I laughed at this line in the article:
"The iPhone does everything the iPod did and more, and has served as an iPod replacement since its debut."
Well, yeah, no, not anymore. The iPod actually still has a headphone jack.
I no longer consider my iPhone (I have the 8 Plus) a music player. It works about 80% of the time (since I usually use wireless), but I still on many occasions find myself trying to plug in an audio cable or wired headphones and going... "oh, yeah, that's right..."
iPhone is no longer a fully functional music player -- unless you have a clumsy dongle that I almost never have with me and that degrades the "three-in-one" aspect of the device Steve Jobs heralded when iPhone was introduced. It's a very un-Apple like experience with that horrid dongle.
Steve Jobs mocked other phones for having styluses, noting that it's something to lose and to have to fumble with. That's how I feel about the dongle, only worse, because at least my Treo had a slot for its stylus -- no such home for the dongle on the iPhone, and no wonder, because it would be rather stupid to have a place for a dongle when you could just use the space for the headphone jack.
The iPhone is no longer what it was when Steve Jobs introduced it in 2007 as a three-in-one device. It is still a phone and an "internet communication device", but it's now a crippled iPod -- all so Apple can feed the ridiculous, unnecessary obsession with ultra-thinness (my 6s Plus was fine and had a headphone jack).