Apple bet on the wireless future across the board, and has been betting on it for a while. The results are a mixed bag to say the least.
As for headphones/earphones, IIRC there was a marked trend in adoption of bluetooth headphones, so Apple bet on that. Funnily enough, the competitors that derided Apple for removing the jack, and building some of their marketing campaigns around that, would remove the jack a year later.
There is no longer enough space for it on recent iPhones, it has been used for other things.
Personally I think you could still make a small phone with a jack, but ultimately it doesn't matter much either way. Adapters work fine and bluetooth works even better.
FWIW, I disagree. The best Bluetooth earbuds don't compare to 3.5mm in sound quality, and wireless just adds another charging dilemma, which is usually fine but can become an issue in certain situations. The adapters are fine in theory but often are clunky or incompatible across platforms. USBC would probably be fine but almost no one uses them and when they increasingly double as charging ports, you have the charging problem again.
3.5mm is a standard that just works and works everywhere. I hate the pressure to get rid of it. It seemed nothing but self serving on the part of phone manufacturers to do so and driven partly by DRM concerns and a desire to either sell accessories (airpods) or ride a minimalism trend to shave design and manufacturing costs.
bluetooth has latency and it re-encodes audio to a lossy bluetooth audio standard (and yes I know there's at least two and the high-fidelity one isn't bad - it's still lossy) . Unless that is, Apple has "special bluetooth" that avoids this. I wouldn't put that past them. Link me to a doc if they do.
Than wires with a jack at the end, in my personal opinion.
No analog unpredictability or crackling, clean digital all the way to the DAC matched to the speakers, no wires to tangle or damage, reliable controls.
i mean, there's clearly enough space for it, so was it really just to make way for the (very profitable) earbud trend?