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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

>Samsung should get the memory card slot back.

They still have models with SD card slots, but they're never coming back to flagships because:

1. so they can milk you on cloud storage or on the expensive variants with more storage

2. access speed difference of UFS 4.0 vs fast SD cards is huge and unacceptable on a flagship that's supposed to compete with iPhones on speed

3. biggest and most important reason I learned from the horses mouth, people used to put the cheapest junkiest "value" SD cards off Amazon in them, which would be slow and negatively impact UX, and would also spontaneously die, taking the customers photos with them, so then the angry customers would blame the phone for both issues("your damn phone ate my photos/sd-card!"), so they had remove it to ensure UX and reliability across the board

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(3) is interesting, but when you are the phone manufacturer that has to be so easy to mitigate:

- slow = notification with "slow photo write to SD card, use a better SD card for better performance"

- failure = they could offer a built-in app with reliability stats for the SD card currently inserted

At Samsung's size and amount of money to solve these problems, the skeptic in me feels like (3) is a convenient excuse for (1), or to excuse just copying what Apple does.

Your suggestion feels like a lot more work and effort that still leads to terrible UX, slow phones and unhappy customers.

1. Customers being nagged their SD card is slow will hate the phone, not just the SD card they just bought and can't return. How will the users know which cards are fast enough? Most average users are not tach savvy at all and are easily duped by marketing fluff.

2. SD cards can also die out of the blue. Good luck trying to predict when with an app. You might as well just offer them data recovery services while you're at it for when they loose all their photos.

It's easier to just skip SD cards and offer fast and solid UFS storage at a higher cost, that you can vouch for, instead of something that could always be flaky for reasons outside of your control.

Assuming the average user wants to look at apps or believe the phone sure. If not there's no winning here and I can see why making it so the user just can't mess up on choosing storage and doesn't have to be presented all this information/responsibility when they do is still a much better image of the phone's storage quality.

Doesn't mean it's any less aligned with getting to charge more for storage. Just means it can still make plenty of sense as an excuse. Power users have consistently turned out to be a poor target for phone makers.

>>so they can milk you on cloud storage

Samsung doesn't sell cloud storage though, so I'm not sure that's a valid reason. With apple it's obvious, with Samsung I don't see it.

>Samsung doesn't sell cloud storage though

Google, Dropbox and Microsoft do and they all partnered with Samsung at one point or another to ofer promotion or be defaults on their phones.

The assumptions you have to make to arrive at the conclusion that Samsung doesn't put SD card slots in their phones so that people buy cloud storage from Microsoft seem a little excessive.

It is excessive because that's not what I said. It's what you're saying.

Well, what are you implying in your post then?

I'm implying exactly what I just said before.

Google and Microsoft (and Dropbox at one point) are partners of Samsung, so Samsung got paid by them to feature their products preinstalled on their phones and push certain promotions with their phones(free 1TB of cloud storage for one year or something like that).

So it stands to reason that if Samsung were to offer crazy amount of NAND storage out of the box, then then their partners in the cloud business would not be very happy, now would they?

Not that it's the main reason why they're not incentivized to put lot of NAND by default, but these partnerships can't help either.

I'm just explaining putting 2+2 together here guys, as I though the implication was obvious to everyone.

I'm so freaking confused. The person you replied to said this exact same thing, but you called them out on it. And when I pressed you on that point.....you just repeated what they said? Eh?

>I'm so freaking confused.

I already explained my thought process as best I can. I don't know what more to do.

>The person you replied to said this exact same thing

They didn't say the same thing, to my understanding. Maybe language barrier and cultural differences mean there's a confusion here.

Unclad5968 said what you said.

You claim Samsung keeps sd cards off phones because they are motivated to by partners.

Unclad said "it seems excessive to think Samsung is doing keeping sd cards off phones because of partners".

You and they disagree, but he stated your position accurately I believe.

No, I think I was right to disagree. He said Samsung doesn't put larger storage to sell Microsoft cloud storage.

I said that's false because Samsung doesn't put larger storage for mainly other reasons, but if they did put larger storage, then it would be a conflict of interest with their cloud storage partners, so they have an extra incentive to stick to this, but it's not the main one like (I understand) he claimed.

> 3. biggest and most important reason I learned from the horses mouth, people used to put the cheapest junkiest "value" SD cards off Amazon in them, which would be slow and negatively impact UX, and would also spontaneously die, taking the customers photos with them, so then the angry customers would blame the phone for both issues, so they had remove it to ensure UX and reliability across the board

Thanks, that's really interesting and a bit disappointing to be honest. I wonder if optionally "bundling" high quality microSD cards at the time of sale might've helped?

> I wonder if optionally "bundling" high quality microSD cards at the time of sale might've helped?

High quality SD cards have always existed but consumers have been avoiding them because "the other one's much cheaper and I'm no sucker to pay more for the same amount of storage".

Also, Amazon is full of counterfit SD cards. That's why we can't have nice things.

So it's understandable phone makers are trying to avoid these extra hassles causing consumer frustration and support tickets.

1) Samsung actually stopped their cloud drive service. They have a dumb deal with Microsoft now but they're not really upselling you there anymore. The expensive higher-storage variants yes though.

2) Be aware by the way that on the Samsung S23 and S24 base models you are not even getting UFS 4.0! The 128GB model comes with UFS 3.1 only. All the 256GB models and up are 4.0.

3) Nah.. If they cared about performance and UX they wouldn't sell us the Exynos version in the EU. Point 1 - upselling to a higher version is the real reason.

Point 1 being true (upselling for more money), doesn't negate points 2 (potential cloud partners deals) and 3 (SD cards shitify the UX) also being true.

Regarding Exynos, Devil's advocate take: Most customers won't be able to tell the difference between Exynos or not in real world tasks, but they will definitely tell the difference between reading off SD and UFS.

They don't put Exynos in the US because Qualcom owns that modem market there as even Apple still uses them. Maybe if the EU had any alrge domestic competitors left in these spaces(phone modems and mobile phones), the situation would be different, but since we don't, we're at the mercy of US and Asian giants for selling us their consumer hardware.

Wow. It looks like I must upgrade my phone soon. So far I hung up on the missing audio jack, but I didn't realize the SD card is also missing in Galaxy S. WTF, this sucks.

Not sure if you're sarcastic or not, but SD cards have been absent from flagship Androids for about 10 years now. Wait till you find out the batteries are not swappable anymore.

Galaxy S10+ came out in 2019. I believe this was the last flagship to have a microSD card slot.

Interesting. I had a OnePlus 3 since early 2016 and that already dropped the SD card slot for UFS storage way back then so I assumed all flagships did the same.

Galaxy S20 definitely has a microsd-slot. At least some models.

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