> I hated Flash but also thought it was unacceptable for Apple to unnecessarily ban it
Well, let’s be fair, banning it is one thing, but Adobe also never produced a version of Flash than run acceptably on mobiles, didn’t chew the CPU and battery up, there’s no real way to have made the desktop-optimised experience of most Flash games work well on an iPhone or even an iPad due to the lack of a pointer, and Adobe quickly and quietly canned it anyway.
You can’t really ban what never really existed, not to the standard that people expected, nor the high bar that Apple set for mobile software.
> [...] gettigng rid of a physical port for audio seems premature
That word ‘premature’ is an interesting choice, but really, there’s never any good or easy time to deprecate something universal upon which people rely. Either you wait until the usage levels are low enough that nobody will miss it, which would never happen for the headphone jack, or you bite the bullet and just get rid of it, endure the few years of naysaying, and then after a while nobody remembers what the complaint was about.
I can think of two analogies, one a success, one a failure. The success would be when Apple dropped the floppy disk drive on the original iMacs in favour of networked storage, rewritable CDs and DVDS, early USB storage, and USB floppy disk drives. That was a significant; cotributor to accelerating the uptake of USB, effectively mandating that peripheral companies started making high-quality, reliable, and accessible USB devices for the general public — many of whom still didn’t come into contact with USB for another few years, parallel and PS/2 ports remaining the norm on PCs for years. But eventually, and rather quickly, the floppy disk was relegated to history. The only people who miss it are the ones doing clean-outs of their attics, finding old copies of DOS games that are easier to download off the web than source a floppy drive.
Then on the not-so-successful side, there’s Windows 8. There was Microsoft’s first real attempt to ditch some of the legacy stuff, ride the wave of mobile and tablet design with the Metro frameworks, and a rethink of what Windows is and could become in future. And of course, customers hated it; sales were low, Windows 7 remained the preferred operating system, and other projects like Windows RT were lambasted for apparently promising one thing but turning out to be another (which is why, I’m sure, Apple made sure to not officially refer to iPhone OS [as it was] as “Mac OS X” after the iPhone’s launch; iOS may share many technologies with macOS but it isn’t macOS, and customers don’t seem to show any confusion about this as opposed to the Microsoft-ian strategy of naming pretty much everything Windows, but I digress).
So Microsoft’s solution is to dial things back, ease off on what made Windows 10 unpopular, bring back some of what people liked about Windows 7, and confusingly offer something in between the legacy that they wanted to get rid of and the future that they no longer seem to believe in. Half the operating system is the new, fancy Metro stuff; the other half is the old, staid, stuff-from-the-past-but-somehow-back-again.
Now looking at Apple’s story with the headphone jack, it seems to me that although people miss it, need it, want it back, and will probably do so for a lot longer than people clamoured to have floppy disk drives back, Apple’s profits and sales don’t seem to indicate a Windows 8 scenario of having to go back on their long-term plan. Far from it, the story of the removal of the headphone jack shares a lot more DNA with the story of the demise of the floppy disk drive than it does with the story of how Windows 8’s successor was, eventually, Windows 7-with-Metro-apps.