Get a Galaxy Xcover 6 Pro. They have removable batteries, a 3.5mm audio jack, SD card slot, and a SIM card slot. I’ve had mine for about 3 years now it’s a big reliable brick of a phone that I hope might last at least another 3 years or more. The only downside is that it’s only compatible with Android (that I know of).

Engineering definitely lets you you enjoy both options simultaneously. I’ve dealt with liquid nitrogen leaks, a near miss with an icicle falling on me, battery fires, and seen accidental finger sticks with used medical devices. Working with spreadsheets, test reports, and programming scripts in a noisy open concept office is usually the better experience. Usually.

They’ll become useless plastic when the eShop servers inevitably shut down. They have less functional longevity than an NES cartridge.

They may be an entry point for water and dust yet my current 3.5mm jack equipped Xcover 6 Pro is IP68 rated at 1.5m of water for 35 minutes according to GSMArena. I’m not exactly looking to go snorkeling with my phone any time soon either so it’s not like it’ll be a concern for anyone in the vast majority of use cases. I’ve had water splash on it occasionally over the years and it never caused any harm either.

I can’t really talk about what the PCB footprint of a 3.5mm jack is but if it’s something that already comfortably existed on most previous phones along with micro SD and Sim card holders until very recently then I doubt it actually matters. Keep in mind phone manufacturers are incentivized to hold back on as many features as possible if it means they can cut down on BOM costs and make an additional sale through apps or accessories down the line.

I see it as a question of convenience, economics, and waste. It’s so easy to plug and play a jack without worrying about your headphones’ charge level or pairing them. No aux ports also means you have to pay a USB C adapter tax for one that may eventually break or get lost and it forcing you to pick between quietly listening to your audio and charging your phone. I’ve personally saved about $60 USD a year on average by not having to swap out dead Bluetooth headphones as well.

I get it if you like the convenience but it really wouldn’t kill these phone manufacturers to keep such a useful legacy component in the hopes you’d buy some additional accessories from them to fix a problem they created.

How hard is it for them to include a DAC and aux port in their phones? They’re tiny! I tried using Bluetooth headphones with the OnePlus 5 but the poor sound quality and constant need to recharge and replace due to their batteries dying every few months was exhausting. That experience was enough to drive me back to the exceptional reliability of plug and play traditional headphones with a Galaxy Xcover 6 Pro.

I don’t care how easy it is to replace the batteries in Fairphone’s new headphones. Their ethos should compel them to include a jack for those who don’t want to waste rare earth metals.

All the surveillance of a house arrest without ever having committed a crime in the first place. Fantastic.

Just wait until some cars get hacked to accelerate as fast as possible because we just had to have telemetry in them for surveillance and profit.

Some bored kid in robotics class is gonna hack a drone and spray a bunch unsuspecting classmates one day.