Apple's iCloud Storage Margins Run Near 80 Percent, a 2024 Lawsuit Alleges. The MicroSD Slot That Let Phone Owners Skip That Bill Disappeared From Flagships the Same Decade Storage Subscriptions Took Off.
For a decade, phone makers gave four reasons for deleting the microSD slot: it lets water in, it lets dust in, cheap cards are too slow for modern software, and the space is needed for bigger batteries. Every one of those reasons is true. None of them explains why the slot's disappearance lined up so precisely with the years phone storage subscriptions turned into one of the most profitable line items in consumer tech.
A 2024 class-action lawsuit against Apple puts a number on it: the company's cloud storage margins run close to 80 percent, roughly double its company-wide average. The microSD slot that once let a phone owner buy 256 extra gigabytes once, for about twenty dollars, and never think about it again, vanished from flagship phones in the exact stretch of years that Apple and Google built storage subscriptions serving hundreds of millions of paying customers.
The Official Reasons
The engineering case against microSD is real. A card slot is a hole in the chassis, and a hole in the chassis is harder to seal against water and dust. It is also a moving mechanical part in a device that manufacturers otherwise spent the 2010s trying to make as close to a sealed slab as possible. And the performance argument holds up under a benchmark: modern phones use UFS flash soldered to the board, which is meaningfully faster than a generic microSD card bought off a shelf.
What the official reasons leave out is that none of them required removing the slot entirely. Plenty of phones ship both a sealed, waterproof body and a card slot today — mid-range and budget Android devices still do it routinely. The slot didn't disappear because it was impossible to keep. It disappeared from the products with the highest margins to protect.
The Numbers Behind the Design Language
Storage upgrades on new phones are now some of the highest-margin add-ons a consumer electronics company sells. Industry analysts have taken to calling the price gap between storage tiers a "storage tax": the actual NAND flash chip inside a 1TB iPhone costs Apple somewhere in the low hundreds of dollars, while the retail jump from a 512GB model to a 1TB model runs to several hundred dollars more than that. The markup exists because there is no alternative — no slot to route around it, no card to buy separately for a fraction of the price.
The same math works on the subscription side. Once a phone ships with a storage ceiling and no way to raise it with a ten-dollar card, the only paths forward are paying more for a bigger phone at purchase, or paying monthly for cloud storage after the fact. Both funnel into the same manufacturers.
When Users Pushed Back, Samsung Blinked — Then Stopped Blinking
Samsung's own history shows the slot was never a technical inevitability, because Samsung reversed itself on it twice.
- 2015: Samsung removes the microSD slot from the Galaxy S6, following Apple's design direction and dropping the removable battery at the same time.
- 2016: after visible customer backlash, Samsung brings the slot back for the Galaxy S7 and keeps it through the S20 line.
- 2021: Samsung removes the slot again, this time for good, starting with the Galaxy S21 — and every flagship since.
The slot came back once, when the company still felt exposed to customer complaints and a competitive Android market that offered it. It has not come back a second time, in years when Samsung has had a mature, high-margin cloud storage and subscription business of its own to protect.
Google Throttled the Card Before It Removed the Slot
Google's version of the story started even earlier, and at the software layer rather than the hardware layer. In 2013, Android 4.4 "KitKat" quietly changed how third-party apps could write to microSD cards, blocking most apps from writing anywhere on an external card except a narrow, app-specific folder. Google's stated reason was security and file-system consistency; the practical effect was that a card users had already bought and inserted stopped working the way it used to for backups, downloads, and app data, unless they rooted the device to bypass the restriction.
The hardware followed a similar arc. The Nexus S, in 2010, was the first Android flagship to ship with no card slot at all, on Google's own reasoning that it wanted a single, unified storage volume rather than a messy split between internal memory and a card. Every Pixel phone since has continued that decision without exception. Google didn't wait for the slot to become commercially inconvenient — it built the case against removable storage into Android itself, years before it built Google One into a subscription business with more than 150 million paying members.
The Antitrust Filings Say the Quiet Part
The clearest evidence that this was always about the subscription, not the waterproofing, comes from the lawsuits filed once regulators and plaintiffs' lawyers started reading Apple's own numbers. Gamboa v. Apple Inc., filed in the Northern District of California in March 2024, alleges that Apple restricts how much third-party cloud services like Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive can integrate with iOS specifically to push users toward iCloud, then charges monopoly-level prices once they're there — the suit cites Apple holding more than 70 percent of iOS cloud storage and margins near 80 percent, against a company-wide average closer to 40 percent. A federal judge declined to dismiss the monopoly claims in June 2025, and the case remains in discovery.
The UK has its own version: the consumer group Which? filed a roughly $3.75 billion competition claim against Apple, arguing British consumers were effectively forced into iCloud once storage ran out on a device with no expansion option and restricted alternatives. Neither case is about the microSD slot directly. Both are about what happens to pricing once a company has already made sure users have no way around paying it.
What Gets Left Behind
Right-to-repair advocates have pointed out the quieter cost of all this: a microSD slot was one of the cheapest ways to extend a phone's useful life without replacing it. A user running out of space could buy a card for the price of a couple of coffees and keep the same phone for another two years. Without that option, a phone that runs out of local storage has fewer paths forward — buy a new device with more built-in capacity, or pay recurring fees to keep photos and files accessible in a cloud that isn't guaranteed to stay priced the way it was when they signed up. Global e-waste hit a record 62 million metric tons in 2022, with less than a quarter of it properly recycled.
The waterproofing argument was never wrong. It was just never the whole argument, and the part left out is the part that shows up on the earnings call.
Filed from public reporting:
- Pocket-lint — "6 reasons why microSD cards disappeared from flagship smartphones"
- Tech Times — "iPhone 18 Pro 1TB Costs More and Runs Slower as Memory Hits Record 34% of Build Cost"
- Notebookcheck — "Apple iPhone: DRAM crisis causes 350% higher RAM and NAND costs"
- 9to5Google — "Samsung ditches microSD cards in Galaxy S21 series"
- Android Central — "KitKat and SD cards — what's fixed, what's broken and what's misunderstood"
- Android Central — "Why Nexus devices have no SD card"
- PhoneArena — "Why Google wants to kill SD cards, and what's holding them back"
- Hagens Berman — "Apple iCloud Antitrust Litigation"
- Kiplinger — "Class-Action Suit Says You're Overpaying for Apple iCloud Storage"
- TechRadar — "Apple hit by huge iCloud 'lock in' lawsuit that accuses it of 'rip-off prices'"
- Tech Startups — "Google One soars to 150 million subscribers after launching AI-powered plan"
- Business Standard — "Storage full? How cloud subscriptions became Big Tech's reliable cash cow"
