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Comment by drakenot | Hacker News Reader

Everyone lamenting the loss of the headphone jack reminds me of the same people lamenting the loss of the CD-ROM drive in the MacBooks.

The headphone jack is a legacy, bulky port. I would not be surprised to see a port-less phone in the next few years.

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. They made the right choice then and I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt now.

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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.

Bluetooth is slow and unreliable unless you're using Airpods (due to the W1 chip), which I think is the more subtle move by Apple in this case. I was not a happy camper when I first read about Apple removing the headphone jack, but I won't lie, I'm an Airpod convert. They work flawlessly for me and I haven't traveled with or used normal headphones since I got them (other than a nicer pair of over-the-ears when I'm working on my desktop).

I'm not saying this excuses the removal of the headphone jack, but from a business perspective it does add up.

I've said it multiple times now but I was exactly the same way. I was a little bit annoyed at the removal of the headphone jack but then ended up getting the iPhone 7 because I wanted the newer features. I didn't have wireless headphones, so I went all in and got the AirPods along with it and, holy hell, this is the closest that any technology has come to really feeling like magic to me. The pairing process was awesome, the range is great, the sound quality is great (after breaking them in hard for a week or two), and I literally forget that I'm wearing them sometimes to the point where it feels like the music is coming from inside my head. They're just so convenient and nice that I'm ok with doubting Apple initially but relieved that they proved me wrong. Forget the headphone jack. If this works the way these AirPods do going forward, I'm a convert.

> the sound quality is great

Really? I use AirPods when I'm out and about but when I'm at my desk I plug in a pair of $20 wired Sony earbuds that sound way better...

Personally I really do find the sound quality to be quite good on the AirPods. When I'm at home I'm often using a much more expensive pair of open Beyerdynamic headphones so it's not like I haven't experienced high quality sound, though I wouldn't consider myself an audiophile.

This is another good point. Quality headphones are rarely bluetooth. I have a nice pair of Sennheisers. They do not come in bluetooth. And yes, I use them with my phone at work.

I thought the AirPods sounded like ass when I first started using them but after 2 weeks of using them every day for hours on end, they've really broken in and they have great range and separation. They don't have a great seal but I don't consider that a negative for what I use them for.

Buy some felt covers for the AirPods.

The biggest problem with them is poor isolation.

This is exactly what I feel: music coming from inside my head. The AirPod is a very under-hyped product. Its beauty is that you can wear it and completely forget about it and focus on whatever the hell you want to do. You actually feel that rare freedom. This freedom and focus it gives you is the most precious quality that 99.9% gadgets lack these days.

Well said. They're the only reason that I actually think a wireless future is possible without a headphone jack.

> I literally forget that I'm wearing them sometimes to the point where it feels like the music is coming from inside my head.

I see I'm not the only one :D I've also noticed other people and their wires hanging out more and more. I'm thinking wires are probably going to go out of fashion in the future and will look weird.

In addition to it being magical, it's really incredibly useful and handy for driving and for work. Great to be on a phone call in a crowded server room, without extra wires being in the way. Great for commuting. And super-extra-great at the gym.

Even on the treadmill? Even going hard?

I'm not trying to push buttons. I use Jaybird X3s and feel comfort from the corded nature of the headphones. Here on the streets of NYC, I see AirPods more as fashion statements over an actual audio solution.

The instantaneous pairing sounds lovely, but I'm concerned most concerned with audio quality, bluetooth connection in a busy city, and general practical logistics both in and out of the gym.

I play basketball in AirPods. That should tell you all you need to know. Running, jumping, trick shots, drills, 1:1, and they've never fallen out even once.

I used to have JayBird X2s. They were fine but they definitely fell out from time to time and I'd always have to subconsciously "manage" the cord.

AirPods are my primary gym headphones and I'm never going back. I will pay double or even triple to replace them if I had to. That's how much value they deliver in my day to day life.

Yes, even going hard. I can't dislodge AirPods even if I shake my head around as hard as I can and try to dislodge them. My wife is on the treadmill almost every day with hers, running fast; she has no issues with them falling out, either. I do get that the security of a cord is preferable for some, but I've had a really great user experience. I don't wear them because they are fashionable; I think they look rather dorky, to be honest. But I love how they work.

I tried wearing them at the gym, but I sweat too much.

I've also had one fall out when I was out shopping. I was on an escalator and managed to pick it up, but now I'm super paranoid whenever I walk near a sewer grating.

I guess physiological variations are inevitable but for me I have to be a newly showered Labrador to shake it off my head.

I fear anything involving putting on/taking off a helmet could dislodge these suckers. And any activity the helmet is used for: mountain biking/climbing/mountaineering, is not the right venue for them. Too bad, since the iPhone's water resistance would be a major upgrade over my current phone.

Wearing in-ear headphones while biking is a bad idea anyway. I've switched to bone conducting headphones for my daily commute by bicycle and they're great for listening to podcasts while still hearing the surrounding traffic.

> Wearing in-ear headphones while biking is a bad idea anyway.

On roads? Yes. Mountain biking? Depends on where I am.

> I've switched to bone conducting headphones for my daily commute by bicycle and they're great for listening to podcasts while still hearing the surrounding traffic.

Any brand/model you would suggest?

You should try it if you can. Yes, helmet removal can and likely will dislodge, but it's not obvious that just the act of using them with a helmet on will cause problems.

Maybe it won't work, but worth trying.

I've worn them with a helmet and they only fell out when I tried to take the helmet off. As long as I look for them when taking the helmet off, they're no different from checking my regular headphones.

Most things I bring mountaineering - especially - most especially electronics are tethered in some ways. It may be too risky to buy an iPhone just to try this out, and I'm doubting anyone's gonna let me borrow a phone and a pair of these. regular earbuds are inexpensive, and if you lose/break them, it's not the end of the world. Airbuds are... $150. For something that can be easily lost.. yikes.

I had Jaybird X3's before I had AirPods.

The X3s were not terrible, but, the AirPods are more comfortable and stay in my ears more firmly. I can wear them for hours and hours without them bothering me and I only dislodge them if I physically knock them out of my ear.

I own AirPods and Jaybird X3s, and the sound quality of AirPods crushes that of the Jaybirds. I completely switched over to AirPods a few months ago and have never looked back.

Then the X3s must sound really bad because AirPod sound quality is decidedly mediocre, especially for $160 in-ears.

I disagree completely. You either don't own a pair or you only tried a fresh pair. You gotta break those bad boys in. It took me 2 weeks before they broke in and I noticed a huge difference.

Bluetooth audio quality is subpar to a wired port in my experience. A good example is the Q35, when paired via bluetooth the audio quality is worse than when plugged directly into the headphone port.

IIRC there are multiple audio codecs in the standard (and of course different versions of standard), some of them really old. So with certain device combinations you may get better result than with others.

I once looked into these and got the impression that main goal is to make it possible to produce standard compliant devices as cheaply as possible.

Edit: I had written down some of the stuff I found: http://juhap.iki.fi/misc/qc35-windows-bluetooth-audio/

Just wanted to note that listening to music through earbuds while driving is illegal.

I generally believe that laws only need to be enforced when reasonable. But this law actually sounds reasonable...

In California, to my knowledge, it’s only against the law of both earbuds are in.

The legality depends on what state you are in.

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/10/31/is-it-legal-to-w...

Apple has had a series of truly revolutionary products over the years.

The complete list, as far as I'm concerned: Original Macintosh OSX/macOS iPod iPhone AirPods

AirPods really are amazing, my singular complaint is that they're not waterproof.

Waterproof AirPods would be the one thing I would pay stupid amounts of money for. My biggest complaint with the AirPods (and it's a really tiny one) is that they don't have a great seal. Waterproof AirPods would have to have a good seal to the ear.

And that’s exactly why Apple is so often so great at innovation: they make bold trade-off decisions on behalf of the users knowing the public will beat them initially, but that it’ll pay off in the long run - for everyone. Which other company does that?

I don't see what AirPods do that any other, more affordable, Bluetooth headsets don't. I get the wireless appeal, I like using my cheap 20€ Bluetooth headphones with build in microphone/remote. I mostly got them for the remote, their 7 hour running time lasts me for like 3 days of commuting.

But I also still carry around my wired UE triple.fi because I like having the option for going wired, better sound quality, less latency and especially less drain on my iPhone SE's battery due to disabled Bluetooth.

Even when nothing is paired/active just having Bluetooth enabled seems to drain phones batteries so much faster.

The thing AirPods do is work better than other, more affordable, Bluetooth headsets. There’s no lag, you painlessly pair once and can use on all your Apple devices, they’re so light you can easily forget they’re in your ears, etc etc. I have a Plus which has a much bigger battery, but I don’t notice any difference with Bluetooth on or off.

There is no latency or battery drain with the AirPods. That's exactly why I can't compare them to any of the other Bluetooth headphones I've tried. They are significantly better.

How often do you have to charge airpods ?

I never pay attention to the absolute time, but when they need a charge they make a sound to indicate it and then you can easily put one in the case/charger and then put it back in your ear when it’s charged and then charge the other one, all without pausing your call. This duty cycling means you are effectively limited by the case battery size not the bud battery size.

I agree with the others upthread that I’m not going back to wires after getting my AirPods.

If you're on a call (and I do some marathon calls), I get a small ding in my ear and pop out one airpod, charge it, in 10-15m put it back in and charge the other one and with ~30m of completely uninterrupted conversation (swapping airpods does not cause drops) I'm good for another 2 hours.

For music, I get ~4 hours easily.

Mine last about 4 hours, and are up and running again for at about another 2 hours in as little as 15 minutes.

Apple's quoted battery life and charging times seem accurate to me.

Amazing how factual statements in response to questions about same are getting downvoted. C'mon people.

This makes me jealous for an Android version. The Bragi Dash has been a huge letdown due to persistent connectivity issues.

If it makes you feel better, AirPod users rarely talk about their bluetooth stuttering issues, but it does occur.

Bluetooth is lossy. Replacements must keep quality of predecessor as a minimum.

Do you mean in this case, or in general?

I think it's very often the reverse – a disruptive replacement has to really blow past the incumbent in some respect, but it's quite hard for something new to be up to par with the old, polished thing in all respects.

PCs were less powerful than mainframes, MP3 is lower quality than CD, etc. etc.

They all solved problems. For example you can't carry 10000 cds with you everywhere you go. I can't see what problem Bluetooth is solving apart from allowing companies sell more consumer grade junk. I'm not even a die hard audiophile but Bluetooth headphones take the biscuit. Shittier quality audio (and generally build too) for double the price and you have to charge them too.

If there was ever proof that we are brainwashed by consumerism in the same way the North Koreans are by the Kim's, Bluetooth headphones is it. Total worthless junk yet people still drop non-inconsequential amounts cash on it and rave about it.

The problem Bluetooth is solving is wires. It’s really something you don’t recognize how annoying it is until you don’t have to deal with it anymore. With aptX the audio quality isn’t bad either. Over time all of those issues (price, build quality, audio quality, battery life, etc.) will only get better, while wired headphones will by definition always have that wire...

Wires are better imo. Anyways they could and do easily offer both to keep everyone happy. No need to remove the wired option.

On a side note I found this analysis of aptX very illuminating. I found it after the salesperson in my local B&W store tried tell me it was completely lossless http://www.sereneaudio.com/blog/how-good-is-bluetooth-audio-...

I should add that the portable Bluetooth speaker he was demoing sounded great compared to other offerings in the market that I have heard. I wasn't sure if this was more due to the codec or the general quality of the components. The speaker in question is the Dali Kaitch https://www.dali-speakers.com/loudspeakers/active/dali-katch... for those who are curious.

Apple doesn't support aptX so it's irrelevant to cableless iPhone users.

> It’s really something you don’t recognize how annoying it is until you don’t have to deal with it anymore.

I definitely recognised it while still using them! When I'm not wearing the headphones, the wires are always getting tangled. When I am wearing the headphones, the wires are always getting caught on things.

> The problem Bluetooth is solving is wires. It’s really something you don’t recognize how annoying it is until you don’t have to deal with it anymore.

I bought an iP6S instead of a 7 just for the jack because I wasn't a fan at all. Then in the span of four months, three jacks died on me in a row. I had a spare cable for my over-ear Momentum but the two intras are dead, and having to look for a replacement suddenly brought back to my mind the whole OMTP vs CTIA mess, if they have remote volume control at all. I'm seriously considering wireless for the next ones without even having used any.

With aptX-HD you get lossless.

It's actually "near" lossless however one could successfully argue that it's good enough. Check out the wikipedia for details.

That is something you have to enable, if you need to respect some bandwidth restriction.

> The codec optionally permits a "hybrid" coding scheme for applications where average and/or peak compressed data rates must be capped at a constrained level. This involves the dynamic application of a form of "near lossless" coding – but only for those short sections of audio where completely lossless coding cannot respect the bandwidth constraints. Even for those short periods while the "near lossless" coding is active, high-definition audio quality is maintained, retaining audio frequencies up to 20 kHz and a dynamic range of at least 120 dB.

> Bluetooth is lossy.

And 99% of people don't care.

...which is how you slowly erode standards for both twisted fun and massive profit.

It's sad and pathetic watching this mission creep of audio degradation at the greed-fueled discretion of corporate profiteering.

Phone DACs aren't very good. I use a very expensive DAC when I listen to music at home because I actually care. I also own a pair of AirPods because in a noisy city environment walking around it doesn't actually matter that I'm losing fidelity.

Simply incorrect, at least on the Apple side of things. Android DACs and onboard amps are hit and miss.

http://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/iphone-6s-plus-audio-qualit...

He's done similar measurements on other Apple audio devices, including their $9 Lightning-to-headphone adapter and they all fare well.

As I commented elsewhere the problem with Bluetooth is fatigue related not listening pleasure related.

Edit: As a side note the only positive I can see out of removing the headphone jack is the potential proliferation of quality DAC/preamp dongles. Still annoying though.

Analog headphones are lossy, I trust compression algorithms to improve more than I believe manufacturers will use more expensive, higher quality materials and connections at the same price point.

My Sennheiser HD25s are still going strong after ~18 years service. You cannot find Bluetooth anything that sound remotely as good. Not even for 3 times the price and I can guarantee you that each and every Bluetooth headphone in circulation today will be in landfill in 18 years.

> You cannot find Bluetooth anything that sound remotely as good.

In absolute terms, you are certainly right. However, for most people, Bluetooth headphones sound good enough. I'll gladly give up some fidelity if it means I can lose wires.

Yes, usage longevity is another factor to consider besides sound quality. However, I was replying to OP, who specifically was talking about the signal loss due to BT encoding. I countered with the fact that analog lines also experience loss, and only the latter has little chance of improving moving forward.

Bluetooth was never designed for audio usage. Revisions over the years have shoehorned functionality into what is effectively an FTP protocol. There's also the compression and audio mangling that bluetooth does. You do not get this with a straight through audio cable (or some other wireless technologies that don't compress)

How easy is it to move your Airpods from your phone to your tablet to your desktop to your non-Apple work PC? Don't get me wrong, I think Airpods are pretty amazing for what they are. But they're still hampered by what they are. For someone whose primary concern is "I hate wires" they're great. They sound 'pretty good for earbuds' as multiple friends, some of whom bought them, can attest.

Personally, I can't stand the sound quality of earbuds. My closed-back Audio Technica over-ear headphones can be unplugged from one device and plugged into another in seconds (no pairing/unpairing, turning bluetooth on and off, etc) and are always 'charged'. Plus they sound lightyears better than any bluetooth anything.

my airpods are unreliable. I could not connect them to my MacBook Pro the other night. tried changing rooms thinking maybe there is interference. tried re-pairing from scratch. they'd pair but not connect. after 15 minutes of trying various things I switched to wired headphones.

I haven't tried again since then. Had to re-pair them to get them to connect to my iPhone.

this is the first time I haven't been able to get them to connect but I've had several times where they won't say connected for more than 30 seconds

As with troubleshooting most hardware issues - experiment, restart, reset. It can either be an issue with the driver in which case a simple restart (maybe a “hard” smc reset as well) fixes the problem, or a hardware problem with the bluetooth antenna which would require a swap of the chip itself, but is usually on the macbook/iphone side, not the airpods and would affect all of your bluetooth connectivity. I’ve had both types of issues and it sure sucks. Had to replace an antenna cable in an iphone 6 to be able to connect to my airpods again.

Moving the airpods between devices is still a huge pain. Even just switching from my iPhone to my iPad sometimes requires turning bluetooth off and on, and other superstitious pairing rituals.

If I only use them with my phone (which I do almost all of the time), they will connect automatically quickly. But pairing between devices will probably always be more painful than a simple wire.

I noticed this thing with my old acer transformer 2-in-1 laptop if you enable bluetooth for audio streaming and have wifi running it slows to a crawl (watching youtube for example) actually won't buffer. I'm wondering if the bluetooth/wifi is on the same chip and can't run simultaneously.

> I'm wondering if the bluetooth/wifi is on the same chip and can't run simultaneously.

Worse, they're close to the same frequency band, and can interfere with each other. Wifi channel 14 is 2.484 ghz. Bluetooth is 2.4835 ghz.

Not just 'close to'. The wifi channels are very fat, and every channel extends .01GHz in either direction from its center. But more importantly bluetooth uses the exact same 2.40-2.48 range. It tries to minimize interference by frequency-hopping, but it's guaranteed to overlap 2.4GHz wifi.

So it's probably okay to use for a wireless mouse/keyboard but continuous sound output is a no go? Just seems like a bad design I mean the computer doesn't even have an ethernet port so to have wifi + bluetooth as a suggested combo/function and it doesn't work... haha

Same here. I have a pair of AirPods and the whole setup is so much more elegant now. I really don't miss them wired headphones, or the headphone jack. Now, I just pull the AirPods case out of my pocket, pop up the lid, insert the headphones in my ears, and everything just works.

Don't Bluetooth devices start lossily compressing audio when either the sender or receiver can't keep up? I listen to flac files, so I'm not interested in that, no matter how much space you lose with a 3.5mm socket.

AirPod concert here, too. I love them things.

convert.

Which makes everyone else's decision to drop the audio jack that much more stupid. Virtually all other OEMs tend to do things so much more superficially than Apple. Like face authentication for instance. It's been and still is a joke for years in the Android world. Perhaps Apple's will be a joke, too, but at least it looks like they put a good amount of effort into making it secure even if they had to add some extra hardware components in there.

Another reason why it's stupid for everyone else to follow Apple on this like sheep is because Apple also did it to sell their expensive Beats Bluetooth headphones. The other OEMs don't have a billion-dollar headphone division...

Half second delay? what Bluetooth are you using? I suggest you to buy something better, my 3 years old bluetooth headset doesn't have any noticeable delay.

The other examples are not really good examples: - bigger drives and faster internet connections? I don't think most of the countries where Apple sells had those things at that time. But, hey, it is a premium product, so they expect you to pay premium for other stuff too (read their new bluetooth earplugs) - faster javascript and better browser? Chrome had those things, not safary, and it did had flash too.

I have Powerbeats wireless 2 headphones and have no perceptible delay. I wouldn't be able to tolerate a half second delay.

If there was such thing as a 1 second delay then the tech would be dead by now. He’s just making things up.

He's not making things up. I experience massive delay with bluetooth headphones, and speakers. The delay is not one second, but it's enough to make it useless for watching video.

What is the delay? For me it is imperceptible (it means it is below 50ms).

I see here a lot of people talking about delays and how $2 wired earphones solve the problem. So I get people buy cheap and wants quality with their new iPhones. Cheap earphones with or without wire are always crap, the sound is horrible and the quality follows. It might be the reason of the delays: cheap stuff

Apple has mastered hiding any delay with AirPods and perfectly syncs things up. No small feat because it has to sync up both left and right in addition to what’s on the screen.

I've never seen bluetooth audio devices that were capable of syncing video and audio in 10 years of using bluetooth audio devices. My most recent tao tronics BT headphones were great for podcasts and audio, but useless for watching video from my Moto X. Have also tested this with Anker portable speakers, Amazon Echo in BT mode, and Creative BT speakers. All are useless for video. I replaced them with a set of $9 Panasonic wired Earbuds that sound just fine and never run out of batteries.

It also depends on the device (and software) you're watching video with - some are smart enough to compensate for the lag. iOS is decent at it when something uses the system APIs to play video (so not VLC), but I never had any luck back when I used Android. On that Mac I get really bad sync issues sometimes (seconds!).

I use Bluetooth and never had issues with delays. I had couple of computers, couple of mobiles and 3 different Bluetooth headset during this time. My Bluetooth headsets weren't the cheapest ones either.

> I suggest you to buy something better

No thanks, I don't feel like spending more money. With my current phone I can buy compatible earphones with zero delay for as low as $1.50 a pop. Bluetooth headphones just can't beat that.

...and you can use all those same headphones with a current iPhone, using the adapter which is free and ships in the box.

Frankly, the ability to use $1.50 headphones is of vanishingly small significance.

Anything can beat $1.50 earphones. With that price I bet you the sound is going to be crap.

It's an extreme lower bound to make a point.

(And, actually, dollar store headphones are surprisingly decent these days. I use them to listen to podcasts in the pool, without worrying too much about whether they get wet.)

An average quality headphones are in the price range of bluetooth headphones. So I don't understand your point.

I couldn't find anything below 10€ with decent sound quality, and it was hard to find something at that price that was good. Moreover, they lasted around 3-6 months for me, while a 25€ Bluetooth headset I bought 3 years ago is still working and the sound is better.

Most of Apple's major markets had pretty good Internet connections by 2012, when they started producing computers without CD drives.

I have bluetooth headphones (AOSO G18) that cost around 11€ (while on sale at Amazon) and they don't have a perceivable delay. They even show the battery level in iOS. Great for working out.

Looks like "AOSO" is a fantasy brand, they are also sold as "EarTime", "Dacom", "GranVela", ...

No, I prefer to keep using my wired earphones.

In fact, I bought them AFTER I had Bluetooth earphones, because of the inconvenience of having to recharge them.

I also got gigabit Ethernet in the apartment after using Wi-fi for some time.

In fact, I see the hate of wires as an irrational behaviour. They work better in practically all cases with only minor inconvenience.

I myself don't need to be walking or moving all the time either. If there's a chair, there are cables available.

Wires are a major inconvenience though. Sure, at work I use a big pair of wired headphones and connect my laptop to a dock.

But when I am on the move every cable stinks. I have caught the headphones wire on doorknobs and bus ticket validators so many times that now I gladly suffer through the unreliable bluetooth to avoid that.

I can see how wires can sometimes be problematic and I don't disagree with you. You can easily avoid most issues by having the cable under some of your clothes though.

My point is I don't think people can have an extreme opinion on the issue and still be objective, like I have seen so much online lately. Sometimes wires are better, sometimes wireless is better.

I use heavily earphones. They usually last between 3 and 9 months because of the fucking wire. When I am working I cannot type comfortable because of the wire, it is in the middle. When I move I always pull the wire. If I am walking with my mobile in my pocket I also pull the wire from time to time. So they always broke in the connector because of the wire. Even with a lot of care they always break in the same place. So it is around 15€ every 6 months. You can buy them cheaper but the sound is crap. My Bluetooth headset was 30€ and have been working like charm for more than 3 years now. They have 8 hours of battery life and I need to charge them less than the smartphone. So I don't get the inconvenience of charging something than last more than an smartphone.

Modern Bluetooth is nowhere close to a half-second audio delay. I was concerned with this in the past, but with modern headphones and codecs it is not an issue anymore, there is virtually no delay.

When they removed the CD-ROM Drive, a lot of people complained how they could possible do that, because apparently so many people used CDs a lot because in the real world internet connections often are not that fast etc. You will always get these kind of complaints but the majority will accept eventually and in a few years nobody cares anymore. I think it's better that way because modern bluetooth is really good (despite charging) and enables innovation in other areas.

Not to mention for audiophiles there is the extra concern about sound quality loss.

I consider myself an "audiophile" and have spent way too much money on nice equipment. That being said, once I started hanging out with people that call themselves audiophiles and have way more money that I do, I realized that most of these people can't even tell the difference in the sound quality and, frankly, there is no loss. One of the meetups I went to even had a contest for anyone that could tell which DAC was being used and another for anyone that could tell a FLAC apart from a 320kbps MP3. No one won the prize money. "Audiophiles" are, for the most part, full of shit, in my opinion and just need to justify spending ridiculous amounts of money on great looking audio equipment.

Mind you, I'm also probably full of shit because everyone tells me that I can get exactly the same computer for half the cost of what I paid for my MacBook Pro and I'm yet to find anything that comes close. At least with the Apple stuff, there are objective things I can point to that justify the more expensive costs. With audio equipment, there's a slow curve up and then it just drops off once you get past a certain point.

I don't buy into a lot of audiophile nonsense (and personally I don't think I can tell the difference between a 192kbps MP3 and uncompressed), however there is a clear and obvious quality issue with some Bluetooth devices, in addition to how terrible the pairing experience is.

The Pareto principle is alive and thriving in the audiophile community. Anything beyond midrange is pure wank IMO (although I'll happily listen to 160kbps MP3 so you can probably disregard what I say. :P But this does seem to be borne out by a lot of double-blind testing, as you mention.)

As for Apple products, you might get the same spec computer for half the cost but Apple has really nice build quality and integration (or at least did when I got my MacBook). It's the same spec but it's just nicer.

> I'll happily listen to 160kbps MP3 so you can probably disregard what I say.

I'm with you several hundred percent.

Didn't a serious of fairly rigorous tests way back conclude that nobody could tell the difference between a ~160kbps VBR MP3 and an uncompressed source (as long as a good MP3 encoder was used)? I think it was the Hydrogen Audio people behind it.

I think they decided ~192kbs was the point where there wasn't any statistically significant evidence that anyone could tell the difference.

And that's in ideal listening conditions when people are being asked specifically to listen out for differences. I think the margin for realistic listening situations is probably much wider.

> Didn't a serious of fairly rigorous tests way back conclude that nobody could tell the difference between a ~160kbps VBR MP3 and an uncompressed source (as long as a good MP3 encoder was used)?

No, the conclusion was that most people couldn't tell the difference above 192kbps, but to a trained ear many people could still tell the difference in 192 to 256, or 256 to 320.

It was 320 and above where there was basically nobody who could tell the difference unless they were using recording studio grade gear, which most people don't have.

Agreed 100%. I've owned so many different computers over the years that I'm 100% willing to pay what most consider to be an "Apple tax" when, in my mind, I'm paying a little bit extra for an overall better product. You're totally right... it's just nicer.

I agree with all of this, but the knock on bluetooth sound quality doesn't fall into this category of audiophile foolishness.

It's real & severe downsampling, and incredibly noticeable.

Bluetooth 5 should have the bandwidth to solve this problem.

While I get what you're saying, I only find this drop in quality on really cheap Bluetooth headphones/headsets. I have tried 2 "high-end" wireless headphones (1 of which are my AirPods that I own) and I find no downsampling or quality loss that's noticeable.

On airpods there’s so much background noise and lack of sound isolation the quality drop won’t make a difference.

If you can't hear the difference between 320kbps and lossless you're either not using equipment capable of the response and the frequencies where the cutoff for 320kbps and resulting compression artifacts are noticeable or you just aren't able to hear the artifacts, either because of unfamiliarity or bad hearing especially as you get older. I've done blind a/b tests with my equipment and over 20 samples proven that I can tell a difference with a high degree of statistical certainty between 320kbps and FLAC (try http://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html) Lossless vs 192kbps or lower is just too obvious, I think most "audiophiles" like yourself should be able to tell the difference with a high-end set of headphones or speakers. 320kbps really only makes a difference for me for classical recordings as a violinist who can hear every detail with audio equipment thats pricier then what 99% of people are willing to pay for that extra 0.1% of audio fidelity. Alot of enthusiasts are also audio engineers who are very familiar with compression artifacts and audio mastering

I'm also a musician and can hear the difference between plenty of blind tests but I'm going to call bullshit on your claims. There have been several tests done like this and some of the most prominent musicians and engineers couldn't tell the difference. Neil Young and his engineer couldn't even tell the difference when bloggers trolled them with their own Pono format files. You may very well be one of the 0.00001% of people that can tell the difference but I highly doubt it.

Do you have references? As I pointed out in another comment, I would be interested in tests conducted on trained musicians with classical (or at least acoustic) music.

Congratulations!

Often, claims that 320kpbs is indistinguishable from lossless are based on tests conducted on regular people (as opposed to trained musicians) and with pop music (as opposed to classical recordings). I would like to see a test conducted on classical musicians with well-recorded classical music. I honestly don't know what the outcome would be, but it would be instructive.

The DAC on most consumer devices is not audiophile quality. Having had a mac book and a standalone USB DAC, there's really no comparison.

I don't really have a problem with DACs on PCs, but the amount of noise present on most motherboards is terrible. (I can usually tell when my machine is compiling).

A few years ago I bought some USB DACs and separate headphone amplifiers and it made a world of difference, even to my relatively ancient ears.

At least the iPhone's DACs are absolutely audiophile quality, especially because the idea that "an audiophile quality DAC costs 20x what you see in smartphones" is patently ridiculous. There's no evidence at all that any good as in not flawed DAC will sound the same on nearly any, if not any system.

At the very least, the audio quality degradation of most bluetooth devices has a worse impact than even your average middle tier Android phone's dac.

My Aiepoda replaces a pair of $20 Sony over the ear headphones. They mostly sound better, the only difference being that the Sonys has bigger drivers and could do a better job on the low end.

I never spend more than $60 on headphones (ignoring my noise cancelling Bose).

Quality isn’t an issue. For something so small they sound quite good. For something so convenient they sound fantastic.

I use the airpods and these are the future. I'm always wearing them and they are the least intrusing earbuds I ever wore. Now I always carry a wired one with me for two reasons:

1. The battery doesn't always last. the benefits are huge so I'm OK with it though. I don't think I'll ever go full airpods just because I'm always going to be in situations where I have no battery in these.

2. My Nintendo switch and some other devices don't have bluetooth :(

I saw the other day that no other game consoles use bluetooth headsets. However a recent Switch update enabled USB audio, either through the dock or with an adapter on the port (although for handheld you might as well just use a wire).

I remember reading that the Bluetooth spec has about 300ms of latency. Far too much for games, which is why no current console uses Bluetooth for their headsets.

The PS3 and PS4 use Bluetooth for their actual game controllers and the PS4 has audio out on the controller.

No matter how well you don’t Bluetooth has some latency, so until something improves I wouldn’t expect it to show up on game consoles.

Apple computers come with SSDs only on the macbooks, so losing the DVD drive due to bigger hard drives isn't the case here because the hard drives are MUCH MUCH MUCH smaller now. I have tons of customers that face serious issues because they didn't know about this and they don't know much about computers.

Flash might be garbage, but its still super important.

Now lets talk about regular USB.... Apple dropped it without including a free adapter. They could have EASILY added one USB 3.0/3.1 port on the motherboard. There's plenty of space for it, but they would rather have you pay them tons of money for an adapter.

You can't be seriously suggesting that Apple did all the work to put only USB-C ports on the computer so that people would pay them "tons of money" for adapters. For starters, the adapters are cheap and can be purchased from any number of retailers that aren't Apple but, secondly, I have had to purchase 1 single adapter that has given me all the functionality of having these multiple ports and I've literally used it twice (once for the VGA out and once for USB). They didn't remove the old ports to get money out of people just like they didn't remove the headphone jack from the iPhone to get money from people. They did it because they feel that USB-C and wireless devices are the future and they're not wrong.

Lol I got the first 12” macbook and was sad about ports. Bought the dongle so I could hook it up to a monitor for a week while on business. Fast forward till today and I don’t where the dongle is cos I never use it.

Yup. Same here. Bought one of those "all-in-one VGA/DVI/USB/etc" dongles and have literally used it twice just because I was lazy and didn't want to unplug something else that was behind the desk.

> For starters, the adapters are cheap and can be purchased from any number of retailers that aren't Apple

Not all USB-C cables are created equal.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15473777

In what way is Flash still important?

I have had Flash disabled via a browser extension for what feels like years now.

Good luck taking online training from any government agency. FEMA, e.g.

What kind of issues is the lack of DVD drive causing your customers?

Not to mention a USB DVD drive is $25.

> If you use the USB/Lightning to AUX, you can't charge your phone at the same time.

There's now a dongle that enables you to do both...

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/1/16393078/a...

You don't have to use bluetooth for audio. Every iPhone comes with an aux port adapter for a reason.

adapters are a hack, not a final solution.

And a hack's all that is needed if you accept the premise, which is that wired headphones for mobile devices are hideously inconvenient and about to be rightly obsoleted.

I'm not saying they are, but phone connectors.. aka "Aux ports" were designed in 1878, with the 3.5mm rendition dating back to the 1960's. It's obsolete tech. We can easily be making headphones with connectors that are a fraction the size. There's no reason USB-C and lightning ports shouldn't be multi-use. One port, many applications.

We have gone from one standard interface, to now three interfaces (headphone jack, USB-C and lightning), and one of them is proprietary.

We move from a world where you can buy any set of headphones, and use them with any device, to a world where... nothing is compatible with anything else. Either you use a permanently connected dongle, or you buy multiple sets of headphones.

The future is stupid and I don't want to live in it.

Standards are fucking amazing. You can plug an early electric guitar from the 50s into any modern amp or pedal.

How is an aux port obsolete for the task of transmitting audio? It does the job simply and perfectly, with a tiny connector.

Just because something was created a long time ago doesn't mean it is obsolete.

So I want to charge my phone and use headphones at the same time. That's a dongle.

I want to use any piece of stereo equipment made since the 1960s. That's a dongle.

Why don't we just ditch USB C too. Wireless charging and pairing via wifi/bluetooth.

The iPhone8 onward now has wireless charging. I see portless phones in the next 5 years tops.

BT headphones also have the massive downside of insufficient control over volume. Minimum volume is too loud == hearing loss. Strikes me as a market oppty for someone to develop BT headphones/earbuds that solve this.

All of those transitions where painful, it's just that we tend to look at the past with rose color glasses.

Not that not having a headphone jack doesn't suck. It very much does

It does hark back quite strongly to when Apple removed the floppy drive from the original iMacs. And not having a floppy drive sucked at that point. Just because something's the way of the future doesn't mean the old option is instantly obsolete.

For the few months before I got AirPods it was fine. I bought 2 or 3 of the little pigtails and it was largely a non-issue.

Bluetooth isn't always the only alternative option.

I plug my iPhone into my car's USB port (via the standard USB-A to lightning cable) and it works really well.

I also could have connected to my car via Bluetooth, or via the AUX input.

The USB connection works best and also charges my phone.

Bluetooth 5.0 has none of the issues you've mentioned. Alternatively, you can run audio over usb-c if you want to continue using wired headphones. The selection is small at this point but will grow over time.

with regards to charging while using the "charging port", with my 8+ I simply leave it on a wireless charger and it gains charge while making a call. I have a Plesson charger.

I did move to air pods so I have that option as well, but the wireless charge ability and the fact they are cheap removed my concerns. plus with apple providing both adapter for old headphone to charge adapter as well as new head phones with that same connector I am in the camp of, don't matter anymore.

Or just you kno. Plug headphones in using the adapter....

What is the point then, why not just include another port or a jack? If I have to carry a done that messes up the audio.

Or use USB-C headphones

Dropping the floppy also sucked. They were ubiquitous, and practically free. You could re-write them. Copying a file onto them was fast.

Writing to a CD was slow. And cost about a buck. And didn't always work.

So, yeah, there's pain with going to wireless headphones. But in 10 years, we're going to forget that.

Not even 10 years, with AirPods I've already forgotten beside when I want noise cancellation/sound isolation (airplanes)

The headphone jack was emphatically NOT replaced by Bluetooth. It was replaced by a combination of Apple's W1-enhanced Bluetooth, which is not slow, not unreliable, etc., and also Lightning-based headphones.

You're also wrong about charging the phone while using Lightning headphones; there are already adapters that can do that. Plus, it's not necessary to charge your phone all the time; that's what having better battery life is about. And better battery life is made more possible by freeing up precious internal space that the outmoded, single-use headphone jack used to occupy.

If you can't watch a video without an audio delay, that means you're using really crappy headphones. Fix that. Don't blame Apple.

Deleted comment

You're right. I've deleted the offending line from my comment. And I apologize.

Appreciated!

> The headphone jack was emphatically NOT replaced by Bluetooth. It was replaced by a combination of Apple's W1-enhanced Bluetooth, which is not slow, not unreliable, etc., and also Lightning-based headphones.

That cost $160. Let's not dance around that. Airpods are extraordinarily expensive compared to the headphones everyone used to be able to use.

They are not extraordinarily more expensive than any BT ones I have used that work acceptably.

If you mean wired, those still work just as they did prior. The iPhone comes with the adapter.

Yes, the first iteration of W1-headphones are pricey. Point granted. But that will change. (Also, they are worth the price, which helps.)

BeatsX (with W1) are at $150, by the way. So the price is already down several percent! ;)

>The headphone jack was emphatically NOT replaced by Bluetooth. It was replaced by a combination of Apple's W1-enhanced Bluetooth, which is not slow, not unreliable, etc., and also Lightning-based headphones.

Let's make a comparison.

Is the alternative faster or more reliable than the original that it's replacing?

No, not by any typical (audio) criterion.

A $150 pair of in ear monitors will have a huge impact on sound quality and the average person will continue to notice improvement into the $300 (dual driver) range before significant diminishing returns. Air pods don't come close to that quality for the same price.

Power usage matters much more in wireless headphones. Bluetooth takes power. DACs take power (better ones and better algorithms use even more power). Better drivers use more power (without considering the big response boost you get with multiple drivers at the cost of additional power usage). With super limited battery size, all of these are cut with a corresponding decrease in quality.

The USB and lightning ports tend to get a lot of interference from the dozens of digital signals mere hundredths of an inch away. The size of the 3.5mm seems to ensure that it's more isolated.

What about those of us with nice headphones that don't want to be locked into the Apple eco system.

The phone comes with an adapter. If you want another one, they cost $9. I believe the Pixel will be the same.

The iPhone came with a dongle.

> 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.

One more counterexample: nano SIM cards. The move to micro SIM cards was wonderful and well-timed, everyone followed Apple within a year or two because the spacing savings were obvious.

In contrast, the nano SIM card has been around since the iPhone 5 came out in 2012, but cheap smart phone (think Samsung J-something[1]) still use micro SIM cards. Pointless fragmentation to save a millimeter.

If Apple wants to drop legacy cruft, how about they start with 5400rpm hard drives??!

[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_j2_(2017)-8900.php

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

How are any of those counterexamples? Thunderbolt wasn't dropped and most users don't care a single bit about Magsafe and/or the physical escape key.

Sorry, should have been clearer. What I meant:

Power: Magsafe 1 being incompatible with Magsafe 2, which is in turn incompatible with USB-C. No drastic improvement in either.

Data: Thunderbolt 1 and 2 were at least port compatible. Thunderbolt 3 is the same thing as USB-C, so the cable won't fit and you have to buy an adapter, so in effect thunderbolt was dropped. I get that it's a different story internally, but from my perspective, it's again frustrating.

Anyway, at face value, I'm happy that they /finally/ decided to collaborate with everyone else and agreed on an industry-standardized connector, but damn. Even then, I keep reading horror stories re: cable compatibility for USB-C because the standard is so complex. Oh well, it'll settle eventually.

Anyway, none of this bothers me as much as headphones specifically, which cost a lot of money, last decades, and aren't a throwaway item like adaptors and cables. So if you're going to make me change them or use an annoying dongle, there had better be an excellent reason :-(

Please check your facts before using words like "finally". Thunderbolt was a collaboration as well; it just seems like it was a proprietary Apple thing because Apple pushed it earlier and harder than everyone else. The same is true of the beloved USB-A, of course, which was pushed earlier and harder by Apple than by PC makers too.

Anyway, make up your mind. Are you furious that Apple had the courage to adopt a standard like USB-C, or are you happy? Choose one. :)

> Thunderbolt was a collaboration as well

As far as I understand, Intel co-developed Thunderbolt with Apple on their own. The standard was published, but this isn't the same as an open and public collaboration the way other standards are, e.g. USB has the USB Implementers Forum, which is a consortium of companies. Plus, they used to charge royalties, and only recently did intel make the standard royalty-free. Good for them for doing that.

To me it looks like they did what they wanted on their own, then eventually slapped it on top of the existing USB-C standard when it didn't get much adoption elsewhere. I don't know why Apple would care about that in the slightest, but I can imagine Intel does.

> Anyway, make up your mind. Are you furious that Apple had the courage to adopt a standard like USB-C, or are you happy? Choose one. :)

Why? Can't it be both? I'm happy that they found the "courage" now, but unhappy that they found it after floundering through a bunch of different options first. I'm also unhappy that they took away my darned headphone jack in the process :-)

I'm still bummed about losing Magsafe!

However, I am very glad that I can now charge my laptop with pretty much any USB charger* and a cheap cable. I consider not having to buy $88 replacement chargers a huge win.

*Yes, even the tiny iPhone brick can charge my MacBook, albeit very, very slowly.

If you really are at risk, (thinking of when I had small kids running around the house) maybe consider one of the Belkin "BreakSafe" magnetic adapters? Yeah, you'll have a nub sitting on the outside of the machine, but it might be worthwhile.

https://griffintechnology.com/us/breaksafe-magnetic-usb-c-po...

Early on Apple shipped with a thunderbolt connector that the rest of the industry ended up not using. Any tech purchased around that connector was deprecated when the machine it was to connect to was upgraded.

IIRC there were very few devices with a hard-wired cable on the device end. So for them it was just a new cable or if not, then a permanently-attached dongle. That doesn't mean the device itself is obsolete.

I still have a FW800-Thunderbolt adapter...

Magsafe is a lifesaver if you have kids/pets. I even tripped the wire sometimes. I understand the appeal of a single cable for power/data but Magsafe was great.

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.

No one has taken away anything. Your current phone still has a headphone jack. Stop acting like somebody took something away from you.

In the age of mass production, you get what they make. Custom items of the same price & quality as those mass produced are often/usually prohibitively expensive. If they stop making what you want, you stop being able to get it. So what's Parent going to do when his current phone dies?

> So what's Parent going to do when his current phone dies?

Buy virtually any other phone, if it's that important to them?

> Your current phone still has a headphone jack.

My current phone is rapidly disintegrating. If I had the time, I could argue that the current method of production and rapid obsolescence did, in fact, take both my current phone away, and my ability to easily transition to the new model being offered without having to rethink how I listen to music.

Completely false. There is no adapter out there that can do simultaneous audio and data. My Apogee JAM sits gathering dust as a result.

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 also don't see why they didn't go full USB-C with their phones. Maybe they didn't want to put out too many changes at once. Still, iPhone 8 seemed a great time to pair USB-C.

I don't remember where I read it, but apparently Apple committed to the Lightning port for a certain number of years when speaking to accessory manufacturers.

It's to close to the point where they ditched the 40 pin and everyone bought new stuff.

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.

> Xiaomi Note 4

I picked up a Xiaomi Mi A1 for ~$325 last week when my Nexus 5X died of sudden bootloop. I think it's very similar to the Note 4 but is part of the Android One initiative which means it runs stock Android and should get updates more regularly. I think it's marked up a bit in my market but it was still cheap enough and is a great device—awesome build quality, fast enough, and has a headphone jack!

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.

The LG V20 has the Hi-Fi Quad DAC as well (in case anyone wants to pick it up at half the price).

The sound is quality truly amazing.

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.

On Android, there's a prompt when a paired device requests access to your contacts/call history/messages, and you can deny the request. It's irrelevant to play audio but it allows the car to give you a built-in interface to use your phone for calling and such.

I didn't know that iOS didn't prompt you for that.

You didn't have to do that, though. You can connect Bluetooth audio without syncing your contact list. Additionally, just because your phone is showing your contacts in the car's interface, that doesn't mean anything was synced to the car. It may have just been reading your contacts from the phone via Bluetooth. As soon you as unpair the device, those contacts would be gone, if that's the case...

Thanks for pointing that out possibility because I couldn't find it. I wonder if it's an option for Hyundais because it's not included in their quick start guide either:

http://www.hyundaibluetooth.com/content/dam/Bluetooth/Hyunda...

My Ford does this (sync contacts) by default too. Yes it's an inexpensive car but you have explicitly turn this off and it's not intuitive. Not quite a dark pattern per se but I prefer to not connect BT to rentals for that reason alone.

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.

I know you think you believe all that, but as an AirPods user and addict, I am at least somewhat confident in saying that you'd believe it a lot less after 48 hours using AirPods. Until you use them, you can't grasp just how rapidly they charge, just how easy it is to keep them topped off without even thinking about it, just by putting them back in the case, and the fact that you can't and don't "forget" to put them back in the case. Because the case is always with you, and because they're just a pain to carry without the case, and because of the penalty if you lose one.

AirPods are a miracle; a true "wow" product. And as an aside, the audio is really surprisingly decent. I'm a professional classical musician, so my ears aren't terrible.

>> I know you think you believe all that,

Without being an Apple product buyer myself, I feel I can get a good pretty read on Apple products' success by the degree of condescension / stridency in reviewers' language. Like some Garner hype curve for fanboyism.

Judging by your tone, Airpod is still rising in popularity, yet to break through to mainstream, but may still do so.

an AirPods user and addict

AirPods are a miracle

Seriously? Headphones?

Yes I would go with that and I hate Apple and have never tried airpods. I have tried normal Bluetooth headphones in Android world though and am prepared to believe that the Apple audio experience is better than what I am used to.

However, if you could go back in time by a short amount of years to show anyone the current iteration of music player and air pods then I think they would find the technology to be tantamount to magic and therefore a bonafide miracle.

At the other end of the scale you have the Apple fan and if they find these Airpods things to be miraculous then I think they are only being fair about what has been achieved here technologically to bring music to the consumer.

Miraculous? Really?

Equivalent to an act of God?

You don't think you're being utterly hyperbolic here?

The recharging story is made even better by the ability to put one at a time in the case. That's particularly important for long phone calls/web conferences/etc, when the microphone tends to drain the battery faster.

With my wired headphones I don't have to do any hacks or workarounds to use them as long as the host device is turned on, I get better audio, they will outlast AirPods if I'm not rough with them, I can (and do, probably several times a day) move them quickly between my workstation, my laptop, and my two phones, they cost about the same, they're more comfortable, they have a better seal, they work where RF is not allowed, they work just as well with every device I own.

If I ever need a replacement in a pinch, almost every convenience store has an inexpensive pair of compatible headphones, good ones can be bought online or at audio stores.

Headphone jacks also double as line-out jacks, allowing you to play audio through any of the billions (!) of compatible systems without noticeable RF interference even in congested conditions.

Yep. And I still would never go back. The liberation of wireless is just amazing.

I'm just sick of all of this "I know you think that" condescension. I'm not even telling people "The massive sucking sound you're hearing is a fad, you just haven't noticed yet.", I'm not telling people that wireless headphones aren't great sometimes.

I'm just saying: keep the jack there, it's cheap, it's convenient, it costs next to nothing in any way (BOM, water resistance, space), it gives customers good and valid options, even if they ultimately want to shove a little plug in the hole and forget about it.

It is not like a CD-ROM drive at all, because it is ubiquitous and common in use (unlike optical media at the time of the superdrive removal), and removing it does not notably improve the device in any way. It doesn't hinder form factor, it doesn't hinder any selling point of the device, and it makes hundreds of millions of people happy.

Four years ago, when Apple started removing laptops with optical drives — they only finished this time last year — from their lineup, very few people were still using optical media on a regular basis. Today, almost everyone who uses headphones uses wired ones when they have the option to.

There's a difference between avant-garde, and jumping the gun.

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.

I believe that discs do survive longer. I remember reading some article describing the decay of data over time. As long as the discs aren't horribly scratched up they will retain data for a very long time without decay.

> 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.

Flash on iPhone didn’t exist because Apple didn’t want it due to security issues. It was controversial when they decided not to allow it.

https://www.google.com/amp/bgr.com/2016/12/12/steve-jobs-iph...

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.

But if you're the type of person that has one good pair of headphones then attach the adapter to them all the time and just pretend that the port on your phone is a weird shape.

I get that it's not ideal and that adapters are awkward but it seems like it's such a minor inconvenience for your use case. I would expect that audiophiles are used to adapters to go between 2.5mm, 3.5mm, and 1/4" stereo already. What's one more?

I get where you're coming from but the "What's one more?" idea is what led to this whole donglemania. Dongles are conceived of bridges into a brighter future but no thanks I'll happily live in the past for now.

This is exactly what I've done. I have one pair of $250 headphones I've had for years that I use when I want to sit in a dark room and just listen to music. Now the dongle lives on them and there is no inconvenience at all.

I just wanted to say that this is a really great point and, inevitably, the answer from people with these objections is always the same - they just prefer what they already have and are comfortable with. It's such a mild inconvenience that they're already ok with in every other scenario but, for some reason, this time it's completely different. It doesn't make sense.

Im not ok with it in every other scenario, I just swallow it often times because e.g. making a switch away from my MacBook would be prohibitively costly for me and I'll rather endure these "mild inconveniences" (dongle for Cinema Display, USB, Ethernet).

And yes, I really do prefer what I already have (my headphones working without a dongle).

Edit: I'm not even an audiophile btw

So what do you do when you need to plug those headphones into a DAC with a stereo input? You need an adapter. What do you do when you need to plug them into a TV or game system? You need an adapter. You are definitely ok with it in other scenarios, just not this very specific one.

>need to plug those headphones into a DAC with a stereo input

Don't have one.

>need to plug them into a TV or game system

Don't have either.

You're completely right that I need adapters but that doesn't mean I'm ok with getting increasingly more of them. Especially when I get nothing out of them except backwards-compat for hardware that is simply not of the legacy type.

Adapters are easy to forget at home, lose on the go, break, etc. pp. They're detrimental to the user experience and hence should be restricted to support of legacy hardware.

> 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

What's your criteria for when that future will have arrived?

When there's a decent wireless competitor to the headphones I already have. When there's cheap wireless in-ears on the market.

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.

Floppy -> CD-ROM

CD-ROM -> Internet/USB stick

Ethernet -> WLAN

Flash -> HTML

etc -> pp

The only proprietary port on today's Macs and iDevices is the lightning connector, which is quite obviously better than the abomination that is microUSB, which the competition uses.

I can't fathom how people can delude themselves into believing such easily disproven myths.

Newest Android phones are using USB C, not microUSB.

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.

There's only one phone you can use? ;)

I set up the equivalent Square card-reader device for my kids' school parents group, together with a dedicated iPad with cell connection. It's magic... even the most technophobic mum can operate it.

Sure, would be a problem if (or when) the iPad died, but it is stupidly cheap (and contract-free!) compared to a dedicated payment machine.

I don't know if this tech was released yet, it was something to do with wireless payments if I recall right.

I think I bricked my phone once when I was messing with rooting/overclocking. I don't do that anymore, I bought a pretty solid LG phone for like $80 (new) from a lower end mobile provider it functions better than this other phone by ZTE that had a finger print sensor, it kept freezing after running say more than 4 apps.

Edit: The podcast was about PayPal Beacon

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.

Apple Airpods.

Really? Have you tried playing a game with them or any kind of app that is like a musical instrument?

I just checked now and there is a very slight lag, maybe on the order of 100-200ms. It's pretty subtle though and I definitely did not notice it before you mentioned it. I can imagine that it would be maddeningly slow if it were something like a rhythm game or a musical instrument app though.

Yeah that's what I was referring to. At one point, I thought I was going to wirelessly connect my electric keyboard at home to my stereo through a bluetooth transmitter. I soon found out that there's a delay associated with audio transmission through bluetooth. I don't think anyone's really solved this problem for these kinds of applications because most people use bluetooth audio for passive tasks like listening to music.

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.

serious people map caps lock to escape!

Seriously though, using the corner esc key to get into normal mode sucked anyway.

What do people map control to then? The fundamental problem for this era of computing seems to be that people's needs/workflows are fragmenting while devices are converging, becoming more proprietary and one-size-fits-all.

Will there be a backlash to this? Possibly, but if dealing with a shitty keyboard is the cost of getting a high-end machine with great build quality, maybe not. People will come up with more and more workarounds to fix something which wasn't a problem a few years ago.

Let me let you in on a big mac daddy secret sauce:

Map both ctrl and esc to caps lock key: when it's pressed and released on its own, it sends an Esc; when it's used as a modifier key (pressed together with another key), it sends a Ctrl.

http://www.economyofeffort.com/2014/08/11/beyond-ctrl-remap-...

+1000 this is what I use and it's amazing.

I mean... Dell and PC still have plenty of options. My Pixel has a headphone Jack. My laptop can be upgradeable...

I am not sure I buy the one size fits all argument. That is mostly an Apple thing.

Also, while it's true Apple quality was higher the last few generations are much worse. We have had numerous service issues come up, keyboards now break... I can't see Apple quality being what it once was.

A few days ago my OS and applications were all customized to death, I had huge dotfiles to cater to my specific needs.

But now I decided it's easier to learn the "standard" configuration than to configure every computer I have to touch.

I map ctrl to ctrl

lol... but Mac keyboards have small ctrl keys!! :)

I type in dvorak but I've never been able to stop the escape spamming.

Habits are strange.

Or get a computer with a sane keyboard.

I don't think it'll matter? I think it will just drive adoption of Ctrl + [ for vim users which is arguably better anyway since it's closer to the home row

I preemptively remapped escape to caps lock since my next laptop probably won't have an escape key. It took about a day to adjust to. Now, I can't see how I ever used escape in the first place, it's so far to reach.

Although now, I keep turning on caps lock when I use other people's computers.

The home row isn’t magic, I don’t get the obsession with it. Our fingers don’t lie in a naturally perfectly straight line—each finger has its natural zone, it tends to stray vertically from the home row.

Well I suppose my fingers normally stay around the home row because that's how I was taught. I suppose it's my mistake for assuming that's how others type!

Nevertheless, esc is still super far away from all the letters which is presumably what you are likely to be pressing.

Ctrl-C

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.

Exactly. Are airplanes manufacturers going to start building in the lightning port?

You joke but this has already been suggested by several airplane manufacturers. They want to build in lightning and USB-C ports to replace/add to the power outlets. Most airports already have the extra USB ports now next to the power block.

Hell even recent Apple laptops don’t have one.

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.

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