1. waste money on good adapter when jack worked fine
2. connect it to the end of my headphones and leave it there
3. remove it so I can connect same headphones to laptop
4. lose adapter
repeat
2. connect it to the end of my headphones and leave it there
3. remove it so I can connect same headphones to laptop
4. lose adapter
repeat
Doesn't your laptop have USB ports?
"Not enough people complained" is a terrible metric. Companies do anti-consumer nonsense all the time and there is no effective way for the customer to "vote with their wallets" when near enough everyone converges on the same solution.
And why did Apple do it? Don't overthink it -- it is more profitable for Apple not to put headphone jacks in their phones because then they get to sell expensive AirPods. That's it, that's the reason. There have to be millions of super frustrated iPhone users like me out there that are annoyed every single time they have to use a stupid fucking Lightning dongle just to listen to stuff with decent headphones, but Android is not an option for me and the iPhone 7 is too old to be viable, so I just clench my fists in my pockets every time I think about my garbage iPhone (and sometimes whine about it on the internet.)
Removing the headphone jack was bad, is bad, and will forever be bad. Just bring it back. Sell it in the Pro Max as a super audiophile high end DAC thing, I'll pay the $2000 or whatever you want, I don't care, just put the fucking jack back in.
You don't have to overthink, you just need to think. Why permanently graft a part to a highly space optimized device when it isn't even being used most of the time?
I got over it, you should too. It helps to try to put off the onset of grumpy old man syndrome as long as possible.
I mean, that's a valid way to view it, but I doubt it was an engineering decision first and foremost. Hanlon's razor applies: 1) Apple makes a ton of money from selling AirPods and 2) this decision was made during the Jony Ive era of "remove literally everything that is not strictly necessary just because fewer ports is more aesthetically pleasing". Under these conditions, of course they would remove the headphone jack. It's Apple doing Apple shit.
But: people used the same arguments -- less ports saves space, who needs it, etc -- to argue that the HDMI port, MagSafe, and decent keyboards would never come back. But they did, in MacBooks that were thicker than the previous generation. Sometimes you can teach old dogs new tricks.
They could have polled the market to see what it wants: release an iPhone that has a headphone jack and is slightly bigger if needed, and a slim one that doesn't have one. This will never happen, and that is my point: you or I will never know if people care, because people never had the ability to choose.