I don't expect it, but I truly hope the next iPhone has a headphone jack. People want airpods whether or not their phones have headphone jacks, it was insecure to take it away in the first place. Have some faith in your products.
On the plus side, I often get to pick the music in my friends' cars.
The MagSafe charger kind of solves this, since it's at least easy to pick up with the charger attached, but MagSafe chargers are more expensive than Lightning cables, and the official one has a very short cord.
In my dream world, the iPhone would have two Lightning (or USB-C) ports, but I don't expect that to ever happen.
Are you suggesting that Apple removed the jack in order to sell AirPods? Seems a bit cynical and doesn't even make sense. I think they removed it for engineering and design reasons. If you need it back there's an official adapter that costs just a few dollars.
In my mind this isn't even a conspiracy theory, it's just what you'd expect from a competent company. If nobody in the decision-making process to remove the headphone jack asked how it would affect long-term AirPod sales, then that just seems like a pretty big oversight on their part, doesn't it?
Spotify bought podcasts so it tie them to a DRM-encumbered platform with ads, Facebook bought Oculus so it could monetize the data, consoles remove disk drives in part to drive digital purchases and cut down on game reselling, iMessage is iPhone exclusive because it makes it harder to switch to Android, and Apple cares about influencing long-term consumer trends in the headphone market. I don't necessarily agree that acknowledging this stuff counts as being cynical.
This is how basically every business works. Facebook didn't merge Occulus accounts with Facebook accounts the same year that they bought the company. Epic has been outright giving away games to chip at Steam's market share, but they're not planning to do that indefinitely. They have plans about what they want the PC market to look like in the future. Companies are capable of thinking long-term. Apple is definitely capable of thinking long-term, it's a business run by very smart people.
Do you believe that the iPhone has not driven Bluetooth adoption at all? I think that would be a pretty bold claim to make. Apple has positioned the lack of a headphone jack as a signature mark of a premium phone. Other phone manufacturers have jumped on board with that consumer perception, which has driven investment into making more Bluetooth compatible devices, which in turn makes AirPods more convenient and easier to use with a wider variety of devices. Because wireless audio technology is still evolving (unlike static wired standards), Apple now has an opportunity to make a set of devices that work best with their own products, encouraging more consumer lock-in to the Apple ecosystem. This also positions Apple to differentiate their headphones from competitors in ways that would be difficult to do with an analog connection (offering seamless paring, higher bitrates, etc...).
It's not like Apple doesn't have a history with this, they have openly (proudly) removed features in order to push industries in preferred directions. See CDs over floppies, USB/Thunderbolt over CDs, HTML5 over Flash, etc... That's not a conspiracy, that's literally Apple's stated reason for those changes. And of course Apple thinks about how changes in those industries and markets will affect the products they sell. They'd be foolish not to.
What is it that makes you think that wireless headphones are different then the last 3 or 4 times that Apple has done this? This just seems like very obvious business practice to me, almost every company tries to manipulate markets and demand to some degree.
I think the fact that they sell a simple and compact adapter which restores the functionality for less than ten dollars makes me think it cannot be to sell Bluetooth headsets.
Restoring previous functionality for "less than ten dollars" would certainly fit into a nefarious scheme for selling Bluetooth headsets - those who do not want bluetooth headsets are still forced to buy something: buying a less expensive item is still buying. Self-cannibalization is not an old trope.
But they even included them in the box for several years - they didn't charge extra for them. They wouldn't do that if they were trying to force people to buy Bluetooth.
Now years later and after most people moved to Bluetooth voluntarily they're not needed and would be wasteful to include.
Apple removed a headphone jack and provided a stopgap solution in the form of a dongle that was easy to lose and that provided a noticeably worse experience than a normal jack (the inability to charge and listen at the same time).
Once consumers started to come into the Bluetooth ecosystem, Apple raised the gates behind them and stopped providing that stopgap solution. This is pretty normal. For example, if you want to change your privacy policy, make an optional change at first, and then shift it to be opt-out, and then finally make it mandatory.
When you introduce a new policy or change to your products, use the optional nature of that change to shut down complaints. Even though they're not strictly required to, at least some people will migrate (after all, some people were buying Bluetooth headphones before the removal of the jack), and you can use that as evidence to support introducing further changes that make it harder and more annoying not to migrate. Eventually, the numbers will look good enough that you can stop pretending it's a choice at all.
And how does that work out in practice? Well, Apple now controls ~70% of the totally wireless headphone market, and AirPods are arguably one of their most important product categories.
> they're not needed and would be wasteful to include
This is a level of charity towards business press releases that I just don't really know how to connect with. I don't mean this as a gotcha question or anything, but do you believe Apple when they say the reason new iPhones are shipping without chargers is to help the environment? I thought we all took it as a given that all of the companies saying stuff like this were full of crap.
It does not restore the functionality. You cannot use the wired headphones via the adapter, and simultaneously charge the phone. The adapter was sold on the tagline of 'courage' by instilling the myth that 3.5mm jacks were verboten in the ecosystem. To suggest it was an altruistic act, is absurd. It was a calculated bet, like everything else they do, e.g. iPhones have yet to feature USB-C.
Admittedly this is all FUD.