Apple have barely innovated anything on smartphones. Everything they have made popular has been copied off someone else. The things like getting rid of the headphone jack is a negative, same as not shipping chargers. It's to save money for them, not to benefit customers. Samsung have copied them to save money as well.
They are a marketing company that produce tech. A bloody good marketing company but a mediocre tech company.
I didn't use the word improvement, I just said they did it, and being the size they are, they tend to set the trend - doesn't matter if they did it first, they aren't afraid of making big decisions to nudge the market. Getting rid of the headphone jack is a negative if you use wired headphones exclusively, but its a transitional change, same as computers not having CD drives, another thing people went mad over, and yet I cant remember now the last time I used a software CD/DVD and its a long time since I built a PC with one in.
Yes its done for cost purposes, but it also saves space and allows for other improvements. The benefits of no headphone jack is its got one less point for water to ingress, more space for things like higher capacity batteries and its one less thing on the phone to collect pocket fluff into. I remember being annoyed at the time but Bluetooth headphones were far less popular back then and the quality wasn't really there - since then there has been a number of revisions to the Bluetooth standard - I'd generally prefer wired headphones, but for a phone its wireless all the way. I remember that model of iphone came with an adapter that let you use it anyways, and its still in my drawer unused. I've got wired headphones, but am I really going to use my phone for critical listening? The only drawback I guess is battery life for bluetooth headphones but with Bluetooth LE battery life is extending. I've got a basic set of headphones i use for travel and they cost me £15, they get 3.5 hours battery life and the case charges them up to 4x before it needs charging itself. They charge to 70% in a couple of minutes, but its rare I would have headphones in for 3.5 hours+ in reality.
Majority of people's audio gear probably isn't good enough to resolve the quality difference with apt-x and LC3.
We've already moved away from a data cable being a necessity. I used to hate having to hook my phone up to my PC to do proper backups and get stuff on them - across every manufacturer. Now, whilst you can do it it, its essentially just a charging port as everything is cloud based. The only thing keeping the charging port here is the slowness of wireless charging - however there are already phones out that can wireless charge at over 100w, it just needs standardising properly. In real world terms that phone charged 0%-77% in 6 minutes with a wired charger pulling 260w, and 77%-92% in 3 minutes. Yes faster over the wire, but its at the point there where it almost doesn't matter in real world terms, whereas now they're quite slow. Again charging ports are just pocket dust collectors, so if fast charging comes out I'd be happy for that to be removed to make way for something else too.
none of that really happens when you're still stuffing headphone ports into things while everything else is moving on. If my stereo amp removed it, I'd be raging, but a phone? not a huge deal. Phones are selling in vast numbers still and used more than ever for music with explosion in streaming services.
Not shipping chargers is annoying, but then I have about 6 iphone chargers in my drawer and, in reality, the ones they bundle with it are pretty slow vs the ones you can buy third party, but I guess its annoying if its your first iphone.