SD cards have long served as one the cheapest and best ways for Android, Windows Phone as well as feature phone users to expand the storage of their devices.
Lately however it seems SD cards in the future would slowly be eradicated from the top end smartphones and would end up becoming a feature limited to low end handsets.
The reasons for believing the same are as follows.
1. SD cards disappearing from high end smartphones -
There are five major reasons for this to happen -
1.a Higher ASP (Average selling price) -
Its a general practice for smartphone manufacturers around the globe to place different price points of a smartphone model on the basis of its internal memory. The general norm is to increase the price by $100 for every higher stage of memory capacity.
Apple exploited this with the launch of the iPhone 6. iPhones as many people reading this post would know have never supported SD cards. The case with iPhone 6 was no different. Below the unlocked prices of iPhone 6 are mentioned -
1.16GB model - $650
2.64GB model - $750
3.128GB model - $850
Apple has removed the 32GB option and rather started its base model with 16GB. For most people 16GB is very low to suffice their needs. A few high end games would easily fill up the measly 16GB of storage in no time. Hence most users would opt for the pricier 64GB model or the 128GB model. This in turn leads to a higher ASP for Apple. Let me explain how -
Imagine 100 consumers enter a market planning to pick an iPhone 6. Now since iPhone 6 does not support memory cards, 70 consumers would opt for the 64GB model. 20 consumers would opt for the 16GB model and 10 consumers would opt for the 128GB model.
In such a scenario the ASP would work out to be -
[(70x750)+(20x650)+(10x850)]/100=$740
Now for a brief moment imagine iPhones all of a sudden allowed memory cards. In such a scenario, 50 people would opt for the 16GB model and buy a memory card. 40 people would buy the 64GB model and 10 people would opt for the 128GB model.
In such a scenario the ASP would work out to be
[(50x650)+(40x750)+(10x850)]=$710
Notice that the ASP has dropped by $30 which when employed over a scale of millions of shipments achieved by Apple could end up in hundreds of millions of profit for a particular quarter.
Android manufacturers such as Samusng are also using the same tactic. With the launch of Galaxy S6, Samsung for the first time dropped support for SD cards although this would help in improving profitability, the major reason why Samsung dropped SD card support was because of the shift to unibody design and new materials.
On the contrary, there are manufacturers like HTC which rely on SD cards to actually reduce costs. For example, with the launch of HTC One M9, HTC just released a single model of M9 with 32GB internal memory and users who needed more storage could buy a SD card and expand it accordingly.
The problem with HTC is that sales have fallen for their flagship smartphones and by creating a single model, HTC is able to mitigate the risk of unsold stock. For example if the 64GB model ends up being more popular, the 128GB model will sell less and vice versa. In case of HTC, the company mass manufactures the 32GB model on a wide scale so that there is effectively only one SKU for a particular model and accordingly lesser risk of unsold stock.
However both Samsung and Apple dominate the high end smartphone market by a huge margin and the fact that they don't support SD cards could very well make this the trend for high end smartphones. Samsung and Apple don't support SD cards in iPhone 6 and Samsung Galaxy S6 and both phones have sold very well for the respective companies. This again goes on to show that the lack of SD cards isn't something that can drastically affect the sales of smartphones.
The fact that Apple and Samsung are able to achieve good sales of models that don't support SD cards coupled with the benefit of higher ASPs could entice almost all Android manufacturers to drop support for SD cards. In fact even LG and HTC at the launch of LG G2 and HTC One M7 did not support SD cards.
1.b. Impact on performance -
SD cards themselves come in varying qualities often denoted by a class number, which ranges from 4 to 10. The higher the number the better the I/O, Read/Write speeds of the SD card. But often times there is a huge difference between the price of a class 4 SD card and a class 10 SD card offering the same storage. For example a 32 GB class 4 SD card costs $15.48 whereas the same for class 10 costs $28.34
Now the major reason why people choose SD cards instead of higher storage models is to save money. Its thereby no wonder that the same people while choosing SD cards also opt for the lower class (lower price) models which ultimately deliver low performance.
As Tech radar wrote in its article on MicroSD cards -
"According to a study carried out by Hyojun Kim at the Georgia Institute of technology, using a microSD card in your phone can cause it to become sluggish, with even basic tasks like web browsing suffering as a result. Overall performance can often drop by between 100% and 300% and in one case the study found that there was an incredible 2000% decrease in performance.
Even at the lower end that's a massive loss in performance and is an unacceptable trade off for some extra storage, particularly on higher end handsets where you're paying hundreds of pounds extra for a boost in specs.
The reason for the performance loss is simple, microSD cards themselves aren't fast enough. They can't keep up with the power and speed packed into modern smartphones. Though some are better at this than others and the brand and class of card you choose will have a big impact. "
Smartphones are highly interconnected machines. A slow down in any one part can drag down the entire experience and disappoint the end user. When a user spends $600+ on a smartphone he expects the best of performance and if that's not achieved, the user gets a very bad image of the brand.
By eradicating SD cards and using high quality NAND (internal memory) the manufacturer can eliminate false belief of their product being a low quality product.
1.c. Move to cloud -
Most market where high end smartphones are sold are increasingly favouring the cloud to store and access their data. People in developed markets prefer streaming music from Spotify rather than downloading it, the same users prefer streaming videos over Netflix or Youtube rather than downloading them. People prefer syncing their videos and photos with iCloud and Google Drive rather than storing them on their smartphone forever.
This leaves the internal storage of a smartphone with only one function which is to store apps. Most apps on Android can't be loaded on SD cards without special permissions (root) and if essential apps are loaded on SD cards of low quality, the user experience will only degrade even further.
The sales of high end smartphones occur mostly in developed countries where most people have access to high speed broadband often touching the Gbps mark such as Google Fiber, even in case of wireless networks developed countries have some of the most advanced wireless networks such as 4G capable of carrier aggregation. Within some years these countries will be some of the first to adopt 5G and if 5G helps carriers to use spectrum even more efficiently, it will help carriers allocate even more data per consumer consequently promoting cloud even more.
One must note that if people start storing all their content on the cloud then the case for a higher internal memory would also dissolve and accordingly the Higher ASP point I mentioned would no longer be applicable. But ultimately both the Higher ASP factor and the move to cloud kill the need for SD cards.
1.d Easier file access -
This isn't as big a reason for the removal of SD cards but the removal of SD cards from smartphones will leave the smartphone with just one storage which is the internal storage and this is where all the data will be stored. This will reduce a great amount of confusion as to where the data has been stored since there will be one and only one space where the data is stored. Google provides an app developer the choice to store an app's data either on the SD card or the internal storage. Some developers choose internal storage while other choose the SD card, this fragments the user data over both the storage mediums.
1.e Modifications to OSes -
Android and ios together capture more than 85% of the world's smartphone market.ios ever since its inception has not supported SD cards. In case of Android, Google has not been so fond of SD cards. None of the Nexus devices have support for SD cards and starting with Android 4.4, Google introduced restrictions to the way in which data stored by apps in SD cards can be accessed in order to strengthen security. These restrictions essentially broke the functionality of several apps that read data of other apps stored on SD cards.
Even manufacturers such as Samsung who updated their devices to Android KitKat had broken some of the device's functionality and had to fix the same with follow ups.
2. SD cards will continue on low end handsets -
2.a Price conscious consumers -
Most consumers who buy low end smartphones are often highly price conscious and manufacturers try their best to cut corners wherever possible to sell their devices at attractive price tags. This often leads to manufacturers loading the smartphones with very low internal memory of low quality. Since many low end smartphones are bought by first time consumers, the lack of enough internal memory isn't even noticed by the consumer since the consumer doesn't really know how much a 4GB or 8GB internal memory allow him to store.
Imagine you're buying a car for the first time and haven't used or bought a car before. You're given with two options. A model whose tank can store 40 litres of petrol and another model whose tank can store 80 litres of petrol. If you're unsure how much petrol you need at one go, you might opt for the 80 litres model but if you're someone whose on a tight budget(like most first time smartphone buyers) you would go for the 40 litres model.
2.b Performance issue non-existent in this case -
With just 4GB of internal storage, SD cards are a necessity. Also in such cases a SD card wouldn't really degrade the performance since the NAND(internal memory) itself will be of very cheap quality to start with. These smartphones often come with very weak processors and low RAM, hence the chances of the SD card becoming a bottle neck are reduced even further
2.c Race to bottom -
In most emerging countries its always a race to the bottom and the 4GB internal memory standard will never run out of fashion. For example lets say this year a particular smartphone maker Y makes a smartphone costing $80 with 4GB internal memory, now if a competitor X next year provides 8GB for the same price then Y will also start providing 8GB models at $80 in response to competition. But this doesn't mean the 4GB model is completely discarded rather the manufacturer Y will go a step lower and make $70 smartphones with 4GB internal memory and so on the saga keeps continuing with X again bringing 8GB at $70 and Y bringing 4GB to $60.
1.d No cloud -
Most emerging countries have very low broadband penetration and even high speed wireless networks are patchy and expensive when compared to the average income. This means its almost always necessary to download data and store it in one place since continuous stream of data in real time isn't possible. Since internal memory is already low, that one place of storing data is nothing else but the SD card.
Conclusion -
SD cards have always played an important role in smartphohes but its not difficult to see them losing popularity eventually in high end phones yet they will always continue to have a place in low end smartphones.**Note - For the sake of simplicity I am referring Micro SD cards as SD cards in the entire article.
