"A little eBay shopping and you can find 128GB Micro SD cards for under a tenner"
Come on Simon, at least learn to rock man.
Those cards are all fakes.
So, Apple charges £539 for a 16GB iPhone, £619 for a 64GB device and £699 for a 128GB jeesus! Phone. Which means that if you buy your memory in the form of a more expensive iPhone, you pay something on the order of £1.60 for a gigabyte. Which, in turn, might just be why the Jesus mobe doesn’t come with an SD slot. A little …
Yeah, I bought one of the 64GB ones dirt cheap when they first came out. The FAT tells the OS it is the correct size but if you try to write data to it it get's to about 2GB and then fails with an "Out of Memory" error. Needless to say I got my money back.
"Even SanDisks have issues, (although I suspect I had 3 x 32gb from a bad batch)"
There was a known issue with Samsung devices and 32Gb Sandisk cards, and Sandisk are still happy to replace them more than a year after they were bought. I had a near two year old card replaced without fuss a couple of months ago.
Raise an issue via their web site, they'll ask a few questions via email, and then direct you to an on line form to fill in, after that they'll send you and RMA, and you send your card off the (IIRC) Czech republic (cost of about £1.40) then a few days later you get a new one back.
"Even SanDisks have issues"
SanDisks are also some of the most counterfeited cards on the market. The situation is so bad I believe they even have a system for you to check the serial numbers. I'd never buy a SanDisk anywhere but from a reputable retailer it really is that bad.
Caveat Emptor for very low priced ebay goods, especially newer stuff like 64GB+ cards!
The cheapest good 32GB SDHC card is probably about £10, 64GB card about £23 to £30; 128GB about £70 to £80.
Apple are still seriously taking the piss for a 16GB to 64GB difference of £80, and a 16GB to 128GB difference of £160 for well over 100% pure profit!
> Yes it is. Mostly because it's the same chip with the same interface.
Neither the same chip nor the same interface actually. And that's part of the reason why it's not (even remotely) as fast. But again, it doesn't really matter for the expected uses of a smartphone, except perhaps way-too-high-pixel-count video shooting.
"Is an SD card as quick as built-in memory? I assume it is, if you get a decent card?"
Not even remotely close, but a decent speed class card is usually fast enough that you won't notice the difference on a phone, unless perhaps if shooting insanely high-square-pixel video directly to card.
AFAIK as a rule of thumb the speed for such devices is internal flash>CF card~USB drive*>>SD card
The internal memory of the iPhone is compact flash, and with a high-speed interface I would expect, so it's expected to be massively faster than a SD card. By a factor 10 at the very least I would guess. Again, for most uses it probably won't be noticeable very often especially on a phone. For example my Pi can stream 720p video seamlessly from a relatively low-speed (class4) SD card.
*both USB devices and CF cards speeds vary enormously depending on the interface, the storage hardware and the iteration, so they leapfrog each other on a regular basis; they are not usually direct competitors though, so the comparison is not really relevant)
CF is IDE (PATA). It's actually pretty slow by modern standards!
There are other parallel-interface flash chips, but they are rarely used these days.
See iFixit for details - the chip name even starts "SD"!
Looks like a SanDisk iNAND family chip, which has an eSD interface. I leave it to the reader to figure out what the "e" stands for!
Almost every Arm device with decent amounts of Flash uses an SD interface. The silicon is cheap, fast, reliable and well documented.
"...pure profit!"
Nope. They're *obviously* using these price differentials to 'Robin Hood' the public, in a good and proper left wing sense. They're overcharging the rich and handsome that can afford it, to subsidize the unwashed masses that can't afford the 128 GB version and couldn't afford the cheaper one without the built-in subsidy.
Think about it. Do you think that Apple tracks 'normal' profit and even more 'pure' profit in separate columns? Of course not. That would be silly. They have an overall plan and an overall profit margin target. Therefore, logically, the overpriced one subsidizes the other cheaper one.
There is no other rational explanation. Plenty of irrational explanations, but only one rational explanation.
No wonder they call it the 'Jesus Phone'.
Incidentally when they announced the iPhone 6, me and a mate did a bit of a memory cost comparison. With a Nexus 5 16 Gb costing £299 and the 32 Gb costing £339, you are paying £2.50 per Gb for the extra 16 Gb.
So although I wholeheartedly agree that the cost per Gb is extrotionate, it's not like it's an Apple centric issue... they are ALL as bad as each other, so wouldn't it be better to bash the industry as a whole and not just Apple?
(For the "bias" record I used to own an iPhone 4, before moving to the HTC One X+ and am planning on getting the Nexus 6... if it is ever announced...)
Are you comparing coffee to coffee or coffee to specialty coffee drinks? SBUX coffee tends not to be any more expensive than any other typical modern coffee shop. People where I live call it "TenBucks" and always complain about the cost of coffee. When I ask what they usually get: "Triple Grande Caramel Macchiatto with extra ..." ... uhm, that is not a "coffee".
For unmolested (black) coffee, Starbucks is around twice as expensive as the convenience store, or around twenty times as expensive as brewing it at home.
Of course, Starbucks coffee is subsidizing their various costs, particularly the physical plant which houses a bunch of students, bloggers, hipsters, and the like who buy a single cup and then sit around all day taking up space, electricity, and wi-fi bandwidth. But it's still a lot to pay for an over-roasted indifferent blend.
You're not buying memory. You're buying storage.
It's still memory - it seems these days there's a tendency to assume that typical usage in relation to conventional modern computers must be some kind of universal truth, so you end up with that kind of false distinction being made or even claims along the lines of "by definition, secondary storage is non-volatile..."
I recall at one employer they retained a machine from the 70s, mostly as a curiosity, which completely dispelled that myth. Main memory was non-volatile (plated wire memory) but the secondary store was an electrostatic drum store and yes, it was volatile. Showing that machine to some people was enough to make their heads spin.
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"A little eBay shopping and you can find 128GB Micro SD cards for under a tenner"
Slow fake ones maybe.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/SanDisk-SDSDQUAN-128G-G4A-128GB-UHS-I-Class/dp/B00M562LF4/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=undefined&sr=1-1&keywords=128gb
Decent ones:
RRP: £135.78
Price: £90.81
So same point...but with some facts.
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I still have a nice fully functional StarTac phone that serves me well.
As for overpriced stuff, just look for the word "Audiophile" for a multitude of examples. They range from power cords to outlets to speaker wire. In all cases the stuff you pick up at a local Radio Shack (as long as they stay in business), or hardware store are perfectly acceptable, and do the same job. These people don't believe in A-B tests (double blind!) at all.
it's not just Apple, but as memory is so direct cheap, wondering why a just out of the door Nokia Lumia 635 has a piss poor 8Gb is base memory., or similar for entry level phones from Samsung, LG, HTC etc...
Surely stop putting shite headphones in the box and all mannar of other tut, and have 32Gb as the defacto base memory
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Unsure why Apple has dropped the previous sweetspot memory phone of 32Gb, to rake in more 64Gb cash ?