Apple made $230 BILLION in revenue last year, of which less than one fifth of one percent came from MFI licensing fees.
Removing the headphone jack had absolutely nothing to do with selling dongles and everything to do with Apple doing what it always does: seeing which way the wind is blowing and dragging everyone kicking and screaming into their vision of the future.
They did the exact same thing with the floppy drive and optical drive, they're now doing the same thing with USB and the headphone jack, and within five years you can be sure that every single one of their competitors will have made the same decision.
That's terrible to read. I'd hoped that Apple had just happened upon a streak of decisions that were inconvenient to users, and might reverse the trajectory. At less than 1/5 of $230B (more than 1/6?), and obviously at an extremely high profit margin, there's essentially no way.
I had been really optimistic about the adoption of USB-C, since it is as an open standard, but the discovery of such enormous licensing revenues that are essentially without expense to Apple, makes it almost inevitable that they will begin insisting peripherals get permission from Apple, too.
I think you may have misread what I wrote: one fifth of one percent, i.e, 0.2%. It's a minuscule drop in the ocean for Apple, such a small number it doesn't even show up on their financial reports. There's no way in hell they made a massive change like removing the headphone jack just to sell more accessories when their entire accessories revenue is little more than a rounding error.
Removing the headphone jack had absolutely nothing to do with selling dongles and everything to do with Apple doing what it always does: seeing which way the wind is blowing and dragging everyone kicking and screaming into their vision of the future.
They did the exact same thing with the floppy drive and optical drive, they're now doing the same thing with USB and the headphone jack, and within five years you can be sure that every single one of their competitors will have made the same decision.