I knew this would happen around the S21 series when they removed the last hardware item of consequence, the SD Card slot. After that, Samsung focused on being Android’s iPhone, except they imitated all of Apple’s shortcomings instead of playing to their core values that got them here in the first place: hardware supremacy. Now that the only discernable difference between Samsung and Apple is the OS (folding screens aside), people’s choices became binary (iPhone or equally expensive iPhone clone) instead of multifaceted (headphone jacks, SD card slot, etc. vs iPhone). Actually, scratch that - Apple actually added more hardware features* (action button and USB-C) on their latest model, making Samsung look dumber for regressing.

On top of that, other OEMs, like Google, caught up with the only hardware that Samsung has been improving on - the cameras and folding screens - and soaked in customers that feel spurned by Samsung (myself included as of 2 weeks ago), for a lower price. If they don’t reverse course and begin concentrating on hardware advantages, especially in an era where consumers are so starved for features that Nothing Phone made a living out of glowing back lights, this may be the beginning of the Korean giant’s death knell since younger generations are choosing iPhones.

*Side note - I’m even more pissed about the removal of expandable storage on Android since Apple actually brought them back for the recent MacBooks! So people who claim it’s an outdated technology can try and explain why it’s making a return on $2K laptops, but not mobile devices other than for greed.

While I agree with you in general…

So people who claim it’s an outdated technology can try and explain why it’s making a return on $2K laptops, but not mobile devices other than for greed.

Quality. A phone is gonna see a lot more shock than the average laptop, so a card slot has to be very robust to prevent data loss. Across two LG, three Moto and one Blu, I’ve dealt with SD corruption on every one of them. The worst case was one of the Motos. It would corrupt the SD at the drop of a pin. The shock of dropping the phone less than a foot onto my bed was enough. The best one was my first Android phone, the LG Stylo, which had a removable battery with the SD card under that. It only corrupted the card a few times the whole time I had it, though do keep in mind that we’re talking about how often total data loss is acceptable. It took me years to realize that I was paying more in my time and lost data than the cost of just getting a phone with more storage.