The advent of camera phones spawned smartphones, instantly ballooning the storage requirements on handheld devices in the past couple of decades. Most users are now inexplicably dependent on cloud storage to manage documents, back up their app data, and even store copious amounts of images and video. This is no accident, and corporations happily mint money from cloud storage services without subsidizing hardware for consumers in return. In fact, I’m tempted to believe the death of expandable storage on smartphones also contributed to a boom in cloud storage demand.