Today you can more or less buy an SD card and stick it in something and have it work. I am glad we eventually won this war.
The real egregious one was the PS Vitas memory cards. Good god were those ever a scam
The Sony of today is vastly less awful about this nonsense. PlayStation games are still copy-protected but that's just how that whole industry runs. I'm glad they started being mostly pro-consumer somewhere along the way.
Sony made a Memory Stick adapter like this, too. I imagined that one day someone could back up their computer to a Memory Stick.
(Alas, still a dream, as the Transcend JetDrive Lites for MacBook Pros are as unreliable as they are slow. Never put data on a JetDrive Lite that you want to last more than a couple of days because you never know when it might just suddenly stop responding for no reason.)
Even floppies were like this towards the end. You could buy media at any store, but quality of the magnetic substrate must have been very low. By the time school labs phased them out, best practice was to save your work to two or three diskettes because the deterioration was so quick.
In addition, CF uses IDE protocol and has more volume for more memory chips. Smartmedia uses a bespoke and initially proprietary format (plus two incompatible logic levels) and its thinness meant the spec only describes one and two chip variants.
But they seem to work fine when I buy them from ebay and use them in old electronics.
https://affon.narod.ru/CARDS/elec10ei.pdf
Because 5v Smartmedia cards are rare and I have a Roland MC505 that can use them, I am wondering if it is possible to create a hardware emulator using an Arduino.
Smart(sic)Media is just a NAND flash interface really.
Looking at the spec, it seems doable, but it is way out of my wheelhouse (assuming I even have a wheelhouse).
With CompactFlash and MMC (and SD) if they physically fit they generally worked.
Apples software only run on their own hardware and their hardware only runs their own software. It is a huge split in the ecosystem and any advance Apple has makes future of computing more bleak and proprietary and void of choice.
Their constant battles with right to repair alone is pathetic in its own right. And they had to literally be forced to give up their lightning connector, because their walled garden of accessories was just too profitable. Not sure how one can view that differently than what Sony did.
Only difference is that Apple has a borderline monopoly, which of course makes it immeasurably worse. Sony lost because of competition.
I'm not arguing against what you're saying, but I think it's orthogonal.