You keep using that word, fiasco. I don't think it means what you think it means. It doesn't mean "hoopla". It means "disaster/failure".
With the phones selling more than any model before them, I'd hardly call that decision a fiasco for Apple.
People have a natural resistance to change, 20 years ago my city saw major protests when it wanted to close a road and open up to the river underneath it. It would be a colossal failure, naturally it wasn’t and today no one can imagine the town without the nice nature stuff.
I think the headphone jacks are in that category. They weren’t really great, and now that they are gone, only niches really miss them.
The AirPods are such a nice product. I mean, Apple basically made Bluetooth not suck. They are locked to the Apple ecosystem, but they connect seamlessly across your devices, and Apple has frankly once again embarrassed the rest of the tech sector by making age old technology actually useable for people who don’t want to fiddle around.
Now, if removing the headphone jack had been a failure, it would probably have come back, and everyone else, the one-plus included, probably wouldn’t be removing it.
I’m not for or against it by the way. The AirPods would’ve worked with the headphone jack. I just think calling it a failure or a fiasco is silly when it’s so obviously working out great.
The iPhone rarely was the top selling phone and never had the majority of the market (though it was of course a single company against 4-5 other companies anyway).
It was the phone that caught most of the top end (pricy) market and almost all of the profits, and it remains that.
That said, not sure what's this "isn't the top selling phone any more" is supposed to mean. The headphone-jack-less iPhone X killed it in the market:
https://www.cnet.com/news/iphone-x-was-best-selling-smartpho...
That report was the moment I knew Apple had lost their position as the leader in the market, because they had to take specific dates in time to say they were best-selling...as opposed to a few years ago, when they were best selling all year long in a runaway.
Besides, not even sure what you're going about. Apple never sold the most phones.
If anything it's the opposite: they're catching up to Samsung:
https://www.statista.com/chart/7941/apple-vs-samsung-smartph...
https://www.cnet.com/news/iphone-x-was-best-selling-smartpho...