Cameras are used for multiple professional purposes, including videography and commercial photography. SD cards are also used in devices such as Zoom audio recorders, which I often use for recording music. Especially right now, I'll loan a Zoom and a nice mic to a musician so that they can record tracks for me remotely.

They're also the standard boot device for computers like the Raspberry Pi. Basically, they're a professional tool which one might expect in a professional laptop.

Regarding videography: professional digital video isn’t usually recorded to SD cards (nor was it ever, ever since “professional digital video” became a thing.) 4K RAW was “too big” when that was what videographers worked with; and 8K RAW is “too big” now. It’s not just that you’ll fill up the card before you’re done a single recording session; often an SD card just won’t have the IO bandwidth to persist writes at the speed the camera wants to stream them in at. (How do smartphones do it? By having lots of RAM for buffering, and expecting that you won’t record for very long.) The SD Forum is always trying to bring new SD interfaces to market to up the total bandwidth; but the needs of professional videography always outpace the implementations of those standards arriving in the market.

What we do instead:

• DSLRs, when used as video cameras in professional workflows, are usually wired directly to a computer, streaming down the wire like a webcam.

• Purpose-built professional video cameras record directly to SSDs (either regular ones, like Samsung T7s; or proprietary ones, like RED’s “mini-mags”) that you’re expected to mount to your computer over USB — either by them being regular USB3 devices themselves; or, in the proprietary case, by the manufacturer selling a USB dock you’re supposed to buy for your editing workstations.

Regarding commercial photography: SD cards have gotten so large — and wi-fi sync so fast — that even the largest RAW photos sync instantly and hardly make a dent in your storage. There’s no real point in taking a 512GB SD card out of a camera.

Keep in mind, integrated ports are only really a demand of professionals when urgent, portable connectivity is a requirement; i.e. when even the time required to find and plug in a dongle would be SLAs broken and revenue lost. This was a true need for professional photography when SD cards were small, as you’d often fill up an SD card in the field and need to “dump it out” onto your laptop to continue shooting (or swap it for another while handing off the first to your editor to establish a pipeline.) Today, it’s not.

None of the other tasks you listed have ever been urgent, in-the-field tasks; they’re tasks where you do have time to go back home/to the office, and plug in an SD-card reader dongle to do the task.

Exactly, SD card support would be largely meaningless as far as professional work is concerned.

My Sigma fp has to record 12-bit CinemaDNG to an external SSD (SD cards larger than 64 GB can’t maintain the required throughput and 64 GB is enough for probably minutes). I might use the SD recording capability if I take the camera for a leisure photowalk (as far from professional work as it gets); I keep reminding myself to simply get a Wi-Fi enabled SD card so that I never have to take it out.

A memory card format that might be a bit more relevant here is CFexpress; but then again, it’s unlikely that as a professional you’d ever use your laptop’s built-in reader for this as opposed to sticking it into a box that automatically copies everything onto a 4TB HDD while you fill up another card.

By the way, tethered operation (wired or wireless) is used in professional photography as well, not just videography.

Even there, though, there are many competing standards. My MacBook has an SD card reader, but I need an adapter to plug the microSD cards from my Raspberry Pi into it. My camera's CompactFlash cards require a USB adapter. To use the high-speed SD cards, I need to bypass the built-in SD card port and use a USB adapter, anyway.

So it turns out it's easier to just buy a multi-card adapter. My computer's built-in SD port never gets any use anymore, not even for full-size, non-UHC SD cards.

Apple stopped catering to that kind of professional when Jobs died.

Apple is taking away ports so their devices will be more likely to survive falling into water. That is the kind of "professional" Apple is catering to.

Is a Macbook Pro from 2020 more likely to survive falling into water than one from 2015?

On the other hand Macs are heavily used by audio and video professionals, the Pro in the name doesn’t just refer to developers.

In fact doesn’t nearly every story on Mac dissatisfaction always have someone mentioning that high end A/V users are the real Mac target demo, not devs?

SD card support is largely meaningless to high-end professionals, few use memory cards and even fewer would bother with a built-in reader in professional work. There’s tethering (wired or wireless) for studio photography, cameras with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for when you’re on the go, high-speed SSDs or CFexpress cards for 8K 10-bit footage, etc.

Hobbyists, vloggers, even mid-range professionals (wedding photographers et al.) might use SD cards, but that’s pretty far from high end.

It's almost like something interesting was happening in early 2020...

The same graph for the rest of the year. http://www.cipa.jp/stats/documents/e/dw-202011_e.pdf

Camera sales are lower than previous years. AI pictures look unnerving; but it's definitely the way things will go.

That's interesting. I also use SD cards to transfer data from my phone (I make tons of photos). I used to do it by connecting via USB cable, but after a couple of months the USB-C port worn out and no longer works, so for me the only reasonable way to get the data out is through an SD card. I tried things like setting up network server and sending files wirelessly but that was flaky.

You're an outlier. Most people don't take and process as many photos as you, and if they do, the processing is Instagram filters :-) Also the need to transfer photos around has decreased drastically with social media sharing and cloud storage.

You'll see in the next few years that smartphones, tablets, laptops will cater less and less to your needs. Sad... But probably inevitable.

Good observation. I use cloud sporadically - for example if I have just a couple of photos and feel lazy, I send them to Google Drive and then download on my PC, but I can imagine people use it all the time thus no need to have SD cards laying around.

I don't think it's fair to represent that graph as the death of the standalone camera, at least with regard to the 2020 data. The fact that nobody could go anywhere or be with anyone probably had a lot to do with it.

Camera sales on a whole peaked in the 2000’s and have been on a massive decline ever since. Smartphones are where photography is at for most consumers today.

Supporting an SD card is silly unless you plan to support many formats. At that point, you may as well just use an external card reader or just plug in the camera directly.