// ZDNET — MOBILE & WEB
Stop paying for smartphone storage you don't need - here's a better approach
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Modern smartphones are a perfect vehicle for upselling, allowing manufacturers to profit twice: once on the sale, and again on cloud storage services further down the line.
Soldered-in storage -- plus the death of the microSD slot on most phones -- makes it easy to trigger buyer anxiety and push people toward buying more storage than they need. Once they've bought a device and let digital clutter pile up, as it inevitably does, tech companies bank on the fact that nobody has time to clean out their files, so users pay again, this time for cloud storage to back everything up.
Also: This $50 power bank is safer than my lithium-ion battery - and it's coming on my next flight
Note that much of what I'm writing about here also applies to laptops, although you have greater flexibility for adding external storage to these devices.
When people buy or upgrade their smartphones, they're mostly driven by a price in their head. But during the purchase process, they're faced with a storage upsell. For only a few hundred dollars, they can double their storage.
That sounds like a good idea, right? At the price point, they're optimistic that their shiny new purchase will last them at least three years. That belief convinces them that the upgrade is worth it. After all, storage is tight on their current phone, and they had to delete the farm simulator game they'd not used in a few months to make room for photos of their breakfast.