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Comment by entee | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the bluetooth being inferior, I hate that the standard headphone jack is going away. If it isn't broken, don't fix it.

That said I've been told that the 3.5mm jack takes up a surprising amount of internal space, and that between freeing up that space and a few other tweaks, getting rid of the jack substantially boosts battery life. Still, I think it's not a great trade-off, now you have to babysit a new battery in your headphones, which probably won't last a full day of use.

On a personal note, anticipated lack of a standard headphone jack is one of the reasons I upgraded to a 6S recently, this way I'll have the best 3.5-mm phone Apple made for a while. If I do have to upgrade later on, I'll be strongly tempted to get an SE instead of a higher end phone, as long as it has a 3.5mm jack.

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> getting rid of the jack substantially boosts battery life

Yes, as you say, by moving the power draw for the DAC to another device, which must be charged separately. This isn't a real gain in battery life in any way.

Yeah, I recognize that. It's also extra space to shove battery into. Like I said, I don't think it's a real worthwhile trade-off.

At least for most headphones with some kind of band, there is a lot of room for a battery.

There's also a lot of additional weight.

It's always possible to add a battery. That's not the problem. The problem is that we have a passive device, headphones, that works well and are a stable and mature tech, that will become crap.

I dont want to charger yet another device in my daily routine. I won't, actually, and will steer away from any phone that requires active headphones to work.

I have a phone with a headphone jack, and I'm using Bluetooth headphones for hours every day. The headphone battery lasts a lot longer than the phone. In the past few years even audiophile brands have been releasing blueooth models and they are getting good.

I'm not saying I agree with getting rid of the headphone jack. The amount of utility it provides is pretty high relative to the volume it takes up.

Most of the people I know use the internal speakers on their phones extensively, and hardly ever use audio over either Bluetooth or the 3.5mm jack. In this case, how would battery life be improved. The DAC and amplifier cannot be removed unless the on board speaker is also. I hope this is not the case.

Do you know anyone who works out? Runs? Rides a bike?

Maybe I'm in the minority but I could never imagine not having music pumping in my ears.

> Most of the people I know use the internal speakers on their phones extensively

These people are a pox on public transport.

The only people I know who don't use headphones are both teenagers and reviled by the people around them. If what you claim is the case, public transport would be a wasteland of pop music and clash of clans sound effects. I highly suspect your friends aren't representative in the least of the general population.

I use the phone's internal speakers to play music in the car. I would use the audio jack for that, except that cars no longer seem to come with any way of accepting an audio cable. My car from 2002 had a tape player, and I was happy using an audio cable with a casette tape adapter on the other end. A car from 2015 just can't do it. :(

I also use the phone's internal speakers for playing the notification sound. (And, technically, ringing.) I sure hope that's not going away.

Does your car have a USB port? If it does, it might speak iAP to play audio through it. If it doesn't, you can always replace the radio and get some more inputs.

Bluetooth's more reliable than USB in a car anyway.

Doesn't your car have Bluetooth? Or rather: how old does a car have to be before it doesn't come with Bluetooth as standard? Every rental I've had in the last five years has had Bluetooth to my recollection, and I don't hire expensive cars.

As pointed out elsewhere in the thread, bluetooth is not a good solution when you want to use one speaker (the car) with several devices. The beauty of a cable is that it's unambiguously connected to whatever it's plugged in to, and not to anything else.

Huh? How is it harder to disconnect a phone on bluetooth than to unplug a cable?

I recently had the joy of having to delete a paired device in a car before I could add a new one. For some reason you could only have three devices paired.

Agreed; this is a normal part of renting.

Micro FM transmitters. Plug into the 3.5mm jack, power from the cigarette / accessory adapter. Usually a choice of frequencies to broadcast on which can be picked up over your car's FM receiver.

Quite frequently found at highway truck stops, though almost certainly other electronics stores as well.

And suffer from interference and low volume; has been my experience.

Wireless is convenient.

Wired is reliable.

YMMV.

Plus, they're crap. Seriously. I bought one of the more expensive ones, with auto channel scanning, still crap. Made me go back to burning CDs until I put an aftermarket stereo with 3.5 mm jack in. Fortunately that's a near-universal feature these days.

To be sure, I use it too! But almost never in public; I still use the headphone jack daily.

I just got the One Plus 3 which has the USB3 type C and the 3.5mm jack right next to each other and I have to say the jack is only slightly larger so I don't see the point of replacing it.

Oh and it felt too damn thin as it is I was constantly wary I would accidentally bend it or scratch the metal casing so i got a rubberised cover. Now it feels a lot better to hold.

Yeah, that's my personal pet peeve too; if, instead, we had that kind of armor built into the device itself, it could still be pretty thin, durable, have a 2-day battery (which would be a one-day battery at the end of 18 months of daily usage), and fit a 3.5mm jack no problem. Instead we get a super fragile bendable piece of thin aluminum (which is not known for being very rigid in such gauges, especially with so many holes around the edges) and glass, which we are expected to never drop onto a hard surface or get wet. This would be fine if we all lived in the desert away from rocks and bodies of water, but instead, in most first-world countries, we spend the majority of our lives surrounded by hard things and wet things which don't play nicely with these now-ubiquitous devices.

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