If you’re constantly switching then it may be a good idea to buy another dongle.

If you have to switch between lightning and 3.5mm constantly, how in the world does buying another dongle help?

This is my biggest problem. Even across Apple's own line, you have iPhones with only lightning ports, and iPads with no lightning ports. If I use headphones across those different devices, I'll have to unplug and replug the adapter constantly. Which means that adapter is going to get lost.

This is all such an unnecessary problem.

It's not supposed to be perfect. It's just a solution to that problem. Remember when optical drives where removed from laptops? We had to carry an external optical drive. Some times we'd forget it. It was inconvenient. But we survived.

No, “we” did not carry external optical drives. By the time Apple removed them, downloading music and software was already mainstream. Removing the headphone jack is not the same.

> It's not supposed to be perfect. It's just a solution to that problem.

It's frustrating to have to come up with solutions, however effective, to problems that should never have existed in the first place.

But usb thumb drives and services like Dropbox are arguably superior to optical media. Bluetooth is not superior to wired.

Optical drives take up lots of space, use a lot of electricity, and have moving parts that can break easily in a portable device like a laptop. A computer like the Macbook Air would simply be impossible with an optical drive.

I'm willing to make that trade, especially given how uncommon DVD's were even by the time the MBA launched. (Although I'll note that my desktop has a BluRay drive and I wouldn't have it any other way.)

What benefit am I getting in exchange for the loss of a headphone jack? An extra couple millimeters of screen real estate?