[mikepurvis]

The cost of a headphone jack at scale is a few cents. I'm pretty sure it's less about the cost and more about size/thickness, with moisture sealing as possibly a secondary concern.

If you say that the battery is a little bigger because the internals of the phone didn't need to accommodate a headphone jack, does that make you feel any better? How often do you use not-your-regular-headphones (which would just have dongle on them permanently) vs using the battery down to the final 10%?

[magduf]

We've had waterproof phones with headphone jacks for ages, so that's not an issue unless you're incompetent.

I've never seen a phone where the battery extended down to near the headphone jack.

If I put a dongle permanently on my headphones, how do I use them on another device that has a standard 3.5mm jack?

Thickness is only an issue for Apple fans. No one else actually cares if a device is 0.2mm thicker.

[mikepurvis]

I mean, it's not like it's empty space in there. Looking at the insides of an iPhone X, it's clear that something would have to give to make room for a new and quite sizeable connector: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+X+Teardown/98975#s182...

In any case, I fundamentally agree that it's not worth the tradeoff; I use an iPhone 5S and find it perfectly serviceable (and charmingly small and light). But some people do value those things, and/or only use wireless headphones or headphones with a single device.

[Rebelgecko]

Supposedly, previous iPhones had a lot of empty space near where the headphone jack would have been. Enough space for this guy[1] to drill a hole and install Apple's DAC in it.

[1]:https://strangeparts.com/bringing-back-the-iphone-headphone-...

[mikepurvis]

Ha, I can only assume that on account of the obvious controversy, this was done by the engineers so they'd have an option to reverse course if the executives had a last-second change of heart. Once it was clear they really did have that space to work with, they filled it up with stuff.

[Larrikin]

Its infuriating to me that Sony led the way with high end waterproof phones. They had a relatively stock Android experience and pretty much perfected the water proof phone with an open headphone jack.

Then Apple came out with a phone without a headphone jack and they just dropped the head phone jack from all of their worthwhile phones. I was a regular Sony buyer for years because of them being waterproof, but reluctantly had to switch last year to Samsung when my Sony phone was stolen.

[mackrevinack]

same. was mainly buying sony phones for the last few years but the xz1 compact was the last one. they just lost the plot after that. now I've moved to Samsung and the s10e which is too big for my liking but it's the only phone around today that ticks all the boxes I want

[magduf]

The Samsung Galaxy S5 was waterproof too, and had a headphone jack.