These changes come slowly. How long, for instance, did it take before lots of 64gb micro sd cards were around?
Flash memory has been following Moore's law, so it took about 18 months to go from 32G cards to 64GB cards. That means in another year and a half, people will consider 32GB small for a flagship phone and the upper end models will have 128GB. In three years 64GB will be the low end and 256GB will be the high end. Of course there are people who consider 32 to be the minimum for a flagship phone now, so you can double those numbers if you believe them. Media file sizes have not been following Moore's Law. There's little chance a movie that comes out in three years will be four times the size of a movie that just came out. Media storage size changes slowly, computing storage changes quickly. My media library has only marginally increased over that time. In fact the storage internal to my phone is 32 times larger than it was in 2010 (if you go back one more phone it's 800 times bigger) but my media library is, at most 30% larger . I'm saying that storage capacity in phones is catching up to media file size. PC's went from having hard drives barely capable of holding one CD to easily holding entire libraries of CD's. Now they're holding entire libraries of movies. The desire to hold an entire library of movies on a PC isn't what pushed the advancement of how much space was available on a PC. It's just something someone found they could do with all of the extra storage because storage got so cheap.
These phones are very small. They aren't coming out with 2tb drives any time foreseeable.
But the number of transistors you can fit in one doubles every year and a half, and that's assuming no improvements in PCB manufacturing. That means we'll have 2TB drives in phones in 7.5 years. That's assuming cloud storage doesn't slow down the demand for internal storage, which may happen as well.
SD cards will always have the utility I spoke of for backups, for quick changes, outlasting phones, and so on. That's not going away.
So does cloud storage. You don't have to worry about breaking or losing your cloud, either and it's backed up automatically. Those are all advantages removable storage does not have.
They are far more convenient than internal storage for media storage.
I don't agree with that. If that were the case then MP3 players would use removable storage and they don't. The whole point of consolidating devices is that you don't need removable storage. There's no advantage to taking it out becasue there's nothing else to put it in to.
If something makes sense, and it does, I think, there will be demand for it. "The future" also does not change the pattern I discussed of software makers and consumers always finding ways to use more space if they have more space.
But they use the space they have after it's available, they don't push hard for more space once it's there. They weren't making big arrays of 20 meg hard drives in their homes to try to store their CD's. They just found someting to do with the extra Gigs of space because that's what came with their computer.
That's how the computing field has gone for a long time. It's the rule, not the exception, and If they come out with a cost effective 128gb phone in 2 years, that doesn't mean, as I said, that an extra sd card slot will be irrelevant. People will find uses for it. They always do.
But they'll only find uses if it's there. They may not demand it.
That was the purpose my analogy to my old 20 meg computer. If you want another such analogy, I remember when it was an amazing thing to buy a card you had to install that would give you an extra 80 megs. Wow. Who could foresee a use for more than that? I actually remember people saying that. If people have 20 gigs, someone will find ways to use it. If they have 200 gigs, people will find ways to use that. (Hmmmm...HD, 3d videos anyone?)
I.e, no matter how cheap or big internal storage gets, there will always be people who can find uses for more, for both convenience and space.
Again, that's the user finding uses for extra space they're given, not users demanding more and more space. The use of the space is following the technology, not pushing it. You also have to consider the trend of cloud/streaming media becoming more popular. As that grows, the number of people who need any media storage is shrinking. There's nothing that's pushing people's media libraries to get exponentially larger. There are only things that are pushing them to get smaller. I already have several TB of movies on my phone. It's called Netflix. Not everyone will use those services, but it's another thing reducing the need for external/expandable storage.
It's going to be a long time, if ever, before the logic and convenience of SD cards are completely superseded. They have too many advantages at low cost.
The only advantage most see is the low cost. You keep ignoring the huge disadvantages the manufacturers see. If people are only using a feature becasue it's there and not becasue they're demanding it, then it will get dropped, especially if it's as big of a pain to implement as an external SD slot. As the demand for external storage is lowered by rising amounts of internal storage it will get to a point where it's not worth including in a design. Considering that one of the biggest debates in the Android world right now is whether or not you should get the HTC One or Galaxy S4 (there's a similar debate between the Droid DNA and Galaxy S3 on Verizon), it appears as if we're already half way there.
The trend has already started. It used to be that pretty much every Android device had a micro SD slot. It wasn't a flagship phone if it didn't have one. Now more and more, top of the line phones are being designed without them. That trend will continue as internal memory get cheaper, it won't reverse.
Long story short(er), you're making a lot of arguments for why we will get more storage in the future, but no real solid arguments for why that storage needs to be removable. The size of removable storage that's widely used has been eclipsed by internal storage since the introduction of the hard drive. The only reason removable storage is used in phones is because internal storage was so low compared to the size of media files and that's getting to not be a problem anymore. No one was swapping out 20Meg hard drives when that's all that was available. Zip type drives never really caught on. USB thumb drives are tiny compared to hard drives. People want storage, they don't need removable storage for a portable device. You're already carrying it with you, what's the advantage of being able to turn it into two things you're carrying with you that will make it worth the hardware, software and customer service headaches the manufacturer's see?
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