Well, he kind of is, but not in a way that appeals to most tech geek crowds.
He has a degree in Industrial Engineering which (defined by Wikipedia): "work to eliminate waste of time, money, materials, man-hours, machine time, energy and other resources that do not generate value".
Engineering to make things more efficient and reduce waste may not be "tech sexy", but to make it happen involves real technology and engineering.
My biggest issue with it's removal is that they didn't replace it with another analog interface. I believe that the DAC should live in the phone, leaving the headphone to merely to deal with a simple analog signal. I haven't jumped into the wireless bandwagon, bc the wire has never bothered me. On top of that I have a great battery and DAC in the phone already, I really don't want to be bothered with charging one more thing.
If they had adopted a new standard interface that would have been great. Hell I would even be ok with it being usbc if that meant that the jack was standard. It's this non-standard interface that has me considering not buying a new iPhone. I don't care about the loss of the analog jack as much as the non-standard wired option that's left.
Ancient, but MASSIVELY used, and affordable. There are finally high quality affordable wired headphones out there that I can use between multiple devices. Removing it forces people to spend significantly more money on a ancillary accessory that is not guaranteed to work across multiple devices. It was a money grab.
There is _also_ not enough wireless bandwidth available for an entire plane of people to simultaneously support 250 different stereo audio streams in such a small area. ...or a crowded office.
I have a really nice pair of IEMs I had molded to my ears from Alclair Audio. They're already expensive enough, there's not reason to add the inconvenience of batteries, latency, and bandwidth competition.
Of course, I do not know if the USB-C has been tested for the kind of brutal, constant usage that would be common on aircraft so I might be completely wrong.