When I was studying at university, I had the highest-capacity USB drive of its time, which was 64mb. I was able to fit all my Word documents and some extras, and still felt huge. I can't find a reason for anyone to use a tiny flash drive and store 1tb info on it. It is too risky to store anything important without a backup. Versioning is also an issue and must be synced somewhere all the time. I thought we were over flash drives already. I only use flash drives for installing fresh distros on old computers. Can't find a reason to use them anymore.
I used SanDisk Cruzer Fit https://amzn.to/47OqNXT for a very long time (USB 2.0) for ESXi server installations too. Never had a problem. But this "new" design looks terrible.
Backup drive is my use-case. But that means a mountain of sustained write traffic, which means thermals are important, which is where this thing sucks. I had been using a regular external with a short cable, until I got a Framework and decided to try one of their "fits in the module slot" SSDs, which is perfect.
I still pop it out after the backup and store it elsewhere, but it's lovely that during the backup job (which can take a while if it's doing a fresh copy), it's completely unobtrusive and can't break off if I set the lappy down wrong.
Maybe they have a GoPro and want to be able to do some basic 4K video manipulation. Or want to download some warez or porn, or use it as a backup drive, etc.
1TB is enough space to be actually useful for some of this, and if you have a somewhat older laptop, it might only have 256GB or 512GB internal.
I used SanDisk Cruzer Fit https://amzn.to/47OqNXT for a very long time (USB 2.0) for ESXi server installations too. Never had a problem. But this "new" design looks terrible.