I used to think apple was obsessed with thinness, but I think that's actually the byproduct of what they're actually obsessed with: weight. While they might seem like the same thing, and they are obviously related... I don't care so much about the change in thickness from an aesthetic standpoint, but I do appreciate that the latest generation of macbook pros are noticeably lighter in my hand and on my back. So, I can see one practical reason for doing it.
That’s all fine until they use this as an excuse to remove a drive, or a headphone port, or prevent you from changing the battery, and then refuse to admit they aren’t meeting the needs of their customers.
All Apple provides us is correlation, so it's entirely possible (likely even) that the removal was incidental and driven by competing internal needs (like removal of wires, progression towards thinness). Materially it doesn't matter at all what caused this because they don't offer phones with functionality people clearly desire that are otherwise commonplace.
It'd be much nicer if they simply offered things like removable battery, headphone, etc, and articulated how this would affect the form of the phone, but that would affect other priorities that Apple has. It's not difficult to accept, even on this forum, that materially their massive profit margin hurts their product offering.
Progression towards weight doesn’t sound to me like an excuse for ... doing it for progression towards thinness. Which was what your parent comment was talking about their motivation being. I, by the way, am an iPhone user who wishes they kept the jack.
I’m also not sure what you mean by their profit margin hurting their product offering. Do you mean their desire to keep iPhones an aloof luxury brand hurts their product offering? I suppose dropping surprises like removing jack X or button Y could be part of that, but I think it’s more likely they have found customers with different preferences than you or I to be a preponderance of their user base and decided that making us happier is not economically worth a totally separate mechanical design that they have to both manufacture and separately stock. Maybe they incited people to move to airpods, but their forced converts seem to largely like them.
The two aren’t really related tough. If you took the current MacBook and made it twice as thick, but kept all the same internal components, it might weigh an ounce more from the extra case metal. The rest would be air.
I agree that Apple's behavior isn't quite consistent with a simple obsession with thinness, but I don't think it's weight, either.
My 15" PowerBook in 2001 was 2.4 kg. The 15" MacBook Pro in the linked answer is 1.83 kg. (At their heaviest, they got to about 2.5 kg.) This seems like a lot of trouble for half a kilo (-25%). It also got much thinner over that time, from 2.5 cm to 1.5 cm (-40%).
It's probably a combination of factors. Jony Ive in 2001: "People will have a visceral reaction to its weight and volume."
Hey, I'm happy to have optimizations around weight and I understand that internal jacks and cards to handle specialized lines adds weight, but an integrated jack is going to add a lot less overall weight than a dongle and, while not everyone uses ethernet, I think it's at least common enough to justify keeping the jack around.
At work we all use laptops to allow working from home and we're also all hardwired in because there's no way we'd have reliable throughput over wifi with the multitude of employee work & personal devices our network supports.
