It would be like Mercedes suddenly deciding cars didn't need air conditioners any more and refusing to build cars with that option. "We're Mercedes. We know best. You don't need an A/C. Open the window if you're too warm."

The whole premise just sounds insulting, and if it happened you'd never buy a Mercedes again.

Personally, I would never want to go back to the crappy headphone connectors. The connector always wore out on me. So while I understand why you might want a headphone port (and some people likely want an in-built parallel or ADB2 port), it's hyperbolic to call it "utter madness and gross incompetence".

In reality, it's just someone having different values than you. Why is that so difficult to accept for some people?

I stand by the phrasing of 'utter madness and gross incompetence' when usability is degraded and things get unnecessarily complicated in an essential functionality. All of this for questionable changes (I wouldn't dare calling it improvement, I feel improper just to mention this word in this context, the whole thing is very far from improvement).

What I also need to add how strange is that certain groups of people get offended on strong and grounded opinion about some consumer product like if it was a central element of their life not a utility of an auxiliary topic.

There must be some sort of an internet rule one party intends a statement to be about the other, but it really applies to the author.

But the additional flexibility offered via software updates is the core power of software. Where we are able to replace hardware with software functionality, there's additional flexibility for improvement and iteration. That's a valuable add.

It is bad putting software into anything and everything, just because we do it frequently to other things. It should have much better reason for that. Complicating unnecessarily and many times introducing risks and troubles is a no good.

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Sadly, we forget this simple fact.

Automatically that view is disqualified because we are talking about Bluetooth headphones; there must be software on them to communicate efficiently with paired devices.

AirPods receive firmware updates to make adjustments to the audio, and AirPods Pro receive further updates to make adjustments to balance audio quality and the way the noise cancellation works in order to make sure that the AirPods fit properly in peoples' ears.

I don't know that (A) connectivity, (B) audio quality, and (C) fitting in peoples' ears are contrived in any way.