'It's really simple. We come up with a product. We try to tell everybody about it. Customer tell us by how they vote with their wallets whether we're on track or not. If enough of them say 'yes,' we get to come to work tomorrow.' — SJ
(I say this as someone who would like his phone to have a headphone jack, and doesn't personally want a new iPhone—and, on a more personal note (I'm a several-generations-out-of-date Android user not much affected by current iPhone trends), who hates the direction of macOS and wishes it were possible to live in the land of Snow Leopard forever—but also has reluctantly to concede that Apple has a better track record than I do for predicting and shaping the tech marketplace.)
Eventually, sure. If they made poor decisions for a long enough period of time, their customers would probably go elsewhere. But what I'm talking about here are the odd one-off poor decisions here and there. It may be true that 90% of Apple's customers really want a headphone jack. If that were true, I'd say removing it was a poor move, even if that entire 90% collectively goes, "Well shit. I guess I'll have to live with this overpriced and clunky wireless crap." No product is perfect. You can make a good product worse and still have people say, "Well, it's still good enough I guess."
Quote is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLvvzktuVY8
I don't really think the headphone jack is the start of some grand decline or anything. I'm just saying you can't wait a year, look at strong sales of the iPhone 7, and conclude that it was good decision to remove the jack or that you were particularly visionary to have done so.
yet i know a 2-decade-long apple user who has felt the final nail in the switching away from the walled garden coffin from the removal of the headphone jack, and i'm sure he is far from alone.
eventually, gradually, incrementally, apple will convince people to leave their walled garden, and they certainly aren't winning many converts with these moves.
You know what I'm interested in? Innovations in radio technology. Why can't I get a phone with built in mesh networking? No some weird bastard wifi hack, but an honest to goodness mesh networking solution maybe with a STANDARD interface? Some way for my phone to talk directly to a friend's phone without any need for a central authority to regulate our communications.
That would be ground breaking.
Like Bluetooth? Like wifi ad hoc (what's the hack involved)? There are chat/file transfer apps for both of these "mesh" networks on the App Store. They are reasonably popular amongst K12 students when school districts get overzealous with filtering.
What do you realistically want that these don't provide?
By having a inside track at big media, and spending massive amounts on advertisement.