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Comment by chrishacken | Hacker News Reader

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Just because something was created a long time ago doesn't mean it is obsolete.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

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