". Well, yes, in the UK it is legal for telcos to lie to their customers. When they say fibre, they mean Fibre-To-The-Cabinet - and VDSL the rest of the way. Would anyone call their 3G mobile service "Superfast Fibre" because the tower is fibre-fed? No. For whatever reason, though, this is totally okay in the UK.