iPhone and external storage

I have iPhone and many people asking me why iPhone doesn’t have ability to insert SD card to extend storage. And I decided to explain it here. But before I would like to put disclaimer: I’m not Apple fun. I use only iPhones from their products. For Steve Jobs is good manager and not an icon and so on.  

From technical side it is totally not a problem. Apple can do it without any problem and it is not expensive. But why they didn’t do it then? Well I have to admit what Apple does differently is to look at product not as list of features but as whole experience. And from that experience external SD card doesn’t look good. Let me explain why.

You need to know that iPhone and SD cards use flash memory. Flash memory can be slow, can be fast, can be fast for read and slow for write. So, imaging you bought phone and slow SD card and use your phone. Then few month later you realized that phone is almost full and switch storage for photos to SD card. Before switching to SD card, you will take photo and phone instantly will write it to internal memory and will be ready for new photo. Now you will experience few seconds delay because your SD card is slow. Will 90% of people remember that they switch to SD card? The answer is no. Whom they will blame? You are right, they will blame Apple because their $1000 phone became slow and unresponsive. Now imaging you are trying to record 4K video at 60 fps. Sure, Apple can write software to test SD cards but again manufacturers will try to cheat these tests and fool phone that speed is much faster than it really is. And developing software cost a lot of money. Or they can do certification. More about that later.

Next, flash memory wears. It means that it has limited number of writes per flash block. After that memory switches to read only mode but some flash drives stop respond at all or even corrupt themselves. Again, whom will you blame when you lost 10-20Gb of photos? You are right again, they will blame Apple. And most people do not backup until they lost valuable data. Can Apple do something about it? Probably they can do certification but again a lot of people will say that greedy Apple trying to keep small manufacturers out of market.

Next, SD card can be removed at any time, so file structure should be always consistent at any time. This will prevent delay writing decreasing performance even more. Your phone cannot put important stuff on that SD card because it can be removed at any time. Also end user can copy any file to that SD drive, remove and change any file. So, iOS should be prepared for this. Again, software development cost money.

SD card takes space inside your phone case. It is not much space, but it is space. So, there will be less space for battery for example or your phone will be little bit bigger and heavier. Also, SD card socket contains moving parts, some springs etc. So, with time it will stop working if you take open and close it many times.

Because it is SD card anybody can put pirated content there. So, there are copyright issues. In early days Apple were trying to convince major recording companies to go with iTunes and absence of SD card helped a lot. Sure, you can ago around this, but it takes time and it is much easier to just buy it. And this factor still plays some role even now.

SD card need another hole in case and these days most of the phones are water resistant. Sure, you can do SD card slot to be water resistant, but it will cost more money.

So instead of all these issues and certification that anyway will increase cost of SD card by 10-30% Apple decided that it is better just to use internal flash only. Yes, it is created a lot of pain especially early when difference between 16GB and 32 GB was huge, but I personally think that in long run it was right decision. It removed whole class of problems related to SD cards and whole experience was much better. And even someone say bought 16GB phone and ran out of space that person could blame only own greediness and not Apple. Moreover, when there will be time for next model that person will buy model with more memory, perhaps with maximum available to remove that chance and thus increase profit for Apple.

But maybe while Apple remove whole class of problem but at the same time, they perhaps missed a lot of opportunities? Let’s see how it was done on their competitors on Androids.

At the beginning you can use SD card only as storage for photos, videos or other files like books. So, if your phone’s storage is full then only thing you can do is to move that stuff to SD card. If you have no such files on your phone, then you cannot use your phone even if you have a lot of free space on SD card. Trust me it is really annoying experience. In next versions they allow apps to store something on SD card. Again, even now only some apps support it. Most apps even from Google does not support it. Again, a lot of free space on SD card and your phone is useless. Next step they allow to treat SD card as system memory, but many manufacturers disabled that feature because if your SD card died then your have to reset your phone because your system memory would be corrupted. As you can see there were not many lost opportunities here.

And as we all can see many other phone manufacturers removed SD slot from their phones. Specially now when cloud storage is so cheap and safe.