It’s not bullshit. I deal with the repair and engineering side of 1/8” phone jacks and they’re fucking stupid ass miniaturized versions of designs from 70 years ago that have to maintain mechanical backwards compatibility with several profiles and conductor arrangements, literally cannot be reliably implemented in a high IP way, cost a bunch, are worse to clean than even usbc and provide a very high leverage thing to torque on your board as well as necessitate additional pcb space for the dac and its power conditioning, shielding and other stuff.

And people who like 1/8” will just buy a dongle anyway.

I too just bought a Motorola. My pixel 8 developed a line in the screen. I missed the headphone jack so much I decided I care more about that than I do the privacy of grapheneos. I did put /e/os on it though.

What Motorola did you buy? I went with a moto 5g 2024.

For me personally, charging is the inconvenience. That and having to buy new earbuds over and over when I shouldn't have to.

To each their own though

I mean, for headphones.

I did buy the fairphone 6, and it does in fact work in the US (with some finagling).

The lack of a headphone port is a disappointment, but it's fine as long as you get a GOOD dac. A shitty one will be the worst audio experience you'll ever have. I use this: generic dac (sorry for the Amazon link, I'm sure they're available other places.)

My everyday earbuds are essentially cheap studio monitors. I like these because the sound is great and if the cable breaks I can just replace the $10 cable and keep the high quality headphones. And there's no battery to fuss with, you just plug them in and they work.

Connecting it to a mixing station and doing a sound check before the band.