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Comment by jm4 | Hacker News Reader

I couldn’t care less about those features. I’ve never met anyone who says they would buy a new iPhone if only it had those features.

The problem is the iPhone has been so good for a few iterations now. There is absolutely no reason to buy a new one unless you are gaming. I can’t tell the difference between the 7, the X or the XS in terms of day to day capability.

It used to be there was a good reason to upgrade every year. Now you can easily go 2-3 years without missing much.

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I dumped my iPhone 7 this year for an Android. I would have upgraded if they still had headphone jacks. Bluetooth headphones are garbage: I have enough things to charge and I wear my headphones pretty much every waking hour of my life. Any contemporary android phone with a headphone jack seemed like a better value proposition than a current iPhone.

I value good headphones too. Which is why I simply leave the small lightning-to-jack-adapter attached to them. A minor inconvenience that surely won't make me swith from an otherwise fantastic phone and platform. And of course the headphone jack is on its way out in Android land as well.

IMO you are on point. As an X user I couldn't care less about the XS or XS Max (even though I do want a bigger screen since I read a lot) since they are small and iterative upgrades but people I know who switched from 6S / 7 to XS are very happy with their choice.

Wait till you try using your fancy Airbuds on an airplane or on a crowded street. They's simply not enough wireless bandwidth available for more than a dozen people in a small area to be using them

Never had that problem. I'm certainly not going to preemptively switch from iPhone to Android - which has a laundry list of its own problems far larger than the lack of a headphone jack - in order to avoid an issue that may or may not occur with a function that isn't one of my primary use cases in the first place.

I have a pair of headphones I like that can connect via bluetooth or wire. I have a headphone dongle that works even if it is a minor inconvenience. I also have the cheap lightning headphones that came with the phone.

Basically, the headphone jack issue has been mitigated to the point where it's simply not an issue for a lot of people. Maybe it costs Apple a sale here and there. I would be willing to bet a significant number of buyers don't realize it's missing and an even larger number don't care enough to make an issue out of it.

The headphone jack issue is old news anyway. It's been multiple iterations that haven't had it and some of them sold well. It has absolutely no bearing on sales of current models.

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