GoKawiilAdrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET
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ZDNET's key takeaways
Manufacturers profit twice: on sale, and on cloud storage.
Think in $/GB, not GB; that's what storage really costs.
A gigabyte of storage is not as much as you think.
Modern smartphones are a perfect vehicle for upselling, allowing manufacturers to profit twice: once on the sale, and again on cloud storage services further down the line.
Soldered-in storage -- plus the death of the microSD slot on most phones -- makes it easy to trigger buyer anxiety and push people toward buying more storage than they need. Once they've bought a device and let digital clutter pile up, as it inevitably does, tech companies bank on the fact that nobody has time to clean out their files, so users pay again, this time for cloud storage to back everything up.
Also: This $50 power bank is safer than my lithium-ion battery - and it's coming on my next flight
Note that much of what I'm writing about here also applies to laptops, although you have greater flexibility for adding external storage to these devices.
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