IMO, one of the biggest scams in the mobile space currently.

My old OnePlus 3T flagship from 2016 came with 128GB of storage and it "only" cost €480. Also, best phone I ever owned by far BTW.

Today, nearly 6 years later, Apple and Samsung flagships (I'm staying away from OnePlus nowadays) are charging huge markups for more than the base 128GB of storage, on phones that already cost €1000+, despite flash storage getting significantly cheaper since 2016.

This is beyond insulting, especially since modern flagships also lack microSD expansion.

They'll do everything they can to push people into using their cloud services. It erodes the concept of ownership when you have to ask for permission from another party to access your own stuff. The more dependent they can make you on them the better. Plus when I listen to an MP3 stored on my phone, there's no opportunity for 3rd parties to track what I'm listening to and how often or to push ads at me.

(I swear there was an episode of The Weeds where they read an ad for a therapy service for dogs.)

I'm in the UK and noticed both kind of happening: an ad for LinkedIn (I think) was localised to use a UK example in several episodes of This American Life during the last year. It was spliced into the programs seamlessly and sounded just like any of their usual sponsorship segments.

I'm presuming they just edited a handful of versions of the program for their largest listener regions and there was no need to do anything on the fly except pick which to serve. Of course I paid little attention to the ad as I was distracted more by it being the first time I'd noticed that kind of localisation.

Any way you slice it it's still price gouging.

No, I already explained above why I consider it price gouging.

Are you 'gouging' your employer by asking for the highest salary you can get away with? Of course not. It's a market price.

Your phone doesn't support some kind of SD cards?