Is there a reason why an iPhone can't have a memory card slot?

[Peris1947]

A lot of people are complaining that 16gb is not enough.
With other smartphones, you can just slot in a memory card and take as many selfies as you want.

[TCav]

Originally Posted by Peris1947

A lot of people are complaining that 16gb is not enough.
With other smartphones, you can just slot in a memory card and take as many selfies as you want.

Actually, memory card slots are a frequent point of failure that many smartphone manufacturers are dropping from their product lineup in their attempts to increase reliability.

So Apple isn't the only one.

[JimC]

Originally Posted by Peris1947

A lot of people are complaining that 16gb is not enough.
With other smartphones, you can just slot in a memory card and take as many selfies as you want.

Profit :-)

If you buy an iPhone with more built in storage, you're going to pay more for it.

An iPhone 6 with 16GB of internal storage has a suggested retail price of $549.99

An iPhone 6 with 64GB of internal storage has a suggested list price of $649.99 ($100 more than the 16GB model).

Yet, you can buy a fast 64GB Micro SDXC Card for under $20 from sites like amazon.com, shopping for major brands like Samung, Sandisk, and others.

Here's one example, and if you scroll down on the page, you'll see other competing cards for around the same price.

http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-microS...dp/B010Q588D4/

So, if you were Apple, would you rather customers paid you an extra $100 to get 64GB of internal storage, or would your rather them use a Micro SDXC card to get the same amount of storage for a much lower cost (under $20 at major online vendors) where you would not be making a profit on the storage being purchased by customers? :-)

You'll see similar price differences on the higher end iPhone models that are available with 16GB, 64GB or 128GB of internal storage.

Apple is realizing huge profit margins on their phones (much higher margins than makers of Android models are bringing in from their phone models). So of course, they don't want to make it easy for you to add more storage, as they'd rather you upgraded to a phone model with more built in storage at a much higher price point (meaning even more profit for Apple).

I have not owned an iPhone yet. But all of the phones I've used running Android have included Micro SDHC or SDXC slots. For example, my current phone can use Micro SDXC Cards that are 128GB in size if I wanted to put one that large into it. Instead, I've got cheap Sandisk 32GB cards in our phones right now, where I bought a "3 pack" of them on sale from amazon.com a while back for very little money (for use in my phone and my wife's phone, with a spare I use for other purposes), and I've had no problems with them.

If I took a lot of photos or videos with my phone, then I'd splurge on a larger card (still very inexpensive compared to what phone manufacturers charge consumers for models with more built in storage included).

[dennoman]

Simple answer: Apple doesn't allow it. iOS is a closed system and Apple doesn't want people to interfere with it. If you want anything on or off the iPhone then Apple wants you to use iTunes.