In message <
[email protected]> kony
And that's part of my point -- Down the road, when 4GB is considered
tiny, why would I want an additional 4GB added to my 32GB SD card?
Why would you wait to have the capacity, not buying the card
now but instead buying it 'down the road' ?
I'd rather have the cost lower and invest that money on external memory
as desired, (which requires less engineering then adding two distinct
memory spaces, and all the other redundant circuitry, and power
consumption to power said circuitry)
"Less engineering" is pretty irrelevant as they already did
the engineering and aren't going to subtractively discount a
full featured player just to omit it (by more than the cost
of the memory). It is unfortunate but when buying such
integrated devices we can't often choose to have everything
but *one* feature and that just to suit an ideal of slight
cost decrease.
Two distinct memory spaces should be considered irrelevant
so long as there is no bug preventing that from working
seamlessly.
Redundant circuitry is fairly irrelevant as well, since a
scattering of 1 cent SMT parts adds little to size or cost
when talking about much larger features like screen,
controls, battery, and the memory card/slot.
It is true and a good point about power consumption, though
not always the case as having one internal and one external
should be no worse than two external chips. Over the long
term there is the possibility to offset it with higher
density chips, so long as it's not just stacked chip die,
but I would not think of a lowered cost MP3 player as a long
term investment and there isn't even an assurance you can
perpetually upgrade the card before reaching a capacity
limit (as is already the case with SDHC support, and was in
previously years with some having FAT16 filesystem. ). So
putting this into a context, if 2-3 years ago you had bought
a player supporting SD cards, you couldn't use today's 8GB
cards. Your total capacity is significantly higher if it
has more integral memory. We can hope a player bought today
has a longer forward compatibility with higher density
memory but we cannot control nor be certain of it.
Towards the goal of future support, certainly it's a better
time now than 2 years ago, but looking for all these
features it tends to be the case that not everyone wants
same features as you or I so the player has more features to
suit everyone instead of an attempt to make 6 different
players... except that in many cases they do vary the amount
of memory inside so you can at least choose the least memory
endowed if that's what you want.
