While I mourn the practicality of the embedded jack on my iPhone 8, I've had quite a few headphones in a row whose jack ended up failing due to the way my phone is placed inside my pocket, and a repair was impossible, so that was quite an unexpected improvement to have the adapter possibly fail and be replaced at a very small cost instead of a full headset† going bust.
† five actually (100-300€ price range), two of which the cord is replaceable (which I did) but how long will that specific cord be available?
You can cut off the jack and solder a new one. You also don't need specific cord, buy a new cord and add the jack. For non replaceable cords you can open up the headphones unsolder the old cord and solder a new one. Or you can cut the cable somewhere high and patch another cable.
If you can't do these things your self there is probably some cheap electronic repair shop nearby. Most likely cheaper than shipping new brand cable or replacement parts.
On side note plastic in one of my shure 840 joints broke and I managed to fix it by modeling and 3d printing it. They're working fine now. The only official way to fix that was to buy original head assembly and ship it, but that's almost as expensive as getting a new pair.
Repair is possible, just sometimes you need to be a bit creative.
> Repair is possible, just sometimes you need to be a bit creative.
Indeed, and I attempted to do so myself since I know how to handle a soldering iron... yet some of them were in-ear, one was over ear but cracking its case was a one way destructive operation; some had those hair-thin copper wires downright coated with an insulating material that makes soldering a pain, if at all possible. I swear it's made on purpose to thwart attempts at repairs.
I bet I have broken more jacks in a couple of years than during the 20 years before that. Crazy.
Anyway that doesn't change the fact that before that I never thought about having a small, cheap jack-to-jack part in between the headphones and the playing device, as using the adapter was the first time I happened to do something similar, but that's not a property of the adapter itself; or rather, DAC, really, and I find it nice that there are alternative DACs available, at which point if I always have a DAC at hand, well it's less of a problem to not have a jack embedded), but really, I'd rather still have the jack, or having the removal of the jack coincide with the replacement of Lightning with USB-C (together with the USB-C situation not being such a bloody mess) and have some new universal standard emerge across all devices.
> I've had quite a few headphones in a row whose jack ended up failing due to the way my phone is placed inside my pocket, and a repair was impossible ...
Why don't you change the way you put it in your pocket?
† five actually (100-300€ price range), two of which the cord is replaceable (which I did) but how long will that specific cord be available?