Well batteries and headphone jacks seem pretty different. You can add a dongle for like $10. Having Apple replace your battery is prob 10x that.

I do 1/2 agree about the AirPods thing but, I’m not convinced the internal space isn’t one of the primary reasons

Again, my point 1. was the space the headphone jack takes up.

Apple is going as far as to remove the sim-card slot in iPhones lol

Ironically my fav lossless streaming service on Android is Apple Music. Amazon Music HD is also pretty good.

Not a fan of Tidal’s UI and recommendations, and I hate that I can’t see album covers when scrolling through a playlist. Haven’t tried Deezer cause Canada

Quake Champions, it’s the best and most underrated shooter game I know of

I think it’s mostly gaining market share cause Steam Deck

Haha definitely possible. Maybe compare side by side and see if you can learn to appreciate it a bit if you’re interested. It’s kinda nice to be able to tbh

1. As people have mentioned, it’s not about saving $, it’s about saving space inside the device which is highly valuable

2. Lots of dongles are quite high quality. Apples even sounds good, and Moondrop makes a higher-end audiophile one that’s better than basically any built-in jack. There’s a pretty big market for good USB C dongles (less so for Lightning).

3. if you care a lot about audio quality, you might know that the companies always tried to save $$ but using pretty mediocre DAC’s internally

The Apple one isn’t very durable but the sound quality is just as good as built-in jacks were. Not as much selection for Lightning :/

USB C dongles have potential to be higher quality than your built in-jack if quality is the main concern