Putting the audio jack on the front is a strange design choice to me if you plan on hooking it up to wired speakers all the time. Did they run out of space to keep it in the back?
Edit: also I noticed they moved the power button to the bottom corner of the Mac Mini! (It used to be on the back as well.) This makes me think even more that they didn't want to crowd up the back too much.
Would have been nice to have audio both in the front and rear, with front audio overriding rear audio (like in most desktops), but I guess that would have been too much maximalism for apple
And to further muddy the waters, the space in the 7 chassis for the jack was mostly still available, which led to that one madlad bodging in his own headphone jack, for a one of a kind iPhone 7:
https://hackaday.com/2017/09/07/bringing-back-the-iphone7-he...
But yeah the headphone jack dropping was obviously just to get more people onboard with AirPods that launched at the same time. And you can't say it didn't work! I remember when the first images of people wearing AirPods came out and it was the laughing stock of the internet. People said it looked like you had Q-tips hanging out of your ears, or the tips of an electric toothbrush.
A few years later and they're pulling in tens of billions of dollars per year, just on AirPods sales alone. AirPods could be pulled out into its own business and it would be seen as a wildly successful tech company.
You may still need an amp for electrically incompatible (high impedance) headphones.
But yeah, anyone "serious" would go discrete for all that stuff regardless. I guess this also lets Apple sidestep a bunch of fuss around non-stereo use-cases, for people who want quadraphonic or 5.1 at their workstation.
i'd guess.
if you use headphones all the time, you'd plug them into the back, or the monitor etc.