So now instead of just plugging something into the car radio, we ought to solder (!) in a bodge to listen to phone music. Doesn't that strike you as over engineering a solved problem?
That depends on how badly you want Bluetooth and how comfortable you are doing this sort of work. Nobody is saying you have to do it, just that you can if you want to.
I think the question is not how much you want bluetooth, but how much you want to play songs on your phone over your car stereo.
In the current world you can often plug your phone into your car by a 3.5mm jack and play music. In the brave new world, you can plug a bluetooth dongle into your car's cigarette lighter and 3.5mm jack, pair your phone and then listen to music. If needed, you have the "option" of hiding this awful mess under the dashboard and hard wiring it.
It sounds worse than cassette adapters to me, but I am not a phone manufacturer, so I can't do much more than bitch on the internet :)
It's an option, sure. It's just far less convenient or practical than my current ability to plug a simple wire into my phone and then into a jack in my car. Removing that option in favor of soldering a device into my car stereo is not desirable.
OK? Nobody is saying that it must be desirable for you. It is merely being presented as a possibility in case the tradeoffs do make sense to you.
I find this to be a very puzzling part of hacker culture. Any suggestion that doesn't fit the personal desires of the commenter must be attacked, not merely ignored or politely rejected.
I hardly think imgabe and my posts constitute an attack. I'd call them a polite rejection of an idea.
Ignoring an idea in the context of a discussion about the idea seems pretty weird. Disagreement is part of discussion, and disagreement is not, in and of itself, impolite.
Losing a universal port on one of the most common phones doesn't really seem like an "option." It hasn't happened yet, so it's still a "possibility" but it is a possibility in the sense that the future is unknowable, not in the sense that it's something you have a choice in (beyond abandoning iphones). It's something Apple wants to do, but it isn't like a person could go buy an iphone with the "backwards compatible audio" option
