One of the most infuriating excuses I ever heard was from Fairphone, who decided not to add a headphone jack to their newest model, despite having been told by their userbase to add it back in.
If you don't know, Fairphone is a company that is centered around repairability. They also use recycled materials whenever possible, and less unethical virgin materials when they can't use recycled. Their phones are modular, so if there's a problem, you can just replace the part yourself instead of throwing out the whole phone. They are also designed to be moisture resistant and generally robust - I bought mine in 2020 and the only parts I've had to buy so far were new batteries.
Six years ago, my model (Fairphone 3) was already old and decidedly mid-range; now, it's definitely low-range and has some problems that can't be fixed by replacing parts. So out of curiosity, I decided to poke at the newest model (6) to see if a) I could afford it (I can't), and b) they had added the headphone jack back in after removing it from the 5 and dealing with the backlash (they hadn't).
My friends, when I tell you what a crock of shit their excuse was.
What it boiled down to was 'we're trying to be competitive with other smartphone brands and because the jack makes the phone a little thicker, we had to leave it out.'
Now, here's the thing. Their phones do have to be a little bigger than average, because they're modular; they use screws rather than glue and have be easy to remove, because otherwise our big meaty human fingers would damage the replacement parts. Adding a jack (that would also need to be modular) would, indeed, make the phone a few millimeters bigger.
But it doesn't fucking matter, because regardless of the phone's size, it's not going to be competitive with other smartphone brands! It's a Fairphone, for fuck's sake! The people buying iphones aren't doing so because of the quality of the thing, they're doing it either because apple products are a status symbol or because it's too much mental energy to switch to a different OS. The people buying more mid-range brands, like huawei, are mostly doing so because those phones are comparatively cheaper than apple or samsung... or fairphone. The people buying fairphones are doing so because they care about repairability, the environment, and worker health and safety. They (we) are willing to buy a mediocre phone at a premium pricepoint (600 euros for the newest model) because that's what those values are worth to us.
And it just grinds my fucking gears so much that this company -- a company built on the right to repair and fighting against planned obsolescence -- would be so far up their own ass chasing a pipe dream that they would listen to the only people buying their products complaining and say 'yeah, we hear you... but we're trying to appeal to a different market so fuck you guys.' And then decide to build phones that require additional consumption in order to use them fully.
This turned into a rant about fairphone, but I think my point is that the whole 'no more headphone jacks' thing is so unbelievable insidious that it's a genuine propaganda problem. Even companies that should be standing their ground against more technological waste have bought into the idea that it's favorable or, at the very least, no big deal.
