This is a technical audience. This article is about people not upgrading phones. There are many technical and professional people that have chosen not to upgrade phones because of the lack of these features.
Clearly, that group isn't the main reason for the decline (it's not even mentioned as a trend in the article,) but it really shouldn't be surprising that there are people on this site who still take these things into consideration when upgrading.
Oh yeah, moved on to what? What has replaced those things and rendered them obsolete?
On-board storage sure didn't, that's small and not portable, and we already had that. Bluetooth headphones didn't, those require special hardware, have to be charged (battery), have higher latency, reduced sound quality (lower fidelity), packet loss, and spyware built in, and DRM capable. Not even close to a replacement for analog headphone jack.
The storage on the device is portable when the device is portable. There are very few instances where I'd find an SD card acceptably portable but a phone not so.
Phones these days come in hundreds of gigs of storage. My current phone was a decently cheap one and had 128GB of storage, easily >100GB of usable space. On Android one can easily mount the storage as a USB drive and transfer data at high speeds. And given its a nearly permanently network device its pretty trivial to have it sync storage someplace else, including your own self-hosted infrastructure. I don't need to have my complete music library on my device everywhere I go, I just cache the playlists I'm in to at the moment and stream when I have network (which is the majority of the time). Same goes with consuming video content or listening to podcasts or whatever. Why save it locally when it can trivially be streamed? Why keep your entire photo and personal movie collection on your portable device which can get lost and broken when you can just connect back home and access even more storage with higher reliability anytime, anywhere?
Between on-board storage ballooning in size and network infrastructure making it pretty easy to access things over the net, for me and many others having SD cards is entirely obsolete.
I don't understand what you mean about "spyware built in" for Bluetooth headphones. All my Bluetooth devices do not have any other kinds of network connectivity, they don't phone home or anything like that. There's no app or anything like that needed for them.
There's also no "DRM" for Bluetooth, the output of the Bluetooth audio doesn't have some kind of macrovision or something preventing you from recording it or anything like that. I've got Bluetooth receivers which output to S/PDIF and analog RCA connectors, its not protected or anything like that.
> On Android one can easily mount the storage as a USB drive and transfer data at high speeds.
One can? I thought one actually can't, because a) the internal storage is using a file system Windows PCs and Macs don't understand and b) you can't simultaneously mount the internal storage on both your phone and your computer because that would only lead to data corruption. And unmounting the internal storage while the phone is running isn't possible either, because that's were all your apps and settings and whatnot are stored.
Hence for a very long time now you can only access your phone via MTP, which can be annoyingly fickle and less stable.
Conversely, an external SD card that only gets used as additional storage space for documents, music, pictures, etc., actually can be unmounted and at least in principle be switched into true mass storage mode (although in practice this might require root, and I don't know how well this still works on current phone models that still feature SD card slots).
You're using an extremely narrow definition of "mount" here, as in natively mounting the filesystem. Accessing your phone via MTP is still a form of "mounting" the storage over USB. Different than how one would mount an SD card, sure, but its still "mounting" the storage.
I've had no problems over several years using my Android device as essentially a large external storage device to move files around. For the purpose of copying photos, videos, documents, other files, side loading apps, etc. it works well.
And one can go the other way and take an external drive and plug it in to most Android devices these days to copy data off of it without having to use it with a Windows/Mac/Linux device. So from the perspective of someone who went on a vacation in the woods and is shooting hundreds of gigs of videos it is possible to plug in external storage and copy off to it directly. One could even use a USB SD card reader and write it to SD cards. Or MMC cards. Or floppy disks if you're so inclined.
> I've had no problems over several years using my Android device as essentially a large external storage device to move files around. For the purpose of copying photos, videos, documents, other files, side loading apps, etc. it works well.
Yeah it works, but I'd still say that "well" only applies with some caveats. MTP only works with full computers, not other devices that only expect some dumb USB storage (like the book scanner at my local state library), for a long time there was a bug whereby Android didn't preserve the last modified date when copying files via MTP (and I'm still not absolutely sure it's been fixed in current Android versions – I guess I'm going to find out once I finally upgrade my phone), sometimes it didn't show changes I made on my phone if the media scanner hadn't got around to indexing them yet, normal software on my computer other than the file explorer couldn't directly access files, listing of directories was slow, if you tried to do too much at once (like continuing to browse the storage while some large file transfer was underway) you'd get the dreaded "device is busy" error… it's better than nothing and it's not completely unusable, but there's a reason why I immediately looked for better solutions
> Why save it locally when it can trivially be streamed?
If you usually have a network connection, then most of the time streaming is fine. However, not everybody does. About 50% of the time I'm not home, I have little to no service, and even sometimes when I have a strong signal, it will randomly just stop working unless I toggle airplane mode off and on to reforce a handshake with the tower. If we all lived in a big city then sure we could probably make that assumption, but some people live in Wyoming. With local storage I can download high quality FLACs from Bandcamp and get higher quality without having to even think about whether I'll have service. Offline playback of music is a feature the original iPod had!
> Why keep your entire photo and personal movie collection on your portable device which can get lost and broken when you can just connect back home and access even more storage with higher reliability anytime, anywhere?
I would guess most people have more than 100GB in personal photos and videos, so even for the average use case this seems wrong, but especially for people that record much 4K video, you'll run out of space very quickly. Those files can easily get multiple GB in size. If you're on a vacation where you have little or no network connection, you'll have to downgrade your video quality or limit what you record. How is that better? If there were an SD card slot, this is a non-issue because you can bring as many SD cards as you need, and swap them out as they fill up. Can you do that with onboard storage? Then it's not a replacement/obsolescence, it's just a feature removal.
> I don't understand what you mean about "spyware built in" for Bluetooth headphones. All my Bluetooth devices do not have any other kinds of network connectivity, they don't phone home or anything like that. There's no app or anything like that needed for them.
That's great, I'm really happy for you. But some bluetooth headphones do have spyware (especially some of the best ones in some people's opinions). If it requires you to use a special app to pair and/or access features, then it (probably) has spyware in it. Bose is a great example (or at least was, maybe things have changed). With a physical head phone jack, there's no pairing required and there's no way to force you to use their software. That's a hell of a feature IMHO.
That you don't personally have a use case for a headphone jack, doesn't mean it's obsolete. There isn't a replacement for a physical headphone jack, only alternatives with different pros and cons. If that were the criteria, then the M3 macbook would be considered obsolete because I don't personally have a use for it.
> If it requires you to use a special app to pair and/or access features, then it (probably) has spyware in it.
There's an extreme minority of Bluetooth audio devices which have apps. And even in those extreme outliers, the app is optional. The headphones still pair to Bluetooth devices without issues, or else it is not using Bluetooth. I've used >50 different bluetooth audio devices over the years, 0 ever needed some kind of app to pair. Suggesting Bluetooth has some baked-in spyware is absolutely untrue; There's no baked-in spyware to the Bluetooth audio stack. The Bluetooth audio stack has no built-in way to enforce the app.
It really shows your extreme biases though stating such wild untruths like Bluetooth has baked-in spyware and DRM.
> Suggesting Bluetooth has some baked-in spyware is absolutely untrue; There's no baked-in spyware to the Bluetooth audio stack. The Bluetooth audio stack has no built-in way to enforce the app.
I never said that. If you actually read what I wrote, you'll see that I specifically mentioned that some do that, and that they require an app to pair or access special features. That is the opposite of saying the spyware is baked into the Bluetooth audio stack. Not to mention, there isn't just one stack, there are numerous different implementations. Either you're arguing in bad faith or you don't understand the technology and how an app could introduce spyware, or both. If you want to actually have a productive conversation, you need to stop the straw manning[1] and pearl clutching[2] and address the arguments (of which there several more that you're conveniently ignoring).
And the attempt at accusation in a mirror[3] of "extreme bias" further demonstrates bad faith on your part. I think it's best to just go our separate ways on this one.
> Bluetooth headphones didn't, those require special hardware, have to be charged (battery), have higher latency, reduced sound quality (lower fidelity), packet loss, and spyware built in, and DRM capable.
Here you're not stating that some extreme minority (read: probably <0.001%) have an entirely optional app which might possibly have spyware. You're stating Bluetooth headphones have spyware built in. Where's the limitation that its only some of them? Sure, later you walk back your extreme position, but you make yourself known off the bat in your original comment.
Thinking that Bluetooth headphones, as an overall concept, has spyware baked in isn't grounded in reality. The only way I can imagine you pushing that idea, which you 100% did in your original post, is an extreme aversion to it. Which its funny you then accuse me of not knowing how Bluetooth audio works, when you're the one arguing spyware is inherently baked into it. Which please, point to me any standard Bluetooth Audio spec (A2DP, LE Audio, etc) which has spyware baked in like you originally claimed.
Please, show me one pair of headphones which represent themselves as Bluetooth headphones but will not pair without an app installed. That somehow use the Bluetooth protocol to enforce DRM and enforce spyware. Or else get otta here with claims like "Bluetooth has spyware built in". Maybe its not me that doesn't understand the technology.
Ah, but I'm the one arguing in bad faith and doesn't understand technology. Not the one who makes non-factual statements like "Bluetooth has spyware built in" and later argues they didn't say it.[0] Its not straw manning to address something you literally did write. Its not pearl clutching to point out when someone says something untrue like "Bluetooth has spyware built in".
