This is […] a strange marketing strategy by AI companies. Instead of selling products based on helpful features and letting users decide, executives often deploy scare tactics that essentially warn people they will become obsolete if they don’t get on the AI bandwagon.

Very insightful for me to read this. If AI in its present state was as useful as it is advertised, it wouldn’t need such apocalyptic language.

I have no proof but I suspect it is a mistranslation. The French legal term “bande organisée” literally means “organized crime group” but is simply the French counterpart to criminal conspiracy. That is to say, they are suspected not merely of breaking the law but also of having done so as a collective that knowingly planned for it.

I don’t have any statistic, but I would guess that the proportion of people wanting a Jack is significantly higher in the group of people interested in buying Fairphone that on the general population.

Fairphone literally does have that statistic. They spent effort to gather that info in order to inform their business decisions. And they report:

We also looked into the consumer data and Fairphone 4’s weight and thickness were more of an issue than the lack of a minijack

My guess would be yes, the whole point of including a legacy port like this would be compatibility. Laptops used (still use?) PS/2 long after desktops moved to USB keyboards because the lack of polling meant improved battery life, so it’d make sense for the hardware support to still be there.