I see a lot of comments that say something along the lines of "Apple knows best about what its customers want. The fact that we would prefer to keep the headpho

I see a lot of comments that say something along the lines of "Apple knows best about what its customers want. The fact that we would prefer to keep the headphone jack doesn't matter because we don't necessarily represent the average customer." However, I think that's giving them too much credit. It's not that Apple "knows what the people actually want", it's that Apple knows how far it can "push" the customers to extract the most amount of money possible. It is a business afterall. Also, they want to lock people into proprietary protocols. The headphone jack isn’t proprietary. Apple probably hates the fact that you can plug a pair of Sony headphones into an iPhone. They know that they have a large enough market share to be able to “drive” things they way they want. As for the other manufacturers ditching the jack as well, they are just following Apple. If Moto was the only company doing this, no one would care. The people who want the jack would simply buy another phone. However, in the case of the iPhone, the barriers of simply switching to another phone are much larger. It's unlikely that someone who wishes they had the headphone jack is going to switch to Android just because of that. They will probably just end up biting the bullet and buying whatever adapter is required by Apple.