You’re wearing headphones in the car?

No, that's illegal where I live (at least for the driver, I'll sometime wear headphones on a long trip when I'm not driving but in that case I won't be navigating so battery drain isn't as bad). I was responding to the above poster's question: "And when was the last time you needed to charge it and listen to music at the same time?" I don't have wireless Android Auto or whatever new cars have nowadays, so I use an analog connection to my car's stereo. The cable uses the same 3.5mm jack as headphones, but is legal as long as I don't fiddle with my phone while driving.

My last two cars don't have fancy interfaces, but when you connected iPhone to a USB to charge you could also listen to the music.

That's a fancy interface.

Connecting a portable music player to car radios tended to go

* 3.5mm cassttee input

* FM transmitter input (for cars with CD, not cassette)

* 3.5mm aux input

Power was a 12V cigarette lighter.

During all of this the output from the mp3 lpayer was a 3.5mm device.

It was only relatively recently (say in the last 7 years) that most cars started getting USB and bluetooth sockets that took audio connections. Even then there are issues - my 2016 skoda's airplay doesn't play music properly - it frequently skips, I have to use bluetooth to get skipless sound, which means not using maps.

Having USB audio input as standard was even more recently than that - I hired a newish car about 3 years ago which had nothing by a 3.5mm input and 12V jack.

This sure seems like a niche case that rightfully Apple wouldn’t see in their actual-use statistics when making decisions like “should we remove the analog 3.5mm?”

I'm not sure "driving an older car" is a very niche case. 3.5mm jacks on car stereos go back literal decades, and my 2019 Jetta still has one (even though it also has Android Auto + CarPlay). Even as far back as cars with cassette players saw people buying cassette tape adapters so people could route 3.5mm audio through the tape deck.

Even in newer cars, it's the same kind of choice reduction you see on phones, though. With a jack you can choose whether you want wired or wireless audio; without a jack you're still with wireless all the time, even when wired would be more convenient.

It's definitely a niche, most people buying $1000 phones are probably driving newer cars.

However I think use cases like air travel or just hanging out at home with a low battery are less rare. These can be partially mitigated w/ wireless charging, but when I use a wireless battery pack on a flight my phone and tablet don't do a great job actually staying in place, and necessities lowering the tray which is annoying

Presumably plugged into the AUX jack in the car. Usually with power plugged into an cigarette lighter adapter. This use case is covered with the correct kind of dongle, but they're a bit hard to find. You'll probably have to order it off of the internet, not pick it up from the checkout aisle at the 7/11.