That’s my point, for most people the performance gains of one 2024 or 2025 flagship over another don’t mean much.
I can transfer stuff over WiFi to my iPhone in seconds. Like 2-3GB movies, 100MB-1GB video clips, etc. Seconds.
microSD sucks and I think anyone familiar with the tech knows it. The issue is speed. microSD is fine for like 16GB, maybe 32GB. Once you get bigger, you wanna put bigger files up there, more files, but they move. so. slow. It’s painful to watch. Then you get a bigger one and it’s such a headache to transfer stuff between them. I think a couple companies tried to make faster microSD cards/readers but they never took off. So I talked about NVMe and UFS. Slower than UFS, on garbage Android phones that aren’t good enough for UFS, is EMMC, and EMMC is faster than microSD. microSD is good for Jack and shit, and Jack left town. Apple may have blessed the industry by never including it. It’s trash and Jobs knew it, and he didn’t put trash in his products. Lots of people know microSD is trash and that, not Apple, is why most Android phones don’t include them now either. One, because yeah, they wanna sell you the faster internal storage and/or cloud storage. But two, because it’s just so slow.
But yeah, I’d say get a big-ish phone (storage wise, like 256GB or more) and keep stuff on the internal UFS or NVMe. Optionally get a Samsung T7 or T9 portable SSD, 2TB for around $100, on Black Friday (I mean, that’s about what I paid for my T7, like $110 tops) and keep stuff on that. Yes, iPhones can read/write from/to flash drives and portable drives. Same as Android, you open the file manager, browse to the drive, copy stuff over. Apple’s built in Files does it. On Android I’m old school, I’d only mess with either Solid Explorer (my personal choice) or FX File Explorer (2nd choice). I know Android has a file manager now (Samsung had one longer) but I trust those.
I don’t mind difficult games. I recognise that they exist as a kind of pushback against mobile games and casual games that have risen in popularity. I don’t mind that they exist. Likewise, I strongly believe that gaming is for everybody, but not every game has to be for everybody.
I think it’s perfectly fine, though, to ask the question: if the game — any hard game, to include the Dark Souls game and its spinoffs (e.g. Elden Ring) and knockoffs (e.g. Breath of the Wild) — had an easy mode, where virtually anyone could win it eventually, would that truly make the game less fun for people who like hard games? What if the game were hard by default, and easy mode cost $5 extra? That way, you would never be presented with the option, but those who want it can get it for a slight upcharge. (Maybe less on a $20 game, I’m thinking the $5 would be for a $70 game.) Case in point: Final Fantasy XV was never hard. But for 49¢, you could buy a “DLC”/“mod” that made gas cost half — 5 gil instead of 10 for any fill-up — and also made hotels (which give a big XP buff) half price. So one early-game strategy was equipping a ring that would not pay out experience when you camp, and saving your XP (which is normally paid out every time you sleep) until you could afford a room at the XP-doubling Galden Quay resort hotel, gaining you several levels by then. With the DLC/mod, you could afford it much sooner, and you could actually do it a few times, setting you up for later parts of the game. It wasn’t an easy mode, but it did soften the grind a bit, and it wasn’t presented as an option in the game. You kinda had to know about it and go look for it.
I actually think there’s something to that. Making a game and selling parts of it never really goes down well with players. But most players can’t beat hard games. So what if instead of new games being $70 or $80, they were $50 or $60 still, but people who want help can buy things that will make the game easier. Let those players subsidize the ones who are good enough to beat it without them, incentivising them to get better. Ideally, to get better at that game so they uninstall the helpers, beat it without them, then when the next one comes out, they’re ready.
I don’t hate hard games. But I’m not going to pay for them. If they make their money off people who have that much time on their hands, that’s fine. It’s a sound business decision. But I also think a game can’t say “we wish we made more money” while intentionally excluding players who maybe have full-time jobs, families, or other valid reasons to not learn the perfect button combinations and ultra-precise timing some of these games require. I think if they could find a way to include those players while not putting off their base, they’d have a winning solution on their hands. And no, we’re not gonna quit our jobs or neglect our families to “git gud” like we live with our parents and are half our age.