Or a weird generalization.

There are people who love to complain everywhere and in every age group, I’d say. But you don’t hear the ones who don’t complain complaining.

Perception is biased.

In light of some other replies: the same could be said about having kids.

well yeah. But most phones w/o a 3.5 mm jack don’t have an integrated DAC anyways, so the choice is up to you.

But the storage and the fact that it’s all in a light weight bundle, that’s indepedent of your phone is pretty convincing.

I remember having on, back in the day, that ran on a single AAA battery for a week an was marginally larger than one of these. Unfortunately I tinkered with trying to run it on an external power supply when I knew to little about electronics and ran a few too may Volts through it. Otherwise this thing would probably still work fine. I kinda never looked back since was content enough with my phone for listening to music. But I do have fond meories of those things, and I miss the 3.5 mm jack on my most recent phone, maybe I should reconsider…

What’s the advantage over a smartphone?