Considering you can use a lightning or usb c to 3.5mm with a built in DAC that sounds as good or better than the ones they were putting in the phones, the 3.5mm jack was pretty redundant.
Strip the phone down to the bare minimum. Obviously they just want me to buy a separate pocket PC instead, and only use the phone for emergency calls and businesses that don't have websites.
Back to the dumb-phone days.
They're both next level when compared the the capabilities of a smartphone. The camera has Zeiss lenses, has amazing optical zoom, all kinds of manual and automatic modes, and takes far better night shots than any phone. The media player's battery lasts weeks, plays every file type, and has actual hardware playback buttons and a volume knob. Oh, and it drives all kinds of nice headphones perfectly well.
And neither of these devices interrupts me with notifications or demands any amount of my attention.
I don't think I'll get another smartphone until I absolutely have no choice. It's better for my mental health anyway to not have some magic device that I rely on for everything and I can't stop pulling out of my pocket whenever my brain needs stimulation.
Not to take away from your valid experience but my phone doesn't interrupt me with notifications because I turned off everything I am not 100% bothered about (which leaves just a couple of messengers, phone calls, and bank transaction notifications) and all those are silenced 2000-0800 (or during workouts.)
Dumb phones had headphone jacks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA
So I call BS on space constrains, I call BS on waterproofing (waterproofed phones with 3.5mm jack exist). Conveniently, when Apple released iPhone 7, they also released 1st gen AirPods :-)
Then stop trying to make paper thin personal devices.
I think the industry is hostage of some "visionaries" thinking hey will eventually make movie-like holo devices with no need for electronics, while the reality of engineering is much more complex and laden with trade-offs.
The vast majority of wired earbuds are so awful they are almost a crime. Passive ones have no cancellation and very few have passive isolation. Even moderate background noise makes them unusable without dangerous sound levels.
Phone earbuds are mostly used on the go. Having a cable is way too much of an inconvenience in the age where Bluetooth exists.
Especially if it reduces the waterproofing or increases cost to add the jack.
It came with a USB-C->headphone dongle and then I discovered that USB->headphone dongles were cheap, so I bought one for each of the headphones I used regularly, and it was really not a big deal.
But now I've switched almost fully to bluetooth headphones, except for my old expensive Etymotics that I use on airplanes since they are small and easy to pack, and the in-ear style is great at blocking noise.
I'll never get another phone without a headphone jack after that
I have noticed that the main reason my phone screen breaks is due to headphone wires though. It'd be great to have a magnetic equivalent to the wired headphone
Makes the argument that the headphone jack was removed for lock-in reasons pretty weak when the replacement will probably start coming with your produce in a couple of years. There is certainly no lack of Bluetooth headphones you can buy, even if they have all of the flaws above. The lock-in is not the problem.
One of the biggest usecases for the 2.5mm jack was the square cc readers. Guess what has to be MFi certified now?
And then Apple removed Bluetooth Explorer from Xcode 12, meaning I have no real way to even diagnose that on the newest macOS releases.
The only thing you can do is use apps like IINA which have delay features to allow you to account for the latency (I needed to use sound delay recently when watching a movie that fell off the back of a truck, even with Airpods).
The future might be brighter, with Apple seemingly designing its own bespoke wireless sound standard to support uncompressed and latency-free headphones.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/what-is-apple-w1-bluetooth-...
Lossless 96khz/24bit one? It can't do that without microphone either.
3.5mm has one purpose, but you have no control over what is using that audio device. Less control = Less $$$ to be made. NOBODY bought Apple earphones after-market before AirPods were a thing, and even though the iPad has a USB C, most people are buying apple peripherals due to locks.
No difference between having an internal 3.5mm jack and one connected via USB.
And regardless of the numbers, I also wonder at what rate people are actively switching to Bluetooth because they want to vs. because that's what their preferred phone line is forcing them into.
The average user does not care at all. HN has a tendency to attribute everything to some global conspiracy from the elite’s to make you use technology their way. It’s inconceivable that most people just don’t care about flac quality audio or having to charge their AirPods once a week.