Not everyone lives in your world.

> Why should a tech company design for old tech?

a) Apple isn't a tech company, it's a style / aspiration company that sells some bits and bobs that occasionally are high-tech, and b) 3.5mm headphone jacks have been around since the 1950's -- so presumably this was 'old tech' when Apple first came up with the iPod ... and yet ... and yet, they still put this 'old tech' into every device since then, up until the last iteration of their mobile phone. 'Old tech' is a canard.

(I'm not a fan of apple, but) I wouldn't say "Apple isn't a tech company". Even a little. They design their own chips, software, and hardware, and sometimes push the tech industry (independent of whether or not they're subjectively innovative). Their success definitely comes from their marketing and design, but that's practically the norm for tech companies.

>Not everyone lives in your world.

Exactly, sometimes I think people forget not everyone owns the latest and greatest of each and every product category.

For example, I finally gave in and bought a Pixel 2, but I've also held onto my '03 Jetta and still use a cassette adapter to play music. I'm used to shuffling cassette adapters between vehicles, so I speak from experience when I say that buying extra adapters or always having one on hand is too much of a hassle and I'll end up stuck with just the radio on occasion.

Even if I were to get a new car with bluetooth, I'd still be hosed in: my SO's car ('06 Rav4), my parents' cars ('99 Wrangler and '02 A6), my best friend's car (Saturn Ion), and my sister's car (older Impreza). In fact, the only car I'm ever in that has bluetooth is my brother-in-law's Mazda. Even solely looking at playing music in the car, I'd still need an adapter the overwhelming majority of the time. Now maybe my circle hangs onto cars longer than average, but I don't think it's too far off the norm.

My last 3 cars had Bluetooth in them. Each had some kind of issue with it. For some reason car manufacturers put in crap that's anywhere between incompatible and randomly failing when connecting to flagship phones. And there's no real way to report an issue back to then. So they do have Bluetooth and I still use the aux cable with them.

A typical interaction with bluetooth audio on both my iPhone 6 and Pixel 2 goes like this:

Press pause

Wait 5 seconds

Press pause again, only the original pause has now registered finally, and turned back into a play button, so the audio is playing again.

Turn on NPR instead.

Bluetooth has quality issues compared with an AUX cable unless you're using the fancy codecs that aren't supported by most devices.

Also, anecdotally, I drive a Chevy from 2012 with no bluetooth for anything but answering calls. Cars without bluetooth are still very common.

Bluetooth is lossy compression. There are plenty of reasons to still stick with AUX and the 3.5mm jack. It does make a difference in sound quality. Additionally if I'm traveling and forget my headphones, it will cost me $5 to get a pair to get me through the week. Bluetooth headphones are more expensive.

There is a guy who was able to fit a 3.5mm jack in his iPhone X. They just chose not to do it. It's not like having a 3.5mm jack excludes you from also having Bluetooth technology. We've had both in phones for years. Apple just wanted to sell more air pods. I'm not hating on Apple, they're a business, but to act like Bluetooth is a strict upgrade is just blatantly wrong and I will continue to use my AUX jack.

The reason the headphone jack had to die was so they could waterproof it.

There are waterproof jacks...

There were waterproof phones with headphone jacks before the iPhone X. See some of the Samsung Galaxies as an example.

The simple fact that, with my not-so-old iPhone 7, I cannot listen to wired headphones and also charge the device is ridiculous.