Yet you still bought the phone. What message does this send to Apple?

That the missing headphone jack, while unfortunate, was outweighed by other merits of the phone?

Unfortunately the "vote with $" is very imprecise.

With respect to the headphone jack, a purchase of the phone could be anywhere from "I enthusiastically agree" to "I disagree strongly enough that it almost prevented my purchase" or even "I thought it would be OK, but realized after purchase that I will not buy another phone without a headphone jack."

"Voting with your wallet" is such an imprecise message that I wish people would stop bringing it up. It doesn't work. Customers choose out of the available options, so the real choice is with those who decide what options are available.

In theory if there's a choice missing that consumers would prefer, some other company will step in and fill the void knowing customers will prefer their new offering.

In theory, yes. And it works for the easy things. But one does not simply walk into expensive electronics sector. Between capital requirements for product development and for marketing, it's really hard to make a viable product. People do try - there have been some bottom-up efforts for creating smartphones with features missing from the mainstream (ranging from security to customizability to openness), but they mostly failed.

What I'm saying is - voting with your wallet works for products where it's easy for a random entrepreneur to design a release a new, unique model focusing on unmet market needs. But smartphones are not such a product. Customers always choose out of available options, the difference is in how easy is for the market to iterate on different variants for different market subsegments.

Any conclusion after that? :)

I wish there was a viable alternative. Moving to Android after years and years of purchasing apps and setting my digital life up around apple's ecosystem makes that a nonstarter. It's platform lock-in.

And, I'm not about to stall at a particular model, since I know quite well that the headphone jack isn't likely to come back.

I've switched after 4S [1]. Yes, the lack of bought apps and general apps selection (3 years ago) was pretty disappointing. But I bought a few apps and games, navigation, set up office, video and music as subscriptions and it is working pretty fine. The point is - I've invested like 50$ to 100$ unreturnable overhead costs into Android to completely fill all my needs and and I have a backup iOS account filled with apps for a time when I want to switch back. Also it works on my tablet for now. Basically you can switch for cheap and then return a year or more after if you wish. Also consider that Android flagships cost 50%-75% of iPhone, (Sammy and Sony about the same).

[1] Battery life of new iPhones is not enough for me now and iOS can't function in low-tech, no internet environment where you need to share files and do other "geek" stuff suddenly and without PCs of any kind.

This is how I feel about the USB C dongles too. I forgot the a adapter at the office the other day and couldn't effectively work from home because of that. It's just a bad experience.

I feel your pain here, but at least USB C is on the way to becoming the new standard. Sure, nobody likes a dongle, but it's been a while since someone did a facepalm because they can't use their keyboard since they left their USB to PS/2 converter at home.

The transition is irritating, but eventually you buy a new compatible peripheral (or you leave the dongle permanently attached) and life is good again.

The unforgivable thing about what Apple has done is insist on keeping that proprietary "Lightning" port around. It was a better design than anything else when it debuted (I've thrown away more broken micro USB cables than I can remember), but now it's just a sad shadow of USB C and it needs to go.

When they killed the headphone jack, they had an opportunity to divert everyone's attention away from that loss by sticking a USB C port on the bottom. Instead of people bemoaning the loss of the perfectly good 3.5mm audio jack, they could have been talking about the exciting possibility of a fully-functional USB C / thunderbolt port, and with a "USB C everywhere" approach across all their devices, they might have actually deserved to call themselves brave(ish).

I might have forgiven them if they had gone USB C.

But they launched the 7 without a jack and the latest MacBooks without USB A so their latest phone couldn't connect to the latest MacBook without a single.

I know - lightning to USB A makes sense for legacy laptops but still. It was a bizarre decision, one that I doubt Jobs would have made.

> at an airport kiosk Here's your problem.

If you're going to be so salty, why did you buy it?

Probably for the same reason I bought a MacBook Pro with the stupid USB-C ports and no F-keys: there is no alternative.

Are you serious? How about just leaving this user hostile ecosystem instead?

Again, there is no alternative. I need a Mac for iOS development. I also do Android development and I know enough details about how the sausage is made that I don't want to use an Android phone as my daily driver.

So not only do you buy hardware for this toxic ecosystem, but you directly contribute to its success, and still complain about it. Nice.

Android is fine. At least the sausage recipe is available, iOS is a black box that's probably just about as gross inside. You can choose to use technologies that don't disrespect you as a user and a consumer.

iOS is not a toxic ecosystem, I love the OS they also have far superior hardware. Sure, lacking a headphone jack is annoying, but I can live with that. I can't live with Android phones using inferior CPU's and GPU's. I also wouldn't want to use Google's horribly over-engineered OS.

Why does your phone need a powerful CPU or GPU? What exactly are you doing with it that demands that?

Without going into specifics, I work on some mobile software that does heavy image processing of the live camera feed.

Getting a decent frame rate on shitty Android hardware (even the so-called high-end devices) is quite a challenge. iPhones are so much faster it's not even funny.

Well, if you approach with that attitude of course you sentence yourself to a life of regret.

Millions of people found alternatives.

> Millions of people found alternatives.

Millions of people do iOS development on a non-Apple laptop that doesn't suck ?

I rent a machine from the cloud so I have everything available for $50 a month

Last time I checked there are lots of other computers on sale.

Last time I checked none of them ran macOS, which I need to do my job as an iOS developer.

Faire enough, I was assuming the tipical HN user that only sees macOS as a pretty UNIX.

In that case I do share your pain, only in my case it is related to their GPUs.

I don't even mind the touchbar and the USB-C ports, but I wanted them in addition to the existing ports/keys, not instead of.

4 ports is just not enough.

Linux is a nice alternative, and has a much more pleasant userland than macOS. You have nothing to lose but your chains!

You don't need an iPhone, there are thousands of alternatives you could have bought.

Android is far, far worse. I'm actually an Android developer by profession and I use Android phones all day, I wouldn't want to use an Android device as my personal phone in it's current state.

Platform lock-in.

I read this as "It's ridiculous, I just bought a Tesla and i can't even fill it with Diesel anymore."

in other words, innovation = having to dump old "features".

change =/= innovation