You and I have a very different ideas about what clickbait is.

What market. Nobody asked them to remove features.

They all pretty much unilaterraly axed these features around the same time so your “choice” in the high-end segment went from having these things to not having these things, at all, in the entire segment, within the timespan of like a year.

So your choice back then was to take the hit or buy a mid-range phone that still packed those features. But it’s not like these things are the only thing that matter. Phones are complex devices. Buying lower end you forego other stuff like memory(speed) processing power, camera quality, build quality, screen quality, software support period, etc.

These things didn’t stop because there’s no market for them. These things stopped because they can get away with removing them to make more money selling you repairs, their own storage variations and bluetooth gear.

You don’t get rid of a car because you don’t like the buttons on your dashboard, if the rest of the car is up to your demands. People now having phones without headphone jacks or sd card trays doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have preferred otherwise.

You’re a lot more optimistic about the motives than I am.

I’m convinced big tech being able to make more money selling you other storage options instead of allowing you to just expand it yourself with a much cheaper SD card is at least 90 percent of why sd cards stopped being a thing on phones.

Cloud storage will have had some effect on demand but read/write speeds are not a variable if you just store a bunch of music and photo’s on the SD card. Read write speeds to the cloud are also trash compared to internal storage.

Same story with the headphone jack. It’s not that people didn’t use it, there was definately still an audience for it and it’s a part that costs pennies. But axing it boosts the sale of Bluetooth gear.

It’s not a coincidence that Apple and Samsung led the charge here, they sell tons of accessoires.

Stop using platforms that are actively locking you out.

Everybody did think becoming a developer is where it was at, so a lot of people did, now these people looking at an ever tightening job market (even before AI) with LLM’s possibility annihilating the need for their expertise entirely at some point.

At least maybe people will stop telling other people what to do. It’s obvious we don’t know what is relevant next week, much less in 10 years.

All these people that are now told to school themselves for manual labour are being set up to run into the same thing. Especially when those chineese bots inevitably also escape the gadget level.

There are no “AI safe” jobs. Even if it can’t do your job (yet) all the people that are made redundant and need new work will be flooding remaining markets.

You could park a Smart Fortwo in front of that honda and it would still not protrude as far out as this truck is.