[jhugo]

It's almost like features like card slots in smartphones are not particularly important to the mass market!

The discussion on HN when headphone jacks come up is always quite amusing. The market has demonstrated now for years that removing headphone jacks from phones is a perfectly reasonable decision for a manufacturer to make. I wonder how much longer HN commenters will keep insisting that it's a terrible mistake.

[jmprspret]

> It's almost like features like card slots in smartphones are not particularly important to the mass market!

No shit most users don't care about this. If they did phones would still have sdcard slots. There is _A_ market for devices with sdcard slots however. It's not the biggest one but it's sizable for sure.

[8note]

it could easily be the biggest one, but still lose because phones without the slots are more profitable because they have apple branding

[kalleboo]

It could still lose with Apple branding - we heard people online complain for years about how phones are too big, Apple finally released an iPhone Mini and by all accounts it's not selling well and will not be renewed.

[shusaku]

If HN was in charge your smart phone would have a floppy disk drive

[aunty_helen]

And a physical keypad

[8note]

Customers don't necessarily have a choice in the matter, they'll buy what's available because it's a life requirement. This is really the kind of thing that needs government clamp down

[jhugo]

There are a wide variety of phones available with and without headphone jacks. There's no reason the government needs to intervene. The ones without headphone jacks are, as far as I can tell, much more popular. I don't really consider it when selecting a phone, since I don't care one way or the other (I haven't used the jack in years, but it doesn't hurt me if the phone has it), but most of the phone I've owned recently haven't had one.

In these respects, to me, it feels similar to PS/2 ports, floppy drives, optical disk drives, USB-A ports, or any other number of previously-useful things that many computers no longer have. A bunch of people get upset when you remove any feature, no matter what, while the majority don't care very much, and after a short while it's completely normal to not have the legacy feature.