Imagine for a moment that Tim Cook suddenly changed his mind and decides to release an iPhone with a microSD card slot. Suddenly the whole storage paradigm in iOS would change and iPhone models like the 1TB would disappear. We could even extend this hypothesis to the iPad.
But to raise this and stay with conclusions at the material level is not fair at all: What changes could there be to how iOS and apps work? So many doors would open that Apple would have to make a series of crucial decisions. Let’s do an exercise in imagination of these decisions.
More comfort and more options, but at the sacrifice of performance
Apple could wash its hands and do the simplest thing in the world: if you put in a microSD, leave it appear as an additional location in the “Files” app and propose to be able to store data in the same way as we can do now when we connect a USB key or an external hard drive. In fact, it would be the quickest and most logical move since Cupertino.
But knowing that there are microSD cards with up to 1TB of space, perhaps these could help alleviate the major space demands that are currently in the iPhone. A 128GB iPhone might prefer to store the library on an SD card with more spaceWhether or not it is synced with iCloud. An encrypted format of this card linked to our Apple ID would prevent said card from being read on third-party devices.
It would also allow options like moving that library to a Mac or iPad without much hassle, bringing the flexibility of Photo Libraries on Mac to iPhones and iPads. The same can be said with apps that require large amounts of storage, like whatsapp and your chat history or mailboxes with thousands of emails.
Imagine being able to make local, encrypted backups of an iPhone to a memory card
Another great advantage of these microSD cards could be the possibility of making local backups of devices on them. Again, encrypted with keys tied to the user’s Apple ID. Recovering data from a broken iPhone this way could be a boon.
We could also gain functions in the opposite direction: we could take the content of a camera or video and bring it directly to the iPhone with a simple change of cards. Yes, many use standard SD cards, but there are many microSD to SD adapters on the market and they are very cheap.
To all of this, it’s arguable: we already have ways to use iPhones with external storage that could include all of these options. And it’s true, but we will not carry in our pocket an iPhone with a cable adapter and a USB key permanently connected. Having a microSD means having external storage inserted inside this device, with which all these use cases would have a very important additional convenience.
Will we ever see something like this? Nothing is impossible, but I bet not. iPhones with large internal storage are a good business point for Apple, and the data read/write speeds we might get with a microSD wouldn’t even come close to what we currently have in the company’s built-in chips. . We would win options but maybe we would lose a quality performance and feeling that Apple does not want to give up. It doesn’t matter how much microSD we see in Android devices.
