Eight years ago it was light years ahead of anything else on the market. No other phone offered full screen surfing of the internet. None. Every other Internet experience on a mobile device was to crippled mobile sites. Not on the iPhone. The rest of the phones on the market were pains to surf the internet. . . The iPhone did not "suck" as you so blithely claim. it re-defined the smartphone completely. The point of this article is that Apple continually improved and added to the technology of the iPhone. They did not rest on their laurels. For example, the cut and paste was not a "slap dash" system but one that is considered the best in the mobile market. . . it works across ALL apps. They made it so that it would. That took time to get right.
SD card? Even Google has realized the error of supporting SD cards on their devices. They are not secure! Google has dropped support for SD cards in the latest incarnation of Android because it was making it difficult for Android devices to break into Enterprise use. They can easily be stolen, borrowed and copied, or they are a vector for malware. Storage upgrade? Why? As I have pointed out to you many times, for documents, music, videos, I have no need of storage upgrades. . . I have direct wireless access over WIFI or cellular to terabytes of encrypted storage on my home computer and my iCloud account at all times. Why would I want to stick anything on an unsecured SD card where it could be stolen, copied, or lost due to the flakiness of SD cards?
Sword, From what I understand, they've dropped that idea, and put SD support back in due to folks complaining. I know that the lack of an SD card was one of the primary reasons I went with Android rather than an iPad for my tablet. For me, it's a deal breaker. Don't really care about it so much on my phone, as I'd be happy if the phone did nothing but calls and text, but I need to be able to move serious data to my tablet, and the online options for doing so are not acceptable to me.
I understand the security implications of it, and don't particularly care. Corporate issues are not my concern.
You poo poo the lack of security of SD cards for some reason but then mention about iCloud a proven security risk. You have a certain conundrum there Sword.