There is a moment somewhere around 2014–2015 where smartphones had almost everything. Not in a maximalist, check-every-box way — more in the sense that the tradeoffs being made felt deliberate, and the things being included felt chosen by people who actually used their phones. Then, gradually, features started disappearing. And not because anything better replaced them.
The HTC One M8
The phone I keep coming back to when I think about this is the HTC One M8. It was a remarkable piece of hardware: front-facing BoomSound stereo speakers that genuinely sounded like something, a 3.5mm headphone jack, an IR blaster, a microSD slot, and a build quality that felt expensive in a way most phones don't bother with anymore. The aluminium unibody was cohesive rather than showy. It felt like someone had considered the whole object.
You could hold it with one hand. Not just technically — comfortably. It wasn't fighting you. And when you listened to music through it, whether through the speakers or a good pair of wired headphones into its full-size jack, it was actually pleasant. The DAC was real. The audio chain had been considered.
I'm not claiming the M8 was perfect. The camera wasn't the strongest point. But it made choices, and those choices were for the person holding the phone. That is not the approach most manufacturers are taking now.
What We Lost
The headphone jack was the first obvious casualty, and the arguments for removing it have never held up. The most common one — that it freed up internal space — has not been reflected in any meaningful improvement to the components that supposedly benefited. Phones didn't get dramatically bigger batteries because they cut the jack. The space went to something else, or nowhere visible at all. What disappeared was a zero-latency, universally compatible, non-battery-dependent audio connection that worked with every pair of headphones made in the last sixty years. What arrived in its place was a dongle in the box, and then not even that.
Front-facing speakers went around the same time or shortly after. Nearly every current flagship has speakers firing out of the bottom edge and the earpiece, which means one of them is pointing at a surface whenever the phone is flat on a table, and neither of them is pointing at you when you're watching something in landscape. Stereo front-facing speakers were genuinely better. They just took up space on the front of the phone, and bezels became the enemy.
The IR blaster is a small one, but it disappeared so completely that most people have forgotten phones ever had them. A good IR blaster turned your phone into a universal remote for every television, projector, air conditioning unit, and set-top box you'd ever encounter. It required almost no space, used almost no power, and cost almost nothing to include. It's gone.
Removable batteries didn't disappear cleanly — they faded. For years there was a reasonable argument that sealed designs allowed for better waterproofing and thinner profiles. But batteries age, and a phone that can have its battery swapped by a user who knows what they're doing is a phone that can last five or ten years with care. That's not good for replacement cycles. The incentives were never really about the user.
3D Touch is the one loss that still feels genuinely unresolved. The pressure-sensitive display Apple shipped in the iPhone 6S allowed for a different class of interaction — not a gimmick, a vocabulary. Pressing harder on an app revealed contextual options. Pressing harder on a link previewed it without navigating away. It required hardware that Apple removed in 2019 and replaced with a long-press gesture that is slower and less precise. The reason given was manufacturing complexity. What was lost was a dimension of input.
What a Phone Should Be Able to Do in 2026
The technology to build a phone that has all of the following exists right now, in 2026. None of it is speculative. Front-facing stereo speakers; a 3.5mm headphone jack connected to a quality DAC and amplifier; a battery large enough that you can go a full day and into the next without thinking about it — we're talking 8000 mAh or more, which is possible at current screen sizes if the decision is made to prioritise it; wireless charging; fast wired charging; dual USB-C ports so you can charge and use peripherals at the same time; NFC; a hardware camera shutter button, which several Android manufacturers have started bringing back; a fingerprint sensor under the display or on the side; Face ID; programmable physical buttons that actually do what you tell them to do; a rear camera module that is centred rather than shoved into one corner; good microphones, plural, positioned usefully.
The reason no phone has all of this is not engineering impossibility. It's product segmentation, and the assumption that the consumer who would want all of it is too niche to design for. The result is a market where you have to decide which features you can live without, because no one building phones believes you should have all of them.
Where This Leaves Things
I don't think the situation is going to fix itself. The incentive structures that produced it are still in place, and most consumers have adapted to the missing features rather than demanding them back. The headphone jack discourse has mostly quieted down. 3D Touch is barely remembered. Front-facing speakers are treated as a premium bonus rather than a basic expectation.
What I do think is that the people who remember what we had are still around, and foldable phones — which I'll write about separately — are at least doing something interesting in a landscape that has otherwise converged on a rectangle with a large screen and nothing else to say for itself.
The M8 was not the best phone ever made. But it was made by people who seemed to think the person holding it had opinions and preferences worth accommodating. That is rarer than it should be.