If you would trade basically anything for a smaller form factor (including the 3mm headphone jack), you'd just own an iPhone 13 mini by now. I was on your same

If you would trade basically anything for a smaller form factor (including the 3mm headphone jack), you'd just own an iPhone 13 mini by now. I was on your same boat until I actually owned an iPhone 12 mini. In reality, it sacrificed usability and battery life to achieve that small form factor. I had to bail on the phone because it was physically straining my eyes. Our phones are basically pocket computers. That's why the screens are big. They're used for everything. Here's the other thing about the 3mm headphone jack on phones: it's irrelevant to anyone with enough disposable income to afford wireless headphones. I personally own the second generation AirPods Pro, and to be honest they're completely mind-blowing compared to what we thought was possible on a technical level just 5-10 years ago. Yes, I spent a lot of money on them. Yes, they are perhaps a disposable item considering how difficult/impossible it is to replace their tiny little batteries. But would I go back to using wired headphones and getting them caught in a bunch of shit? No, not ever. No amount of dollar savings or latency shavings could convince me. I still use wired headphones on my desktop computer, but that makes a lot more sense in that context. I'm not taking wires onto the train or the bus or the airplane ever again. The reason budget phones like Nokias have headphone jacks and sometimes even microSD slots is because their customers will not pay for upgraded internal storage or expensive wireless headphones. On the other side of the market, companies like Samsung and Apple can upsell a lot of their flagship phone customers and give them a nudge by removing that port. It's the same reason why you don't see a number of options packages on a Toyota that you can get on a Lexus that's based on the same vehicle. Is the removal of the headphone jack a shady tactic? Maybe it is. On the other hand, maybe it's just an obsolete port for that market segment. If I am using an expensive gaming PC, do I need my graphics card to output to VGA or DVI? Of course not. But I might need that if I'm buying a PC to hook up to a 15 year old monitor in a school computer lab.