You keep asking for a reason for removing it, then go on about why there is no justification, when you've been given a reason. The bottom line if they do it, they need the space for better battery, new technology and improvements.
Battery cells are a uniform length, height, and depth for manufacturing simplicity and other concerns. Space saved from removal of the 3.5mm jack is not going to result in battery going into that space because the battery already is wider than that. See image here:
Making the battery longer into the headphone jacks's space would require removing the other components in this area of the phone
including the Lightning Port.
As for Apple making their phones thinner, well they just made the 6S thicker than the 6. Go figure.
They had to increase the thickness because of the Touch3D display. So the phone internals are really the same thickness as the 6.
And I don't really see Samsung, or any other phone manufacturer racing to be the first to make a thicker phone. The Samsung flagship Galaxy S7 is .31" and the iPhone 6S is .28". That's 3/10ths of an inch. That should tell you something right there -- Customers seem to want thin phones, and if Apple doesn't give it to them, Samsung will.
Feel like I'm reading a Red Herring here. Its not that customers don't want thin phones, but that desire only reaches to a certain point. They want good battery life and durable phones. The problem is the pursuit of thinness it compromising both of those objectives.
Let's look at some specs:
iPhone: 1715 mAh battery, 7.1mm thickness
Sony Experia Z3 Compact: 2600 mAh battery, 8.6mm thickness
And if you look at the rest of the measurements for the Z3 you'll see it's slightly shorter and narrower than an iPhone, too. So this isn't a case of a wider, flatter internal area, it's pure thickness, and how you make use of interior space. Sony didn't have to remove a headphone jack, or leave out a microSD card slot, to do that.
Here's a group of 13 recent (Android 5.0 or above compatible) smartphones that all have height/width dimensions the same or lower than the iPhone, but with higher battery capacity. They all have 3.5 mm headphone jacks and user-expandable storage.
Also, Samsung like to copy Apple -- that's common knowledge here. If most phone makers are lockstep following the one that's considered the leader, that doesn't mean the direction they're all walking in is the right way. It means they'll all trip over the same potholes.
If Apple needs more room to compete with Samsung, then the redundant, single function headphone jack goes.
That's not what redundant means. The 3.5 mm headphone jack is the one and only such jack on the phone. There is no other analog port that can accept a miniplug connector. It's like saying the serial keyboard/mouse ports on PC are redundant with USB. Can you use both for keyboards and mice, sure. But they are completely different ports and buses and using an adapter to connect a USB keyboard to a serial port does not make them the same.
Fair enough. In your scenario, Apple would still control all the specifications for a phone. 3rd party vendors could only mix and match whatever specs Apple chooses to incorporate; it would still be a very tightly controlled environment to prevent fragmentation since only Apple gets to decide what features are available. That could yield a broader array of iOS devices but I am not sure it would. Licensees would be making much smaller production runs and have license fees on top of their production costs, so either they survive on much smaller margins or price at or near an Apple iPhone; with no guarantee that the next iOS release will work on their phone. I'm not convinced that is a workable business model, since it really doesn't support innovation but merely making niche products with no new features.
This is a very reasonable response. A lot of it depends on the cost of these licenses and components that are not normal off-the-shelf items (like A
x processors and the M
x co-processors). But I still think there is room for other manufactures, especially if they are producing feature combinations consumers want (like high-performance, small screen) that Apple doesn't (yet) pursue. Or lower cost (from lower margins). If their phones are inferior from lower hardware quality, then they may sink from that. But the point is the marketplace would decide and consumers would -- not Apple.
One thing I've noticed is there are also some people who can't differentiate discussing Apple's choices with defending them. They are so mad that Apple doesn't do exactly what they want that when someone says "here is a reason Apple may not do that..." they immediately start yelling "fanboy."
The reason is money, and it always has been. If those people trying to reason out Apple's thinking are stockholders then I understand, but when it's people who don't really have a stake in the game and are only being punished by it, the end consumers, well that's just being too much in love with the company at that point.
Those type of people like to hate on any perceived threat to Apple's business as it is, even if it's just competition. I remember the discussion on here when Boot Camp came out and those folks threw a fit about how it would be the end of OSX if people could run Windows on Apple's "superior hardware". There were only a few people who saw it as a good thing to have Windows be able to run toe-to-toe on a Mac. My own argument at the time was that there were people who liked Macs but needed to be able to run Windows-only stuff and simply could not buy two computers (like folks buying a machine under workplace/government contract). Without Bootcamp, a Mac would not have been an available option for those purchases but with dual booting those sales could happen. I think a lot of the worry then was really about performance measurement suites that could now be natively run on Apple and Dell/HP whatever side by side for a
real price/performance comparison.
I remember all three OS licensing periods. Apple never seemed to like the idea and only flirted with licensing their core OS's in two periods.
What I remember about the last MacOS licensing period (the one Jobs ended when he returned) was people were able to get faster Macs from Power Computing than Apple, and save money on some lower cost components on clone machines, too. There were plenty of fanbois then saying that ATA was lower quality than SCSI and that using these other hard drive types (that had been in use on PCs for decades) was a bad idea. Nothing happened. Maybe SCSI drives were higher quality, but ATAs were certainly good enough for consumer use. All that hand-wringing over quality was for nothing. And Apple even started using those "lowly drives" later on in their own Macintoshes, too. Clone licensing was killed because Apple wasn't competitive enough on the hardware side for the then (and still) price-conscious consumer.