Sony had pretty much perfected the water proof phone with a headphone jack in their Z series, but for some reason decided to get rid of it with the latest revamp. This was also the first year since the release of the original Z where I didn't buy a Sony phone when I needed to upgrade.

That's simply not true. My Samsung Galaxy S5 has a removable battery and headphone jack AND it's waterproof.

@foota says 'easier', not 'possible'. And the S6 doesn't have a removable battery, so what does that tell you about how Samsung felt about the engineering compromises they had to make with the S5 and all the rubber grommet-ing around its removable battery?

It's still pushing the "loss of features a,b... that are actually useful to users enables features x,y..." narrative, which is rather frustrating. The S5 isn't some marvel of modern engineering that is incredibly expensive to produce.

> And the S6 doesn't have a removable battery, so what does that tell you about how Samsung felt about the engineering compromises they had to make with the S5 and all the rubber grommet-ing around its removable battery?

And I haven't bought a Samsung (or other mobile phone) since the S5, so what does that tell you about the quality of the recent mobile phone offerings?

Since Samsung is a corporation, it tells me that grommeting cost more than $0.