There is very little space for anything because of the insistence on making the phone thin. Without the thinness fetish there'd be plenty of space without sacrificing the jack. Add even 1mm, and e.g. the area covered by a battery with the same capacity is drastically reduced. Just look at some older (thicker) phone batteries for comparison to the pancake batteries in newer phones.
> Also, removable batteries and the audio jack get in the way of dust/water proofing.
The same method used to dust-proof/water proof the USB apply exactly as much to the jack. And they also apply just as well for the battery compartment - nobody cares about making the battery compartment dust proof, after all.
I can say water proofing is never something I've looked for in any phone beyond being able to handle the occasional splash. Even then, if you look at the inside of devices with removable batteries vs. devices where the batteries are not intended to be, the main difference is that in the former there is usually an inner shell covering the rest of the components - overall the internals of the phone tends to be better protected. If you want to water-proof that inner compartment, then worst case you get shorts. Again, this is about thinness and some extent cost-custting - dust proofing and water proofing is a total canard since you still have wires crossing the boundary, and two more sets is not going to make a major difference.
> You may think shrinkage is pointless, but that's clearly not what the market or the top designers think.
We don't know what the market thinks, because there are no high end devices that sacrifice thinness for e.g. battery capacity as none of the big brands dare to even try to be different.
I've just gotten a Umi phone that uses a 4000 mAh battery (vs. more typically 2400-2600 for most of the mid-range MTK based phones) and it's fantastic to have that extra battery capacity, but it's a Chinese phone with little presence in Europe/US.
Give it a few more years and we may see if any of the smaller brands manage to grow based on their larger battery capacity.
There are a few others - you can get a decent quality Android phone with 6000 mAh, and one with 10,000 mAh. The downside is that the latter was built with the assumption that anyone wanting that much care more about battery lifetime than anything else, and so it sacrifices the screen quality for a lower power one too, and makes various other sacrifices.
> Why do you want a giant, useless, 100+ year old analog port on your 2017 device? I don't. Its ugly.
I found this hysterical after your appeal to the authority of "the market or the top designers". Outside of Apple, pretty much only HTC have taken that leap. The vast majority of "the market or the top designers" so far still insist on keeping the headphone plug. Maybe that will change, but I note that on my commute now, pretty much everyone I see with a new iPhone also drag along ugly adapters so they can use their old headphones.