Re: What's the actual *advantage* of not having an sd slot?

Your Name,

In some ways they are gouging the customers who still want / need those
functions.

Are they ?   What do you think it costs to manufacture small batches of a
certain product ?   And than there is the risk involved in not getting all
of them sold.  And its not only the manufacturer who runs that risk, but
also all the resell points, upto-and-including the store, in between.

As for gouging, that only works when a single manufacturer is involved - or
you must believe that all the manufacturers all over the world are
colluding.

They remove things from a device without lowering the price, and then
charge extra to get those same functions back again.

You know as well as I do that they do not just remove features while leaving
the rest of the phone the same.   As you mentioned it yourself, the choice
to remove the the audio jack could easily be from the manufacturers wish to
make the phone even thinner than the last one.

No longer including a charger is another recent example.

Why include a charger when the phone has gotten an universal plug and thus
(supposedly) can be charged by any old charger you've got laying around ?
It can be argued that most of chargers delivered with a new phone would just
turn into landfill.

Yes, it would have been nice to see that reflected in the price of a new
phone, but (big) companies are definitily not there to let their customers
profit from any windfall they might come across.  Besides, with a mid-range
phone costing $500,- or more and a charger about $15,- we are talking about
3%.  Thats not really going to break the bank.

The original iMac dropped the floppy disk drive and had no real
replacement since USB thumb drives being too expensive at the time. You
had to buy an external floppy disk drive (once they were available!) to be
able to easily and cheaply transfer files between computers.

And with that you have deliverd a nice example why removing functionality is
two-sided sword : They may grab a bit more cash, but they are losing control
over what they regard as /their/ device.

Something similar happened to the Commodore 64 : they started to sell huge
external diskdrives (called "breadboxes" by the users), and other companies
jumped at the chance and created much nicer diskdrives about a quarter (and
even less) as big. (I've still got both in my closet).

Same happens in many other industries too.
>
It's called "the price of progress".  :-(

You mean "the price of progress" which means that you are *willingly*
carrying a device wich is a super-version of those ankle-bracelets some
convicts are forced to wear ? :-)

Regards,
Rudy Wieser