I too, enjoyed having it builtin with the HTC 10, but having basically zero choice in phones became a serious problem. One thing with the 10 was that security

I too, enjoyed having it builtin with the HTC 10, but having basically zero choice in phones became a serious problem. One thing with the 10 was that security updates were basically nonexistent. You got one or two major OS updates, but nothing in between, and nothing after. Lots of phones have this problem, but then again some don't. Worse than that, the Oreo update completely broke my phone. I went from 2-3 days of battery life with my typical, light usage to something like 12-16 hours with NO usage, screen completely off the entire time. Fixing that required downgrading to Nougat, which required S-OFF, which required me physically mailing my phone to a hacker group and paying around $35. And of course this left me a year or more behind in security patches. Based on the xda thread about this, it affected lots of people, but was never acknowledged or fixed. Consider yourself lucky :) The LG phones are, one would hope, not this bad. But still, my takeaway from the experience is that tethering (heh) oneself to a single model or line or phones is really, really bad. The inconvenience of the dongle is, in retrospect, only slightly annoying in comparison. And there can be significant cost savings. My Moto G6 and SpectraX together cost less than one of LG's phones, and I expect to reuse the SpectraX with my next phone as well. Buying a new DAC/AMP every 1-3 years doesn't really seem right, does it?