I know I for one will never buy a phone with no headphone jack.
What did they gain by removing floppy disk drives from laptops? Well, nothing per se, but it allowed them to make smaller laptops.
Removing the jack will allow them to make phones thinner - if not now, in future iterations.
And the thing with keeping features around is that it's not just a question of that one feature. It's cumulative over time. It's not just a question of removing the floppy drive, it's that AND the internal modem AND the CD drive, etc. The effects can add up.
Any transition like that is going to be awkward at first. If people tried to wait for perfect conditions, progress would never be made.
Pushing progress is not an excuse to force transition with cost and effort burden on customers.
> Pushing progress is not an excuse to force transition with cost and effort burden on customers.
You can't make progress without doing some of that.
Every stationary or semi-stationary networked device should probably have Ethernet. A desktop or laptop should; a phone shouldn't (because it's mobile). It'd be nice if IoT thermostats and the like were wired, but that would require homes to have Ethernet-over-power or Ethernet runs in the walls or something.
WiFi is inferior to Ethernet, except when mobility is necessary. So for mobile devices like phones, it's not needed. For tablets, probably not (but imagine if your charging cable could also carry fast, reliable networking to your tablet, so you could have a better experience while reading or watching TV, but still be able to get up & go).
When they removed that -- or any of the other things -- there was still some backlash from people who still had uses for them, and still wanted them.
> I don’t agree that Bluetooth is a better alternative than a cord that is 100% reliable to pair, perfect audio quality, and never needs to be charged
From what I've heard the ear pods are very reliable to pair and have good audio quality.
I think the comparison to removal of floppy drives fails here because neither is clearly superior to the other.
Wired headphones are inconvenient (you need a wire) but have great sound quality and reliability. They're also cheap. Wireless headphones are convenient in some aspects (no wires) but inconvenient in others (need to charge them) and have decent quality and somewhat less reliability. They're also expensive.
You can't say wireless headphones supersede wired headphones, they just choose different tradeoffs.
I don't believe that is inherently true about wireless headphones.
Re: tradeoffs, you can say that about any set of alternatives, and there can still be one option that in the long term is best for most people. Eg horses vs cars as means for personal transport.
I believe it is. Wireless headphones are subject to interference while wired ones are not. Physical connections are much less likely to fail. Wired headphones also lack batteries.
> Re: tradeoffs, you can say that about any set of alternatives, and there can still be one option that in the long term is best for most people. Eg horses vs cars as means for personal transport.
It's true that whether a product is superior to another is a subjective decision but I think there's a threshold to be met in terms of numbers.
Horses vs. cars is easy: Cars today are cheaper, faster, safer, require less space and require less maintenance than horses. The number of people who'd prefer a horse to a car is insignificant.
Wired vs. wireless is much closer. I think at best 50% of people would prefer wireless after trying them for a week or two.
Wireless and wired aren't mutually exclusive either. There's no reason a phone can't support both wired and wireless headphones and let people choose. That's what we've had for years now and unsurprisingly, wireless headphones haven't really taken off.
The GSM "buzz" would like to have a word with you.
Admittedly it's no longer much of an issue as that standard is not used much anymore, but still...
> I think at best 50% of people would prefer wireless
I'm curious what your sample size on that is, as literally everyone I know who switched to a (good) pair a bluetooth headphones (20+ at this point) is 100% on the wireless bandwagon, myself included.
Admittedly - a large portion of that 20+ samples of anecdata are from pool players who like to wear headphones while playing the game. The fact that there are no wires means that said players no longer have to come up with a way of dealing with the wire to prevent it from interfering in the game (so, sure, my sample is biased).
That's not true. Have you ever had gunk get into your headphone jack and have that affect the sound? I have.
> Physical connections are much less likely to fail.
I hear the air pods are pretty reliable. I've had plenty of wired headphones either stop working properly or stop working altogether. Wires can get yanked and this an effect the internal connections in the headphones, for example.
> Wired headphones also lack batteries.
The literal text of what I was replying to was "have decent quality and somewhat less reliability", and batteries have nothing to do with that.
> Horses vs. cars is easy: Cars today are cheaper, faster, safer, require less space and require less maintenance than horses. The number of people who'd prefer a horse to a car is insignificant.
We're not talking about horses vs cars today, we're talking about horses vs cars when cars were being introduced! That's the analogous situation.
> I think at best 50% of people would prefer wireless after trying them for a week or two.
On what grounds?
> Wireless and wired aren't mutually exclusive either. There's no reason a phone can't support both wired and wireless headphones and let people choose.
Yes, that's true. But I think that the longer-term picture is different. More features means more cost and complexity. And you can't consider this just in the context of one issue. It's cumulative over time. An analogy here is all the various features that have been lost in desktop and laptop computers over the years (and replaced by different ones). Sure, any one of those isn't necessarily a big deal, but in the longer term it's not about individual ones. If you said that about each individual feature, and kept it on, the devices these days would be really encumbered with all sorts of stuff.
> That's what we've had for years now and unsurprisingly, wireless headphones haven't really taken off.
We're not talking about decades and decades of good, consumer-level priced wireless technology. It's still pretty new, and that also means it's still pretty expensive. I think it's clear that a fair number of people who are against the wireless headphones still haven't actually tried good one, which shows that the exposure levels for the technology is still pretty low.
And removing the jack is the kind of thing that may push the adoption of wireless headphones and lead to the kinds of economies of scales that reduce the price and lead to more takeup.
Also, this already happened with the Ethernet port.
Routers need to be plugged into a wall socket. Batteries don't require that constant use of a cable or socket.
An advantage I didn't mention in my original comment is: getting rid of cables. Personally, I hate headphone cables. They seem to always be getting tangled up when the headphones aren't in use (meaning I have to mess around untangling them before using them), and always caught on things while I'm wearing them.
Aside from cost, more devices that need to be charged creates more overhead.
The analog headphone jack still does as good a job of connecting headphones, speakers and such in a practical sense as it always did. Perhaps even better since cars have aux in ports most of the time now[0]. It hasn't fallen into disuse either. While bluetooth headphones exist and enjoy some popularity, most people I know own, and regularly use wired headphones.
I don't think the analogy holds. The headphone jack is still as useful and popular with consumers as it ever was.
[0] Yes, they also usually have bluetooth, but getting a car and a phone to pair, and getting the right phone to be paired at the right time isn't always a good UX.
There were still people who had stuff on floppies who wanted floppy drives.
There was a big fuss when Apple first removed CD drives from their laptops.
> The analog headphone jack still does as good a job of connecting headphones, speakers and such in a practical sense as it always did.
Many people -- I'm not claiming it's the majority -- disagree. Many people find headphone cables a big pain in the ass.
> While bluetooth headphones exist and enjoy some popularity, most people I know own, and regularly use wired headphones.
At least part of that is that wireless headphones tend to be expensive and many of them aren't the best at pairing and staying connected. Those things aren't inherent to wireless technology and will change over time.
> Yes, they also usually have bluetooth, but getting a car and a phone to pair, and getting the right phone to be paired at the right time isn't always a good UX.
Again, that's nothing inherent to wireless. Apparently the Apple wireless pairing works pretty perfectly.
But they don't also find having to charge headphones, and eventually to throw them out and purchase new ones, to be 'a big pain in the ass'?
> At least part of that is that wireless headphones tend to be expensive and many of them aren't the best at pairing and staying connected. Those things aren't inherent to wireless technology and will change over time.
I'm pretty sure that expense and complexity are inherent to wireless. No wireless connexion is going to be as cheap and reliable as an equivalent wired connexion, if only because the wireless connexion terminates in … a wire.
Basically, chaos originates from the involvement of computer science.
Cordless home phones and "900 Mhz" wireless headphones to use around the house are dead friggin' simple and reliable.
(Not to mention insecure: another story).
you have to buy at least one pair of wireless headphones (and eventually they'll be bundled with phones), but you wouldn't need to replace them any more frequently than other headphones. This is the way with all changes. When wifi first became available we had to buy new modems.
As for charging them, that doesn't seem like a big pain to me. I charge my phone and laptop each day, this is just one other thing. For me the benefits -- no cables to get tangled (and have to untangle) or get caught on things -- outweigh the costs.
> I'm pretty sure that expense and complexity are inherent to wireless. No wireless connexion is going to be as cheap and reliable as an equivalent wired connexion, if only because the wireless connexion terminates in … a wire.
I hear the air pods are very reliable.
Regarding expense, if economies of scale get going, which I believe will happen, and manufacturers get more experience making them, then this will make the prices come down.
Except that the batteries will eventually stop holding a charge. This is not a problem with wired headphones. I can plug a 40 year old pair of headphones my Dad got in college into my phone and they work the same now as they did then. You can't do that with wireless headphones.
You're wrongly assuming that this always means the headphones will no longer work. There are wireless headphones with replaceable batteries -- e.g. https://www.beoplay.com/products/beoplayh8#techtalk
And, it's not like most wired headphones last forever. I must have gone through 5 - 10 pairs in the last few years. Admittedly most of these were towards the lower-end, but still, they just stopped working.
I agree completely - wireless headphones are amazing, I hate dealing with cables.
My first pair of bluetooth headphones were shit, and very difficult to switch devices, so I went back to wired. My second pair of bluetooth headphones (Bose QC something) are fantastic! Easily connect to multiple devices, easily switch between the devices. My third (AirPods) are similarly amazing, easy to switch devices, easy to pair.
I'm never buying a pair of wired headphones again.
I still want cheep, easy to find, simple, reliable personal audio that doesn't depend on a low-noise RF environment.
I still want to EASILY interface with /all/ of the current devices that accept standard electronic line-in signal.
Sure, my use case is different than your's, but that port is still useful and it is a feature.
Just make the battery a little thicker to keep things uniform and give us all a full 10 hours of watching videos on a plain / train / etc.
As far as I can tell, that move is now seen as prescient rather than premature.
People keep saying this but the circuitry and the depth was very small. There was even that guy from China who hacked a working 3.5mm jack into the iPhone 7 without changing its shape AT ALL yet Apple cited that they had to remove it to fit in more stuff.
If this isn't something that's useful to remove now, they should wait until it IS useful. It's all very frustrating. I now have my non-techie family asking me what to do with their phone that doesn't have a headphone jack or they're asking for support for their bluetooth headphones which MOST of them still completely SUCK (especially for the average user).
I mean I ultimately agree with you but I think we're still years away.
What is advantage of thinner phones? They are uncomfortable for hands and have probably smaller battery. They must be also easier to bend.