Interesting; is there some connection between waterproofing and 3.5mm I'm missing?

There's plenty of phones and devices waterproofed to any given standard with 3.5mm. To my ignorant mind, a USB C or Lightning port is not fundamentally different exposure / difficulty than 3.5mm when it comes to this - this is far from my area of expertise, but a cursory google search, and plentiful of counter-examples, indicates this is just a post-hoc justification for Apple's removal, not a real critical path.

Understanding that "if you need something, get an adapter / live the dongle life" is the core Apple philosophy, and agreeing that most standards should eventually die (parallel port, Firewire, etc), 3.5mm still seems a uniquely standardized, useful, and time proof feature that's is sorely missed with no adequate replacement (dongle, of course, is not it, for many reasons - expense, inconvenience, losing them, and if you want to charge your phone while being on a call things get very wonky very quickly - does Apple even offer a 1st-party solution for this common office-worker use-case?)

Sony solved open headphone jack while being water proof nearly a decade ago. The idea the phone can't have a headphone jack and be waterproof was a lie pushed by Apple to save money on not having to put in a headphone jack.

I've been using Sony phones in the shower and at the beach for years now and only briefly switched to a different company when they tried to pull that headphone jack removal of crap briefly when I needed a new phone.

My understanding was that it’s always been about the physical size and the impact it has on the stack-up of iPhone components. Looking at a standard mini-jack vs. my iPhone 13, the connector itself is close to 40% of the thickness of the phone. Add the additional size for the jack’s structure and you quickly get to a point where the phone has to be thicker.

Now, has Apple gotten too obsessive about thin phones? Maybe - but that’s a different discussion.

If that is the case, I have a hard time believing it's still true on any model past iPhone X. There's plenty of space to fit a 3.5mm jack in there, I would happily trade any/all of the FaceID hardware or Lidar components for a headphone connector.

I don't see how that could be true. The thinnest ever iPhone was the 6, and it had a headphone jack. The phones since then have been 3-20% thicker.

Some searching suggests that 5mm is about the point where it won't fit, and iPhones are comfortably 7+. One of these phones is 5.6mm thick with a headphone jack and has near-zero bezels.

Phones exist that have both waterproofing and a headphone jack. I’m sure it’s a challenge, but it’s not technically an either or decision.

Is there? Last time I checked there doesn’t seem to be a dongle that both outputs and charges my iPhone in the car. Or the non Apple ones have terrible reviews that they set off the persons coffee maker scalding the persons dog or something.

so you're saying that a 3.5mm port cannot be waterproof, yet the stupid Apple proprietary power/data port can?

It's stupid in that it has exposed pins. It's stupid in that its proprietary. It's stupid in a lot of ways. It's not not stupid because you like it.