The official reason was, famously and ridiculously, "courage". Apple further explained that space is at a premium, listed the many things competing for that space, and noted that a large, single-purpose legacy connector no longer made sense.

A lot of Apple's strategic choices are driven by products that take 5, 10, or sometimes 20 years to realize. For example, the forthcoming foldable iPhone (and the proving ground for many related decisions, the iPhone Air) was on roadmaps literally a decade before a decision like this reverberates through released products.

Putting a high-quality DAC in a dongle wasn't a terrible solution (many phones with analog jacks have poor ones), and today hundreds of headphones¹ courageously have native USB-C support.

¹ https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/products/usb-c-headphones/ci/...

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realusername 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Apple is very late to the foldable phones now, not sure that's the best example

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throw0101c 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Apple is very late to the foldable phones now, not sure that's the best example

“PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” — Palm CEO Ed Colligan, 2006, https://www.engadget.com/2006-11-21-palms-ed-colligan-laughs...

“A wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to.” — Gandalf the Gray

	▲	realusername 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		By "late", I mean they are starting to lose market share because of that in some regions, that kind of late.

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CharlesW 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Regardless, the point of mentioning it is that Apple commonly makes decisions that can seem bizarre to people who don't consider systemic and longer-term reasons why they might've been made. Another micro-example of this that comes to mind is Tahoe's mostly-reviled chonky window borders, which along with many other gradual UX changes over years, absolutely foreshadow touchscreen Macbooks.

	▲	realusername 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They've also been late sometimes and had to change by force their assumptions, the first app store in iOS was cydia and a lot of what we consider modern iOS design was copied over from the jailbreaking community.