It is well known that for today's consumer digital industry, "facelift" often means relatively small performance and experience improvements, while "replacement" usually represents a huge technological advancement and the consequent significant enhancement of functions. Especially in storage-related products, the difference between this "facelift" and "replacement" is often particularly obvious.
For example, in the early days, the USB 2.0 U disk read and write speed was usually only around 10MB/s, and later "high-speed" models that could reach more than 40MB/s appeared. But in the USB 3.0 era, even the most ordinary USB 3.0 U disk usually has a read and write speed of 150MB/s, which is directly several times faster than the previous high-end products.
For example, in the PCIE 3.0 era, the read and write speed of ordinary SSDs often does not exceed 2000MB/s, and only those high-end products can approach the limit of 3500MB/s. But in today's PCIE4.0 SSD, the read and write performance of about 5000MB/s can only be regarded as a "fairly average" level, and it is only a mid-range product at all.
For this reason, whether from the perspective of manufacturers or consumers, the pursuit of the latest generation of product technology as much as possible is the simplest and most effective way to enhance product competitiveness.
However, if we tell you that there is now a consumer electronic product, on the one hand, all the mainstream manufacturers refuse to use the latest technical standards, on the other hand, these manufacturers generally do not hesitate to develop their own proprietary technology to further exploit the performance potential of old products from many years ago, will it be a little strange?
The most important thing is that this is not a particularly unpopular niche product, but a storage product that is actually in demand by users and is very cheap - microSD memory card.
Performance has been stagnant for 13 years, and microSD cards have long lagged behind
If you have paid attention to the relevant content of our Sanyi life before, you may remember that we have criticized the "lack of progress" of microSD cards more than once.
For example, we have pointed out that the "SD Card Association" behind microSD cards has actually updated technical standards many times. Among them, taking the latest version of the SD 9.0 technical specification as an example, under its framework, the highest read and write performance of the standard size SD card can theoretically reach 3920MB/s (SDEX specification, PCIe 4.0*2Lane). Even if the microSDEX card can only use PCIe 3.0*1Lane interface due to size limitations, the read and write speed should be able to have a level of 985MB/s.
However, looking at the market today, it is not difficult to find that not to mention the products of the latest SD 9.0 specification, even SD 6.0 (UHS-III), and even SD 5.0 (UHS-II) level "old products", are still very rare. Especially for small size microSD memory cards, almost all brands are still stuck in the SD 3.0 specification, that is, the UHS-I era.
You know, the world's first microSD UHS-I memory card was released in September 2010. In other words, from 2010 to 2023, in nearly 13 years, the entire microSD card field has basically fallen into the strange circle of "technical specifications are constantly updated, but products have been stagnant".
Technical specifications continue to improve, but manufacturers choose to turn a blind eye
Speaking of which, some friends may feel that this is another story of a manufacturer collectively falling into the "comfort zone", not thinking of progress, and eventually killing itself. However, in the past 13 years, the microSD card industry has really been completely "unenterprising"? Looking up relevant product information will find that the situation is actually far more paradoxical than expected.
The SD Association webpage is also a little speechless
On the one hand, the microSD card manufacturers represented by SanDisk (Western Digital), Toshiba, and Samsung are actually the developers behind the SD memory card technology standards. In other words, in the past 13 years, they have been constantly developing new SD card and microSD card technical specifications, and updated the SD standard from "SD 3.0" of 104MB/s to "SD 9.0" of nearly 4000MB/s today.
On the other hand, these manufacturers do not mass-produce microSD cards after SD 3.0. The microSD products they currently sell on the market are still UHS-I, which is the "SD 3.0" 13 years ago.
But this is not the end, these manufacturers are actually aware that the 104MB/s SD 3.0 standard can no longer meet the needs of users. Therefore, in their latest generation of microSD cards, self-developed read and write acceleration technology is generally added to them, and the speed of these microSD cards is increased to the level of 200MB/s.
But if you think it's an inspirational story, you're wrong. Don't forget that the microSD card itself is available in the 300MB/s UHS-II, 600MB/s UHS-III, and 985MB/s microSDEX standard. But these manufacturers would rather put the ready-made, long-developed and faster new standards not use, and also patch the ancient UHS-I with "self-developed technology" to bring about a faster speed that is actually less effective.
What's more funny is that according to the official description of a number of related products, it is not difficult to find that these self-developed microSD card "speed-up" technologies developed by manufacturers can actually only play a role when paired with a dedicated, manufacturer's own card reader. That is to say, when you insert these latest, nominal 200MB/s microSD cards into drones, dashcams, mobile phones, or game consoles, you will "recover" to industry-standard reads and writes of up to 104MB/s because of compatibility issues with these devices.
Meaningless technological innovation is the last vestige of the sunset industry
In this way, the topic returns to the beginning of the article. Obviously, for the microSD card industry, they are not without advanced technical standards to guide the direction of product progress, but manufacturers collectively "ignore" their own new standards and choose to "stick to the rules" in actual market behavior. Even at the expense of this, they have come up with a more flashy self-developed "speed-up" program.
Why is this? To be honest, this is actually a very, very bad signal, because it may indicate that the relevant manufacturers have realized that those consumer digital products that represent "high performance" are generally no longer in demand for microSD cards. In other words, although microSD cards still have considerable sales, only those products that have little demand for storage performance will consider using it as a capacity expansion solution.
On this basis, if the manufacturer launches a really faster microSD card that adopts the new version of the industry technical specifications, it will only end up because the interface is completely incompatible, and it can only run at a "slow" situation in actual use. In contrast, manufacturers spend a little cost and come up with a "speed-up" technology that can be slightly faster after at least matching their own card readers, which is naturally not really to improve the experience of microSD cards.
For example, it's like those "high-quality metal music tapes" or "gold-plated CD burning discs" of those days. Their experience is indeed a little better than ordinary products, but in essence, it is already a meaningless "technological innovation" artificially made by the sunset industry under the premise that it is inevitable to end, in order to increase the product premium for the last time.
[The picture in this article comes from the Internet]