Does anyone truly believe they removed the headphone jack for any reason other than to sell more dongles and more wireless headphones?
There's lots of reasons to believe that removing the jack is NOT meant to drive accessory revenue:
1. They included the dongles in the box for years, and still sell them at $9.
2. They include compatible headphones in every box.
3. iPhones are compatible with all wireless headphones.
Now I have a pair of airpods and I love them. The improvement is marginal, but it's an improvement that touches many aspects of my life (commuting, cooking, sleeping, working). I love, love, love them.
> Does anyone truly believe they removed the headphone jack for any reason other than to sell more dongles and more wireless headphones?
I think Apple believes that wireless headphones are the future and they decided to prove that it can be done right. IMO they succeeded with airpods.
Removing the headphone jack was a forcing function. It's only an issue if you don't buy into the Apple ecosystem. Obviously that's a risk, but it's a risk that Apple has taken before.
Assuming it's some kind of cockameme plan to sell more dongles doesn't really fit the profile of Apple as a company, IMO.
If you tried other Bluetooth headphones than the Airpods now, you would also notice the better battery life. My work headphones (over-ear) only need to be charged on the weekend after over 40h of use and they are very light, too.
Ditching the only analogue sound connector was without question a bad idea though.
It's entirely conceivable, based on my experience, that removal of the headphone jack is attributable to ignorance and not to malice.
I am temporarily annoyed with the audio jack removal, but I get it. It’s a “burn the boats” type strategy of pushing for the wireless, portless future.
I suspect the two most significant reasons were to reduce manufacturing cost/complexity and to improve reliability (one less physical port to get dirty and break, one less entry point for water damage).
Headphone jacks take up quite a bit of space that can be used to improve battery life.
Apple's success depends on the iPhone. Without it their services businesses become useless, their retail presence becomes an albatross, peripheral devices like Apple Watch, AppleTV start to look a lot less useful and forget about future growth in AR/VR. And so the idea that Apple would compromise all of that just to make a comparatively tiny hundred million or so is just crazy. And Tim Cook is anything but crazy.
The fact is that the market is moving towards wireless for everything. Audio included. And 99.999% of the world aren't audiophiles who can tell the difference (or even care if they can) between BT and non BT audio. So why waste valuable phone space for an insignificant number of people when you can improve battery life by say 5% ?
Most companies try to leverage their market position in this way. To not do it would be unusual.
Still, several of the older people in my life have gotten them, and they were a huge improvement for those people.
Now if you were talking purely about the connector itself. Whatever wireless technology was forced upon the population is not actually capable of replacing a wired connection.
* Bluetooth doesn't work in crowded environments. * Standard Bluetooth sound quality is inferior without proprietary extensions to the protocol. * Latency between device and headphone can be massive (500ms to 100ms), * You have to recharge it. * Devices have to be paired and sometimes "unpair" for no reason.
Bluetooth just sucks for audio. I'm sure there are hundreds of wireless technologies that are better than bluetooth, otherwise these proprietary extensions wouldn't exist.
You can in theory get <32ms latency with a special obscure subvariant of a proprietary standard of bluetooth (aka aptX LL) that no one has ever heard of for which you need a certain dongle and your headphone must support it. (hint your phone and headphones don't support it)
The question was:
>Does anyone truly believe they removed the headphone jack for any reason other than to sell more dongles and more wireless headphones?
There are attributes to wireless beyond it being more expensive. Wireless isn't some gimmik to increase revenue. It genuinely is better in some ways and an acceptable complete replacement. If you're sold on wireless you don't need a headphone jack.
And worse is some ways. It is not absolutely better; and, for plenty of people, not "an acceptable complete replacement".
Your claim in your original comment ("Anyone who has felt a tug at their head from headphones getting snagged by something accidently[sic] is quickly sold to the merits of wireless.") is also far from convincing that wireless is "an acceptable complete replacement", or even better than wired in more than one minor way.
> If you're sold on wireless you don't need a headphone jack.
In which case, I repeat, you keep using wireless. A headphone jack does not hurt those who want to use wireless. Removing the jack actively denies them a feature, while doing little for those who want to use wireless. Not to mention, removing the jack does not sell people on wireless, it forces them to choose between a dongle and wireless; or worse, a different platform.