Regardless of the potential merits of alternative storage formats, it's a good point that people who have needed an SD card reader since their removal have probably gone out and bought external ones by now. I'd expect the standalone units to generally be higher-quality than the ones that would be built in.

That said, I'm glad to see Apple has finally realized some of the ways they've been alienating their customer base, and they appear to be walking back some of their most unpopular changes.

Apple has sold their dual GPU late 2015 powerhouse model on the website, allowing people to completely skip the USBC donglebook with butterfly keyboards and touch bar

I’m looking forward to having that in the new processor and with touchbar

They are acknowledging the folly of their ways as they have gotten rid of the butterfly keyboard, adding magsafe back, and adding sd cards back

They are making the least contentious and perfect machine

> They are making the least contentious and perfect machine

My "perfect machine" could also play DVDs, but that may be getting a bit contentious.

I mentioned what I use, not what everyone uses (Nikon D850, XQD card). True, XQD has mostly been replaced by CFExpress.

Regardless, the point remains that high-end cameras often use high-end memory cards that are not SD cards.

For what it’s worth, XQD has been succeeded by CFExpress which is why you don’t see new devices using XQD.