[Larrikin]

The silliest part of this is that Google phones specifically do not have removable storage so you're forced to use a cloud service, most likely Google's, for extra storage. Before the removal of the headphone jack this was one of my main reasons for avoiding the Nexus/Pixel line.

[gempir]

Do you really need a SD card when your phone has 64 or 128gb? That's so much space for stuff

[Larrikin]

There was once a time when the iPod was still a thing where I could carry around my entire music collection that was larger than that. Now that space needs to be shared with pictures, bloated apps, and video. 128gb is not much space at all if you actually try to use it and don't want to waste your time playing inventory manager.

[rakoo]

I have 64 GB with the internal storage + the SD card and I constantly have "no space left on device" popups. It's surprising how fast you can fill that with the music and the photos and videos.

[Jonnax]

Well the phone manufacturers are the ones advertising things like 4k video recording.

[aaomidi]

Are we blaming phone manufacturers for putting new technologies in phones now?

Also to be honest at least on android phones you can use various solutions, like plugging into your pc. On iPhone you’re essentially stuck with iCloud or iTunes.

[csydas]

No, the above comment is specifically referring to the idea that 64 GB or 128 GB is enough when a heavily advertised and useful function of modern phones is 4k video, which uses a lot of space, making 64 GB/128 GB last not nearly as long. It's not blaming them for anything, just stating that internal only memory when modern features easily use more space than is included may not be sufficient.

> at least on android phones you can use various solutions, like plugging into your pc. On iPhone you’re essentially stuck with iCloud or iTunes.

I know what you're hinting at (taking a stab at iTunes), but this is still the same thing. You plug the phone into a computer and offload the data, with the difference being the required software.

[thisacctforreal]

There's also a wonderful open-source command-line suite for intefacing with iOS devices: http://www.libimobiledevice.org

The idevicebackup2 command lets you do encrypted backups and restores.

The ifuse command lets you mount the iPhone as a fuse fs, which is super super handy because the photo folder names are APPLE100,APPLE101,etc and don't change, unlike the folder names that get generated when you plug in the iPhone normally :)

Really great software, made backing up my stuff a breeze.

[aembleton]

Maybe not with 128GB of internal storage, but I carry around 60GB of music on my microSD card as well as many other file types.

[Veratyr]

It might seem like that now but if you're travelling and don't have internet access or you live in an area with poor cell reception, storage starts to look extra important.

Plus, it might be a lot now but how about in 5-10 years? Sure most people will have upgraded their phones in that time but it'd be nice not to have to.

[andybak]

A handful of games, a few video recordings and a reasonable chunk of music so you don't continually have to curate your own listening - and bam - it's gone.

I want my SD card slot (I also want removable batteries again but apparently I'm not allowed those either. Thank god for fast charging)

[drdaeman]

> do not have removable storage so you're forced to use a cloud service

Photos are probably non-issue. There are many options - I basically feel that almost every single app that has anything to do with sync or storage offers to upload photos. That is, including many self-hosted options or cloud storage that promises client-side encryption with keys not known to the service.

What I haven't found is alternative backup transport. There is Google's default one (com.google.android.backup) that sends everything to Google Drive (no encryption!), local debug transport (com.android.internal.backup) that just dumps data locally and... as far as I know, nothing else.

[icebraining]

You can also use an OTG flash drive (or a regular flash drive with an OTG cable).