Another "courageous" thing that Apple did was release a computer in 1983 without any fans, which was extremely heavy because it had a giant heat sink, and would still overheat constantly.[1]

And yes, this was apparently Steve Job's idea, as he felt that fans were "too noisy and inelegant". I imagine that he felt that fans were holding humanity back, and smugly told people who disagreed that they were clinging to obsolete technology.

It got so bad, that Apple actually advised their customers to physically lift and drop their Apple IIIs to re-seat the chips that had popped out from the excessive heat.[2]

Of course, if today Apple decided that fans were obsolete again, and the latest Macbooks were twice as heavy and still overheated, then it would become the new normal, and it would be hard to find computers that had fans anymore, and we would long for the days when we could just use computers for as long as we wanted without worrying about them overheating. And on the internet, commenters would say that it wasn't a big deal at all, and if you were some sort of power user that wanted to use your laptop for more than a few hours at a time, you should buy a $250 cooling pad for it.

[1]: http://lowendmac.com/2015/apple-iii-chaos-apples-first-failu...

[2]: https://www.tekrevue.com/apple-iii-drop/

> Of course, if today Apple decided that fans were obsolete again

If? Apple's recent laptops have been notoriously undercooled, and the processors can only run near full speed for a brief moment.

The only difference is that they throttle instead of self-damaging.

That's awful. Of course the pattern repeats: Apple deprecates something that shouldn't be deprecated, and offers a barely adequate replacement. Competitors copy Apple and also deprecate the feature, but their replacements are even worse.

We’re sort of in that world with the Mac mini. Except instead of overheating we just get laptop performance in a desktop.

It still has a fan though.

Well, I have an Asus laptop that doesn't have a fan...

The key to the statement is the "a lot of our lives are just a little worse" at the end, which is an argument that doesn't work for floppy drives, serial ports and, arguably, CD drives, as they were phased out well after commonly-used replacements were well into the mainstream.

The use-case for the 3.5mm headphone jack is still well and truly within the mainstream, and will probably stay there for some time as per the comment in the blog:

the right pair of headphones was the pair of headphones in front of you, or in your pocket, or mangled at the bottom of your bag. It didn’t matter.

There's a lot of legacy-weight hanging around in people's houses, bags, and workplaces.

Your point, however, isn't completely lost on me. I still miss CD drives occasionally, having to retrieve an older laptop in order to grab data from a disc I haven't yet bothered to archive to an ISO file. However, removing a CD drive from a laptop feels like a much higher percentage space saver than losing the 3.5mm jack from a smartphone.

The world had mostly moved on from 3.5" floppy drives when apple dropped them, they were mostly used for windows boot disks and to transfer files between machines. Their complete hardware control allowed them to drop the former and their tiny market share meant they didn't have to care much about the later, floppy disks being incompatible between macs and PC's. The G# being a desktop machine also meant that for anyone that really did need a floppy drive an external one was an acceptable option, carting around dongles is not.

The world didn't care about wireless headphones until their wired option was taken away. It's a solution to a problem of their own making.

I don't know about you, but my computer still has 2 serial ports on the back, a 3.5" USB drive, and 100% compatibility with CDs via my CD-RW/DVD-RW optical drive. Who removed these things? Who would have the gall to tell me that my use-case is somehow invalid because I use older, more reliable hardware and methods?

So why do their new computer models from this year have the 3.5mm jack?