Though to be devil's advocate, my current phone has 256gb of storage and I think that only got full when I loaded up a load of content for a long flight. My next phone (ordered already) is gonna be 512gb.
I say all this because I was missing the SD card for years, but finally I'm in a situation where I don't feel like I'm missing it anymore now phones actually come with a reasonable amount of storage.
Still would be nice to have the option. They could even force it to be an A1 minimum card if their reasoning about people using shitty SD cards and trashing performance has any real weight.
It's not just about expanded storage on the device though. I want to be able to read SD cards from other devices (like my dashcam) on my phone. And no, I'm not going to get a USB adapter because I fucking lose those things all the time and cannot find them when I need them
Those don't fit the use case. I want to be able to take the SD card from assorted devices (cameras, dashcams, etc) and pop them in my phone when I want to review or send things.
Taking pictures and video, keeping such things, requires expandable storage the better the cameras get.
I'm not bitching at you, playing devil's advocate is awesome. I'm countering that advocacy in the same spirit (and, I hope, not in a seemingly a dickish way, it certainly wasn't intended that way).
Phones has stopped being just phones, and the people making them want us to treat them like a more portable device akin to a laptop, where we use it for everything (mainly so they can figure out a way to profit from that use). Can't do that if we can't store what we need on them lol.
To be fair I'd forgotten about the local music use case, I've been streaming music for so long.
Pictures and video, in my opinion, are too valuable to not be backed up, so IMO people shouldn't be shooting enough to fill half a terabyte before moving them elsewhere.
But very good point about it being people's main device more and more—I guess it says something about my assumptions that I just assumed everyone has a bigger main device to offload content off to
I don't know if it's a problem anymore, but there's something in wasting write cycles on a disposable SD card instead of unchangeable drive and also dedicate SD for demanding processes like recording a 4k video while the system drive is free for other processes. Does it make sense today?