A Eulogy for the Headphone Jack
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Done as in, we can just keep using it. It perfectly solves the problem of moving audio and similar from a device on or near my person to my ears. There's no need for any such device to be smaller in any dimension than the minijack allows. Wires are fine, they're so easy to understand. There is absolutely no need to keep working on this, it's fine as it is.
They should still be making headphones with minijacks in a 1000 years - because maybe in time we would learn to make devices that lasted that long. In general I really wish our culture would become used to the idea of solved problems.
In the 4-pole incarnation, it handles the addition of a microphone with backwards compatibility. A headphone-only plug works without issues in a 4-pole socket, and a 4-pole plug works equally without issues in a headphone-only 3-pole socket. Obviously you won't be able to use the microphone, but it will not mess up anything, only give you sound in one ear or something similarly weird and unexpected.
There was a small issue with TRRS standards, OMTP on one side and CTIA on the other, where the mic and ground pins were switched in relation to each other. Everyone seems to have agreed on using the CTIA standard now, though. And a lot of headsets are able to accomodate both automatically.
The minijack has stood the test of time.
If everything is already going to have a USB C port, and USB C can handle audio transmission, then I see no reason to keep the 3.5mm around. Sure, there's an argument to be made about keeping the DAC inside the smartphone, but once we are out of the transition period, any pair of headphones you want will either be wireless, come with a dongle, or forgo the 3.5mm entirely and just have a USB C cable.
It would be nice if Apple would join the rest of the world (and their own Macbooks) by replacing lightning with USB C, but I think that will happen eventually.
I like the good old-fashioned analog connections because there's no way to add stupid DRM. You get the analog signal, without the issues associated with technologies such as HDCP/DPCP.
Most people that I know use a streaming service for their music. Spotify, Apple Music, or Google Play Music mostly. They already don't own the music they're listening to, and even when they download it to their phone it's encrypted and can't be easily transferred anywhere else.
The experience is convenient and cheap enough that they just don't care.
They don't even need to get rid of the headphone jack to only allow specific headphones. Nothing was stopping Apple from only allowing people who own Beats with a lightning cable from listening to Apple music, even when the phones had a headphone jack. I imagine a similar scheme could be cooked up using the microphone input to the phone. Have the headphones transfer some kind of key through that to the phone, and only allow certain analog headphones to listen to music. Sure, it's probably easier to crack than USB C/lightning based DRM but still possible.
But I bet that's not good enough for the RIAA/MPAA. They want everything DRMed out the wazoo. Including the output devices. If they can require digital-only connections with heavy DRM and all analog parts potted in epoxy, they will do it.
Any pair of headphones I would want will be analogue, because I dislike audio delay & expense and I like audio quality.
Adding DACs & dongles is just adding needless complexity. The analogue headphone is basically perfect: it doesn't need improving, and it can't be improved. Wireless headphones add expense, waste, complexity and quality/delay problems.
People have been buying external DAC's for years because they are higher quality than the ones inside phones and computers. Audio professionals don't use the soundcard in their computer - they buy an external one that probably uses USB, firewire, or thunderbolt.
The headphone jack and DAC in a smartphone is convenient and often high enough quality for most people, but it is in no way a perfect solution. People who care a lot about audio quality in particular should not be sad to see it go, because they should be using USB or lightning already anyways.
If youve ever skateboarded, popped a trick, had the wire get caught on your knee, violently tug the headphones out of your ears, and get caught up in your wheels, then you know this pain.
You're needlessly converting to 'lightning protocol' and back. DAC will be lower quality than an internal one (because of size and power constraints and the fact that you need one internal and one external)
According to this site, http://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/lightning-adapter-audio-qua..., Apple's dongle is roughly the same as the internal DACs on iPads and iPhones.
Generic dongles purchased from Amazon can be expected to have lower quality DAC's, but most people that want to cheap out on something that only costs 9 dollars probably aren't using good enough headphones or speakers to care.
People that really care about audio quality can purchase something like this, https://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-DragonFly-Red-Headphone-Am..., which is higher quality than what you will find in any smartphone.
Here's an idea: Try blind testing 10 songs or so and see if you can figure out which one is played from the adapter and which one isn't. I bet you won't hear the difference.
Headphones -> headphone jack in device is sensible. A dongle isn't.
I would really like to know how many people who find issue with the dongle have day-to-day experience with a headphone jack-less device. My bigger concern is that headphone jacks will vanish from headphones.
Yes it does, unless the port has an analog audio channel
It's extra hardware that has to be on the dongle (at the expense of everything else) - for Audio I'm gessing it's USB https://www.chipworks.com/about-chipworks/overview/blog/syst...
> Try blind testing 10 songs or so and see if you can figure out which one is played from the adapter
Would be an interesting test, I would begin by checking the max volume allowed
Then you'd have an internal DAC. Apple is extremely greedy with space, but a DAC/amp isn't large. The dongle has more available space. The sound is digital before being converted either way, the "lighting protocol" won't hurt the quality unless they lossily compress, which I doubt.
I am so much happier with a bluetooth headphones: free movement \o/. Software problems but you know what they say: software eats the world.
Or apple abandoning that cool magnetic charger! My mbp 2010 had that skinny one, and I never came off.
Now we have usbc or whatever it is called, but waaaaay longer battery life, so that might be the answer there.
Come to think of it, is there wireless charging for laptops yet?
I think Apple must have fired all of their UX engineers. That's the only thing that can explain the inability to charge & use headphones and the inability to charge & use a mouse[0].
[0] https://www.geek.com/apple/design-before-function-apple-magi...
Amazon has a few Qi receivers with USB-C plugs outputting 1A - that's probably enough to (slowly) charge the 12" Macbook.
A docking station serves that purpose already, and it allows much faster charging than a Qi pad.
Maybe there's a middle ground solution.
I think what would be perfect would be something carrying both power and a lossless digital signal.
It is beyond insane to remove the headphone jack when we have no even half-decent alternatives. This is before the detail that today you can be absolutely certain that all your bluetooth devices are remotely hackable.
Most people that don't seem to mind the disappearing of the headphone jack only seems to view it from their own very narrow perspective. Yes, you've just bought some decent bluetooth headphones and love the cordless freedom, I get that - it is awesome. But that is a very narrow use case that isn't going to hold long. I've alternating between cordless and wired headphones for many years and there is no reason even on the horizon to stick with cordless headphones.
Also, you have to pay $100 extra for that bluetooth connectivity. So, a wired headphone for $100 will cost you $200 if you want it cordless, and that goes with the assumption that you have aptx. And I don't even have a clue of whether I have aptx.
And a decent wired headphone will just last (spoiler, good headphones have better cables and connectors than that $25 headphones that break all the time), the cordless version will not be that cool when the irreplaceable battery dies.
Also, I have to spend tons of money on adapters I have to carry with my all the fricking time just so my phone manufacturer can save a few cents, it's ludicrous.
If you go out and buy a new android smartphone and a new laptop right now, there's a pretty high chance that they will both have USB C. You can then use a reasonably priced USB C -> 3.5mm adapater with a DAC (the Google one is only 9 dollars, and your phone will probably come with one of these) and use your headphones with either device.
In the past, laptops/desktops and smartphones/mp3 players didn't share any ports aside from the 3.5mm analog port. Now, they're going to share a USB C port so there's no longer as much of a need for the 3.5mm port.
In the near future, I expect many more headphones to come with their own USB C adapter or to forgo the 3.5mm jack entirely. In the medium to far future, I expect Apple will replace the lightning port with USB C and from that point on, including a 3.5mm port on something will make about as much sense as any other legacy port that most people no longer care about.
The exception will probably be professional audio equipment, which I expect will keep analog ports around forever because it actually makes sense in that field.
Oh, and why shouldn't I be able to charge and listen to music at the same time? I need another adapter for that?
Adapters are an insane solution to a non-problem.
The answer to that is partially because there is a huge culture of analog being superior to anything digital in parts of the field, and doing live signal processing on an analog signal being cheaper than digital. For most recording purposes, the sound is recorded and turned into a digital signal almost immediately. However, for live sound, a lot of places still use analog compressors, equalizers, reverb, and other effects because they're cheaper than the good sounding digital counterparts and easier to troubleshoot.
If that wasn't what you were asking why too, feel free to specify what you were asking about and I'll give answering that a shot too.
> Oh, and why shouldn't I be able to charge and listen to music at the same time? I need another adapter for that?
The answer to this is pretty simple, I think. Most people just don't charge their phone and listen to music with the headphone jack at the same time very often. Obviously, for those who do this will be an inconvenience but for most people who charge their phone every night and don't listen to insane amounts of music this will never be a problem.
Even if Apple were to put a second port on the next iPhone, it would make much more sense to put a second lightning port instead of a headphone jack. Then people could listen to music and charge, or do any number of other things and charge at the same time.
In a perfect world they would put a lightning and a USB C as the start to their transition to USB C iPhones, but I can't see Apple doing that.
> The answer to this is pretty simple, I think. Most people just don't charge their phone and listen to music with the headphone jack at the same time very often.
Quite common during work. Or when traveling, airports, trains etc. do have USB ports for charging.
Something like this (https://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-DragonFly-Black-Headphone-...) is needed to drive high end headphones and might mid-quality headphones sound better.
I don't think that the average person will want to use USB C or lightning instead of a headphone jack, but I also don't think the average person will care about it. Because their phone probably came with a dongle and/or lightning/usbC headphones, it will probably be a pretty similar experience to before the headphone jack was removed.
I personally am in favor of a single port replacing as many other ports as possible. I'm not really sure why, but I like the idea of one port to rule them all.
> Quite common during work. Or when traveling, airports, trains etc. do have USB ports for charging.
I agree that some people will be affected by not being able to charge and listen at the same time. Those who are traveling are probably the best example. Now that most phones have enough battery life for a day and then some of typical usage, and can fast charge to 50% in less than 45 minutes, the number of people affected is small enough for Apple, Google, and other companies to ignore. Much like they ignore people who could use a VGA port on their laptop for their presentations. A good number of people are affected by not having a VGA port, but not enough for it to matter.
I buy into "one port for everything", but headphone jacks will probably outlive usb-c. The stereo right beside me is 15 years old (nothing special but nothing wrong with it either) and the one I just bought will probably be used for way more than 30 years. They both have headphone jacks, none of them have usb-c. It monumentally moronic to have headphones that only work with certain types of devices, especially for no good reason. My car stereo is so old it doesn't even have an AUX input and I'm eventually gonna replace it solely for the reason of gaining an AUX input.
There is no way that you can convince me that removing the headphone jack is nothing but a travesty.
I don't understand how people can just accept this change. Why would you pay for a shittier experience? I feel like people get outraged by the stupidest things these days. But when it comes to issues that will actually affect them in their everyday life, most people don't seem to give a shit.
I'm normally not a fan of conspiracy theories, but I wouldn't be surprised if the removal of the headphone jack on the iphone was actually an attempt to make sure more people have bluetooth on so they can be tracked in shops using the bluetooth beacon tracking.
Really, it's only Apple and Google who are really doubling down on having no headphone jack, and probably because they want to push their own assistant-enabled/burdened headphones.
I hope there's another small but beefy phone when I next come to switch. Honestly I'd even sacrifice the 3.5mm jack for a smaller (but still useful) smartphone
> Tell them you see what they’re up to, and you don’t like it. You can say this part slightly deeper, through gritted teeth, if you get to say it aloud. Or, just italicize it so they know you are serious.
-- is implicitly admitting defeat. Saying these loudly and italicizing in rants on social media won't change profit-driven decisions!
I'm using a 27" 1440p monitor at home (bought it ~4 years ago), and it has plenty of space to comfortably show two full-size pages side by side, with plenty of space left over for toolbars and such. Or two 1280x1440 windows, which is a very handy size, giving me the equivalent of two portrait-mode monitors. Most modern WMs (and even Windows!) have window snapping/tiling that makes this very easy (win+arrows).
Aspect ratio isn't really an issue anymore, as long as you have enough vertical resolution, and the additional horizontal space is nice for tool windows and such.
If you look it up, the human field of view is actually approximately 4:3... you know, like old monitors.
There's two things I love about 35mm - first, along with most numbers used in photography, it shows Americans can cope with (and indeed embrace) metric, and second the origin is a 'let's get 16 frames to the foot of motion picture film' arbitrary decision made in the late 1800's.
That it defines so many amateur photographers' desires 130 years later is perversely delightful.
It's perfect because it's a very capable DAQ system (16 bit samples @ 48 kHz!) and almost every students owns one already so they can play at home.
I have bluetooth headphone for the gym, because exercising with a cable is a faff. But I hate then. I hate that they run out. I hate that I have to, and often forget to, charge them.
From a purely practical standpoint, my year old phone barely holds a day of charge with a little usage. But at least now I'm still able to charge my phone and listen to music at the same time. I listen to music (on fantastic, wired headphones) for about 7 hours a day in the office. I can't imagine a world where I'd have to stop after 5 hours for 3 hours of charging before I could wire in again.
Until you can give me phones and headphones that charge by themselves - nay - until you can replicate my current experience, just without the cables, I'm not interested.
There's one thing I would ask from manufacturers who go the bluetooth-only way, though: please first make sure a bluetooth receiver can handle multiple connections.
I have bluetooth speakers at home that I've put on top of my sofa, so I can watch movies comfortably without annoying neighbors with loud sound. During the day, my phone is my media center, playing music. But I also want sometimes to play sound from my computer, like when I watch a youtube video.
In order to do that, I plug the speakers' jack to the phone, and connect the laptop through bluetooth. This is awesome and is better than jack only speakers: I can easily plug two devices on it. But if everything was bluetooth only, then it would be a regression, as I could only connect one device.
Could bluetooth multiplexing be a thing? (or are there reasons it couldn't happen?).
I would also love to know if I'm an edge case, or if other people here are doing something similar as well.
HOWEVER - and this is a giant caveat - the firmware[1] is really dumb about this because if A and B are connected, A is sending audio, and you move out of range of B, it'll start a plaintive beeping.
[1] Might actually be a function of the chipset since it's happened identically on two different dongles that allowed two connections.
How many Sony Walkman tape players and their clones did I break and where did they break? The headphone jack.
How many headphones have I broken and where did they break? The headphone jack.
As a student playing around 'on the decks' I found that anything with a headphone jack was liable to be responsible for that mains hum.
I have fond memories of using the headphone jack of the 32x CD ROM that was in the front of that 'Compaq' PC that cost many thousands. But when was the last time I touched a CD? So that is another headphone jack we thought we needed but didn't.
Had we moved to a magnetic latch as per the Apple power arrangement then I think that I would have got burned a lot less with the soldering iron and the purchase of hi fi kit and caboodle. Maybe with some optional VGA style screws if you really want the connection locked down hard. This could have been a much more 'jogging friendly' solution, waterproof too.
I mourn the loss of analog audio but not the headphone jack. Maybe the latter is responsible for the demise of the former and maybe there was vested interest in the Walkman era in having the universal but breakable headphone jack.
Incidentally the headphone jack seems much better engineered in computers and phones than in 1980's era Walkman style tape players. Maybe there was some lightbulb style conspiracy to ensure that headphone jacks only lasted '1000 hours' before failing, therefore maintaining sales of new tape players.
I'm very much in favor of keeping the headphone jack, but we'll look back at these analog issues the same way we currently think about needle static from record players.
At the moment there seems to be a group of people thinking about it with nostalgia.
That said, I think a good, working bluetooth solution would be something I'd prefer. I like analog jacks, but honestly, cables are a bad solution for wearable devices.
The microscopic lithium battery crammed into the case - non replacable, usually in difficult environment and if it fails you have to buy new headphones. This is far far worse choice for consumers than normal cable-based headphones.
A bad technological culture makes technology it can't mess up seem better than it actually is.
Let me put it this way - if I buy a $50 pair of bluetooth headphones and a $50 pair of normal headphones, put them both in a box and opened the box in 10 years, the first pair will be unusable due to the built-in battery, while the second pair will continue working just fine. Sure, maybe a $200 pair of headphones would have a replaceable battery - but I find it extremely difficult to spend so much money on a pair of headphones.
I think the main reason why headphones often suck are cultural, not mechanical. If you make stuff in capitalism, it being cheap is always a great selling point, even if it craps out after a couple of weeks of use. So you get the whole market crowded with useless junk, and well-made stuff gets crowded out. Stuff that, from a technological perspective, is outdated, works better than new stuff because of this culture. It doesn't mean that the new technology isn't better. It just means that, with an attitude like ours, we could make crud using any technology.
There's the AvE influence.
Jogging damages them.
I'm not happy at all about headphone jacks disappearing, but I doubt the development can be stopped.
I don't think Apple & Google want you to use the radio. They don't make money from it, so they don't see a reason to permit you to use it.
there is the lightning dac for apple and equivalent for other brands
there are oodles of audio <-> bluetooth adapters
then i am sure there will be a raspberry pi / beaglebone / arduino with open source oscilloscope clients available.