[jmomo]

My three year old Nexus One has more storage with it's 32GB SD card plus it's 512MB internal storage.

In fact, I don't think any of the Nexus phone has had more storage than the Nexus One was capable of.

Google is doing evil by "strongly encouraging by use of brute force" users to store their data in the Cloud/NSA, where governments and private parties can then inspect that data and figure out what a good/bad citizen you are and then take action based on your political beliefs, sexual preferences, religious beliefs, and race/gender, as they have repeatedly done in the past and continue to do today.

Fortunately, there are a few phones with still support SD cards (SGS4), but I can imagine Google strong-arming them into discontinuing this support.

[andybak]

I'm afraid you have tipped over into tin-foil hat territory there.

There's a well documented usability argument by a Google engineer against removable storage. If you don't buy that then the next most obvious argument is that Google has direct business benefits for encouraging cloud storage.

But your leap into "they want your data to be readable by the NSA" is just a touch too far for my tastes.