I agree. I'm going to be very sad when my Pixel 4a dies. Perfect size, plus the headphone jack, and flashable to the various ROMS if I need to. My ideal phone/messaging/audio device, and that's really all I want in a phone these days.
I once saw the 3.5mm jack referred to as "retro" by a tech media outlet once. Except I was the kind of person to use it every week before my original Pixel XL died.
It's one of the reasons I got an Xperia. All the other devices I looked at had some combination of no headphone jack, excessively rounded corners, curved screens, or an intrusive camera notch. The Xperia was the only device on the market that appealed to me in comparison, plus it has an SD Card slot so hopefully the flash memory will last longer.
Thinking about it, one could say that Sony is culturally far behind the other flagship brands in failing to keep up with the (what I would consider regressive) trends in smartphone releases. They're one of the few Japanese companies that release their phones overseas. If they'd made a product that was more appealing to the masses with the expectations set by most brands, then I probably wouldn't have cared for it. But given how much of an outlier the Xperia series is, it feels like something stops them from doing so.
Probably on the 7A.
Just like how they did it with the 6A, which was a bad deal because how off the Norma Pixel 6 was on sale.
Other choices with a headphone jacks are unfortunately limited, you have Sony, but their phones are super Expensive, not well supported and availability isn't the best.
