This is bad news for phone buyers, who are being pushed into expensive cloud subscriptions and losing control of their own files.

• Phone makers quietly dropped SD card slots so they could charge huge markups on built-in storage — Apple pays about $25 for memory it sells for $300.
• The excuses (no room, not waterproof, too slow) don't hold up; the Sony Xperia proved a flagship phone can be waterproof and still take SD cards.
• Better cameras and 8K video fill up phones fast, leaving people no choice but to pay monthly for the cloud.
• Cloud storage becomes a trap: stop paying and your photos and files get locked away or deleted by an algorithm, as one dad found when Google wrongly flagged medical photos of his child.
• Recurring subscriptions are now the real money-maker — Apple's services arm pulled in over $100 billion in 2025, more than Nike and McDonald's combined.

Outlook: Professionals are already abandoning the cloud, and regulators who forced USB-C on Apple could push to bring SD slots back.