Phone SD Card Slots

Why do they even bother with the SD card?

Why an SD card? The phone itself is already a portable device you control.

Why is that more useful than a removable SD card?

I would avoid using SD cards and go for something else like M.2 or NVMe for storage. SD cards tend to be on the lesser side in terms of performance, failure rate, and silicon quality in general.

Nearly all manufacturers are moving away from removable storage in phones.For the majority of users, it complicates things, and can lead to nasty edge cases if they don't understand it.Note that iPhones have never offered removable storage.Also, SD cards can often be of dubious quality. Even good quality ones would never be as good as the NVMe (or similar) SSDs now used in high-end phones.Put it this way - for your laptop, would you rather a NVMe SSD, or a MicroSD card you bough

Nowadays phones are dropping SD card support because they want everyone to touch the 'cloud'.

It's one of those "limited consumer choices to ensure best experience" things. Using an SD card and it's slower I/O speeds would meaningfully degrade the video and burst capability, blackout free still shooting of the camera, so might as well enforce a higher standard tk ensure a uniform experience.

Newer devices are trending towards heavy internal storage and no SD, so that's more a legacy device issue.

Cameras have SD cards instead of internal storage for a reason - plugging in the whole camera is often cumbersome or in some scenarios not possible.

That’s an irrelevant aside because we are already comparing apples to apples here. The reality is that there are very few phones with SD card slots in them.I’m personally fine with it at this point. It’s not ideal and it’s not consumer friendly, but SD cards are slow and failure prone compared to internal storage, and I find that multiple storage volumes introduces management friction (moving apps and content between two locations).