I'm back to statistical significant data, and why it is important to have good data scientists in the loop. The idea is precisely to ask the questions you are asking. Would have been different if…? Then try to control for other variables in order to avoid the induction error. How do you know they didn't do this with their data?

That's why I mention other phone models. There are Sony phones with and without jacks. There are Asus phones with and without jacks. How did they perform compared to each other? How far away is that difference from what could be expected from randomness? How does that difference compare when the other factors are compensated for? How do they compare with other phones?

I assume they did their homework, and also want to sell more earbuds. They wouldn't push for earbuds and wireless if headphone jacks were market drivers. It would be cheaper to install a headphone jack rather than updating the BT board? Maybe, I don't know. But if other factors have a significant impact on sales while the jack doesn't. Then they have their decision made for them. Market research is not about being right all the time, it is not magic, it is about reducing uncertainty and risk in making decisions. Precisely because there are other phone makers with a headphone jack that do worse than the Fairphone is base enough to understand why they feel safe keeping that feature out. It doesn't add sales and its absence doesn't reduce them significantly either. So they know they are free to keep going even if some vocal critics will be pissed, the actual buyers couldn't care any less.

I can't help but detect some passive hostility in your response.

Phone thickness is far from the only consideration. But Ok, you are right. There was space on the iPhone 7. That was also the first water resistant phone. Does this guy phone's is still IP67 compliant after all the surgery he made. And that was in 2016, when IP67 headphone jacks didn't exist. Now the phone standard is IP68. There were no IP68 compliant headphone jacks until recently, I think the ASUS Zenfone 12 is the first one.

I think companies won't bring the headphone jack (a shame, really). But the writing is in the wall, it went away, and phones still sold like hotcakes. While those with headphone jacks aren't being bought anywhere near the same volume. So the signal is very clear, the effort to add a headphone jack — however little it may be — is not financially worth it. It is a feature that doesn't drive sales. Period.

Is it my fault when having the things in the first place is just a hacky workaround driven by corporate greed?

Can you show an example of one from 3 years ago?

Because my experience was that most ROMs were based on AOSP/ LineageOS , which supports very few Samsung phones, and no flagships since the 2018 S10.

And even of those, many didn't support IMS/VoLTE/VoWiFi which made them useless in any geos that didn't have 3G fallback for voice. You can't make or receive phone calls.

Yes, it is your fault for losing or breaking your own property. Take some responsibility. When I moved to a phone without a headphone jack while driving a car that I plug my phone in via headphone jack, I simply kept the adapter plugged in to the cable in the car. It never broke. It never got lost. It stayed there until I got a Bluetooth head unit.

I’ve still got it in a drawer ready for if I ever needed it again, but since I’m not an audiophile with a $10k+ sound system listening to FLACs from my phone I don’t need it.

You know you’ve got not argument when you have to compare a $700 dollar phone to a $5 dongle for your argument to even make sense.

Oh, so I should buy $100 dongles then? lol Everyone's argument about the dongles is that they're super cheap, that's why I made the comparison.

In those phones the DAC is used primarily for phone calls.

Oh really? And how exactly do you think that the phone is generating the audio that comes through its speaker when you're doing anything else? Like listening to music, videos, etc? Does your phone really not make a single sound apart from the audio in phone calls?

I wasn’t talking about some cheap $5 dongle, I specifically said quality headphones

headphone =/= dongle

The dongle is what you connect TO the headphone. Regardless, be more specific then. What's the one you recommend? Should I buy $50 dongles then and keep them attached to my headphones? Since I use 4/5 of them does that mean that it's ok in your opinion that I now need to spend $250 in dongles instead of just having a tiny, cheap, reliable jack on my $700 phone?

How much more specific do I need to be when I explicitly say "USB-C headphones"? What do you think USB-C stands for?

You could've done a single web search yo find that you can buy wired headphones that go straight into the USB-C port.No dongle required. But you're too busy foaming from the mouth like a rabid dog to even understand what I said.

Bullshit

Or there wasn't good enough engineering to begin with to achieve usb 3 speeds. Seems like they should have got it right before using it as a reason to cripple the thing further.