Google's latest iPhone rival off to a rocky start

The problem is, the alternative to dropped techs were better to some extent:

- CD-ROM -> Bigger hard drives, faster internet connections.

- Floppy -> CD-ROMs And BIOS upgrade

- Flash -> Better browser security, and faster javascript

Now for headphone jack, we have bluetooth. Slow, unreliable, requires to charge an extra device, when you run out of earphone battery, you are done listening. If you use the USB/Lightning to AUX, you can't charge your phone at the same time.

If lose the earpiece, you pay premium to replace it.

Also: I can't watch a video with a half-second audio delay. Half a second is being generous.

> Apple has a really good track record of dropping things at the right time: floppy, CD-ROM, Flash, etc.

Counterexamples to your claim: Thunderbolt? Magsafe? Magsafe2? The physical escape key?

All of your examples were actually significant improvements: floppy / CD-ROM took up immense physical space and removing them caused a significant improvement in space and weight. SSDs initially had less capacity, but at least they had way better performance and also improved upon space and weight.

> The headphone jack is a legacy, bulky port

The headphone jack doesn't save on weight, its alternatives aren't an improvement. It does save on space, and I understand that space is tight on a phone, but honestly, we've already had so many brilliant and slim phones that have headphone jacks that I don't really buy this as an excuse. Do we /really/ need ever so slightly slimmer phones every year? Remember the bent iphone 6es?

I'd be willing to buy this if there was something amazingly novel that USB-C provides for headphones, or if wireless earbuds lasted more than 5-6 hours.

Here's what it comes down to: my 2013 macbook pro is fantastic, and none of the new stuff regarding ports is a genuine improvement to my experience, but all of it adds to potential frustration when I eventually have to make the switch when the hardware can't keep up anymore. I feel similarly with my iphone SE.

I really wish they'd stop futzing around with everything just for trivial improvements.

I really wish people like you would stop pooh-poohing legitimate complaints about attempts to prematurely retire tech just because companies have found something more lucrative for them.

We’re not luddites. We’re not short sighted. We understand tech moves on. That’s all fine and also irrelevant, because the situation here is that real tech used be lots of people every day with no real replacement is being yanked out from under us in the name of profit. Stop acting like you’re woke and the rest of us just need to catch up. It’s insulting as hell.

Apple and others should have only considered removing the headphone jack if they were prepared to do all of the following at the same time:

1. Abandon all proprietary connectors and adopt USB-C only on the phone. Keeping the Lightning port while moving MacBook Pros to USB-C-only was incredibly dumb because it immediately made the new products less useful than ANY older and less-expensive combination. Let’s see: older iPhone with charge cable and earphones that seamlessly plug into both the phone and the computer, or new-and-expensive-for-no-reason computer that can’t do any of that!?

2. Put multiple ports on the phone to avoid port-unavailable issues during charging; or, make sure that so-called “wireless” charging is working first so it can be a viable alternative. Instead they just broke a bunch of things and figured at some unspecified point in the future it would all work out. Well, what exactly is the point of buying the product in the meantime?

3. Assume that people will still want wired earphones. Wireless is NOT automatically better, for any number of reasons (risk of loss, sound cutting out, constant recharge, worse sound quality).

I have wireless headphones and I basically hate them; seems that every other time I want to use them they’re already out of battery, or they just STOP working halfway through some music. And it’s one of those products that can’t be used while it’s being recharged. As a result, I just use them way less, and it is a step backwards in every conceivable way. All I want is a wire.

I voted with my wallet.

After owning every iPhone since 3G up to 5s, I ditched Apple, and bought a new phone last week specifically because it had a headphone jack.

My WHOLE PHONE cost only a little bit more than Airpods alone. It's a Chinese phone that offers incredible value for money and I can't be happier(Xiaomi Note 4, for those interested).

Sure, it's specs don't quite match up to the flagship models from A and G, but it had what I wanted - a headphone jack(cheap, good, battery-less and reliable audio), a large-enough screen, lots of ram and a fast-enough processor.

I believe the dropping of the headphone jack was not meant as a way of herding users to better tech, like the CD-ROM ect. They could have left the jack in the iPhone 7 and released the AirPods anyway, as a cross-over test. The market would've decided on the winner. But they didn't do that. They didn't do that because they knew AirPods would not have sold as well.

It was just a blunt move of trying to increase profits. Just like the death-by-a-thousand-dongles decision.

Bad Apple. Bad.

LG V30 is a flagship that instead of taking the port away, made improvements to actually take advantage of it, offering a Hi-Fi Quad DAC built-in. It means I can use my studio-quality headphones and enjoy crisper sounding music on my phone and on the go.

All in all, all four of my headphones use the 3.5mm jack. Don’t see myself paying premium now for half-thought solutions, thank you.

Apple is not a god when deciding what ports to drop, alright? Just because they practically indoctrinate an industry to follow in their footsteps doesn’t mean it’s always right. I’m all for leaving really old or badly designed ports IF there are better alternatives. What’s currently out there is buggy at best.

I'll copy what I said to a similar comment a long time ago:

> Well the major difference is that optical drives were becoming more and more obsolete with the increase in streaming and download services. With spotify, netflix, amazon prime, itunes, etc, the main uses of optical drives for dvds and music disks were decreasing in popularity pretty rapidly. The only uses I ever have these days for my optical drive is to install drivers for new hardware in my PC, which in most cases can be found online anyway. And even this isn't needed on Macs because, unlike customisable PCs, you'll never need to install drivers for a fancy new PCIE wifi card.

> The headphone jack is different, because it isn't being replaced by convenient online services. Sure there are wireless alternatives, but the cost increases, difficulty of pairing, and the fact that 3.5mm is a standard across a huge range of devices from simple headphones to complex audio recording/mixing/playback setups means it just cannot be replaced. They could remove the optical drive without including the external drive because most people wouldn't need it, they definitely could not have removed the headphone jack without including an adapter in the box because of how popular the jack still is.

I rented a Hyundai over the summer and to play music from my iPhone, I had to Bluetooth pair with the car.

Guess what? It started syncing my entire contacts list. I just wanted to pipe audio from my phone to the car speakers, not share my life with a rental car.

So for those of us who value compartmentalising our lives, we'd very much like that bulky 3.5mm headphone jack, in addition to Bluetooth. Thanks.

Bluetooth is a merely adequate replacement, though. It regularly has dropouts depending on radio interference, and it means another peripheral that needs charging.

I don't know about you, but I regularly - at least 5 times a year - find the battery drained in my Bluetooth peripheral when I wanted to play audio, typically before or during a long trip. I keep wired headphones in my jacket pocket for these times, as a backup. I use three different peripherals often, and I don't track their charge state - the first I know about low battery is when they start giving warnings, usually about 10 minutes before they shut down, leaving me in silence. I don't have the time or patience to be checking their charge statuses constantly, or continually plugging them in to charge up, meaning disconnecting them from their home locations and needing retrieval before use.

I'm usually ready to embrace the next step, but the loss of the headphone jack was what made switch to the Pixel.

Call it what you will, but the headphone jack is superior to its predecessor, unlike the floppy, cd-rom, etc. When I heard they were discontinuing it, it felt wrong - it felt intentionally radical. And I knew there was no way I was going to pay extra for some Bluetooth earbuds I will definitely lose on my morning runs.

1) floppy was not big loss at the time -- not even close to the same thing

2) CDROM -- was just about as obsolete at the time it was removed -- also not even close to the same thing

3) flash -- well that did cause some people problems, but I didn't really care at the time, and it isn't really the same thing either.

The headphone jack may be old, but it is still way more useful than either a floppy disk or a CDROM were at the time they were removed. In the case of the floppy drive -- they were already on the way out, and the CDROM drive was there to replace them. When they ditched the CDROM drive, it could easily be replaced by a USB thumb drive or similar device -- which was still standard hardware, didn't have to be made by Apple, and was a reasonable replacement for the device removed. Having to have a separate adapter in order to use a standard set of headphones is, IMHO, NOT a reasonable replacement for just having the jack. And, yes, I DO believe that at least part of Apple's motivation was to make money by selling you Apple-branded headphones with their proprietary connector on it.

It's a legitimate gripe by paying customers. Apple is welcome to make whatever decisions they want on the hardware they sell, and we should not be essentially told to shut up when we (very reasonably) disagree with their decision.

CD-ROM was not the only removable storage medium, and it had an enormous cost in space (and sometimes power, if not implemented correctly). A good consumer-grade headphone amplifier has a minuscule cost in terms of space, even relative to a smartphone. The only reason to remove it is if you want your phone to be thinner than can support a 3.5mm receptacle, but as a smartphone consumer I don't really see the point in making a phone thinner than that, I figure it makes it hard to grasp the phone without touching the screen inadvertently. The iPhone 8 is about as thin as a phone should ever be, in my humble opinion, and at 7.3mm deep, there is definitely room for a 3.5mm receptacle, and there is already an audio chipset and opamp bank in the handset.

In short, the marginal cost in space, power, and BOM is negligible; and the value is high. I can't see myself buying a smartphone without a 3.5mm jack until wireless earbuds don't need to be charged more than once a month, and I can forget to put them back in the case for a couple days in a row without losing the ability to listen to audio.

Apple did not drop the floppy drive at the right time. They did in in 1998 which was at least 4 years before widely available USB flash drives. I remember every computer in the labs at school having a external floppy drive or even worse a Zip drive as there was no easy way for students to save their work and bring it with them. They also weren't responsible for the death of the Floppy disk as their marketshare then was low single digits.

Removing USB A from laptops for "professionals" and removing 3.5mm headphone jack is not really helping anything. USB C adoption will continue but there so many USB A products out there that it is inconvenient to the customer with zero advantage. Yeah I'd really like less ports on here for no decrease in price or increase in portability and would like to carry dongles said no one ever.

For the loss of the headphone jack to not be a downgrade, two things have to happen:

* Bluetooth has to work flawlessly - I hear there's been some issues even on iOS 11 and Android's Bluetooth has always been terrible

* USB C Audio has to work flawlessly [1]

1: http://pocketnow.com/2016/09/08/the-impending-horror-of-usb-...

I still have CDs / DVDs I love, so I have to get a portable. My friend loves vinyl, so she has to get a vinyl machine. The latter example is probably a stretch, but there is a value in using and appreciating old technology.

The drop of headphone jack comes with one problem: I can't charge and listen to music at the same time unless I pay for the earbuds, or get a third-party thunderbolt hub which has serious quality issue...

P.S: Mr. Robot saves whatever he wants to store away on discs. Kinda interesting. He probably doesn't trust hard drive as much as discs, and thinks discs will survive longer.

> Apple has a really good track record of dropping things at the right time: floppy, CD-ROM, Flash, etc.

> At each of those steps there were people decrying the loss of these things. Today however, most people don’t miss any of them.

Those statements don't really support each other. There's no particular evidence that Apple's timing was good, just that they dropped it and eventually nobody cared. But if they dropped it years before everyone moved on, then their timing was awful, not great, even though the end-state was the same.

Flash is a particularly weird example since Flash on mobile largely never existed, so claims to "drop" it are nonsensical. You can't drop that which didn't exist. Yes there was a brief attempt at Flash on Android, but that came long after the iPhone.

Dropping flash on desktop would have been a better example, but Apple didn't actually have the courage to do that, at least not on their own. It was more a unified push by all the browser vendors combined with Adobe themselves dropping support for Flash.

I spent a good amount of money on decent headphones and if I can't use them with my phone without a dongle that's a no-no. I get that "the future is portless" but the future hasn't arrived yet and until then I'm not gonna hand out 800EUR for something I can't use with my headphones with.

This isn’t about making phones smaller- they didn’t get smaller. This is about upselling some wireless earbuds. It made more sense to me when apple did it, owning beats, so even if you don’t go for the AirPods they win, but it looks like Google wants some of that upsell with the pixel buds.

Actually I agree that this is just like a CD drive but reach the opposite conclusion. Removing the CD drive was mostly worse for the consumer of the MBA at the time. Sure, almost no one wants a CD drive now, but that gives little credence to the idea that it should have been removed while still best for the consumer.

> Apple has a really good track record of dropping things at the right time: floppy, CD-ROM, Flash, etc

They have a good track record of dropping technologies in order to push their own proprietary technology instead. And failing most of the time, resulting in ultimately adopting the standard that everybody else is using.

The headphone jack’s legacy-ness is purely marketing-driven. There are alternatives with tradeoffs, but no replacements. Barring some technical miracle, you will never be able to use BT headphones to play games, make music, or play guitar.

I was recently listening to a podcast (embedded fm) regarding paypal and this triangular BLE block that had no ports. Would be funny if your phone was bricked and you had no way to interface with it. Maybe by display at the very least.

I don't know about other people, but I get a lot of interference on 2.4GHz between WiFi and Bluetooth at home. It doesn't matter whether its Bose Soundlink IIs or on-ear headphones.

We have a UniFi access point that is brilliant. However, I don't use 5GHz because the signal can't penetrate though more than 2 brick walls, which is an issue in some of the bedrooms.

While I'm a big fan of my Bluetooth earphones, let's be honest: the sound quality isn't nearly as good as wired hardware.

I use a tiny dongle that allows me to use any headphones I want. It's really not that big of a deal. It's about 2" in length that looks exactly like my apple headphone jack - so no one's the wiser really.

I thought it would be a big deal - I was wrong. It's fine. If you still want to use your cheap/expensive wired headphones, you can.

I rarely see mentioned the fact that the mini jack port ends up broken (connect /disconnect) a lot after a while. It always happens to me, no matter the cost of the device (except for my first gen gameboy).

There should be no ports.. wireless charging, bluetooth, wifi, induction usb if you really need a physical connection otherwise...

Has any bluetooth wireless headphone maker solved the latency issue yet? If not, then portless might still be a ways off.

Pretty much. Wonder how much crying will be happening as we transition to a screen less, brain chipped world

We'll see how dropping the escape key does with people who love developing in vim.

having a headphone jack is graceful degradation imho

my ears hurt from bluetooth wireless radiation :/

A lot of people make this point but I just don't think the analogy works. For one, you use the headphones with the phone as well as other devices, and those things might not grow a Lightning port.

Precisely this. We see this crying and beating of chests whenever some obsolete legacy interface is finally deprecated to the dustbin of history. "You can pry my 3.5mm headphone jack out of my cold dead hands!" the knee-jerk reactionaries foam at the mouth in mock outrage, and then they go and buy a good set of bluetooth headphones or earbuds a few months later.

I have an iphone and the airpods and I haven't missed the tangled mess of the old earbuds at all.

Actually you're wrong. They dropped the standard USB ports and EVERYONE is pissed off about that. And if someone isn't, they're a retard.

Flash is still important even though its written like garbage.

Your last argument is as dumb as can be too. You're trying to say because people have forgotten what they were made about, it doesn't matter. So since people forgot that the iMac they had was USB only and couldn't use older devices, its not important. It may not be now, but it was important then.

I reluctantly agree. Apple has a bunch of dirty practices that makes me thing twice about buying their products, but their market position does incentivize them to protect my privacy. In contrast, Google is incentivized to provide a thick pipe between the highest bidder and the screen in my hand.

Honestly, I feel like this is an argument for watching HBO vs NBC, say. HBO makes a "honest" product and charges for it, while NBC uses the platform to sell advertising.

NBC must therefore be "dishonest" because they're showing you 30 second ads. Despite the fact the business model of serving content for with ads has been a successful (and accepted) business model for decades.

Google's privacy policy is open. No one is forcing you to use it, just as no one is forcing you to watch NBC.

https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/

I don't really see why you're comparing them both, they are both in essential 2 big companies that wants to control their customers in certain ways, sell them products and keep them in their ecosystem.

If Apple could actually take advantage of the potential customer information they have access to in the same way I'm pretty sure they would.

> Between Apple and Google, you think APPLE'S business model is the harmful one?!

Google provides services to everyone in the world. Apple provides services to the social elite, and only them. A person of moderate means living in Ghana? Apple doesn't care about you; you may as well be invisible.

> I'm actually not sure I can even name a tech company with a business model as simple and honest as Apple's.

Because sending in the swat team when you think a journalist has a preview model of your doohickey is "simple" and "honest"? Apple does the same sort of shady stuff as any other BigCorp, they're just better at making things look fashionable, so people tend to give them a pass on it. After all, this is the same corp that patented the black oblong with rounded corners. There is nothing 'simple' about Apple's business model.

so true. actually the whole phone market is dogshit right now

it sure seems like things are getting worse, when all my phone upgrades have been forced:

1. original iphone wipes itself when i connect it to a new computer. ouch. my own itunes account, but somehow not recognized, and zap. went to android after this.

2. first android was the nexus. it had a known hardware bug where the soft buttons were being triggered randomly without being touched. started to drive me insane.

3. enter a unibody aluminum HTC. owned it for 3 years. i missed the sdcard slot but grew to love it anyway because it was durable as hell. it fell down a flight of concrete stairs. then carried on about its day. eventually the camera died on it (all pics started coming out hazy and red). i still see people using htc 7s even now.

4. enter nexus 6p. decent phone. screen was not very bright which was annoying outside but otherwise checks all the boxes. and it still gets the latest updates-- thing runs on oreo! but now its falling apart. the glass at the back broke twice, the sim is loose, gps works half the time, the plastic bottom fell off..

5. and so here we are today. cannot find another 6p. the pixel looks worse in many ways (fugly and bezels are even bigger while the software is the same). the v2 with no headphone jack?? and all these phones with glass backs that are actually even thicker than their predecessors that are obviously not going to last very long (anyone out there have a screen shatter?? lets double those odds). everyone using their own bloatware and not updating anything... android ones only really available in eurasia... ugh. do not want to crawl back to apple. someone help? blackberry, where are you?? lol

> I still get stuttering and low quality all the time when using Bluetooth.

Bluetooth works great for me (good enough quality, no stuttering) - what kills it is latency. Latency makes watching videos very uncomfortable. There's also faint static in nearly every pair of bluetooth earbuds I've tried (and not just cheap ones, $100+ ones do this too).

This is exactly how I plan on acting too. I wish I had a way to tell these companies to attribute the lack of sale they normally would have gotten, to their decision to remove the headphone jack. I'm worried they'll attribute sales difficulties to some other reason.

I think bluetooth is absolutely there now... I've used bluetooth headsets for a number of years now and they are fantastic. You just need to buy a decent product! Currently I am using QC35s and there is no lag, no hiss, amazing quality all round.

Sometimes it is unavoidable though... for example my car's bluetooth implementation however is horrible - very laggy and sometimes unresponsive.

And we've just got Bluetooth 5.0, which doesn't seem to address any of those issues. Instead it focuses on range, likely because that benefits local stores' advertising.

never heard of the librem until now, thanks. would be amazing if it happens

> The number of "but AirPods are great" comments on this entire thread is hilarious. Not relevant. The article is about Google's phone, not the iPhone.

Except that a lot of the complaints are not specific to the Google phone. They're about removing the headphone jack, and what people claim are inherent problems with doing so. If AirPods can be used to counter such claims then they're definitely relevant.

The AirPods are Apple's best product since the iPhone IMO.

That's the nature of change. It's awkward, and never smooth.

I'm one of those people who believe that eventually all consumer devices will use wireless headphones. It's not going to happen instantaneously, and the transition will be awkward, but eventually it will be complete and issues like you're talking about will be non-issues. This kind of thing has happened many times before.

Did USB stick proponents ONLY use USB sticks? What about computers that only use 3.5 inch floppy disks?

It's also an incredible hassle to keep pairing if you change the device quite a lot (between pc/phone) in my opinion.

If not an iPhone or a pixel, what decent phones are left in the running?

Apple is not confused. Lightning is a better and much smaller port for phone use. And there are over a billion Lightning devices out there. There's no compelling reason to switch to anything else, certainly not to USB-C.

And no, moving iPhone to USB-C would of course not end the Great Dongle Wars, nor even get rid of a significant chunk of them. Most dongles are necessitated by all kinds of old ports, mostly video, on laptops.

right???

Really? I found losing the wires (that snagged, pulled them out of my ears, etc) to be a fantastic advantage that far outweighs the inconvenience of having to charge them.

Don't forget they should switch from computer to phone in less than three seconds.

Unfortunately, it's a cheap DAC/amp dongle as, unlike some other phones, the Pixel 2 doesn't output analog audio via USB-C using the phone's built-in DAC/amp. And the Pixel 2 XL has its gain set really low for said dongle, meaning you're going to have difficulty driving lots of headphones.

Why do you doubt that?

No notification LED and No fingerprint reader on the back is why I decided to delay going to the x4. I do like that it has a working FM radio and headphone jack though. :(

Yeah Xiaomi phones are extremely good. They are not really popular in the west but not hard to get one either through Aliexpress or any other reseller.

I bought the mi5, installed Lineage on it and holy shit! I don't want this phone to become old and obsolete. Everything has been near perfect if not perfect. Everything. The battery life, screen size, the speed!

I actually look forward to use the phone.

> After Google left us Nexus 6P (and 5X) users out to rot, I won't be buying into their next hobby

Are there any phones that are actually supporting by Google or any Android maker that actually are suppported for several years? Seems like they all get abandoned after a year.

It will only get software updates for another year and security updates for 2 more years, it's 1/3 of the way through it's effective lifespan. The supported lifetimes are far too short when you buy in release day, let alone a year later.

Dat chin do'

The bezels make it unworkable for me, Donald, and the rest of the small hand contingent.

Well, aside from that, it was the only interface that used a standard connector and an unobtrusive driver library. You could run data in and out through the jack. But now all that's left is the proprietary lightning port and the wifi stack which could have all sorts of undocumented filtering or restrictive behavior in its driver. So it also locks the phone down further in that regard.

With new inventions like UEFI and the Intel Management Engine, running Linux might be ruled out entirely at some point.

> > Yes there are adapters for now but they're transitional and we can expect them to eventually go away.

> Unlikely. The headphone market is huge and these devices are expected to work with everything, from mobile devices to AV Receivers, DACs, amps and studio equipment. The headphone jack isn't going anywhere.

> > Only music you have purchased through your phone's marketplace may be played, and only to an authorized device.

> I doubt it. The music industry is pretty open these days and has given up on DRM for a long time - you can buy DRM-free, lossless music from countless places and while I understand that purchasing music has become rare, your scenario would be a dealbreaker for anyone that still does and truly owns their music. That might be a small share, but still a significant crowd. It would render the device close to useless for people like me. This is a whole other level compared to the compromise of an adapter.

For how long, until they come up with a new report that shows the margins are decreasing and they new ways to earn money?

What do you mean it isn't going anywhere? It's already gone. People who have discrete equipment are vastly in the minority and won't have any choices left anyway once every phone maker has dropped the jack. Plus, how often do you see an iPhone plugged into an AVR?

Why not both? Apple makes a killing from selling media on iTunes and with a healthy profit margin. A better DRM helps protect that golden goose just a little more.

It was the same with Nexus 5x (LG made) and Nexus 6p (HTC made). Nexus 5x was a disaster.

I meant hardware. I agree that their software quality is sub-par.

Same here. My Note 4 is three years old, with hours of screen-on time per day at a fairly high brightness. (I use it primarily as a tablet, not a phone.) Not the slightest hint of burn-in or any display problems.

For sure. Many friends of mine have had no issues. Maybe I was just unlucky or my way of using the phone is different enough, who knows.

So much this. I just want an upgraded Nexus. Hell I'd even take the 5X.

Already done. Maybe this particular phone isn't doing it, but pixel shifting is standard on Samsungs and the iPhone X.

On both Samsung phones and tablets, I've found Auto Brightness to be unreadably low at first and had to shut it off. (With Auto off, you can set whatever fixed brightness you want, it's not a binary Auto vs. Max choice).

I have the GS3, GS5, GS6, GS6 Edge, GS7, GS7 Edge, and a Tab A.

The LG V30 and Samsung Galaxy S8 were both released this year and both feature wireless charging and a headphone jack.

The nexus 5 has both of those things. What world do we live in where a headphone jack is considered a feature?

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2017/10/20/iphone-8-versus-iphone-x/

[2] http://bgr.com/2017/09/25/iphone-8-vs-iphone-7-launch-weeken...

[3] http://fortune.com/2017/10/23/apple-iphone-8-s-version/

Around my neck of the woods everyone I know are holding out for the X.

Time for some partial derivatives and supply curve modeling!

I suspect not, since the X will only be available in limited quantities.

My guess is that it was a mistake to not release both at the same time. If they had done that, people that couldn’t immediately order the X are likely to just go ahead and order the 8 if it isn’t that big a deal to them. But now with the 8 having been out for a month, I think a lot more people are likely to just decide to wait. Net result will be a huge drop in sales (though higher ASP).

I guess we’ll see if I’m wrong many months from now, but this just seems like a huge error on their part to me.

Good luck, I expect by 12:05am the website will show delivery dates in February.

Yes. That may have effected demand for the 8.

Great to see them moving along with the times.

Please don't do this here.

There's got to be a word for the attitude you are running here.. I can't think of it.

Anyway, as an owner of wireless headphones and wired headphones I definitely wouldn't choose a phone without an aux in. My wireless headphones have stayed uncharged for months - i'm not yet ready to be responsible for charging two devices every night.

This is kind of the right answer, even though it's obviously not popular.

The real problem is, right now wireless headphones aren't nearly as convenient along a number of axes as wired headphones.

The real solution is, get them to be absolutely as convenient. After all, solving engineering problems is what we're all about here, right?

Right now, I'm dealing with it by preferentially buying phones that come with a headphone jack. And internally stowed stylus. And a slot for a memory card. Fortunately, the Note 8 has all three.

Sure all of those may be on the way out in long term trend—the others for longer than the headphone jack.

But as long as I have a choice, I'll vote with my wallet for the things I prefer.

Mine will.

My own opinion has shifted along with the availability of my Bluetooth headphones. Before I owned Bluetooth headphones I thought getting rid of the headphone jack was a bad idea. After I bought a nice pair that does noise canceling as well, I became a Bluetooth headphone evangelist. After my girlfriend discovered how nice my (or as she calls them "the") Bluetooth headphones are, I find I'm dreading having to pay another 300-400 dollars for another pair of headphones now that my pixel is arriving in a few days.

No

Better to say suggest or imply rather than claim

As complex as the iPhone X is, I'm thinking that this iteration of it will be a buggy mess (and I'm not just talking iOS).

Hope not, but I'm taking a wait and see posture.

The supply issues Apple has with the X are due to the scale of their global sales machine. If they were dealing with a few million of phones like Google is with the Pixel, instead of tens of millions of phones like they are with the X, there wouldn't be any supply chain issues.

That’s one possibility. The other rumored issue is getting enough FaceID modules.

Not really, Apple is sourcing exclusively from Samsung based on rumors. It's the FaceID module production that's causing supply constraints.

Apple tends to be willing to pay more for the parts and they have very high quality standards.

That said they’re not immune. There have been a number of displays Apple used in the last few years with retention issues (I think the original rMBP has issues) so it’s perfectly possible.

If they made the gamble they must think it’s ok but as someone who plans to buy an X I can say it does worry me a bit.

Edit: another comment points out their keyboards. That obviously hasn’t been going well either.

The problem with the Pixel 2 XL screens seems to be attributable to LG. LG's own V30 phone has similar screen issues. Meanwhile Samsung's OLED panels are doing great so far - and Apple is sourcing from Samsung.

I've never seen a 1st gen apple watch with burn in, even. Mine is a bit over two years old. Apple seems to buy the absolute best quality displays, and have good control logic/orbiting/etc to prevent it. I use mine heavily, although i guess not as much as a phone. I've never heard of one getting burn in/retention though.

If you’re having network hangs, does your IT department install a proxy or VPN? That doesn’t happen on normal devices but when enterprise IT is involved it’s common.

Just got a Moto G4 last month and I really like it. Everything just works and loads quick. No complaints.

File management became available in a recent iOS update.