I still miss my headphone jack, and I want it back | Hacker News Reader

I still miss my headphone jack, and I want it back

fastcompany.com

805 pointsbennettfeely724 comments

We need to take into account _Accessibility_. A large use case that I've found most people seems to miss are individuals who are older and don't have much experience with bluetooth or wireless technology. I'm fine with Apple removing the headphone jack, but they've alienated so many people to find their own path when they don't include the adapter.

Anecdotal example: I recently purchased headphones for my 65-year old father and showed him how to use it, in preparation for his "headphone jack-less" future. After about a month (he lives in China, so I see him only a couple times a year), I asked him how it's going and he said he doesn't use them anymore because he just couldn't figure it out. I tried to explain "Turn on Bluetooth on your phone, then turn on your headphones, then hold down the button to pair, etc", but it was actually quite complicated because once he did this dance, 2 months later his phone restarted and bluetooth was off and we had to do it again. Software-wise, I can just send a link, but when it comes to hardware + software like printers, things become really challenging to explain.

I bring this up because if we're moving to the "wireless" world, we need to really consider accessibility for the elderly. My father ended up throwing away these really expensive Beats headphones, went to his local market and bought some cheap Sony headphones and is now listening fine. I'm not really sure what's going on happen when his next phone doesn't have the headphone jack.

maybe an industry standard that works like AirPods pairing?

Yes, but looking at Apple, Google, HTC, Samsung and recent history, I think it will come down to this: https://xkcd.com/927/ . I'm almost certain that whatever Apple developed for the Airpods will not be shared with other companies. And whatever other companies push forward as a "Standard" will not replace the Apple Solution in the near future. Even replacing apples crappy AFP Network Protocol took 13 years, until SMB finally took over in macOS Mavericks. And even then, they used their own implementation instead of the official "Standard" one.

I wouldn't be so sure - it will take years for sure, but industry has many times come up with decent standards in the past - ethernet, USB, PCI, just to give a few examples. Bluetooth as a network protocol also seems to be fine with its latest revisions, it's just the pairing that sucks - if Apple can do it on top of bluetooth I think others should also be able to.

> if Apple can do it on top of bluetooth I think others should also be able to.

they're only "doing it" with their own limited hardware combinations. the experience of pairing any random bluetooth devices even in ios is still mediocre overall.

Anecdata: I have 19 Bluetooth devices on my iPhone (gamepads, speakers, headphones + dongles, watches, etc.) - of which, I'd say, only one gives me trouble[1] and none really were problematic for pairing.

[1] Cricut Air but then it also has trouble talking Bluetooth reliably to my Windows 10 desktop; I'm not blaming this on iOS just yet.

Actually kind of curious about this.

Because I bought the Sony 1000MX3 and its pairing at least with one device is much faster and more reliable than Airpods. It definitely is worse with multiple devices however.

Anecdotally, Sony BT headsets are pretty good (I'm currently on my fourth set, I wear them out eventually).

In my personal experience they have decent sound, pair reasonably easily (through NFC and "normally"), and the connection is pretty stable.

Pairing partner were various Samsung Galaxies.

I recommend Sony BT headphones.

That said, I also use the 3.5mm jack regularly :-)

It's not just the pairing that sucks. Everything sucks, in every possible way (although pairing is the least problematic, in my personal case).

I have several BT devices, and I never know how they're going to work in the next month, when the next software update is going to be applied.

Ubuntu's BT stack (bluez) is well-known to be trash, however, I was surprised when my Android phone BT's stability took a dip after some "security" updates.

if Apple can do it on top of bluetooth

I think the heart of the problem lies here. It's the fact that we have to pay solid attention to the UI when we make these changes- and we have to care about the UX. This thread is focusing on bluetooth, but I had this experience when iOS updated their text-message interface. I guess there are more buttons to push now, but what is missing is being able to attach a photo that you've already taken by tapping an icon next to the text entry. Now that only opens a camera, and you have to go to the "lower level" to attach a pic that you've already taken.

No big deal, right? Now, if you were going to change your UI and add an icon that signifies attaching a photo, what would your icon look like? If you were going to hunt for one, what would you expect to look for? They use something that doesn't call to mind photographs in my mind[1]. It took me an annoying amount of time to figure out this change because I was in one of those situations I was trying to get the picture off quickly.

In fact, this whole trend of replacing labels with icon and having no mouseover fallback is a huge time-sink. Now, that might have been Apple's icon for a long time, but the fact is I never needed to know that before. It was in a place that was obvious (next to a camera or something, I really don't remember what it changed from).

I mean, am I seriously supposed to know what this means[2]?

[1] http://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/photos-ap....

[2] https://boilingpointdev.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/game-cen...

Regarding SMB... there isn't an official "standard" implementation outside of Microsoft's walls.

Apple used to use Samba, but had to drop it in MacOS 10.7 when Samba switched from GPLv2 to GPLv3. I can't really fault them for making a change based on licensing concerns.

Maybe go back to the industry standard that worked well for 100+ years, the headphone jack.

CD drives worked well for 30 years. Why not bring them back to all our modern devices, too?

They were removed only when few people used them because there was a better alternative. Many, many people use headphones with 3,5 mm plugs and it is not at all clear that the alternative is better.

Well it is pretty clear that the alternative is at least satisfactory.

Because iPhone sales aren't dropping because of the headphone jack and people seem to be enjoying Bluetooth headphones given how popular those are.

Bluetooth was a step sideways. I like not having my cable get stuck under my chair wheels but holy fuck its annoying to use when you have multiple devices.

What's your source for the reason iPhone sales are dropping?

When you buy into Apple you are supposed to follow the trend. It has been the case since the earliest Macs. So it is not surprising that Apple followers simply do what Apple tells them to do and switch to wireless. I don't like it but it has value. Apple products tend to work quite well when used as intended.

As for sales dropping, smartphone sales do drop. Or at least, the upgrade cycles are becoming longer. It is mostly because phones are becoming "good enough" for many years, but the removal of the headphone jack may have played a tiny part.

But that is exactly my point: bluetooth is a better alternative to the headphone jack. In addition, fewer people use the headphone jack than people did one year ago.

We'll just have to agree to disagree, then, because I find that there are zero advantages to Bluetooth in this case. I mean, wireless would be nice in an ideal world where there are no disadvantages, but for me, they are so hefty that it's never worth it.

It's just silly to claim bluetooth is better than the headphone jack. There are lots of reasons people use headphone jacks less. I can't buy a phone one with one, cause I want a recent better spec phone.

Apple removed the CD drive when it was still popular.

This was done with a replacement on hand which was more functional, more reliable, and easier to use. BT is not any of these things.

AirPods are more functional, just as reliable, and are just as easy to use.

Admittedly, far more expensive. But wired headphones come with iPhones

More functional than and just as reliable as what? There are thousands and thousands of headphone models with the standard plug, many of which are arguably much more functional and reliable.

I mean, I guess... Apple is always early when it comes to killing stuff. But as late as 2016 you could still buy a new MacBook Pro with a DVD drive.

NFC pairing is a thing, used by a few Sony headphones. Android supports it.

> they've alienated so many people to find their own path when they don't include the adapter.

My iPhone came with an adapter, though. I continue using the same headphones as I did with my old phone.

anecdotally, the adapter Apple provided me broke after about three weeks, and it seems like most of my family/friends are in similar situations

I've experienced a similar problem. I wear my headphones for about 1.5 - 2 hours per day while walking and I've found that I have to purchase a new adapter about every 45 days. I'm surprised that for the approximately $10 they charge for the adapter that they can't come up with a more durable design.

Most of Apple original cables are getting broken pretty much quickly. This is my experience. Why is that?

All official first-party Apple cables have a 1-year warranty. You can just take it into an Apple Store and they'll just replace it.

I felt the same way about the adapter my phone came with, until I wanted to use the headphones on my desk at work and realized I couldn't do that because I left the adapter with the headphones in my car.

My understanding is that the latest version of iPhone doesn't ship with the adapter anymore.[0]

0: https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/12/17827970/no-more-free-iph...

Confirmed - XR didn't come with it, only lightning headphones.

Well that sucks. Apple's policy of not including commonly needed adapters is a general point of criticism with this company, though. (and a very valid one.) IMO it's not an issue that stems specifically from the headphone jack removal.

The included adapter only works for listening to audio. If your earbuds offer a mic or inline controls, those don't.

Not in the case of Bose QC15s, the mic works just fine through the adapter.

I have the adapter and both my headphones work with the adapter and controls fine. One is a Sony MDR-1R (v1) and the other is a Beoplay H6.

The adapter works just fine with the inline controls on Apple's ear buds.

The problem with the headphone jack adapter is that it is mutually exclusive with input for the power cable.

Where this is particularly frustrating is when you are on a particularly long conference call and your phone starts to run out of charge. This happened regularly enough for me ditch the iphone.

I'm sure there yet another dongle you can buy to address this shortcoming though.

we'll get wireless charging at some point (though probably only if it doesn't interfere with 'thinness') and then we'll only have a couple hundred millions devices with that problem....

Hey most lines have support for Qi standard. The trouble is that it's slow. As in slower than old USB 2 charging without any high current protocol.

The iPhone already has wireless charging.

Yes you can get a dual charging/headphone adapter for $2.65.

I really don't understand people who change entire platforms over such small amounts of money. I know for me personally my investment in apps and content is significantly more than just $2.65.

And how practical is it to keep track of yet another adapter?

It's one adapter.

And you can permanently attach it to your headphones.

> And you can permanently attach it to your headphones.

I can't permanently attach it to everything I might otherwise plug into my headphone jack, including things that I use occasionally but neither own nor have exclusive control over.

Sure, if I have one set of headphones, and use nothing else with the jack, the “you can permanently attach it” mitigation is, actually, something of a mitigation.

Also, Apple's adapter seems (from reports, including reviews at Apple's site) to either not support inline controls and headset mics consistently and/or to require plugging the adapter into the phone before the headset for some to work. And that's not even going to some cut-price, third-party charge+adaptor device.

Where can you get them for $2.65? I've never even seen one for sale.

It's not about the additional cost of a few extra dollars.

It's a matter of practicality and convenience.

I don't want to have to worry about remembering the phone, the charger, the earbuds AND a dongle. In my opinion it's simply one concern too many for basic functionality. Functionality we used to have.

100% agree. Relatedly, too, if they're so cheap... include one with the phone.

But yeah, we used to have the convenience of both (bluetooth and wired), now we pay more $ for less functionality and increased inconvenience. Holding on to my SE for the foreseeable.

While I mourn the practicality of the embedded jack on my iPhone 8, I've had quite a few headphones in a row whose jack ended up failing due to the way my phone is placed inside my pocket, and a repair was impossible, so that was quite an unexpected improvement to have the adapter possibly fail and be replaced at a very small cost instead of a full headset† going bust.

† five actually (100-300€ price range), two of which the cord is replaceable (which I did) but how long will that specific cord be available?

You can cut off the jack and solder a new one. You also don't need specific cord, buy a new cord and add the jack. For non replaceable cords you can open up the headphones unsolder the old cord and solder a new one. Or you can cut the cable somewhere high and patch another cable.

If you can't do these things your self there is probably some cheap electronic repair shop nearby. Most likely cheaper than shipping new brand cable or replacement parts.

On side note plastic in one of my shure 840 joints broke and I managed to fix it by modeling and 3d printing it. They're working fine now. The only official way to fix that was to buy original head assembly and ship it, but that's almost as expensive as getting a new pair.

Repair is possible, just sometimes you need to be a bit creative.

> Repair is possible, just sometimes you need to be a bit creative.

Indeed, and I attempted to do so myself since I know how to handle a soldering iron... yet some of them were in-ear, one was over ear but cracking its case was a one way destructive operation; some had those hair-thin copper wires downright coated with an insulating material that makes soldering a pain, if at all possible. I swear it's made on purpose to thwart attempts at repairs.

I bet I have broken more jacks in a couple of years than during the 20 years before that. Crazy.

Anyway that doesn't change the fact that before that I never thought about having a small, cheap jack-to-jack part in between the headphones and the playing device, as using the adapter was the first time I happened to do something similar, but that's not a property of the adapter itself; or rather, DAC, really, and I find it nice that there are alternative DACs available, at which point if I always have a DAC at hand, well it's less of a problem to not have a jack embedded), but really, I'd rather still have the jack, or having the removal of the jack coincide with the replacement of Lightning with USB-C (together with the USB-C situation not being such a bloody mess) and have some new universal standard emerge across all devices.

> I've had quite a few headphones in a row whose jack ended up failing due to the way my phone is placed inside my pocket, and a repair was impossible ...

Why don't you change the way you put it in your pocket?

> of which the cord is replaceable (which I did) but how long will that specific cord be available?

Isn't it a generic 3.5mm to 2.5mm jack for nearly most of them? All headphones with replaceable cords I own and have owned have this cable.

We don't just need to consider accessibility for the elderly. I need to regularly reconfigure my Bluetooth connections on my phone. They just randomly stop working. With the latest version of Android, I couldn't figure out how to even access the Bluetooth settings. When I connect some devices, they don't show up in the list of paired devices. Somehow it still ended up working, but I don't know how or why.

When I walk into the bathroom wearing my Bluetooth headphones, my podcasting app starts detecting disconnections and pausing, so I have to turn off the feature to stop playing on headset disconnect. This makes everything else work poorly. My podcast player also often crashes when I connect a Bluetooth device.

My problems get a lot worse when I try to pair a speaker or headphones with multiple devices. I often have to factory reset the device to get it to work again when switching sources.

I'm clearly not the only technically-minded person dealing with random nasty Bluetooth issues, as evidenced by this article and https://xkcd.com/2055/

This is why I hold on to my iPhone 6 like it's precious and won't install any software updates so as not to kill the battery. I have bluetooth headphones but they're a pain to charge and the headphone jack just works consistently. I love my iPhone 6!!

From a security point of view, it's really worrying that a lot of users refuse to upgrade software because of the track record of Apple making devices less usable with every upgrade.

I prefer the method of Samsung in this case, they clearly state for the monthly update that it is mostly a security update. Where Apple seems to apply marketing by promising 'the best experience yet' and shiny new features with each major version bump.

edit: typo

>From a security point of view, it's really worrying that a lot of users refuse to upgrade software because of the track record of Apple making devices less usable with every upgrade.

A lot of users? iOS has the fastest and widest adoption rate for new releases of any mobile or not OS. Android specifically used to have awful fragmentation issues and phones never updated by the vendor 3 and 4 releases behind.

APPLE IOS 12 HAS SEEN THE FASTEST ADOPTION RATE, RUNNING ON 50% OF IPHONES AND IPADS (Oct 12)

https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/apple-ios-12-ha...

iOS 11 is now installed on 81% of Apple’s over a billion active iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices in the wild, up from the 76% adoption rate reported on April 25. By contrast, Android Oreo versions powered less than six percent of active Android-driven smartphones and tablets that had been accessing Google’s Play Store during a seven-day period ending on May 7, 2018.

https://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/06/05/ios-11-adoption-rat...

50% is "a lot of users". Ranting about Android doesn't change that.

His ranting style is unhelpful but the underlying point is sound—Apple device owners update the operating software at a dramatically higher rate and frequency than any other significant competitor platform. If there is a contingent of iOS device users “conditioned” to avoid upgrades, it would be impossible to prove this contingent exists statistically.

Frequent vocal complainers on internet forums probably only account for less than 0.01% of their installed base.

Does that really mean anything, though? I'm sure win10 users update at a higher rate than that, but that doesn't mean that people are clamoring for Microsoft's newest update.

The Windows ecosystem has a far higher percentage of users running older versions—e.g. 8.1, 7, 2012 R2.

JFYI 50% is an adoption achieved in only 23 days after iOS 12 release [1]

"Apple’s latest mobile OS hitting 50 percent adoption across eligible devices in 23 days (via VentureBeat).

For comparison, iOS 11, released on September 19th, 2017, didn’t hit 52 percent adoption until November 6th of that year, taking 48 days, or over twice as long as it took iOS 12 to hit its own 50 percent mark."

So now it is probably higher, though I didn't find any fresh stats.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/11/17965302/ios-12-install-...

50% in a couple weeks after the release.

Android was 6% after much much longer.

I mean, it’s much easier to update if you own the entire platform

I never had a problem updating Windows PCs not made by Microsoft. In fact, I was able to just stick a Windows 7 disk in my old 2006 Core Duo Mac Mini and “upgrade” it after Apple abandoned it.

Fragmentation! Lol! The only people who seem to care about "Android fragmentation" are lonely Apple fanbois. It makes no difference to Android users as the version of Android you run and the apps you can install/websites you browse are entirely unconnected.

>The only people who seem to care about "Android fragmentation" are lonely Apple fanbois.

First, "fanbois" is something 15-year olds emotionally invested into "my side is better" would use. Just state what you want to state, and don't assume some magical group of mindless drones or paid shills behind statements that point to deficiencies in a platform. In general, drop "lol", "lonely fanbois" etc from your vocabulary if you want your statements to be taken seriously.

>It makes no difference to Android users as the version of Android you run and the apps you can install/websites you browse are entirely unconnected.

Tons of Android developers have been lamenting fragmentation. It's about having a coherent platform to be able to know what features to count on, and not to have to support several older versions of the OS because most of the buyers are still using it.

Also tons of Android uses have lamented mobile vendors not providing updates for their older models.

https://insights.dice.com/2017/11/16/android-fragmentation-r...

https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/what-is-android-fragmen...

https://hackernoon.com/android-fragmentation-makes-every-and...

"In general, drop "lol", "lonely fanbois" etc from your vocabulary if you want your statements to be taken seriously."

Thanks for the advice but I appear to be immune to this "social networks and digital media causes depression" issue, as I couldn't give a fuck what anyone thinks about me.

Part of the reason Apple has such high update numbers is due to the dark pattern of presenting "enter your passcode to update tonight" (when you select "later" instead of "install now" on an update alert) in the exact same style as the normal passcode entry screen. I'm sure a significant number of people have inadvertently updated their device through that method.

Anecdotally speaking, Android, particularly from version 8, started pushing system breaking changes/bugs in the supposedly security-oriented monthly upgrades (have a look at how many users found their phone not to fire alarms anymore after a minor Oreo upgrade...), so I think this is a market-wide tendency.

> From a security point of view, it's really worrying that a lot of users refuse to upgrade software because of the track record of Apple making devices less usable with every upgrade.

Sure it is, but this is what you get for not separating security and feature updates. I tend to avoid updating applications (both on desktop and mobile) for that very reason (though I do update the OS).

If each vaccination you took came with mandatory remodeling of your house, directed by whims of some "artists", you'd see much more antivaxxers too.

> I prefer the method of Samsung in this case, they clearly state for the monthly update that it is mostly a security update.

I have an S7 and my experience doesn't confirm this, though I don't know whether it's Samsung's fault or operator's (Orange). Either way, I find most updates I get to be indistinguishable by their description. I'm not worried though, because I haven't caught any of them installing bloatware. That said, from what I understand, they're still linear - you're expected to apply one patch after another. I see no way of opting out from feature updates, and sticking only to security ones.

Anyway; why oh why it's so hard to include a changelog in an update?

> If each vaccination you took came with mandatory remodeling of your house, directed by whims of some "artists", you'd see much more antivaxxers too.

I cannot concur strongly enough. (And I will likely steal this lovely analogy in the future!)

Security is important, and installing security patches is a good practice. But companies use this as an excuse to force the adoption of all sorts of other crap. I'm not willing to put up with that.

I understand that back-porting patches requires some amount of additional effort. But asking gigantic tech companies to support major releases for a few years at minimum should not be too much to ask.

In this regard, Microsoft and Windows 10 are by far the worst offenders. Microsoft develops and releases security-only patches for 1607 and will continue to do so until 2026, but these patches are only available to enterprises. Normal consumers need to either use Microsoft's problem-ridden biannual updates, or be insecure.

Actions speak louder than words. If Microsoft actually held security in such a high regard, they wouldn't hold security patches hostage in order to push other corporate interests. I thus don't feel the least bit of guilt about opting out of MS's entire update process.

IIRC, Bluetooth LE devices managed by apps doesn't have to be listed in Android, since the app can talk to it without pairing. Devices not meant for pairing with the OS itself (because it doesn't offer interfaces the OS understand) will not always show in scans, because Android can't interact with them without needing additional apps. So instead the corresponding apps has to be used to scan for them, to tell Android that this app can talk to those devices.

The devices that aren't showing up aren't managed by apps. They're headphones and speakers. It seems I may have been in the wrong part of the settings app, as I've just now discovered that the area of settings labeled "Bluetooth" shows the device name and an option to pair a new device but doesn't show the currently paired devices. I thought my device name was just hidden.

There's a second separate settings page for "Pair new device" that shows currently connected devices and has the same option to pair a new device as the Bluetooth page. It doesn't let you control the current device's name, but it does have a weird link to a general connection preferences page that includes a link to the first Bluetooth one, as well as links to similar pages for NFC, Android Beam, Cast, Printing, Received files, and Chromebook.

I had a lot of trouble finding both of these pages, and the fact that these are two different settings pages does not help at all. They've really made this a lot more difficult and confusing in Android Pie.

Just attach the tiny little dongle that comes with the phone to the headphones. Then say to him that he can put the charging cable there and also the headphones cable.

Would this be too complicated too? You can get the EarPods with a lightning connector. If that’s too complicated then maybe you can draw a picture explaining it?

Then you misplace the lot and you're out $50-$100 worth of kit, rather than a $4 set of 3.5mm headphones, which you already have six compatible pairs of sitting in the culch drawer.

$50-$100 worth of kit? The dongle is €10 (21% VAT incluis) in an Apple Store. EarPods with lightning connector integrated are €23 (again, VAT included) if you want the most easy solution on a like €600 minimum phone.

If you have a phone that doesn't come with a 3.5mm headphone jack, then you're able to spend €10 on a dongle to make your $4 set of 3.5mm headphones work. If you cannot afford that, then you have one of the many phones that do have a headphone jack. I'm sure that, if in the future everyone for some strange reason got rid of the integrated headphone jack and there's no company that sees it as a USP while people still want to use 3.5mm headphones, that the price of dongles will be next to nothing.

You don't have to buy Apple's dongle. I found third party ones for $1.46.

At the price you could just buy like 5 and permanently attach them to each pair of headphones.

Be careful. Many of them don't actually work with the latest iOS for one reason or another. I just ran into this issue myself after grabbing some cheap dongles off of Amazon, and I got an error stating that the "device is not supported."

Not sure of the intent with your tone, but I wouldn't need to draw a picture of something so simple. As mentioned in the post, I would love to resort to a connector, _if the dongle came with his iPhone_. The only new information I can provide is, because the dongle is small, I know he'd lose it and continuously buying this connector isn't an option (hence why I tried to future-proof him)

The dongle no longer comes with the phone.

It's no coincidence that you never see anybody with a visible disability in any general purpose Apple advertisement -- video or print.

Or an overweight person, for that matter.

Or any ad, really. Apple is at least one order of magnitude better at a11y than everyone else in the industry; this is simply a nonsense comment. Nobody else remotely approaches them on this front—it may be their biggest and most unassailable moat, albeit for a tiny market that won’t ever increase in size. It’s one of the most charitable things they do as an organization.

>It's no coincidence that you never see anybody with a visible disability in any general purpose Apple advertisement -- video or print.

Actually you see several such persons. E.g.:

Ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPv9jFWhzGE

WWDC video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgk_Jawzdwk

Also Apple has the greatest accessibility track record (and tons of awards on such matters), and e.g. blind people etc swear by its products (as opposed to at it).

Blind person describing his use of iPhones etc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlbIF7IOb_Q

You mean this one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB4cjbYywqg

Or the "Designed for ..." series?

Meera https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d6zKINudi0

Andrea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoEUsUWihsM

Patrick https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whioDJ8doYA

Todd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PoE9tHg_P0

By "advertising" I was referring to broadcast or print advertising, not special-interest outreach. None of those has been part of their broadcast TV campaigns.

Advertisement means advertisement. In a time when most content (especially video content) is consumed online, you for some reason call those videos "special-interest outreach".

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/08/01/decade-smartphon...

> People are on average online for 24 hours a week, twice as long as 10 years ago, with one in five of all adults spending as much as 40 hours a week on the web. > > This is partly due to the rise in use by those aged 16 to 24, who average 34.3 hours a week on the internet.

You mean the same Apple that got a Louis Braille award[1] for their work in accessibility for the blind and visually impaired, that Apple ?

1. https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/01/27/apple-honored-wit...

I never referred to functionality; I was pointing out the image that Apple wants to convey in its advertising.

> Or an overweight person, for that matter.

How about smokers, while we're at it?

Smokers look just like non-smokers, unless currently smoking.

Not if they're a heavy smoker...

Pity about the smell.

Anecdotally often it's pretty obvious who the smokers are from skin/complexion/teeth.

What's the point in coming here and trying to spread lies? Apple regularly highlights accessibility features and I'm fairly sure they're among the leaders in the tech field, if not THE leader.

There is a good supply of Chinese phones that include a headphone jack. If the iPhone is a product you don't like, just buy another phone. It will be cheaper and will do the same and probably more.

It may take a while to get used to a different OS, but I've seen my parents switching between iPhone and Android without problems so I don't think your father (about the same age) will have more difficulties.

I think the US gov just decided that Chinese phones are not to be trusted. At least Apple has a small semblance of privacy in China.

> At least Apple has a small semblance of privacy in China.

No, they don't. China doesn't even let AWS operate in China without having all the network traffic filter and land in China. Nothing about the Apple network is different. Still towers in China, still servers in China.

One would think Android phone makets would take this as opportunity given the massive uproar. But instead they are absolutely determined to blindly follow Apple off the cliff. Now many major Android phones have not only removed headphone jack but even introduced unnecessary notch even though they don’t have FaceID!! The lack of independent thinking is stunning among leading Android phone makers and very sad thing for consumers in this duopoly.

Phones have long since left functionality for fashion. The notch is in season this year, no one cares why.

Aren't you only thinking of a few expensive "flagship" Android phones? I don't think the vast majority of recent Android phones have followed either of those two innovations.

I wish. It's everywhere. When I went phone shopping this year, my criteria was 1: not a phablet 2: Headphone jack 3: No notch. My options in the $500+ market* were... the Galaxy S9. And it's likely the S10 will be swapping its headphone jack for a cutout notch.

*$500 for a phone is suddenly midrange- let's not forget phone prices shot up 25% on average in the last 2 years, likely because other manufacturers realized Apple could get away charging $1000 for a phone and followed along.

Oh, maybe I'm just naive about what expensive means, then. :P I typed this on my non-notched, audio-jacked, ~80 USD Huawei Y5 Pro, that I'm very happy with.

Notch is not for FaceID, wtf. It's because they need space to put the frontal camera and the proximity sensor.

I'm preparing to jump ship. I think my phone has 18-24 months left in it, but I'm already refraining from getting locked in into iOS-only apps, even though (e.g.) I just discovered Omni products which seem, forgive my french, amazeballs.

The problem is that App Store performance is a much noisier feedback channel back to Cupertino.

I am also very strongly against having 2.4GHz Bluetooth radiation wrapped right around my head. There is a good chance this doesn’t matter but some chance that it does. No one knows. I refuse to be forced guinea pig in this wireless headset experiment.

The radiator is your phone. The wireless headset does a lot of receiving and very, very little radiation. That's why those tiny bluetooth things can have many weeks of battery lifetime on a battery the size of a fingernail: They don't radiate much energy either towards your brain or towards the phone.

(Digressing, I wonder how much radiation incidental WLAN use on a phone causes, compared to a bluetooth headset. I mean things like googleplay chancing to upgrade a few apps via WLAN while you're holding the phone against your ear.)

Do you not use mobile phones against your ear either? Bluetooth earphones are mostly receivers and are several orders of magnitude lower power than a mobile phone transmitter. In fact they're a lot lower power than most domestic landline walk-about DECT phone handsets.

Where does the force come from? Are you required to use this kit for your job?

Personally I feel like makers saw an opportunity on 1) boost sales on new headphones 2) get rid of the cable hanging around. I can understand and feel your fathers frustration trying to use wireless headphones, on the other side if they never ever get rid of the headphone jack then users are going to end up never getting trained on how to use wireless headphones. Generally with leaps in tech there are leaps in reduced accessibility for older people, and with how fast tech is changing I can’t see the current older generation getting more familiar with tech. Although give it a generation more and people that are currently 40 will be able to adapt new tech much easier and accessibility is going to be much less of an issue for the foreseen future.

Also at the end of the day I think there are adaptors that convert the jack into whatever port your phone has. I know it’s not ideal as you get more pieces to carry around and you might lose them but again there is a solution.

Also I have to state the fact that I was highly against not having a headphone jack as I own several pairs of good headphones with jacks and also I just didn’t like that change. I adapted and tbh I am much happier with Wirless headphones right now and not having those cables around me. Battery life could improve which am sure it will with time and I won’t need to charge them every so often but over all I am admitting that I was mistakenly thinking that wireless headphones and no jack sucks.

> I can understand and feel your fathers frustration trying to use wireless headphones, on the other side if they never ever get rid of the headphone jack then users are going to end up never getting trained on how to use wireless headphones.

But why do you want to get rid of the headphone jack? For iPhone, this is a direct downgrade, loss of very useful functionality. That's why people are complaining; while companies seem to like trading utility for fashion all the time, this case was unprecedently blatant.

> Also at the end of the day I think there are adaptors that convert the jack into whatever port your phone has.

That's the trick though. Someone's gonna make money on the adapters :). Also, I start to think this was a move meant to "disrupt" the headphones market. Suddenly the perfectly good headphones no longer work for a big and rich chunk of people, and out come new wireless options. The conspiracist in me wonders whether people responsible for this decision have any ties to people selling AirPods and their alternatives :).

> But why

Sometimes you have to take a step back to take two steps forward.

> Sometimes you have to take a step back to take two steps forward.

And sometimes you have to take a step back because someone pushes you.

I'm old enough to remember getting a cordless home phone. Being able to walk around the house and talk instead of sitting by the phone jack was awesome. And there was very little downside, because whenever you weren't using the phone, you put it on the cradle and it was charging.

Ethernet to WiFi was similarly good. I like that I can sit anywhere in or near my house and use the internet. There's not much downside.

But headphones? If I'm listening to a podcast on my phone, I'm going to have my phone on me. I'm not going to walk away from it because then I couldn't control the playback.

A wireless connection to something I'm going to be touching while I use it anyway doesn't do anything for me. I get zero freedom of movement from that. It just means another thing to configure, another thing to charge, another way things can be incompatible or fail.

> If I'm listening to a podcast on my phone, I'm going to have my phone on me. I'm not going to walk away from it because then I couldn't control the playback.

Every set of wireless headphones I’ve owned have let me control play/pause/skip from them, which makes up 95% of the playback controls I ever use. The last 5% I can do from my watch. Roaming about the house listening to stuff without a care where my phone is seems totally normal to me these days. I would never go back to wires now I’ve lived with the benefits of wireless.

FTR I was equally skeptic before I bought some cheap $10 Bluetooth earbuds to try running without wires tugging with every stride, and found myself wanting to use them all the time in spite of their awful sound quality so I bit the bullet and got some decent ones

What is the step forward?

Any day now.

The only reason apple got rid of the headphone jack was so they could sell you the adapters for $30+. I want a headphone jack, AND I want bluetooth capability. I'll buy your wireless headphones if I want to use wireless, otherwise I'll buy your wired headphones, but I'm not paying $30+ for the dongle. Instead, I'm gonna buy a samsung.

It baffles me that people are arguing about the merits of bluetooth and the ease of wireless when, in reality, it was a profit move!

> But why do you want to get rid of the headphone jack? For iPhone, this is a direct downgrade, loss of very useful functionality. That's why people are complaining; while companies seem to like trading utility for fashion all the time, this case was unprecedently blatant.

I'd say that in order to get rid of cabled headphones at some point in time, you have to start somewhere. I do think that wirless headphones is the future and that headphones with a cable will cease to exist in a few years. I can't argue that there are financial decisions involved into it and that they are not making a killing with it. But someone needs to start somewhere.

I think this apply to any technological advance we've made so far as humans and its part of evolving.

That's fine, but they're pushing the technology when it's not mature enough. You have to start somewhere, but the worst thing you can do is to start before you are ready, and from everything I'm reading here, and everything I've experienced myself, the technology is not ready yet.

> I do think that wirless headphones is the future and that headphones with a cable will cease to exist in a few years.

This is completely ridiculous. Latency issues are not cheap to solve without cable, and watching movies or any video / playing games just can't handle latency. Congestion problems in public transport are frequently mentioned in these HN threads already, and we are nowhere close to "fully wireless world".

I hope phone makers are not this delusional ... They already jumped the shark with phone sizes, it will be getting ridiculous trying to keep alive 6y ild phone just to not downgrade :/

So I am in a few years nearing 40, and I remembered when I first used a bluetooth headset, it was like seventeen years ago, so I was in my early 20s

Though it was (a tiny bit) more "magical" back then, pairing devices sucked then and still sucks.

Has anything even changed with how Bluetooth works?

Cause I keep giving Bluetooth new chances, "well it's X years later, and it still exists, surely they must have found a way to make it suck less"--and every time it's a disappointment. People still fiddling with pairing their devices, taking too much time, always at a most inconvenient moment (either in groups with everyone waiting and the device making funny noises, or when you're busy with the task Bluetooth was meant to free your hands for).

Did they fix or improve anything about Bluetooth over the years? Cause it feels to me the attitude has always been what you said: people should just get used to it better. Because what Bluetooth promises sounds like an awesome idea and why shouldn't we have that? But the reality is that it sucks too much and people aren't getting used to it.

To constrast with Bluetooth, I also remember when Wifi started to appear. It also used to suck a bit. It was often difficult to connect to, very unreliable, connections dropping, etc. You wouldn't want to have to rely on it for connectivity, so bring an Ethernet cable for your laptop, just in case. But nowadays, Wifi works brilliantly. You can bring your laptop for a presentation and safely depend on there being Wifi (or your/someone's phone mobile hotspot). Even older people can connect to new Wifi networks (at a restaurant or friends') without too much trouble. And that's including having to select the correct network manually and type in a password.

Ask yourself this: You're at a new place, there's a Wifi network you haven't used before, but you know the name and password. Also there is a Bluetooth device that you have never connected to before. Which of these are you most confident about you can connect to and use without trouble?

Why is this different? Did Wifi improve in significant aspects in the past two decades where Bluetooth didn't? Why is that?

I don't remember the transition from serial cables to USB being as bad. Yes, you needed adapters or new hardware, but USB has always "just worked". There are corner cases and limitations to it, of course, but USB was never (at least in my experience) anywhere near the headache that Bluetooth was... and still often is.

I use Bluetooth, and in most cases I even like it, but it's still way more of a hassle than it should be, especially for something that's been around as long as it has. I didn't realize it was around as long as you described.

> USB has always "just worked"

I remember plenty of issues with USB device compatibility. Mostly when someone failed to follow the standards, of course—fully compliant devices and host controllers have generally worked well together, at least since USB 1.1. But there are a lot of non-compliant devices out there. Bluetooth isn't much different in that regard: if both devices follow the spec it tends to work well, but it's much more likely that one or both of the devices takes a "shortcut" or two in the name of saving a few cents. The fact that Bluetooth devices are typically battery-powered and thus strongly incentivised to cut corners to save a few milliwatts doesn't help.

However, the standards certainly aren't perfect even when implemented correctly. The most awkward aspect of the Bluetooth experience, in my opinion, has to do with pairing. There shouldn't by any limit to the number of simultaneously paired devices. They should just exchange signed credentials during the pairing process, and either device (but typically the more general-purpose one, such as the phone or laptop) should be able to present these pairing credentials later to establish a connection. The headphones, car stereo, or other special-purpose, storage-limited device shouldn't need to remember anything about the devices permitted to connect.

New tech needs to be easier and better, or it's not worth having. Forcing people to use bluetooth is not easier, and it's not better, so it' a bad idea. Period.

This is about what's good for Apple (and other companies making a similar change, plus the people who sell the peripherals), and not what's better for the users.

>>Although give it a generation more and people that are currently 40 will be able to adapt new tech much easier and accessibility is going to be much less of an issue for the foreseen future

Unfortunately no, it will not. My father would have no conceptual issue operating a smartphone, but he does not have the dexterity required anymore, in fact he has issues just using a keyboard. These things happen with age, accessibility concerns aren't going to dissappear simply because people know how to operate the devices. FWIW, this is a man who knew how to touch-type, but as he has gotten older he is simply less dexterous. There is more to accessibility than just hoping people know how to use the software.

Which wireless headphones do you find to but up to the task of matching the quality of your wired headphones?

A agree completely, but we're not really moving to a wireless world yet unless we choose to. The default in-the-box solution is still wired headphones.

Apple devices are shipped with headphones, which plug into the device. Does that circumvent the accessibility issue?

No, and definitely not the charging issue. The earphones may not fit you at all.

If iPhones shipped with an adapter would it be okay then?

If we're doing anecdata, my mother (70) got my old iPhone and coped perfectly happily with switching to Bluetooth headphones; indeed, she managed all the pairing, etc., herself.

Elderly? I can guarantee that no human being on earth can confidently setup bluetooth on all devices. And that's the issue, these one-off pairings.

I had a friend sync with my car bluetooth-stereo, it took a while and from the steering wheel I couldn't be of enough help. But it worked in the end, was quite frustrating though.

Then later when I tried to use my phone again it had been lost from the receiver (eventhough it can support two concurrent connections and I've only ever paired with two devices). So now I had to go through the whole dance that it was only paired in one device.

Thing is, anything that literally takes more than 3 seconds is a disaster. After a minute of fiddling with it I remembered I had an AUX cable. And then I could patiently fix it when I had time for it.

Bluetooth is a nightmare for temporary connections. Removing the headphone-jack is akin to removing a fire-alarm system because "it isn't used anyway". Well, the times you need it it is indispensable and it doesn't cost anything.

Exactly. Just recently I struggled with pairing a bluetooth speaker with my father's laptop. Another, exactly identical bluetooth speaker paired fine just the day before. The second one couldn't be paired for two days, and I have no idea why. The fact that this bluetooth speaker has three different bluetooth modes with three different ways to switch between them via a single button doesn't help, and even after years I couldn't figure out which mode is meant for what purpose.

And the problem is that this happens regularly unless you never switch any device, which in reality doesn't happen, because nobody wants to buy nice headphones for every audio source. Bluetooth is a mess, and I'm glad I stayed with headphone jacks so far.

That is exactly why AirPods are an absolutely superior product.

For one very niche use-case.

No wireless technology is a replacement for the headphone jack. It will probably be decades before we have anything decent (though I'm not hopeful).

It's not really niche. The GP's problem is solved because pairing effectively becomes "put these two things close together and open the box".

If it only works on one device it is pretty niche and hardly a replacement for the headphone jack...

Not to mention that for that price I can buy a pair of extremely nice-sounding headphones, wireless or not.

I mean it's certainly a replacement for the headphone jack on that device which is pretty much the stated goal.

What? It will only work with that device. It won't work in any car or any other circumstance. Also the pods themselves will not work with any non-apple device.

That's an extremely narrow use-case. If that was the only thing people used the headphone jack it wouldn't have been the big travesty that it currently is (and will be for the foreseeable time).

They have a pairing button like any other bluetooth device. They work in my car and on my windows laptop.

My bad, when they were new I was told it wouldn't work on regular devices. Still, it's just another bluetooth headset then.

I use them with my laptop too. I have had only one ‘pairing seems a bit broken’ issue since buying them as soon as they came out - and an iPhone restart was the fix. That’s about 2.5 minutes of hassle in several thousand hours of use.

If they were a pain, I would stop using them, but they are much less hassle than the many pairs of corded headphones I have. This said, other Bluetooth headphones are much more hassle.

There's still a dance you have to do when you want to change between devices. For example, I want to switch between listening to a podcast on my iPhone to watching a show on my iPad. You'd think that would be quick and easy but it still takes 10-20 seconds.

And it takes longer if the device or OS you want to switch to is not made by Apple.

I switch between iPhone and MacBook sometimes. My flow is usually turning off Bluetooth on the iPhone then selecting the AirPods from the MacBook, or similar. It doesn’t feel like much of a pain but it does seem like there could be an easier way. If the Bluetooth icon/menu on each device could have a ‘move AirPods to iPhone/MacBook/iPad’ option, and maybe a ‘move from’ on other devices.

>Removing the headphone-jack is akin to removing a fire-alarm system

Am I missing something? There's still a headphone port on phones, it's just not dedicated. People can still plug headphones in to their phones right? I'm asking because the tone of these comments makes it seem like new phones have removed the ability to listen to music without bluetooth.

The iPhone allows the ability to use old headphones if you use an adapter. So you have to remember to carry that with you. You then have to buy another adapter to charge the phone at the same time as using the headphones. Say you want to use YouTube, but not pay for Red, Unlimited, or whatever they call it now. You have to leave the screen on, which means eating the battery. Two dongles or you run the risk of running your phone down.

Can I just say how insane it is Youtube charges you for the privilege of turning off your screen? I remember the original iPad did this for free. How is this the world we made for ourselves?

Welcome to the new mobile computing world. The only features you can have are those explicitly allowed by the software vendor.

Works on NewPipe...

There are more and more phones produced without a headphone jack: https://smartphones.gadgethacks.com/news/always-updated-list...

Parent was probably referring to the fact that phones still have usb-c/lightning ports and you can plug usb-c/lightning headphones to them just fine. The port is not dedicated but as long as you are not charging it works identically to the old headphone jack.

Of course since most of the issues seem to come from things like interaction with cars, and GPS tends to quickly drain battery thus strongly encouraging using a charger, and therefore lack of a headphone jack makes getting audio in the car much more difficult... well, that "as long as you are not charging" is a pretty big negative. And that's ignoring all the various issues Bluetooth has, like some apps (eg Waze) utterly failing to output sound over Bluetooth most of the time.

Is it really common to use headphones in the car, though? The last few cars I've owned, I plugged my phone into the radio with USB and it both charged the phone and played music as well.

It is _very_ common to charge the phone and listen to the music at the same time. Maybe only for me ... But I won't ever buy these 1-port-for-everything devices.

Lots of cars don't support transfer of audio via USB but do have an AUX socket.

I think OP was talking about people plugging between the headphone socket of their phone and the AUX input of the car stereo - not wearing headphones in the car.

Then you have to chose between charging your phone or tablet on a plane on a long trip vs using it...

You are missing the fact that lugging an adapter is not a realistic option. I lived the dongle life for almost two years. By the end the darn thing had started glitching on me and you could not buy replacements. I'm lucky it didn't damage the charging port...

Not that it matters, I still didn't have it with me half of the times it turned out I needed it.

I actually considered buying like 10 of them. Now we are talking about 100 USD of the crap and a MASSIVE and daily inconvenience just because the manufacturer decided to save a couple of cents. This shit is just ridiculous.

I bought one and put it on the end of a headphone cable and left it there. I’m not sure what the massive inconvenience is here.

That works but that is just one very very narrow use case. There are tons of situations when that won't help you.

And that's even if you only use one pair of headphones.

I have AirPods for meetings and music while walking, the normal Apple buds - now just backup in case I leave my AirPods behind, some Sony closed back monsters for shutting out noise while working in cafes and some nice open back Grados for music listening at home.

I hardly use the Sonys but if I do, I will just borrow the adaptor from my Apple buds in my laptop bag. For listening to my Grados I use an amp with a headphone socket.

If I wanted to plug them into my phone I would need the Apple lightning adapter and also one to the smaller headphone jack! This doesn’t bother me. If I want to do that, I’ll just do it.

I’ll even spend another £9 on an adapter to leave connected if I do it often enough.

None of this seems terrible to me and I’m not sure how unique this set of circumstances is. What are the tons of situations where this gets tricky?

Get into a friends car which only have aux input, try to connect to an older receiver, tv, boombox or computer speakers. I do this almost daily, so i have to loose several posibilities for the added convenience of what exactly?

1. Lugging your adapter just isn't an option. Stop. This should be enough reason. Seriously. Don't try to justify it in hindsight.

2. Since I had to constantly borrow my adapter from my regular headphones it happened that I forgot them connected to another headphones. So I often had my headphones with me but missing the adapter. Wasn't frustrating, promise.

3. I don't know when I'm gonna need it. I made a long trip by train and thought that some nice bluetooth noise cancelling phones would be nice. Well, at my destination we took a drive and I was asked to play some music. Ooops, no adapter.

4. At work my bluetooth headphones lost battery, no worries, you can still drive them with a headphone jack. Ooops, no adapter.

5. I dance, one day when arriving to practice the people responsible for it were running late. No worries, just connect your phone! Ooops, no adapter.

6. If your going social gathering with friends to a cottage you might not think to bring your headphones. But while there some music would be kind of nice. Ooops, no adapter.

Situations like that happens all the time, and it's nothing one thinks about because it's just a given that everything works. Well, was... So now I actually did bring my adapter even in cases when I didn't need my headphones. Which was another source of (2).

The above inconveniences all assume that it works as expected when you do have your adapter. But it doesn't. You can not charge and listen to music at the same time and while I love USB-C to bits it is way too clunky to be used while in your pocket. The connector did actually start to show signs of wear from having the adapter connected while walking. Luckily I had no issues charging my device but I actually don't know if data still worked.

Think about it, that alone is also completely unacceptable.

And that's all assuming that it would be kind of okay to even have an adapter at the end of your cord, even that just isn't.

See (1).

> I can guarantee that no human being on earth can confidently setup bluetooth on all devices.

I second that. I use my Bluetooth headphones on three devices. But I can only save two connections. So one device I always use via jack to avoid having to repair several times a day.

Also, I tried to use my bluetooth headphones with my Macbook air, even knowing the steps, and it said I had to upgrade the OS to use them (I think the OS was like a year old at the time, and the computer four years old -- El Capitan, I think?)

Seriously? Both OSes knew the version of the bluetooth protocol they needed to use to communicate, and it still doesn't work? Never had that problem with a headphone jack.

I have 3 cars with Bluetooth and one of them (which sports a "Sync by Microsoft" label gives me no end of trouble with bluetooth. At one point I gave up and just started using a cord, because I could. I don't drive that car on a daily basis now (It's a Ford Fusion, which otherwise I like.), but when I do, I still have hassles.

I can guarantee that no human being on earth can confidently setup bluetooth on all devices. And that's the issue, these one-off pairings.

Thing is, anything that literally takes more than 3 seconds is a disaster.

In 2008, Apple introduced iPhone and promised us a future where everything "just works," and where the user and UX are paramount. Taking stock of the last decade, we're basically back to The Inmates are Running the Asylum.

http://a.co/d/59GsyEk

I think it's cyclic. The rejected "IBM guy" in the short sleeved shirt portrayed in the Steve Jobs biopic was once the innovative young turk. Now, the typical mobile and web app developer are that "IBM guy," just with a different set of subcultural aesthetics and a different over elaborated UX language which has left ordinary users behind.

It's very telling that about half the time, I start getting hidden contempt from developers when I give them feedback. They're never wrong. I'm obviously deficient and dim. Never mind that I'm a programmer, and I'm pretty darn good at predicting how fellow engineers think. About half the time, that's where the developer starts from. No questions. No curiosity. It's just like in the old days when the command line was the fancy new easier interface. It's the same as long after GUI interfaces hit a wider public and the public started grousing about computer help desks.

(Directed to the 3rd party reader: Don't be that programmer. Seek not so much to be understood, as to understand.)

> Thing is, anything that literally takes more than 3 seconds is a disaster.

And just to add onto this, the problem isn't that Bluetooth pairing takes three seconds, per se.

The problem is that we already had an instantaneous, reliable, and universal solution. In it's place is an option that may be better in some ways (namely, wires are gone), but is worse in many others. And for what? A tiny sliver of extra volume within the phone?

If you think that's bad I'd like to introduce you to the hell of pairing garage remote receivers to your car's honelink enabled rearview mirror.

Don't get me started on the cryptic pairing manual in the glove compartment.

I think the problem, in the specific audio area, is the technology itself rather than accessibility.

The Bluetooth standard is trash; no stack/device [combination] just works as it's supposed to do.

If BT worked, I think accessibility would pose no problem; ultimately, the intended workflow is: 1. turn on BT on the host device (if required); 2. turn on the client device; 3. listen to music.

As the BT committees and implementers keep pushing features rather than taking care of the stability, for a stable BT to ever happen, it would require all of them to be exiled and replaced by a new generation; I don't think this will ever happen.

> 1. turn on BT on the host device (if required); 2. turn on the client device; 3. listen to music.

how does that work in a crowded space, e.g. public transport, where I'd wager most people are using BT headsets nowadays ?

Generally quite well. Pairing means your devices know to look for eachother, and the bitrate of music streaming over Bluetooth combined with the low range means you'll need some unrealistic congestion before things really start to fail.

unrealistic congestion before things really start to fail.

aka public transit...

Or any busy street crossing with lots of cars.

On the one hand, that suggests either shitty Bluetooth devices you're using, or some pretty unusual density of Bluetooth users in the crowd.

On the other hand, this is what mass adoption of wireless headphones will lead to, and it shows how ridiculously bad this is compared to the tried-and-true wire.

Everyone on a bus could be using BT and you're still not at enough people for connections to drop.

I've never run into Bluetooth congestion problems on public transit or busy streets. BT has a lot of problems, this really isn't one of them.

There are some BT devices that have poor antenna designs and underpowered transcievers, where the proximity of other humans — or even your own body — can significantly attenuate the signal. But this isn't a problem with the spec itself, and there's plenty of devices that have shown it's possible to do it right.

BT runs into congestion issues quite often in my experience. I’ve experienced connectivity issues in areas where there are a lot of wireless networks.

Considering that WiFi and Bluetooth both run at near 2.4GHz - I’d assume that areas with a lot of wireless networks could (and have in my experience) interfere with BT.

This wasn’t limited to 1 set of devices though. Tried it with my AirPods and a pair of NC Sennheiser headphones. Both cause issues when walking into busy (in terms of WiFi) areas.

but that's the pairing step which was touted as problematic for users

https://www.logitech.com/images/pdf/emea_business/2.4ghz_whi...

Seems like it's possible for bluetooth to handle up to 78 users in 10m space without interference.

BT is on the same 2.4 GHz band that most Wifis use, and I can tell you from personal experience that there can be interference. Given how ubiquitous Wifi is, the available bandwidth for BT devices will most definitely not be able to serve the theoretical maximum of users in any given space.

I hit BT congestion every day. I don't care about theoretical maximum users. When I get into various parts of the city centre BT is worthless. I've switched back to cable.

NFC based pairing is already a thing, reducing your 3 steps to 1 step. It's however not supported everywhere.

It's not supported everywhere, including that one platform that kickstarted our descent into headphone-jack-less hell.

(Hint: it starts with an "i" and ends with "Phone".)

I'm not an eldery, and I prefer a jack socket. I just don't get the benefit of bluetooth in most situations.

Jacks are more reliable and definitely plug-and-play. Unless it has a physical failure, your jack socket always just works. As you state it, bluetooth requires you to "Turn on Bluetooth on your phone, then turn on your headphones, then hold down the button to pair, etc", for no benefit. Oh, and now you need batteries on your headphone.

Look at professional musicians: you won't find anybody connecting his guitar to the amp through bluetooth. They are using good old wires and jack sockets: why is that? Are they too old?

>why is that? Are they too old?

Latency. When you're making music and interacting with it directly, you can't afford any noticeable latency. When you're passively listening to it, that doesn't really matter. For phone/tablet users the main place this matters is games, due to their interactive nature.

Don’t forget video. Bluetooth adds latency, and “true wireless” (no cable between the earbuds) adds another layer of latency as the signal has to be sent from one earbud to the other. Noticeable enough that you have to manually add delay between the video and audio tracks, if your player allows it.

Exactly. I bought Bluetooth headphones to listen to music at work & home, and it was all fine... until I decided to watch some TV shows in my free time. It was then that I realized I have 0.5 - 1.5s lag in audio (growing with time), which made movies unwatchable. Very quickly I bought two pairs of wired headphones instead.

Something very wrong in the stack there. There should be a delay in the video in order to compensate for the latency sending the audio to your ears (Bluetooth does not add much here but it all adds up) and you should experience no latency.

> and “true wireless” (no cable between the earbuds) adds another layer of latency as the signal has to be sent from one earbud to the other.

This can be solved if both earbuds connect directly to the main device, no? This is how the Airpods work.

Reliability, too. I don't trust bluetooth at all.

And price: a jack is dumb tech and cheap (cheap anough that I always had about 10 extra jacks of all kinds with me when I was doing a gig).

But to be fair, wireless transmitters/receivers do exist for musicians. They don't use bluetooth ofc, but that means that the latency can be bearable with wireless. It's made for live playing though (freedom of movement), no point using that in studio

Yup. It's not the radio that causes the latency, but the software stack. You absolutely can make low-latency and just-works wireless solution for musicians, but it's name will not be Bluetooth.

Reliability is huge.

The bluetooth implementations all suck. My $40k car is about as reliable and predictable from a bluetooth perspective as Chinese knock-off Jawbone copycat from 2007.

WHY is this still the case? I mean, Bluetooth is fundamentally just a communications protocol broadcast with some kind of antenna. Yet I don't have these kinds of issues making wifi or cell service work.

Who decided to use such a flaky protocol for audio and such, and then remove the reliable connection?

It’s like many things designed by committee of stakeholders with very different needs.

Everyone gets what they want, except for the end user!

The problem with Bluetooth is the stack is too complex. Too many application-specific profiles baked directly into the protocol, which in turn need to be dealt with by device manufacturers. Bluetooth basically handles everything from OSI Layer 1 through 6 at the same time. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bluetooth_profiles

Add to that great complexity at Layer 1, and constantly changing specs. Bluetooth 1, 2, and 4 are all radically different than each other.

Compare with WiFi, which only has to do one thing (Layer 1-2). Cellular is much more complex, but that's why releasing a new phone involves endless rounds of (usually mandatory and very strict) carrier certification.

The RJ-45 connector is an open standard that can carry basically anything—internet, video, audio, low-level data, etc—at a high bandwidth and with low latency. Why can't we have a wireless standard that does that?

I want non crappy Bluetooth mice that don't require a separate USB dongle. :(

Edit: To be clear, I'm sure ethernet cables are an entirely different thing and there's actually a very good reason why wireless makes everything more complicated. But, well, maybe that's one of the reasons people would like to stick with wires.

I do like wireless, for a different kind of reliability: never ever having to worry that I'm going to snap off the plug in my phone, pull the jack off the circuit board from sitting on it wrong, whatever. When I sit down on the train, last thing I want is to sit on my phone wrong and wreck the phone and the headphones at the same time.

Moving parts and physical connections are fragile. Wireless connections solve that fragility. Agreed that pairing sucks, but that's a solvable problem.

Why are you sitting on your phone, in the first place?

While I'm not the most careful person in the world, I'm also not the most incautious; I think it's probably not an uncommon experience for people who do regularly ride trains--e.g. those of us living in big cities where you commute by train instead of your car--that you sit and you realize you're sitting on your coat in an odd way that's got your phone in the pocket underneath you where you're sitting.

I mean, at some level, come on and use your imagination. People riding the metro don't always have total control over getting their belongings situated properly when the train's packed and there's a lot of bustling around. I assure you this experience is not unique to me.

That's weird, it took me half a year (commuting daily) to go from "carrying phone in jeans' back pocket is practical" to "I have to take out phone from the pocket _every time_ before I sit". No problems ever since. But I guess I learn fast ... Unless it's setting up some wireless crap.

Hey that's great. You know what? With the wireless earbuds, I never have to think about that again. I can throw my phone in my pocket, any pocket, and leave it there while I get crammed into a metro car.

So, I guess there are tradeoffs -- and fixing pairing means everyone can enjoy freedom from one more wire, while keeping on using a wire means we keep adapting our behaviors around a wire.

I am looking forward to the day when the pairing will be fixed ...

Don't forget that you can still have a headphone jack AND bluetooth, the problem here is the removal of one as i'm sure many people would be mad if nex gen phones would dump bluetooth and use wired-only audio.

I personally think the 3.5mm TRS jack is more reliable than Bluetooth :) but I would like to comment that this is not the most durable jack out there, so the relative fragility of 3.5mm also is a solvable problem.

The music industry standard for instrument cables is 1/4" TS for unbalanced instrument audio, 1/4" TRS for a few things like monitoring headphones, and XLR cables for most everything else. XLR in particular is a very durable system, unless you get a very badly made XLR cable or jack I would never call this system "fragile". Even 1/4" is quite an improvement durability wise over 3.5mm.

XLR is not exactly a very portable jack, but a mini-XLR jack does exist -- not as portable as TRS 3.5mm, of course. But if increasing jack durability is such a concern on a more portable device, this connector is an option. Same with using 1/4" TRS, this is a connector which has the advantage of having more headphone options with this option built in (most headphones marketed for studios should be 1/4" TRS or at least have that option).

None of the above are as portable as 3.5mm and I think this connector is "durable enough" to where I doubt it is such a priority for most phone consumers to give up some phone thickness for better durability. But in professional music applications there is a reason why 3.5mm is relatively rare.

Well, you can always sit on your phone wrong in the train (or do something physical 'wrong') and wreck 'something' (most likely the screen - coincidental evidence i've seen more phones with broken screen than ones with broken headphone jacks), headphone or not. Why aren't you advocating for the removal of screens from phones?

I wouldn't call wireless "not fragile". It is notoriously unreliable (connection dropping problems, pairing problems, etc).

Yeah, it's all for freedom of movement at shows.

Even though wireless transmitters have gotten a lot better than previous times (in the 1980s one of the Spinal Tap spoofs was getting radio interference in their wireless guitar system if I recall correctly), now using similar frequency bands wi-fi does with proprietary protocols from what I see (definitely not Bluetooth!)... you still see reviews of reliability problems in some circumstances. You'd definitely want to carry around a standard guitar cable as a backup if you have one.

And speaking of latency, technology has broken in another respect here: rhythm games. If I play Dance Dance Revolution from a PS2 on a flatscreen, they add so much lag that the visuals are unusable, even in video game mode. Others have told me they have the same problem even on games for newer consoles intended to played on such TVs.

So I end up needing to find a CRT to play them.

I also saw this on the Nintendo Wii emulations of SNES games on new flatscreens.

Audio and display lag in rhythm video games is a 100% solvable problem provided:

1. The amount of lag is consistent (check, as long as you're not using Bluetooth)

2. The game is not key-sounded (pass for DDR)

3. You know how much lag there is.

Since rhythm games are deterministic, you can just offset the visuals and audio output to compensate for the delay. Keysounded games are imperfect, but it's rarely an issue unless there's a lot of lag.

The real problem is #3. Without extra, expensive equipment, there's no way to know exactly how much lag there is. It's annoying that the only real problem comes down to an inability to measure.

Interesting.

You'd think HDMI would be able to use ARC to send a signal back, since the TV would know the exact moment it is displaying the image.

You could also solve the problem with a hardware database. For instance, I know my projector is delayed by 22ms because multiple reviews mentioned it, so that's the value I use in Project Diva. You can't find this info for most TV's.

Unfortunately, no one with the resources to really tackle this problem seems to care enough to do it.

I should also note that what many games do do is offer some type of user calibration, ie, press the notes with as good timing as you can manage, and we'll assume the average is the amount of delay in your setup. This kind of works sometimes, but it's imperfect for obvious reasons.

Actually, thinking about it again, the reason it isn't sent back via ARC is probably because actual lag time seems to be something that manufacturers don't want to share.

After going through the rigmarole of choosing a new TV recently, TV manufacturers seem very keen on discouraging actual comparison of specifications.

I don't think adding your own lag solves it. The game is still expecting you to hit the buttons at its own correct time. Even if you lagged the sound to match the screen, the game would think you're wrong. And you can't get the image from before the console outputs it.

You adjust the timing window. If the display adds 20ms of lag, you expect the player to press 20ms later.

This wouldn't work for most games, because in, say, Mario Kart, the world needs to immediately react to the player's input. But in a Rhythm game, no one will notice if the visual feedback comes in a few ms late, as long as inputs are being read at the perceived-correct time. (Delayed audio feedback may be slightly noticeable in particularly bad cases, hence my note about key-sounded games.)

N.B.

1. This doesn't make the timing window more forgiving. Presses made at +0ms are counted as too early, because it is too early on the player's display.

2. I say "display" for simplicity, but IRL it's often a mistake to assume that audio and the display are delayed by equal amounts.

-----

Edit: To be clear, you can't fix this—the developer has to add user-adjustable latency settings. PS2 games designed for zero-latency CRTs and will never work properly on laggy LCD screens.

New games, however, usually let you adjust for latency. Although, they often make the mistake of not accounting for audio latency, or not allowing visuals and audio to be adjusted separately.

Btw, I've heard that the newer Rockband games in particular can auto calibrate for latency via hardware built into the peripherals.

Right, the PS2 games don't have that option and even when they do it's not a complete solution.

It's still pretty depressing that they've added so much cruft that the overhead and resultant lag are an issue at all.

Display latency sucks, but I'm a little sympathetic in the particular case of rhythm games, which can have timing windows as small as 15 milliseconds (e.g. for a "Marvelous" in Dance Dance Revolution).

For comparison, for Virtual Reality ≤ 20 milliseconds is usually considered the target latency.

And Playstation 2 developers couldn't have predicted how display technology would change.

It wouldn't matter at all if they didn't add noticeable to an already-computed image.

Remember, this is lag added by the television software, not the PS2 system. We know this because if you take the pure hardware approach of component cables, there's no noticeable lag.

VR has an excuse. VR has to do an expensive computation to decide where all the pixels have to appear to seem real to the human eye. The TV just has to take a signal and display it on the screen. That's the identity function.

>And Playstation 2 developers couldn't have predicted how display technology would change.

Rather, they couldn't have predicted slowness of upscaling and refusal to implement an optimize-for-time option.

And they don't have some of the audio problems the blue tooth and USB have.

I am having a lot of trouble with my works laptop /docking station using usb for skype - To the point where I am going to try brining in a real sound card and use one of my Shure dynamic mics with a 1/4 inch jack

Squelchy artifacts in music were noticeable over bluetooth in a 2016 model year rental I drove recently. Sound quality was definitely superior with an aux cable. I will almost certainly never buy a phone without that jack.

Eeehhh...wireless is a usual thing in the music industry, just not via Bluetooth.

> Unless it has a physical failure, your jack socket always just works.

What does that mean? What would it mean if I said "Unless it has a physical failure, your car always just works"?

I've had lots of problems with wired headphones and jacks. More often it's the headphone that's the problem, but I've have several issues with the jacks themselves. They can get stuff jammed into them, but they can also just not work properly. I don't know why exactly, but I've had it happen.

> What does that mean?

It means you can have two perfectly functional wireless devices and not be able to make them communicate at all, but it won't happen with an analog wired connection.

Surely you wouldn't accept "Unless it has a connection failure, your wireless headphones alway just work". Because it's implying it has more reliability than it actually has. And the reality is that wired headphones don't always just work either. I've had heaps of problems with the headphones themselves, and several instances of issues with the jacks.

Apple designs experiences, and your argument (which is a valid one) boils down to your use cases align with Apple's target. Like anything, wireless have pros and cons.

The big pro is that it's fully portable and gives you a freedom of movement that is difficult to match. Most of the cons are associated with poor care (corrosion, stuff jammed in there) or poor quality devices (which is a "con" shared with wireless).

There are real cons as well. Wireless devices are 5x more expensive than a wired device of equivalent quality, is susceptible to a variety of forms of interference, introduces pairing problems particularly as devices age (ie. A 6-10 year capital asset like a 2014 Honda Odyessy may randomly not work with your iPhone Xs), higher latency, unpredictable latency with different endpoints, etc.

The rage issue here is that by taking away the jack, your profoundly reduce the flexibility of the device. The only meaningful benefit is to drive revenue for Apple's secret weapon -- high margin accessories. Those $30 earbuds have a cost that is probably <$3.

I mostly agree with your comment, but not this part

> The only meaningful benefit is to drive revenue for Apple's secret weapon -- high margin accessories. Those $30 earbuds have a cost that is probably <$3.

As I've argued in many other places in thread, removing the headphone jack will speed the adoption and price-reduction in wireless headphones. While this is not a pro for a lot of people, it is for others, including myself.

I don't agree with the argument that the only thing is to drive revenue to Apple, as there are many different brands of wireless headphones, just as there are with wired headphones. I own non-apple bluetooth headphones.

I can see your perspective here, but I think that's an effect, but not the Apple strategy. Particularly given that they "just happened" to release magical wireless earbuds at the same time!

Apple doesn't need to own the whole wireless vertical, but they are adept at cross selling within the product line.

Don’t forget having to have them charged to use

>I just don't get the benefit of bluetooth in most situations.

Aside from exercise, there isn't one.

OTOH, as you note, there are a large number of serious drawbacks -- battery failures being the biggest and most obvious. The other thing is that, heretofore, you could rely on a dumb audio jack if you wanted to play music with almost any device. Now you're limited to things with Bluetooth, and you have to extend some amount of trust in making that connection.

I use almost exclusively higher-end headphones -- say, $300 and up. Bluetooth has effectively zero presence in that market. There's a reason for this.

I also own AirPods, but their job is about 60% gym and 40% conversations. For serious listening, I reach for the Grados or the Etymotics or the Sennheisers.

Look at professional musicians: you won't find anybody connecting his guitar to the amp through bluetooth.

The first example that comes to mind is Angus Young, who has said that he considers his wireless rig to be part of his "sound". If any rock musician qualifies as "old", well, Angus ain't running around on stage like he used to. Anyway, that's just one example. Pros use wireless rigs all the time. They're not BT, though.

Far too much of my life has already been wasted on pairing, unpairing, and re-pairing various Bluetooth devices. And I don't even use Bluetooth headphones.

So he couldn’t figure out how to use the included wired headphones?

I think this is a wonderful point. I have elderly parents who depend on the web and mobile apps for a lot of the logistics of their everyday life, so I see the harm that this causes. The constant forced updates (looking at you, Windows) represent arbitrarily moving goal posts, UX-wise.

Gratuitous animation, new "social/platform" features, notification-spam, new "design languages", and etc. benefit the elderly even less than they benefit the rest of us - rather these things actively hurt them when basic things suddenly become confusing and difficult without warning. We've made digital technology mandatory for most people, and we've made it unnecessarily bewildering for a big subset of them, basically by pretending that all users are youngish, digitally-fluent, time-rich, and open to unasked-for "innovation".

It all started when we abandoned all the advances in UI that were accomplished by IBM and Microsoft (yes, Microsoft) in the 80s and let art majors start designing "UX".

> but they've alienated so many people to find their own path when they don't include the adapter.

Have they stopped including it? My latest iPhone is an iPhone X and it certainly came with the adapter, as well as the 7 I had before it.

100% agree with this. Its pretty interesting that I almost never use headphones anymore now because bluetooth headphones require a few things: 1) preplanning/foresight in charging the headphones 2) refer to number 1.

I have 2 really nice pairs of bluetooth headphones, and almost NEVER use them. Guess what pair gets used almost daily? my 15 year old beyerdynamic DT770s. 3.5mm or ¼" plug, closed back. Not really the most accurate, but a nice bass heavy rich sound and plenty loud. they work with gear that is 50 years old and brand new(so long as they include a headphone jack). I have vintage analog synthesizers 80s and 90s samplers to <2 year old digital synths. All work with these headphones.

Apple really really really really really really screwed up here. reverse course immediately.

I am happy to discuss with anyone who downvotes as to why they disagree with me. My comment may be tangental but is completely relevant to the discussion and reinforces points made in the article.

I agree completely. Digital video had advantages. Despite those, analog still makes some sense, if nothing but fewer resources being needed.

Outside some niche uses, digital video really does make general sense. I hear and often agree with analog arguments. I keep analog gear, and in my own hardware projects will stay analog, perhaps also having digital, depending.

But, overall? People largely benefit more from digital video, and with the loss of the CRT, adoption makes sense. Digital only gear makes sense. I have no concerns and can easily use an analog adapter in a pinch.

With audio, it is inverted! A few niche uses benefit, most do not. They are equal or very modest gain at best.

Video gear seems to age out more quickly too. Increases in resolution drive all that, and analog limits do too. Above HDTV 1920x1080, analog has real issues.

Analog audio does not have those dynamics. There is no analog cliff to drive digital gear. Great stuff from the 70's remains entirely relevant. It always will. Ears are just not like eyes.

I will never, ever buy something that only delivers audio digitally.

I think you are onto something here. DRM is probably a driver here. if you have an analog signal, you can "pirate"...

Sadly, that will remain true digitally too. It is just not hard to tap the signal.

I think you are right about the DRM.

It will prove to be a waste of time. Audio is too easy. Seriously.

Heck, I can make something to just write the stream to a file, and doing that is not hard. Costs less than a CD.

> Heck, I can make something to just write the stream to a file

Not so easy if the analog signal only emerges at the earpiece ...

Hint: what is the transducer itself driven by?

This analog hole is a ridiculously easy hack job with a soldering iron.

Oh true - I didn't think you planned to go to such lengths (-:

"Ridiculously Easy"? - I wouldn't go that far, but very much within the realms of possibility for a determined attacker I'd say.

But down the line .. as actual physical countermeasures become more sophisticated maybe not so.

Worst case? Couple the device and a great mic in clay.

sounds like a DRM sales pitch

Well they can go right ahead. It won't really matter to me. If they end up better than me, I just don't buy that stuff. Don't need it it's a big world out there.

That's pretty much a policy. If I pay for it, fine. But I have it in generally useful form. No lock-in. Or I don't buy it.

And I don't mind hacking to get it in general useful form. Easy peasy.

Are you kidding? Go and get that signal. Even if they pot the thing, it would take a day.

You have a different definition of easy from most people I know.

Grew up poor. "Easy" as well as, "do what it takes" do have very different meanings.

To me, a bit of work, perhaps gain a new skill?

Not only easy, but fun, cheap, all that.

What is hard is having to spend or do work just because of a business model. I really dislike all of that. It is visceral.

With you 100%

Good luck removing the analog signal from sound.

Announcing the Apple-Neuralink partnership! /s

Someone is going to make that happen.

Then the fiction we all read about illegal implants will be reality.

Unsolicited tip: cultivate some misanthropy so that you can relish downvotes.

That deliciousness of righteousness against hatred.

Try the same kind of comment in the apple support forums and you'll see what kind of mentality die hard apple fans have. The amount of "your opinions are wrong because apple is perfect" is staggering.

I went online to get some help with what was revealed to be the infamous touch-ic issues, and I was told off in so many ways ("that's an old model, you should really get the new one", "if you get flexion based damage, you are using your phone wrong", "wow, another bend-gater. Stop bending your damn phone!").

This was after internal apple documents showed that they were aware of flexion damage before the phone was released to market.

There's a few people on HN who seem to have a weirdly emotional affection for the iPhone's lack-of-headphone-jack. One guy argued that it was all worth it because it reduces dust infiltration, another because it makes it more water-resistant. (Yeah.)

I can see why someone who's never used wired earbuds wouldn't care one way or another, but I really don't understand this sort of attachment.

It's as if the presence of the headphone jack offends them. Like, what significant negative does having a headphone jack have?

A more cynical person than me would suggest that its almost like some of them are being paid.

Careful now - that's the kind of sentiment that gets you flagged!

> another because it makes it more water-resistant.

This, at least, doesn't hold at all. My last flip-phone [0] was water-resistant and still had a headphone jack - it just had a rubber cover you had to pull up to reveal it. The charging port was also protected by the same cover.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/reviews/samsung-rugby-sgh-a837-review/

I like my headphone jack but I’d rather have none than one of those janky condoms.

My Samsung Galaxy S9 has a IP68 rating (it's water-resistant) and has a mini jack port.

I just use the adapter and keep a couple in reserve for when I lose one.

Works great.

It's no wonder Apple's profits are so high.

The thing is we shouldn't have to do this. The beauty of the 3.5 was the fact that you could've gone to pretty much any remote corner of the earth and you probably could've access to one if you lost yours.

Hahaha. That reads straight or as sarcasm. Well done! I’m sure there are a million reasons that the 3.5 plug was holding back the iPhone, but I have yet to see even 1/1,000,000th of them in the iPhone.

Lets say I can buy music rather than adapters.

While “we” are in the 10% I try to think about the changes in the frame of the “90/10 rule” (also how I consider the impact of features in my applications). Anecdotally, dropping the headphone jack (and similarly adding the Touch Bar) has negatively impacted 0% of non-developers I’ve talked to about both.

If I were a company, I doubt I’d change course immediately unless the larger data set said something significantly in the other direction. As developers are still, even with our more frequent “upgrade” cycle, not the largest piece of the pie.

> Anecdotally, dropping the headphone jack (and similarly adding the Touch Bar) has negatively impacted 0% of non-developers I’ve talked to about both.

How does removing the headphone benefit users? Also how does being a developer affect how one would listen to music on a phone?

Lacking negative impacts doesn’t imply that there’s benefit, my anecdata seems to be mostly neutral.

The only thing that being developer hints at here is often that group is often more techie and either would be on wireless or have very strong opinions about their listening setup. But the same is likely true for audiophiles (likely skewing toward the 3.5mm).

For what it’s worth, I’m not arguing for the jack to be gone - just sharing the reception I’ve seen in my network.

The point about developers is probably fair (I don't think I necessarily agree with it, but we're an insular enough group that it might not be inaccurate).

The headphone jack issue just seems like a solution in search of a problem. No one was complaining about headphone jacks before, so in a very best case scenario there is no positive impact (you already have bluetooth headphones, you don't mind dongles, etc), but in a worst case scenario they made life measurably worse for users (you don't own bluetooth headphones, you don't want to have to deal with dongles, EarPods are super expensive for headphones; all of these are issues which disproportionately affect the less well-off of people who can't afford the headphone upgrades, which techies tend to not be).

> The headphone jack issue just seems like a solution in search of a problem.

Agreed, removing it doesn't seem like it really gained anything. It was neutral at best and likely negative on the average, perhaps my smaller network that has discussed it just isn't negative and decided to not say anything at all.

> Anecdotally, dropping the headphone jack (and similarly adding the Touch Bar) has negatively impacted 0% of non-developers I’ve talked to about both.

Anecdotally, the headphone jack loss negatively impacted 100% of the non-developerd I've talked to about it. Now, I recognize the particular skew to that experience that biases it to a negative impact—most of the people I've talked to about it happened to be ballroom dance instructors or students in a ballroom teacher training program at a studio where the routine was to plug your device in to the sound system via 1/8” plug (neither keeping the adapter permanently on the phone or on the studio sound system was a viable solution for any of them, so it was one more thing to forget, misplace, etc.)

But I suspect your 100% is also skewed. Anecdotal experience usually is.

AirPods require neither of these things. The case is always charging them. You want to use your beyerdynamics? Fine. Your phone came with an adapter for them.

Its not that I "want" to use them. The difference is that I could use the same headphones to record drums, drum machines, guitar, Vox, or even my iPhone. Bluetooth is great! I use it in my car for phone and audio all the time. Wireless headphones are at a fundamental disadvantage in that they have less battery capacity than a phone. Those AirPod thingys you like? great. They don't fit my weird ears. My problem. but ear buds and I don't mix. Sorry, wireless and small are at odds with each other.

Why don’t you just plug your old headphones into the adapter and continue to use them?

Because it's a pain in the ass to have to carry around another fiddly bit of tech gear which should have been completely unnecessary.

Yeah, it's petty. But literally no one benefits from the absence of jack (or at least no user), so why inflict even a petty annoyance on some users with nothing gained for it?

Could they have build the iPhone XS with a jack? Because if they couldn’t, I’d argue that everyone who owns one benefits from it not having a jack.

The real annoyance for me isn’t the lack of the jack, it’s that they haven’t also replaced the jack on the MacBook line yet.

Why couldn’t they build it with a jack? Due to the thickness?

I’m typing this out on my iPhone 6 (which I will keep until it disintegrates because of its headphone jack) and it is plenty thin. I think only Apple themselves are obsessed with thin devices.

Heh. No. It's about DRM. Incrementalisim is powerful. They just pretend it's not.

Thinness and waterproofing are the two things I've heard that lead to removing the jack.

Neither seems insurmountable, but if you want to try and remove as many obstacles as possible in the search of those two things then the headphone jack is apparently one of the simpler ones.

Speakers, camera lens, physical buttons, charging, and data transfer are the remaining ones I can think of, and many of those have already been replaced in some models.

Samsung's been shipping waterproof (or at least water-resistant) headphone-jacked phones for years now.

Exactly, I think there are solutions for more or less everything I listed, or solutions could be found if necessary.

I think the headphone jack is a very practical component of the phone, and miss it regularly, but removing it does remove a few limitations on the designer.

At some point, in perhaps the not too distant future, I wouldn't be surprised if phones had been reduced down to look like not much more than a piece of glass. Maybe even a piece of flexible glass!

That's definitely been the trend for a while now, and things like edge to edge screens and wireless charging move us further in that direction. Thankfully neither of those seem to have necessitated the removal of some other function. There have been other casualties other on this path to simplification, such as the removal of the physical home button, but I don't think any which leave as big a gap as the headphone jack.

That would definitely be cool, we see them fairly often in modern scifi films/shows too nowadays.

Yeah, I mean it's not like they need to allow air to pass to the interior of the phone. All you need is a couple of exposed metal tabs, no different than the USB/lightning port.

Can't be thinness because the thinnest iphone ever is the 6s, which has a headphone jack and it can't be waterproofing because android makers seem to do waterproof phones with jacks just fine some of them even thinner than iphones too.

The 6 is the thinnest of them, 6S and onwards are all thicker

Nooo. Don't take my headphone port from my MBP!

In my home office, I have it wired to my simple mixer and amp with which two other computers also connect to. And from that split into my speakers and a pair of headset.

All non-digital and no USB involved with other things that can go wrong. I am no Hi-Fi buff, I just like one volume and power button when I need to silence or amp things.

Whilst commuting on the train I also use the headphone jack, even though I also have a Bluetooth headset, but it is limited to two sources which are already used up by my iPad and phone.

I don't want to yet again swear internally whilst standing on a busy tube with 1000 other people with Bluetooth devices, and having to reset the pairing on my iPad/iPhone.

Ps. I have an old phone with a 3.5mm jack, but I never use it. I use audio on my phone only when commuting or walking and then use Bluetooth. But my old iPad and MBP are stationary so I only use 3.5mm devices with them.

I don’t use wired headphones, but I imagine that I would just leave the adapter on them 24/7?

I'd rather keep the 1/8" to 1/4" adapter on it. Lightning or USB C means now I have two adapters to carry around.

It shouldn't be required either way, but I've occasionally zip-tied two adapters together so I can swap between them quickly.

Correct. It really isn't a big deal.

Until you want to charge and listen to music at the same time, which I wanted to do on a flight recently. I had to charge up to what I thought was enough and then put the headphones in. Annoying.

My wife also brought Lightning headphones, which didn't work with anything except her phone, leading to her using the cheap airline ear buds for the in flight entertainment system.

Alternatively you can pick up a dual-port adapter and charge while you listen:

For example, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E5AHZYA

>but I imagine that I would just leave the adapter on them 24/7?

Except people often use same headphone with both - phone and pc, so you will have to remove the adapter anyway.

Thats one of the most fatal flaws. Apples proprietary plugs aren't even standard across their own devices.

I take it you only use one set of headphones and that you only ever connect them to the phone?

I think it might be slightly annoying to have a two-inch-long dongle hanging off your phone at all times, particularly on a brand of phone that's specifically marketed (and purchased) for being sleek and clean-lined.

>Wireless headphones are at a fundamental disadvantage in that they have less battery capacity than a phone.

I’ve been using a pair of beats for over a year now, and have never run out of batteries with them, even on multi-leg long haul flights. I use them constantly, and almost exclusively charge them when I have to go to a meeting, which doesn’t usually happen more than once a day. I used AirPods before then and their battery life was even better.

What charges the case?

No need for a phone that requires an adapter. There are great phones that drive all audio gear nicely.

Those phones will win in the market too.

Cost / benefit ratio is more favorable. Has been, will continue to be, and that will be true because digital audio does nothing new.

Video does! We have great reasons for DV.

Those do not apply to audio. Ears are not like eyes.

> No need for a phone that requires an adapter. There are great phones that drive all audio gear nicely. Those phones will win in the market too.

Why do you say they'll win?

They won for me at least, given that I'm typing this on a phone with a headphone jack (a OnePlus 5T).

It should go without saying that a fact about a single person's purchase says nothing about what phone characteristics will win out in the market.

What overwhelming Advantage does digital-only audio deliver to the market that's worth the cost of transition to digital only audio?

With video, there's a lot of those. And today in the market we have a mix of analog and digital, mostly digital, and it mostly makes sense.

That isn't really true of audio. And it's not true because audio works very differently.

Why are you asking me? What about my comment, or its grand-parent comment makes you ask me that?

Replied at wrong level. I am going to leave it.

No pressure.

As someone who also EXCLUSIVELY buys phones with minijacks I'd say that they're definitely losing, considering that the brands that carry them right now seem to only be Samsung (rumored to drop them next year) and LG. Currently I use the oneplus 6 but they dropped it for the 6T so they're out of the race. It's starting to look like the next time I upgrade it'll have to be to LG and that's assuming they stick to it.

> Samsung (rumored to drop them next year)

Again? Samsung "dropped" the headphone jack once already and then decided to reintroduce it in their current line of phones. At least that is my understanding of their products with the S7/S8 having removed the headphone jack and the S9 once again featuring a headphone jack.

Late, but I ran into "posting too fast", which can be frustrating at times when a discussion is good enough to warrant more participation, but I digress.

I said it in my comment(s) above.

Video, for example, works differently than audio does. Digital video brings advantages that generally outweigh costs in the majority of use cases. Analog video, like audio, does take fewer resources and can still be indicated for projects, depending.

For ordinary consumers, DV is a general win. They will move willingly and their older gear will age out and become not so useful.

DA is not a general win. Their gear will not age out, will not become less useful, etc... Unless that is artificial!

And that is exactly why "no headphone jack" is so contentious right now! Most forced migrations make sense. This one really doesn't, and it's due to the nature of audio, existing gear investments, and the fact that going digital really doesn't get a person anything new.

Above that we've got some real spiffy bits. No wires is probably the best of the lot. That's a win, but the cost of it, when one is forced to adopt only a digital path is much higher than it needs to be and everyone knows it.

Should the entire electronics industry abandon analog audio, there will be startups who embrace it. 70's era gear remains entirely relevant. And it will, again, unless forced artificially.

70's era video is marginally relevant. NTSC / PAL at SD resolutions, and on analog gear, have a few sweet spots left, but for almost everyone, using that gear does not make too much sense today.

This is absolutely HUGE.

Put another way, the winners from "no headphone jack" are largely the people not wanting to include a headphone jack. Ordinary people can get all the spiffy stuff and abandon analog as they see fit without ever being required to do or spend on things having basically no value.

I don't get anything new, and my personal cost and risk exposure related to audio goes up! And this is true for very large numbers of people.

That's a losing proposition.

I just happened to think of a great parallel: HD Radio. It's got some nice advantages, but basically does nothing new, and it does so at a very significant cost to everyone.

Said that one would fail, and it basically has. Nobody needs digital radio, and what they failed to understand was that (due to commercials and other annoyances already impacting radio), and how people use radios, and the value of the installed base of radios out there now.

Right now, if you get one of those expensive radios, there are literally give away stations, no commercials! That's how poorly the dynamics surrounding radio are understood by the bigger players. They can't give it away!

I know I would not take a free phone, sans the jack. It's way too much of a hassle to be outside a production proven, time tested, high value, audio ecosystem.

These are all reasons why people who don't really get how their customers do things are going to lose in the marketplace.

Heck, I have not even read a single reason why it has to be done!

Big content wants it, because piracy. (laughable at this point, and that's no joke)

Apple wants it, Google probably wants it, because friendly to big content, also up selling, accessory replacement selling.

Samsung shows us it's entirely possible to make an awesome phone with the jack in it. I own one, and it is actually an awesome phone. Apple has nothing on my Note 8. (But I do love Apple's approach to user data security / privacy.)

There just isn't any value added here. Worse, the cost "savings" from removing the jack is what? $50 bucks tops?

How much do adapters, new earbuds, and related bits cost over the life of the phone? What about a person's time, existing knowledge, investments in gear?

Losing proposition across the board. Again, that's why I do not see a win on this.

The battery degrades pretty badly in a year.

> Fine. Your phone came with an adapter for them.

No, no, no. Can we please get rid of this adapter hell? It's awful and just way too much overhead. In every situation. No matter if phone or laptop

The new iPhones do not come with a headphone adapter anymore.

I have had mixed results with AirPods on a 2015 MacBook Pro. The earbuds themselves are great, the case is great, but they just don't know how to bluetooth with the laptop of the same company. Every time I put them on, the hunt for a BT connection starts. Sometimes I have to reboot my computer to make them work. It's such a shame that a behemoth like Apple can't make BT work between two of their products. In fact, it's deplorable. How could they ship such a shitty wireless thing?

Try resetting the bluetooth card in your mac, I was having problems with mine taking several attempts to sync (and my magic mouse point blank refusing). Shift-option then click on the bluetooth icon, debug, reset bluetooth card.

I know every trick because I researched many times, but they don't work. Most of the times the bluetooth just disconnects on its own right after connecting, or hangs during 'connecting'. Such a pity that these famous earbuds fail at their basic function - of producing sound.

Could be you just have a duff pair and need them replaced. Apart from this one issue with the mac (which I've now fixed) they've been flawless.

> Your phone came with an adapter for them.

Not anymore

https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/12/17827970/no-more-free-iph...

Removing this dongle is Apple's next "act of courage" :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_fvQpyuK78

"AirPods" also cost about the same as one of my phones (a Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 running LineageOS [1]) which comes with a 3.5" jack. With one fell swoop I get a phone which does not phone home (other than through the radio firmware blob of course), which runs for a week on a single charge and connects to all those things with 3.5" jacks which I happen upon, be it headphones or cassette adapters or older car radios without bluetooth.

To paraphrase some marketing slogans from the days of yore:

IBM said "Think" [2]

Apple said "Think different" [3]

I say "Think wisely"

[1] https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/whyred

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_(IBM)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different

I use AirPods. I even like them. ... but you do realize that the case isn't a magical source of energy, right? You have to charge that thing... and the airpods themselves last a remarkably long time, but they don't last that long, so I find myself having to do this awkward dance in the middle of meetings where I take one out and charge it while relying on the other one, and then I swap to charge that one... I have lightning earpods, but then I can't charge my phone at the same time, so at some point my phone starts running out of battery and I'd have to switch to the airpods anyway (lol). I have tried buying multiple brands of lightning splitters, and they all suck and often the phone isn't quite able to charge even though it says it is charging.

I honestly don't care if I have a "headphone jack": I totally agree with Apple that it was a shitty jack. It was a fragile hole that made it impossible to waterproof the damned phone. How about they just give me two lightning ports? Or a lightning port and a USB-C port, to make my dreams finally come true of only having to carry around one (USB-C) cable while still getting to be compatible with all of the stuff Apple already sold for these devices?

> made it impossible to waterproof the damned phone Was that what Apple told their customers? Because it's utter bullshit. Sony, Samsung, LG, even those ultra-rugged CAT phones had headphone jacks and at least IP-68 (5m, 1h).

I love my CAT S41 because I don't have any of the issues in this thread and I expect this to stay true for another 10 years.

As a workaround I use an inductive charger while using headphones. Not a great solution because it only works at my desk, but better than nothing.

It's not like the old headphones can't be used without a headphone jack. The 3.5mm-to-lightning or 3.5mm-to-usb-c dongles are small and relatively cheap. I just keep mine hooked up to my wired headphones.

>I just keep mine hooked up to my wired headphones.

This works great, until...

You leave the pair of headphones with the dongle behind by mistake and spend the rest of the day frustrated because you have access to a perfectly good pair of headphones but no the dongle.

Or you stick to one primary pair of headphones and are frequently taking the dongle on and off making it even easier to misplace or leave behind.

It's not supposed to be perfect. It's just a solution to that problem. Remember when optical drives where removed from laptops? We had to carry an external optical drive. Some times we'd forget it. It was inconvenient. But we survived.

No, “we” did not carry external optical drives. By the time Apple removed them, downloading music and software was already mainstream. Removing the headphone jack is not the same.

> It's not supposed to be perfect. It's just a solution to that problem.

It's frustrating to have to come up with solutions, however effective, to problems that should never have existed in the first place.

But usb thumb drives and services like Dropbox are arguably superior to optical media. Bluetooth is not superior to wired.

Optical drives take up lots of space, use a lot of electricity, and have moving parts that can break easily in a portable device like a laptop. A computer like the Macbook Air would simply be impossible with an optical drive.

I'm willing to make that trade, especially given how uncommon DVD's were even by the time the MBA launched. (Although I'll note that my desktop has a BluRay drive and I wouldn't have it any other way.)

What benefit am I getting in exchange for the loss of a headphone jack? An extra couple millimeters of screen real estate?

If you’re constantly switching then it may be a good idea to buy another dongle.

If you have to switch between lightning and 3.5mm constantly, how in the world does buying another dongle help?

This is my biggest problem. Even across Apple's own line, you have iPhones with only lightning ports, and iPads with no lightning ports. If I use headphones across those different devices, I'll have to unplug and replug the adapter constantly. Which means that adapter is going to get lost.

This is all such an unnecessary problem.

Use another brand phone? It couldn't really be simpler, free market and all.

Wireless things suck, I've never considered bluetooth for anything and I really, really hate my bluetooth keyboards. They have nice keys and petite builds, but I haven't used any of them for years now (one Apple, another also with great build). Can't be bothered for batteries, can't be bothered with bluetooth for different linux distros, desktop environments etc. Habits with technology are easily broken even when we don't want to. Give me wired or I'll go without. Also, Wi-Fi internet at home just sucks (IoT/SmartHome I won't even go into, much less that joke called SmartTV [give me regular TVs back please that don't look after me in goody two shoe or shady ways]). Whoever thought Wi-Fi everywhere was a good idea? Reach sucks, gives everyone on the block cancer. Let's stop spamming waves around people. They're not not noise, even if not perceived (microwaves for instance make me want to leap out of the room, it's like a screeching feeling.) I wish ethernet cables were still something people regularly setup, really wish.

I used not to hate technology, really did. Then the executives overdid it and the Wozniaks were put out on the side.

> They're not not noise, even if not perceived (microwaves for instance make me want to leap out of the room, it's like a screeching feeling.)

I don't want to second-guess you, but that sounds more like a high-frequency sound from the microwave mechanism than anything directly caused by microwave radiation. Can you hear the "mosquito sound"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKl_sTh0oHE

I mean, it could be, but I meant like a completely silent sound feeling, there is no sound (well, the microwave oven is noisy, but that bothers me as much as a blabbering TV, which is nearly not as much as this complete screeching silence.) To add to it, it gets 100x more bothersome if I'm within a foot of the oven, whereas being in the same room is still very upsetting and being just outside the doorstep feels more comfortable.

I recently bought a $5 pocket AM/FM radio and found that on AM mode (in between radio stations) I could pick up the radiation from every device in my house. When I moved the radio to my balls (phone), and to my bed (neighbors smart TV), it was very loud there. Sounded like demonic screeching.

Carry my phone in my backpack now, and moved my bed.

Now I just have that smart meter... that one soaks the entire house in a steady whine.

Now I just have that smart meter...

The house electrical system emits radio waves, and so do most screens, many lightbulbs, any device with an electric motor (e.g. hairdryers)..

And of course, your house is bathed by radio and TV station broadcasts, cellphone towers, CB radios, and of course, millions of space objects. Like the Sun.

Please do yourself a favor and google "non-ionizing radiation", then realize that whether or not you have a receiver you are currently being bathed in all sorts of EM radiation. It's not harmful.

So this is the sound I hear every time an old TV is on! Thank you.

> the sound I hear every time an old TV is on

Ah that would be the flyback transformer. Plainly audible to us these days now that most TVs don't have them any more. (I think GP is talking about something else btw)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyback_transformer

Most of the time in non-old devices it's a bad (either of quality or age) capacitor whining. It's infuriating enough in itself but can give me nausea on top of it!

You write like Neil Stephenson. I'd love to subscribe to your newsletter, if you've got one.

OK, since I like to write, have more so lately, have started a newsletter before and was planning to start a similar one soon, I'll bite. Except if Poe's law comes bite me and it wasn't in earnest (checked your comment history and you don't seem to make trashy comments like me), what'd you like to read about in this style? Technology, technological change, society, languages, editors, open source? What periodicity would work for you? Also I'll go finally read Snow Crash already (started once.)

Just finished Snow Crash!

It's really good; as I was reading it I would stop and check the date it was authored. It holds up very well.

Snow Crash is great. I actually just finished Zodiac yesterday and only realized after the fact that it's 30 years old. I'm starting Seveneves now, and it's already blowing my mind.

I've been meaning to read a number of different things, many from friends I've convinced to jot down in my reading suggestions spreadsheet.

It took a new local library opening up, and a holiday, for me to finally get to Snow Crash. I suspect I might be reading a few more of his works very soon.

I don't think I've read any of the others, though I may have started Seveneves at some point, but I did read "The rise and fall of D.O.D.O." (just before Snow Crash in fact!) which I highly highly recommend as well.

Read 'The Diamond Age'. Personally I think it's the best of his books.

Agreed. Also Anathem is fantastic.

Anything tech. Your writing style matches very well with things that are frustrating, meaning I think lighthearted rants might be hilarious to read.

Yes, my life as a programmer has been in horrible frustration with human-computer interfaces. Thanks by the way!

> Use another brand phone? It couldn't really be simpler, free market and all.

Well, it could be simpler, and more of a free market, if you could choose your OS across different brands instead of also having to change that, or if you didn't lose access to everything you have already bought for one OS's app marketplace.

There are plenty of things being done by the vendors in this space specifically to combat the effectiveness of the free market, because the free market is good for consumers and bad for short term company profits. Captive consumers are all the rage in the 2000's.

All the more reason to put your money toward phones that run an operating system that's not locked to one specific device vendor.

Come on. You can pick Apple that sometimes act forceful in the name of (future|profits) and you can pick Google's personal data collector with smartphone functions bolted on, and that's it.

I think Android is very frustrating as well.

Actually, I pick old Palm. I'll buy a new Palm Treo like I did 10 years ago and it was glorious old tech. Maybe no whatsapp is a plus and I'll just use from the laptop, tell people to call/sms me during the day.

The latter ain't necessarily true. Android without the Google Apps suite is possible (and relatively commonplace; see also: Fire tablets, Fire TV, and the rest of Amazon's Android-based devices). I ran CopperheadOS without GApps for a couple years with few issues. I currently run GApps on my new phone with LineageOS, but I'm strongly considering doing a backup and reflashing with microG's LineageOS build (which ships microG as a drop-in replacement for GApps, thus cutting Google out of the equation even for apps that would normally require it).

Oh okay I'll just call up my 70 year old dad and tell him this, since it's such an accessible option for 70% of the population.

Fact of the matter is, while nearly every single obnoxious facet of the tech world can be worked around, half the people in my family can't figure out how to turn their phone's wifi on and off, let alone something as complex as replacing the entire OS and figuring out solutions to the various bugs this might introduce.

For an absolutely enormous majority of the population, your choices are something that doesn't care about UX anymore and comes in three flavors of "really expensive" or something that harvests your personal data all day long.

Your 70-year-old grandpa would probably enjoy using a Kindle Fire. My 70+ year old grandma uses hers regularly to play Scrabble. Granted, Amazon's probably doing just as much data collection, but my point stands: Android without Google is possible, by no means obscure, and still reasonably accessible. You just have to know where to look (and come to terms with not having access to Google's ecosystem).

> Wireless things suck

As a counterpoint, I think wires suck. They get in the way, they get tangled, I have to transport them, they break all too often, I trip over them, they knock things over when I move with them, they blow around in the wind, they present a fire risk and a safety risk, they have some kind of physical connection which keeps changing.

Downsides of wireless: remembering to charge, and configuration (a bit annoying if you have multiple devices).

Hah, this is very subjective indeed ;)

advantages of jacks + wires: reliable, 140 year old industry standard, plug-and-play, universal, cheap, easy to repair, doesn't require battery, doesn't require configuration, doesn't get out of sync, cannot be hacked by a third party.

downsides: sometimes all those wires tend to mix and make knots.

downsides: can't move really far when plugged into stationary device, breaks a lot (at least for me it's almost always the plug or cable that breaks), cable picks up random noise

upsides: my very old thingamajig with a broken display doesn't support anything else

If they break a lot, you should find better headphones.

My JLab Audio Diego earbuds have lasted for the past two years, and I don't treat them well—they stay in my back pocket, and have experienced several trips through the washing machine.

And if they ever do break, the cost of a replacement is $15. That's barely more than the cost of the headphone jack to lightning adapter that I would need if I upgraded from my 6S.

And they have a flat cord that very rarely gets tangled.

I have a pair of Bluetooth headphones that can actually go both ways. It has a wired and wireless mode. The wireless mode is great for exercise and chores, but if I forget to charge them I can still use them.

Is the quality of sound still the same in the wired mode? I have one like this, but the quality of sound in the wired mode is too atrocious to even think of it as an option. So while it ticks a "feature" on the box, it is, for all practical purposes, simply a bluetooth headphone.

Not sure, but it appears that the bypass around the amplifier (which requires power) is just not designed right.

This is almost certainly just a me thing, but just in case: I got some Bluetooth headphones that seemed to sound terrible wired, but it turned out to that the cable had to be pushed and rotated to lock into the headphones at that end. If you really mean atrocious atrocious (and especially if it’s Sennheiser HD 4.40 BT), this might be it?

My experience was opposite. My car stereo has bluetooth and I would often listen to my phone that way because, well convenient .. one day I accidentally used the wired mode because I was charging my phone from it and boom the improvement in sound quality just blew me away.

I looked into this, and the Bluetooth audio codecs just aren't that good. From heated discussions I have learned that the AirPod ones are in fact lossless because they use a grade of codec that isn't commonly available and thus never actually have to decode/reencode or anything like that. It's digital all the way to your ears.

So maybe bluetooth is "as good as" line quality when you've all the pieces lined up; but line quality can be obtained "for free" at all times with commodity hardware. Just a thought.

> It's digital all the way to your ears.

You mean to say "lossless all the way". Also, it cannot be digital all the way except if you were linking up your aural nerves to the airpod directly. ;)

I guess it depends on whether you define "ears" as "the general vicinity of" or "the actual thing" - I had expected that the former definition was evident but forgot this was HN ...

It's digital all the way to your ears in that you don't need to decode and then reencode, thus eliminating that intermediate "lossy" analogue transition phase. So yeah digital all the way, and by implication "lossless" because of that.

I haven't noticed a difference between the two modes, this is the pair that I own:

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B0757WVSN8/ref=oh_aui_de...

Weird, I noticed no difference between using the headphone jack headphones or the usb-c headphones

I guess I can’t charge my phone and use headphones at the same time, but I really couldn’t before either considering the length of the charging cable.

But I guess you must always be charging your phone since the usbport is occupied?

> but I really couldn’t before either considering the length of the charging cable.

The only place this really makes sense is on a long haul flight when you want to make sure you have fully charged phone and listen to music while falling asleep.

A common use case for me was in the car, where I want to be charging it but also use the audio port to interface with one of those tape deck adaptors, or just a rental with a terrible Bluetooth implementation (seriously, some of them scrape all your contacts assuming it is your car, and store them in the center console).

I also have broken or lost over 3 adaptors now. This wasn’t broken and was pretty transparently done to increase the adoption rate of airpods IMO, so it is pretty frustrating. If I hadn’t had mind-blowing-ly bad experiences with samsung phones I would have jumped ship over this.

Personally, I regularly charge my phone and listen to music through the 3.5mm jack at the same time when I'm driving (my car doesn't have Bluetooth, so I have to use one of those 3.5mm-to-cassette adapters). Using a phone that doesn't have a 3.5mm jack would mean needing to burn quite a bit more money to somehow wire up my car for Bluetooth if I want to still be able to do these things.

My 6yo car doesn't have bluetooth, and I regularly do long drives listening to podcasts and running satnav apps.

Thankfully I have a sensible phone, but what's the benefit to me in having a phone that can have sound output or charging but not both?

Latency is another issue. If you use your phone or tablet to make music then wireless headphones have an unacceptable delay. It's not a huge niche but there are a lot of us out there.

The way I read it, professional / amateur musicians and iPhones are the very definition of huge niche.

Pro/am musicians and Macbooks are an absolutely massive combo and Apple get a lot of free advertising every time that glowing apple logo appears on stage. I wonder if they know this or will risk removing the jack from laptops.

Most probably wouldn't care - they're usually using external DACs anyways.

I also still use my DT770s as my daily headphones when I'm at my computer. I wish I had bought the Pro version way back when, as I believe it has detachable cables, and also higher resistance... it's difficult to modulate the volume on my desktop, as even 4-6% can be loud enough in some circumstances and there's not a lot of room for fine control at that level. In any case, I have had mine around the same length of time as you.

However, I also really love my bluetooth headphones, and that's what I use when I'm not at my desk at home. They also work as wired headphones, but I acknowledge they are not affordable to most people. A charge lasts a really long time, and they have some nice features as well. I don't expect them to last 15 years, however.

I bought a specific pair of wired earbuds with a mic to use for conference calls using my phone (Android). Now that my phone is failing and I'm forced to upgrade, I'm a bit concerned that the USB-to-3.5mm dongle for the Pixel 3 may not be compatible w/ the mic in my earbuds. In pictures it looks like it has a proper tip-ring-sleeve configuration so it might work, but at this point I'm just crossing my fingers until I can test.

Just as an FYI you can buy adapters that increase impedance on your headphones very cheaply on eBay. If you are looking to change sensitivity without changing impedance (which has some effects on sound signature), iFi makes the “Ear Buddy” and “iEMatch” products that are a bit more expensive, but do what they claim on the tin.

For what it's worth, I use the USB-to-3.5mm dongle with my Pixel 2, and my earbuds with mic work great.

With regards to your desktop, I had/have the same issue with the volume being insanely loud and my options being either on at 2% or off since everything else was uncomfortable. I found https://equalizerapo.com/ (for Windows, similar things seem to exist for other systems based on a quick google search) fixed the problem and allowed a lot greater fine control.

To get lower volume overall with Equalizer APO: install, reboot and change the Preamp line in EqualizerAPO/config/config.txt to -20 dB or whatever suits you. It should work as soon as you save.

I don't know if this was the case "back when", but nowadays the pro version does not have detachable cables. The difference is that the cable is coiled (and I think a bit longer) and some parts (that do not affect the sound signature) are of slightly higher quality.

Aha, the DT770 Pro are awesome! And they do exist in 80 and 250 ohms variants, which would probably have solved your volume problem...

Absolutely. Any headphone i use has to go through a converter.

The blog ends with the best and most insightful comment:

And no human’s life is measurably better since Apple had the “courage” to remove the 3.5 mm jack. But a lot of our lives are just a little worse.

The author also points towards active de-standardisation between Android and iOS:

"if only there was one universal audio port they both could use"

Apple gets an advantage from this with their iron-grip on compatible peripherals, but I don't know why any of the Android manufacturers would follow suit. The ugliness of the impracticality of fashion.

> "if only there was one universal audio port they both could use"

Bluetooth?

If I had a dollar for every time bluetooth failed between two devices...

Bluetooth has been better for me 80% of the time and then that last 20% is a huge pain where as AUX is consistently a little bit worse but it never totally lets you down.

I think I can count the number of times that I've managed to get bluetooth to actually work on the fingers of one hand. It's just trash. Give me a wired connection every day of the week, and it better be something universal like USB-A, micro-usb, HDMI or 3.5mm.

I've never plugged my headphones into a jack and had them fail to work (ok, on my old cassette Walkman, I sometimes had to jiggle the plug around to get the headphones to work, but modern devices seem to have solved that problem (through gold plated connectors? I dunno)).

But around once every 8 times I get into my car, I need to turn off/on Bluetooth on my car, my phone, or both to get it to connect. More rarely, I have to reboot my phone. I haven't used a Bluetooth headset with my phone in several years, but I had the same problem then.

So I don't think Bluetooth is that reliable "works every time" standard.

Cars are a special type of awful.

As much as I prefer headphone jacks, I'll readily admit that my $15 BT headphones from Amazon connect every time I turn them on.

Car BT implementations are actually an interesting world in of themselves, I've seen car BTs wreck havok with other BT peripherals attached to a phone. The level of "how?" was truly amazing.

>Cars are a special type of awful

Bluetooth pairing always seems a bit unclear. Do I start the scan on my phone or the device? Cars seem to be particularly bad in making this clear or otherwise don't work reliably per instructions.

If you want a really bad Bluetooth experience, see Acura. Calls can require active "transfer" to Bluetooth devices when you're streaming, and there is otherwise clunkiness and competition for the car's audio system, for instance if you try to use car nav.

And, woe be unto you if you have multiple in-range devices. There's a pretty good chance it'll vomit and you'll end up with mixed pairing profiles that essentially require you to restart the car and/or disable Bluetooth on one device.

Not sure how they managed to get Bluetooth so wrong, but it's a solid contributor to an overall poor infotainment center design.

It’s becauese they are all copy-pasting the sample code middleware. A few minor changes are made, like advertising name and what not, but I’ve seen literal dupes supplied by the same Taiwanese vendor. And like most sample code, the error handling is non-existent.

Source: Previously worked on head unit FW.

Equally annoying is if two people are both previously paired with the car (or speaker!) and it’s connects but not to the one you want.

Yeah Bluetooth almost never works reliably for me. If it isn't connection problems, it's dead batteries. I refuse to buy or use wireless keyboards, mice, microphones, speakers, or headphones.

> if only there was one universal audio port they both could use

CTIA or OMTP?

For audio output (the majority usecase, I'd argue), this didn't matter much. Left and right audio output _always worked_, and in my experience, at least the play/pause button worked fairly universally as well.

I probably wouldn’t have bought AirPods if my phone still had a 1/8” jack, and every time I have had to use wired earphones since have been worse than if I had my AirPods on me. So here’s one human who disagress with the first bit.

Which is why, I'm assuming, the author added the last bit, which sounds like it covers your exact experience:

every time I have had to use wired earphones since have been worse than if I had my AirPods on me

I’m simply countering the absurd blanket statement “...no human’s life is measurably better...”

Mine is. The statement is false.

But airpods could have still been developed in a 3.5mm world.

But I wouldn't have bought them, and I would have only experienced two sets of crappy $20 bluetooth headphones and stuck by my assumption that bluetooth sucks, and my life wouldn't be any better.

What about the people who sell Bluetooth headphones? I’d think of some of them are doing better? Or what about the people who worked on the AirPods? Or god forbid the people who like AirPods (or other Bluetooth headphones) more than any wired ones?

False dichotomy. The choice is not only between 3.5mm jacks and Bluetooth; there are thousands of models of devices that support and have supported both.

I was responding to this:

> And no human’s life is measurably better since Apple had the “courage” to remove the 3.5 mm jack.

That's what he meant by "false dichotomy" -- airbuds and bluetooth headphones can still exist even if phones still have audio jacks.

Review what I quoted and tell me if that statement alone is true or false — without simply repeating “false dichotomy.”

It's unanswerable -- what were the bluetooth headset sellers selling before the iPhone ditched the headphone jack? Maybe they were selling higher margin (but lower cost) wired headphones that had a lot fewer support headaches. Few people call support to ask how to pair their 3.5mm jack with the phone.

The Airbud designers could have designed the same product even if the iPhone still had a headphone jack, so it's hard to say definitively that their life is measurably better now.

As I said above: I would not have purchased AirPods if it weren’t for Apple removing the 1/8” jack and my life is better for having them. You only need one example to counter an absolute statement.

But what about the <s>children</s> manufacturers!

Since when having a 3.5mm jack forbids you from using any wireless headphones?

Personally, I detest wired headphones. I find they always get caught on things while I'm wearing them, and because of the neck problems I have that's a big issue for me (and as well as that, they'd always get tangled up in my bag, which was a bit of a hassle).

So I'm personally glad they've removed the headphone jack, because it will help push wireless into the mass market (and bring down prices) at a faster rate than it otherwise would have.

Now of course, there's lots of people who don't find it a positive like I do. My point is not that everyone should find the jack removal great, my point is that it's wrong to claim that it's a disadvantage for everyone.

On a separate note, people like to shit on Apple for that "courage" claim, but even if removing the jack was a bad decision, I think it's fair to call it a courageous one, because they knew well that they'd get a lot of shit for making that decision. Look at what gets said every time the headphone jack issue is brought up on HN.

but that doesn’t really answer the question of “why remove it?” keeping the audio jack does not prevent the use of wireless headphones. and keeping the audio jack does not really pose a problem.

It does answer it: as I said, it forces quicker uptake of wireless, and thus quicker reduction of cost.

i guess my point is that i don’t see how that follows. if bluetooth headphones are so great compared to wired headphones, then wasn’t that incentive and market already there? in fact, it just shows the truth, in that apple just wants to be able to sell more and more dongles and bluetooth headphones, so they force this onto their users.

You say you don't see how it follows, yet you yourself say it will cause more wireless headphones to be sold. And if it causes Apple to sell more wireless headphones, then it will also cause other manufacturers to sell more wireless headphones. Greater volume of sales will bring down the price of wireless headphones.

> in fact, it just shows the truth, in that apple just wants to be able to sell more and more dongles and bluetooth headphones

The idea that this is simply a cheap cash-grab sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.

But even if it's a purely financial decision, so what? Aren't financial considerations behind most things companies do?

If HN is to be believed, most people absolutely hate the fact that the phones don't have headphone jacks. So if people hate it, and won't buy the phones because of it, then how can it also be a cash grab?

> You say you don't see how it follows, yet you yourself say it will cause more wireless headphones to be sold.

no i didn't. i said apple wants to sell more wireless headphones and dongles. removing the audio jack forces users to look at the new shiny airpods, or whatever they're called, and say "i need that". then they need dongles for integration purposes. yet, they didn't need the dongle before and could still buy wireless headphones.

of course it's a cash grab. that is how apple operates. conspiracy theory? the ceo is literally an expert in operations and logistics, probably apple's greatest strength behind their marketing. it can't be any other decision, because like i said, other phone makers are able to integrate it just fine.

"Apple will sell more wireless headphones, but this won't mean they sell more wireless headphones." That's what you're saying.

If people are going to buy more wireless headphones because of these phones, then they're going to buy them from a range of manufacturers -- in fact mostly other manufacturers because the Apple ones are so pricey.

If people are going to buy more wireless headphones because of these phones then the prices will go down. Do you dispute this? Because this is the point that you originally claimed I didn't make.

> i said apple wants to sell more ... dongles.

Do you know that the phones (up until latest models) come with a dongle so there's not going to be a large number of sales of them?

> of course it's a cash grab. that is how apple operates

It's ridiculous to suggest that everything apple does is just a cheap cash grab.

> It's ridiculous to suggest that everything apple does is just a cheap cash grab.

What's so ridiculous about it? Have you not seen the rate at which Apple are increasing the prices across all their products?

And petty practices like not including the lightening to 3.5mm adapter or fast charger on a $1000+ phone e.t.c.

The person I was replying to said "of course it's a cash grab. that is how apple operates". Increases in the prices of their products hardly equates to everything they are doing being a cash grab. Are their privacy, accessibility or environmental (manufacturing processes, packaging choices, etc) measures all, for example, cash grabs?

i just want to remind you that the original discussion that i initiated was to point out that apple has not given any legitimate reason for removing the audio jack. there is simply no need to remove it. creating a thin or water resistant phone is not an explanation since other manufacturers include the audio jack and have no issues with these features.

your argument is that it helps the wireless headphone market. i don’t think it does in a way that actually matters, but even that doesn’t explain why it was removed in the first place. why does apple care about that market outside of their own sales? the real reason why they removed it is to further increase accessory sales and to market themselves as a design leader, which further sells devices. they have created this mystique that they do and others will follow. unfortunately, that is somewhat the case given other dynamics.

the fact of the matter is that there is zero benefit to the consumer of an iphone for having the audio jack removed. there is benefit to apple’s cash flow by removing it. and here we are.

what you originally said was "but that doesn’t really answer the question of “why remove it?”". You're shifting the goal posts by saying "apple has not given any legitimate reason for removing the audio jack. there is simply no need to remove it." I've given a reason for removing it. You don't just get to declare a reason as not "legitimate". You say "the fact of the matter is that there is zero benefit to the consumer of an iphone for having the audio jack removed.", which just ignores the cost benefit, without arguing against that benefit.

Apple has always removed design features that they don't think are where things should head in the future. That's important to do in the longer term. If you consider any single one of the things they've removed from their computers, it might not seem a big deal, but together they are. Removing things they don't see as part of the future helps them to push technology in the direction they think is best. And removing what they see as unnecessary features can save on costs - costs that might be small per unit but large in terms of the sorts of volumes they are dealing with.

Somethings that bothers me about your argument, is that Apple doesn’t support existing highend audio codecs (presumably to avoid paying the licensing fees) and doesn’t include wireless headphones or an adapter for 3.5mm in the box.

Instead they include wired headphones with a proprietary plug.

If you want high quality headphones with an iphone you have to buy some that license a proprietary Apple protocol or chip or settle for lower sound quality generic Bluetooth audio.

> Apple doesn’t support existing highend audio codecs

I am aware this is an issue for some people. At the same time it's not an issue for other people.

> doesn’t include wireless headphones or an adapter for 3.5mm in the box.

Their latest models don't include adapters, their earlier ones without headphone jacks did.

> If you want high quality headphones with an iphone you have to buy some that license a proprietary Apple protocol or chip or settle for lower sound quality generic Bluetooth audio.

The issue with Bluetooth isn't Apple's fault, though.

But if you want high quality headphones then, yes, you have that choice to make. But we need to acknowledge that not everyone has those requirements.

"The idea that this is simply a cheap cash-grab sounds like a conspiracy theory to me."

Conspiracy theories are sometimes true.

In this case, vendor lock-in is Apple's bread and butter, and it doesn't take any mental gymnastics at all to recognize that removing a standard and universal port without any actually good reason fits that pattern remarkably well.

1) it still allows standard 3.5mm headphone jacks to be used.

2) Bluetooth is a standard, and Apple isn't the only company that makes Bluetooth headphones.

...if you want to settle for lower quality Bluetooth audio.

Apple don’t support high quality Bluetooth audio standards except with the license of their own proprietary technology.

Yes. I have never said or implied that it's suitable for everyone.

This same point applies to the criticisms of a lack of a headphone jack, too: the things those people are concerned about, such as sound quality, aren't an issue for everybody, either.

But that argument is justification works for removing any technology, whether superior or not.

If you allow only one technology, it will be cheaper irrespective of whether the disallowed technology is better or not.

This makes Apple’s decision worse. It’s an admission that wireless audio is an inferior technology, and that the only way for it to succeed is by removing the alternative, ans/or making it significantly worse.

I think wireless headphones are a good thing, so making them cheaper is a good thing. As you can see in my original comment, I'm just saying this is my view, and I know many people see it otherwise.

I can see your point but I disagree that it's worth it. I think wireless would have gotten better even if we did not remove the headphone jack.

But that's different to my point, in two ways. 1) I was talking about cost not quality (c.f. "wireless would have gotten better even if"). 2) I wasn't arguing about whether it would get better or not, but the rate at which it happens being changed by removing the jack (c.f. "would have gotten better even if we did not remove the headphone jack.")

If wireless enables quicker reduction in cost then when do iPhones keep getting more expensive?

I never said that. I said if wireless is the only option in those phones then this will cause more wireless headphones to be sold, and this will cause wireless headphones to become cheaper. (This is clearer if you read the earlier comments in this sub-thread. By the time the discussion got to the comment you were replying to, that context was being assumed).

So creating a demand for a market that wasn't in demand, that sounds artificially created, infact it is.

So what? That's how the history of technology goes. Innovations come along that people didn't want until they were there. The technology creates the demand. Henry Ford said (and I paraphrase) "if I had asked people what they wanted they would have said 'faster horses'".

But people could still ride horses when cars came about and they still can, the transition happened over decades. But this change is happening over a matter of years, the reasons for which are not utilitarian.

And people can still use phones with headphone jacks.

Did the existence of cars destroy the existence of horses? Is Apple stopping all companies from using headphone jacks?

I personally feel 'cord getting caught is the real motivation behind killing the jack. Every time I've dropped my iPhones since the first one came out, it was because the headphone cable got caught on something and yanked the phone out of my hand or pocket. I am unwilling to use bluetooth as the signal cuts out, batteries are always dead and occasional pairing difficulties. When my iPhone SE dies...(my 9th iPhone) I will likely have to switch to an Android.

The real motivation for removing the jack was to sell airpods at 180$.

> I think it's fair to call it a courageous one, because they knew well that they'd get a lot of shit for making that decision.

Doing something you know will be unpopular is not automatically "courageous". Sometimes it's just stupid. I'm sure you can think of plenty of examples.

Even if it was stupid, that doesn't stop something from being courageous.

Well yes, it's technically courageous, in the sense that punching a random person on the street is courageous.

Whether you like something or not has nothing to do with whether it is courageous or not.

I don't disagree with you, I'd just question why that particular kind of courageousness is relevant to the discussion.

My point is that there isn't some different kind of courage that separates this from everyday notions of "courage".

Many people mock the idea that removing the headphone jack required any courage.

No, we're mocking the idea that Apple would use "courage" as an excuse for stupidity while also pointing out that they go hand in hand. Yeah, a guy running up to a bear and punching it in the face is "courageous", but it should be no surprise when the bear gets sick of the guy's antics and decides that it's maul o'clock.

In this simile, the consumers are the bear, and Apple is the moron punching it.

Say they're stupid all you like, but whether something is "courageous" and whether something is "stupid" are completely separate issues.

What stops it from being courageous isn't that it's stupid, but that "taking a lot of shit" isn't inherently dangerous. Apple's a behemoth with a captive audience, and their past history taught them that they could push I/O changes on their customers with little risk. Little risk = no courage needed.

They've been courageous in the past, and its generally worked out well for them (keyboards?), but no two cases are the same, and the past doesn't determine the future, so it still takes courage. It's still risky. There are plenty of companies that wouldn't have the courage to do something that is going to, in the short term at least, annoy so many people.

I don't know, I don't think any of those personal reasons invalidates the arguments of the parent. Your mileage on cables may vary, but the removal of an interface that had been understood by laypeople and was universally supported for the last 50 years seems a more important point to me.

It invalidates the quoted bit they endorsed that said "no human's life is measurably better since Apple had the “courage” to remove the 3.5 mm jack." "No human's life" is a blanket, absolute statement, and it's wrong. Wireless headphones are much more ubiquitous and cheap these days, and a major brand removing headphone jacks is part of the reason for this.

I don't think it's wrong. How has removing the headphone jack made anyone's life better? I can't think of one way.

It's not as if you couldn't use wireless headphones before the headphone jack was removed. Now that the jack is removed, you're forced to use a USB-C dongle (which has its disadvantages) or purchase expensive Bluetooth headphones if you want a decent enough quality / battery life.

> How has removing the headphone jack made anyone's life better?

Ancestor comments of this have explained that.

Removing headphone jack speeds up uptake of wireless headphones, and greater uptake of them makes them cheaper. These are changes that have already happened. This has benefited people who want to use wireless headphones.

, and greater uptake of them makes them cheaper.

Does it really? I haven't noticed any change in price that could be attributed to this and I bought a pair a few weeks ago, so I'm somewhat up to date with the pricing.

Yes. Scale/volume makes things cheaper. And yes, the price has gone down over the last few years. For example, I've seen ones for AU$20 now, which was not the case a few years ago.

But that's has been the case for years now - well before this change.

What I'm saying is that I don't see any change that could be attributed specifically to the trend of removing headphone jacks from phones.

Reasons for saying it has an impact.

1) Prices have noticeably come down since they've been removed. This in itself is not proof, but at the same time, what is your proof that these phones have nothing to do with it?

2) Removing the headphone jack has given greater impetus for manufacturers to produce wireless headphones, and to produce lower-end models. More volume, more competition.

3) Removing the headphone jack has given more impetus for people to purchase wireless headphones. There are definitely people that have bought wireless headphones because of this, who wouldn't have bough them if their phones had a builtin headphone jack.

2 and 3 mean more volume, and that means lower prices.

Also, the argument I've been making is not focused just on now. It's also an argument about things going forward.

1) I bought a pair of bluetooth headphones from china about three years ago for $20, the price hasn't dropped.

2) Aliexpress has nearly 100k results for bluetooth headphones there has always been plenty of competition, they are still shit. https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=S...

3) I agree with this more people have spent alot of money on bluetooth headphones that don't work, how is this a benefit to anyone but the corporations that profit from it?

As you said yourself you can get bluetooth headphones for $20, but you wouldn't because they are shit. We don't need lower prices we need better value headphones, removing the headphone jack has done nothing to help this.

There where cheap and shitty, wired and wireless headphones before they removed the headphone jack, there are cheap and shitty wired and wireless headphones after, the market is not better off and the customers are especially not better off.

Edit- AirPods are the first decent bluetooth headphones, they are the competition not the lack of a jack. Look at that aliexpress link its not even a competition they are just copying the style and shoving the same shitty gear inside.

The single feature I've seen that provides any actual value is pairing via NFC - but that came before any mention of forcing wirelessness.

Also the value comes from the fact that manual pairing is still shit - I only do it via NFC because I haven't been to date able to do so alternatively.

> Removing headphone jack speeds up uptake of wireless headphones

1) And by doing this we create even more e-waste!

2) I do _not_ want wireless headphones! I almost exclusively use headphones when I am traveling by bus and train. This happens every 2-4 weeks. At the moment I have a cheap pair of wired headphones in my backpack. They need 0 maintenance. if I need them I just use them. They never needs charging and they never will break. If I have to switch to wireless headphones a) I have to start to take care about charging them and b) they will break after 3 years because the battery dies and can not be replaced.

> 1) And by doing this we create even more e-waste!

You could say that about anything new.

> 2) I do _not_ want wireless headphones!

Good for you, no-one is forcing you to use them.

All I have ever done in this comment thread is argue against the idea that removing the headphone jack has zero benefits for anyone. And yet I'm getting piled on by people basically accusing me of trying to force everyone to go wireless.

As if pointing out that some people have different wants from theirs is somehow denying their wants. It's an amazing lack of perspective.

Is it that hard to accept that someone else has a different view from your own, and that them expressing it is not the same as trying to force it upon you?

But no-one was forcing you to use wired headsets before either. There were options for wireless available.

I think the question remains whether making wired headphones harder to use had zero benefits. That's a different question than whether making wireless headphones easier to use had.

You made an economic argument for the former question - but you can't make that argument and say "no one is forcing you" at the same time.

I made an argument about removing the headphone jack, not about making one thing easier or another thing harder. My argument was about a consequence of removing the jack.

I know no one was being forced to use wired headphones before. That has nothing at all to do with an argument about the consequences of removing the jack.

See also: Floppies, RS-232 serial, optical drives.

The options that replaces each of those items were superior to the older design.

A wireless headset requires charging, requires pairing, is more expensive, is more likely to break. It's not a superior technology, it's an alternative technology. You don't eliminate options just because alternatives exist.

They're viewed by everyone as superior in hindsight, but anytime anything gets taken away there are vocal voices complaining about how the newer alternatives are inferior in various ways (and technically the newer options are always inferior in certain ways, especially in terms of using them within existing ecosystems and usage patterns).

That is completely untrue. No one got rid of the floppy drive just because new technology existed. They got rid of the floppy drive because it took dozens of floppies to do what one CD could do. It was a genuinely inferior product with regard to its primary function.

In the case of headphones, their primary function is to connect to a device and deliver sound to your ears. Wireless headphones do not do this better than wired headphones. At all. They have a specific use case advantage related to the connection format, but that isn't universally better because it carries drawbacks as well.

I have a hate relationship with wired things too. Irony is that when I use BT ones, I stay sit thinking I can't leave or I will rip the wire from the device.

I think the issue is that BT has always been a catastrophy in terms of ergonomy, today things are better but still a bit hazardous. Maybe a super simple wireless protocol for managing audio streams (and handling multiple sinks) would change that

> it will help push wireless into the mass market

They are already in the mass market the problem is they suck.

I have tried a bunch of cheap Chinese bluetooth headphones that cost from $20-$60 they all sound like $5 wired headphones have about 2 hours battery life and break after a month.

I have tried bluetooth head phones that where $200 beats by drea they worked as well as the Chinese headphones they just cost 10 times the price.

Removing the headphone jack has forced people to spend a lot of money on shitty headphones, thats what your glad of.

> They are already in the mass market

...and the headphone jack was removed several years ago, so what's your point?

What I'm saying is that it's makes the prices go down. That means better quality ones will get cheaper.

The bluetooth headphones I use are fine. I've heard most people say that AirPods are great.

> Removing the headphone jack has forced people to spend a lot of money

How is it forcing anything on anyone? One, you don't have to buy the phone, and two, you can use the supplied lightning-adapter headphones, or use an adaptor.

As a frequent long flight traveler I have range anxiety on my wireless headphones. I like the 3.5mm jack guarantees me one less device or peripheral to worry about, it just works (even if the noise cancellation may stop working when the battery dies, sound still goes through)

Removing the headphone jack doesn't push wireless into the mass market. It was already in the mass market and it was going to be in the mass market regardless of how Apple designed their phones. If you want to use a wireless headset, you always could. Removing the headphone jack didn't give you any sort of advantages as a wireless user, it just removed an option you didn't use.

And no, it's not courageous to do something dumb and getting skewered for being dumb is not evidence of courage.

It has increased the speed of wireless headphones uptake.

You can call it dumb all you like, but whether something is dumb or not is completely separate from whether it is courageous or not.

I'm amazed by people hating something so much that therefore, in their minds, makes it impossible to have other qualities that might have a positive connotation.

Removing the headphone jack makes the waterproofing easier and more effective.

How convenient

That sounds like a legitimate reason - they advertise water-resitance and waterproofing for the models lacking a headphone jack.

But.. can't they just make a waterproof headphone jack??

Yes.

Samsung does water resistant phone with their flagship S9. And they still have the 3.5.

And the Samsung S5 has a headphone jack and even an easily-swappable battery, and still has waterproofing.

False. Samsung devices have had good water resistance ratings while still retaining headphone ports. (In fact some of the older models even managed to do so with removable batteries.)

Doesn't seem to be an issue with Samsung phones.

that’s what apple wants people to believe so they believe it. however, it’s not true. for example, the lg v35 has an audio jack (and a high-end audio dac at that) and yet has the same water resistant rating, ip68, as the iphone xs.

"You're holding it wrong"

> but I don't know why any of the Android manufacturers would follow suit.

The obvious reason is a decrease in BOM which corresponds directly with an increase (however so slightly per unit) in margin. Apple made it "ok" to whack this functionality, so why wouldn't every manufacturer join in?

> And no human’s life is measurably better since Apple had the “courage” to remove the 3.5 mm jack. But a lot of our lives are just a little worse.

Eh, you could have said the same thing when they removed serial ports, 3.5" floppy drives, CD drives, etc. etc. etc.

Yes, the world is moving forward. Yes, it's a little inconvenient.

The key to the statement is the "a lot of our lives are just a little worse" at the end, which is an argument that doesn't work for floppy drives, serial ports and, arguably, CD drives, as they were phased out well after commonly-used replacements were well into the mainstream.

The use-case for the 3.5mm headphone jack is still well and truly within the mainstream, and will probably stay there for some time as per the comment in the blog:

the right pair of headphones was the pair of headphones in front of you, or in your pocket, or mangled at the bottom of your bag. It didn’t matter.

There's a lot of legacy-weight hanging around in people's houses, bags, and workplaces.

Your point, however, isn't completely lost on me. I still miss CD drives occasionally, having to retrieve an older laptop in order to grab data from a disc I haven't yet bothered to archive to an ISO file. However, removing a CD drive from a laptop feels like a much higher percentage space saver than losing the 3.5mm jack from a smartphone.

Another "courageous" thing that Apple did was release a computer in 1983 without any fans, which was extremely heavy because it had a giant heat sink, and would still overheat constantly.[1]

And yes, this was apparently Steve Job's idea, as he felt that fans were "too noisy and inelegant". I imagine that he felt that fans were holding humanity back, and smugly told people who disagreed that they were clinging to obsolete technology.

It got so bad, that Apple actually advised their customers to physically lift and drop their Apple IIIs to re-seat the chips that had popped out from the excessive heat.[2]

Of course, if today Apple decided that fans were obsolete again, and the latest Macbooks were twice as heavy and still overheated, then it would become the new normal, and it would be hard to find computers that had fans anymore, and we would long for the days when we could just use computers for as long as we wanted without worrying about them overheating. And on the internet, commenters would say that it wasn't a big deal at all, and if you were some sort of power user that wanted to use your laptop for more than a few hours at a time, you should buy a $250 cooling pad for it.

[1]: http://lowendmac.com/2015/apple-iii-chaos-apples-first-failu...

[2]: https://www.tekrevue.com/apple-iii-drop/

We’re sort of in that world with the Mac mini. Except instead of overheating we just get laptop performance in a desktop.

It still has a fan though.

Well, I have an Asus laptop that doesn't have a fan...

> Of course, if today Apple decided that fans were obsolete again

If? Apple's recent laptops have been notoriously undercooled, and the processors can only run near full speed for a brief moment.

The only difference is that they throttle instead of self-damaging.

That's awful. Of course the pattern repeats: Apple deprecates something that shouldn't be deprecated, and offers a barely adequate replacement. Competitors copy Apple and also deprecate the feature, but their replacements are even worse.

The world had mostly moved on from 3.5" floppy drives when apple dropped them, they were mostly used for windows boot disks and to transfer files between machines. Their complete hardware control allowed them to drop the former and their tiny market share meant they didn't have to care much about the later, floppy disks being incompatible between macs and PC's. The G# being a desktop machine also meant that for anyone that really did need a floppy drive an external one was an acceptable option, carting around dongles is not.

The world didn't care about wireless headphones until their wired option was taken away. It's a solution to a problem of their own making.

I don't know about you, but my computer still has 2 serial ports on the back, a 3.5" USB drive, and 100% compatibility with CDs via my CD-RW/DVD-RW optical drive. Who removed these things? Who would have the gall to tell me that my use-case is somehow invalid because I use older, more reliable hardware and methods?

So why do their new computer models from this year have the 3.5mm jack?

It's not that insightful, since it's obviously false. The fact is that the much-improved water resistance made possible in part by ditching the headphone jack has made a lot of users' lives much better, because they have dunked their iPhones in water and the result has been no damage, as opposed to the expense and inconvenience of replacing their phones.

It would have been more effective if the author didn't cherry-pick only the facts which support his argument.

The Galaxy S9 has the same water resistance rating as the iPhone, and it has a headphone jack.

I've always been skeptical about this claim.

Apple's own 3.5mm -> lighting dongle is surprising resistant to water (I've spilled coffee on mine and it still works), but I can't find any information of whether the dongle itself is waterproof. I've looked.

Also, Samsung made a phone with a waterproof 3.5mm female port. They weren't the first.

Yeah, the 3.5mm port is certainly easier than the USB port to make waterproof. Probably easier than speakers and microphones too.

I don’t know much about this, but from a layman’s perspective I completely agree with you. I find it hard to believe that of all the elements making waterproofing harder, the headphone jack was one of the larger concerns.

Speakers and microphones just need a bit of gore tex. These are off the shelf parts, and companies like Apple etc can easily spec their own.

https://www.gore.com/products/categories/venting?view=portab...

I agree that it's also really easy to make 3.5 mm jack sockets waterproof.

Yeah, I'm not trying to imply the speakers are hard to waterproof. Just that the 3.5mm is arguably even simpler.

not true. the iphone xs has a water resistance rating of ip68. the lg v35, which has an audio jack and high-end audio dac, has a rating of ip68.

> And no human’s life is measurably better since Apple had the “courage” to remove the 3.5 mm jack. But a lot of our lives are just a little worse

Good old shortsightedness at play here. No one looks past this year or years to come when faced with changes. Here's what I think, based on history, is happening here:

# Wires are more bad than good for average consumer:

a. Neglected security based on assumption that since it's not wireless, it's immune to eavesdropping (think side-channel attacks). Wireless puts security upfront and center.

b. Cables get lost, break, are not long enough, are not compatible, damage the connectors, bad cables damage the device, cost extra, etc. Wireless doesn't.

c. Cables are cumbersome. They get tangled, you need to remember to carry them, have backups, etc.

d. Cables have short range.

Apple evidently cares quite a bit about user experience. Wires hurt user experience so they want to get rid of them, one by one. You can't push towards superfast, low power and generally more advanced mobile devices and accessories, if the industry has no reason to do so (because everything works and has for the past 50 years).

It's tiring reading every day how someone is upset because their favorite feature is gone because they can't see past their front door.

Oh, yeah, so how come now I have more cables now because of dongles?

Dongles? I'm talking wireless headphones. Dongles to continue using a wired headphone is supposed to be worse experience so you come off it. Think of it as a transition period.

So you suggest I just throw my $300 perfectly working headphones?

None of these are problems with headphones. Well, tangling, but I'll gladly deal with that over another battery to keep charged up.

The problem is that all the issues you name are only marginally bad for the average consumer — there isn’t much motivation to move when the problem isn’t that bad for most. And most importantly all the issues you mention were already solvable with Bluetooth.

That's a pretty desperate list.

a. because wireless is less secure than wired.

b. loss and breakage isn't a wired-exclusive problem

c. backups? so long as you bring backup wireless things as well, no worries

d. Fair enough, but long cables are possible, and in regards to a smart phone, most people carry it on their person so it's not generally a problem - although the freedom to roam about the house with your phone on the counter while you're vacuuming is advantageous in those particular scenarios. Pending wireless range.

A. Wireless security doesn't improve if everyone continues using wired accessories B. So you replace your accessories as many times as their cables? C. So you have one phone, headphone, etc for each cable you own? The reason people have backups or multiple cables is because of all the other issues: they get lost, cumbersome to carry around, etc

Sounds like your list is a desperate one too.

It’s a bit of a cheap statement though. If keeping the headphone jack would have prevented Apple from making the iPhone X, then the argument wouldn’t hold any value.

I would have hated if the XS was thicker, or if it still had bezels.

Apple has had great success in the past by pushing new standards in computer peripherals, deprecating old standards, and generally moving the industry forward by fiat.

I think we've all benefitted somewhat from this attitude, even if it was inconvenient.

The distinction here is that the 3.5mm standard isn't/wasn't a computer peripheral standard. It is/was an audio industry standard. There are many uses for 3.5mm that have nothing to do with phones/tablets/laptops/desktops.

Additionally, the audio industry has a different obsolescence timeline than computer equipment. Audiophile and pro audio headphones (for example) represent a significant investment and are intended to last many years.

In my view, Apple's approach to this was a kind of chauvinistic hubris. No, I don't want to use a $15 adapter of dubious quality on my $1500 custom molded in-ear monitors. No, I can't just get a new pair. No, I can't re-sell them, they only fit my ears. No, they wouldn't sound the same even if a bluetooth version were to become available. No, I doubt the 4 person company that makes them is eager to try to figure out how to make a lightning version, even if they have the in-house expertise.

The decision really shows a lack of understanding of the world outside of computer manufacturing, and it is too bad others followed suit.

The adapter works great with the Shure SE846 IEMs. I’d rather use the speakers than die on the no adapter hill.

Easy, get a phone that does not force this stuff.

Ah yes, let me just throw out the hundreds of dollars worth of apps, not to mention the rest of my investment in the ecosystem, because I might have to buy, once, an adapter that costs 1% of the sticker price of the phone and can just be permanently left attached.

“Easy”.

Unfortunately that vendor lock-in is exactly the problem. We don't have easy free consumer choice to just pick up the phone that does have a 3.5mm jack, so we are left to complain as per the original article.

So Apple is effectively holding you hostage.

Not any more than I'd be held hostage to the Android ecosystem after having bought hundreds of dollars of worth of apps.

Well, no.

You can get great Android devices with headphone jacks.

Saw that coming a mile away. I won't use an Apple phone. Never would, probably never will. We had this whole lock in discussion in the 90's. Got my first Linux distribution back then. Red Hat 5.2 in the nice box. That investment has paid and paid and paid...

I like some Mac computers a lot. Happy customer. 2012 Mac Book Pro is a sweeet machine! Has all the ports, is plenty fast, sexy. No, I don't run iTunes and friends.

Today, I will run most anything on a computer. I don't mind Android. There are open alternatives all over the place and I use them, moving from platform to platform with relative ease. This all gets easier over time. I can even dumpster dive and get up, running and make some quick cash.

Android is a reasonable, general purpose computer when I want one on the go. Programming, terminal? Check. Content create? Check. Comms of all kinds? Check. Heck, I can through a VM on my Samsung and actually do stuff using the pen. Amazing. If I choose to carry bluetooth keyboard / pad combo, it's happy to show me a pointer and I'm off to the races! And device support? That phone will operate a portable, USB floppy drive, if I need it.

Apple has nothing at all on that environment.

The pads? Throwaways, got one given to me, and it's a great toddler learning tool. Throwaway app buys. I won't ever take the thing seriously, though Mrs loves to stream on it.

As for attached... Nice phone, what's that thing sticking out of it like that... Seriously. Honestly, if it were me stuck with that, I would try and find a case with the jack built in.

And here's the thing! You got that choice forced on you. it's completely unnecessary. Forced migrations happen sometimes. That's OK. This one is unnecessary. There is no meaningful gain, and quite a few downsides to digital only audio delivery.

Finally, yeah. Easy. Only hurts the first time. Rip that bandaid. No joke! Just start. Lots of help out there, and you will benefit over the longer haul.

Once you do, and start navigating away from that lock in, it all improves nicely. I've helped a few people do that. They get there. Soon, they are showing me cool things they found out there in the wild.

I'm happy for you, but please don't assume your desires and motivations are the same as mine. I'm happier with my Mac and iPhone than I ever was running Debian for over a decade, and the headphone jack is a complete non-issue for me since I use Bluetooth headphones.

I'm sure the millions of happy iPad owners would be thrilled to hear you categorize the device as a toddler learning tool.

I'm completely bewildered by your position that a lightning-to-audio-jack dongle is somehow a big deal, given that when it's plugged in it's virtually indistinguishable from the cable you would have plugged into an audio jack anyway. The white cord attaching my headphones is a full inch and a half longer than it otherwise would be, what a horror!

And finally, I'm no more locked in to the Apple ecosystem than I would be to any other ecosystem—Windows-based or Linux-based—that I switched to, over time. It's irrelevant to me if one platform is "open" if I wouldn't be happy with the software available on that platform. I used Linux as my sole environment for something like fifteen years. Been there, done that, happier on a Mac nowadays.

But thanks for your overly-parental concern.

It's not concern, just straight up anti-lock in advocacy. Written for anyone, including you, passing by.

Any happy iPad owners, and I am a happy iPad owner mind you, can and should be perfectly secure in all of that, not concerned at all about how I, again a happy iPad owner, happen to use my iPad. And my primary use case happens to be all the throw away, non-serious use cases.

It's a dongle. It is completely unnecessary. Lots of people do not mind unnecessary encumbrances. One of the more frequently seen scenarios is expression of style.

I am just not one of those people, and I'm gonna pass completely on weak sauce marginalization of so many other great points made, other than I suspect they don't apply in your case, and you are about you. Fair enough.

You and I run about the same on general computing. I run a mix, love Macs that have actual ports on them, the same going for Win 10, 7 and Linux. And I run a mix of open and closed software too. The point being to be happy, while avoiding lock in that could be harmful.

In a pinch, I can drop pretty much any software I use, get the necessary data out of it, and into something else with few worries. That's the open data, open computing, anti-lock in discussion in play. No need to be a purist or zealot.

What that means is this:

I really loved the Mac Book with ports. The current ones? Laughable. Won't recommend, nor purchase. That could change, say when I see some ports again. Or not. Being a happy customer when I can be happy as a customer is my point in all of this exactly.

Apple got me to buy a Mac. Then they fucked way up. I won't buy another one right now, and because I do manage data, software, all that stuff, nothing really lost, other than my business for Apple. Lots of options out there, and I went Lenovo. Good to go. Always will be.

And later, I may well pick up a Dell. Who knows? I'm not locked in, get to evaluate my use cases, product features, and make selections rather freely. And that's what I really like to empower people to do.

Really, I do not need, nor want your thanks. I'll just ignore that bit and stay laser focused on the forced non-choice Apple thinks is better for it's users than it really is for very large numbers of it's users right now. Ideally, Apple cleans that right up, and it's all good.

...until it isn't, which again, is exactly why lock in is to be avoided.

Already helped a few people move off Apple phones and out of that eco-system. Likely to get more. No worries.

Cheers.

yes. for example, i sometimes use my phone as a high quality source for outputting audio that i then sample into my op-1 or octatrack. yes, those are niche products though not niche use cases, and i think it’s an example where apple’s usage dictation doesn’t work.

what is funny is that apple gave the excuse of wanting to save space getting rid of the audio jack. but my lg v35 has an audio jack and is thinner than and just as nicely designed as the iphone xs. additionally, lg actually has a high end audio dac in the phone, so music on my v35, and the v10 before it, sounds insanely good on my beyerdynamic headphones.

if i were to move to an iphone, apple would want to take these experiences away from me. and for what? pure hubris predicated on the business plan to sell more accessories like dongles and headphones mascaraed as design courage.

not sure how people disagree with me simply stating my use of my phone’s audio. also, i meant “masqueraded” in that last line. not sure what happened.

The $15 adapter is most likely of similar quality as the DAC and other audio components in the phone, so I don’t see the point. (Also, most people I know with $1000 headphones use an external audiophile-grade DAC anyway.)

exactly, like what other phones provide. for example, the lg v series phones.

They might, but why should they have to? That tiny ESS DAC in LG phones is measurably better than a lot of external "audiophile-grade" DACs. It doesn't compromise the design or the water resistance of the phone either and probably doesn't add much cost relative to other components.

This is basically an arrogant move that can't really be technically justified. E.g. By arguing that better external options exist - better external cameras also exist, should we get rid of the camera too?

> pushing new standards in computer peripherals

agree about deprecation, but what are the standards that they pushed on to the rest of the industry? i m not knowledgeable on the matter

> Additionally, the audio industry has a different obsolescence timeline than computer equipment

This I have studio headphones I bought in 1995 that I still use nearly daily (albeit not with my phone). I've replaced the earpads on them at least 5 times.

One of the things I feel happens in the tech world is innovation for innovation’s sake. In my opinion, “Real innovation” solves problems. What was the problem Apple was really trying to solve by removing the jack? The only thing I can come up with is to allow a “thinner” design.

In all the previous “radical changes”, they created a “better solution” to a problem. Take the removal of Floppies or CD drives, in both cases, the problem was getting data onto the machine efficiently. In both cases technology moved ahead and created better methods of moving data.

Please correct me if I am wrong here, but I fail to see what problem they really “solved” by removing the audio jack.

Many have said thinner is the reason, yet phones without jacks are not thinner than those with.

The problem solved was encouraging sales of some very expensive wireless earbuds. I really do think it was as simple as that.

Those who want Bluetooth wireless could just as easily have it on a phone with a jack without losing any benefit. They already did.

My understanding is that the headphone jack actually occupies a lot of space. If you have opened up a phone before, it is evident that all internal space is _very_ well accounted for, so removing a headphone jack is actually a very tangible increase in usable internal space. And it's not just the jack, you need to include a DAC in the device, too!

This means being able to include more/new co-processors, different/better microphone technology, etc, not just thinner.

Only what I've heard from other hardware engineers though, I do not work directly in the space. "Sell headphones," could absolutely be a goal.

Well in any case iPhones got bigger and thicker in the last cycle so they must have neededa lot of extra room.

So make the phone 0.5mm thicker or so, and you can make the battery thicker and shorter to make room for the headphone jack (with higher capacity than it had before)

I don't know who is pushing for wafer thick phones that are increasingly fragile with shorter battery life.

> need to include a DAC in the device

How does the earpiece and speaker work without a DAC in the device? That's there whether there's a jack or not. :)

The earpiece and speaker distort the sound so much it doesn't really matter what DAC you drive them through. ARM microcontrollers tend to have built-in DACs that are probably good enough for that kind of use.

But when you have your high-quality headphones on, you can certainly tell the difference between a $0.10 DAC and a $5 DAC, just as you could tell the difference between 8-bit and 16-bit samples or 22kHz and 44kHz sample rate.

To get good sound quality, you need good DAC and audio amplifier chips and well-balanced circuitry around them. That takes space.

Do you notice the space difference? Because I sure as shit do not.

I haven’t seen an XS or XR tear down, but People have opened up the 8 and found room for a headphone jack. I find this argument hard to believe

But then there's that one guy on youtube that managed to not only fit a headphone jack into an existing iphone but also a bunch of circuitry needed to switch the audio path.

If a bloke with a little knowhow and a dremel can do a good job at it so can apple.

Not sure if I'd go with "little know-how" - but yes, he most certainly did it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA

If nothing else it proves that the jack removal was not done for space-saving or anything other than business reasons.

However whilst I'm prepared to think ill of Apple under pretty much any circumstance - I'm utterly clueless why so many other vendors jumped in (as they don't have Beats to schill). Still convinced I'm missing something clutches onto OG Pixel

100% this. The average sale price of the phone can only go up so much.

Removing the audio jack helped make the phone waterproof, which could be pretty vital. The decision is complicated because we're comparing the tangible loss of the audio jack against the intangible gain of a lower prevalence of water damage for iPhones.

Sony make perfectly waterproof devices with headphone jacks. It's a solved problem.

How do the internal components/manufacturing process compare between Sony devices and iPhones? I only ask because it seems like you’re an expert in this topic.

They can waterproof the dozen or so connections of the smaller USB-C, but not the three or four from the jack? Somehow Apple can't emulate something Sony and others have done for decades?

I have more faith in Apple manufacturing ability.

Sorry, I thought the confidence in your original post meant that you worked for Apple and had insider information. Pardon my error.

I'm amazed how condescending you can be about such a simple and easily proven concept!

As did samsung, and many other major brands.

Removing the audio jack improved peripheral sales and helped dominate wireless headphone market share. This wasn't an engineering decision.

Exactly this. I have to wonder if the engineers were even asked for their opinion.

So far, life without a headphone jack has been fine. I don't charge my phone while I use my headphones, and I just keep the dongle attached to my wired headphones. Used some USB-C headphones that came in the box today, and they also worked well.

There are real use cases which aren't supported, but it seems like they come from a vocal minority. And I'm not sure we should be solving these use cases with a (largely) single use port that takes up a noticeable amount of space.

Phones used to ship with IR blasters, but that doesn't really happen any more, and if you want that, you get an adapter.

Maybe I'll change my tune if my adapter breaks regularly, but I needed to replace my cheap wired headphones semi-regularly already.

My experience with my last phone, where the audio jack started losing a connection if I bumped the jack, or tried to reposition the wire also makes me look more fondly on the idea of wireless headphones, since I'm aware that the jack is not perfect tech either.

And in any case, there are still manufacturers making phones with headphone jacks, so vote with your wallet! It is sad that phones are these bundles of tech and you can't just order a phone with a headphone jack, but if this is really a deciding feature, people should definitely vote with their wallet here!

> The only thing I can come up with is to allow a “thinner” design.

The thinnest iPhone ever was the 6s, which had a headphone jack so that doesn't hold water.

The only justification that I know that works out is that by removing the headphone jack you do free up a bunch of space inside the phone, which can be used for more electronics or battery.

It's not to save space. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA . There is just plastic sitting in its place and it is possible to add headphone jack, without making it thick.

Apple and Google seem to have approached removing the headphone jack, not as a way to reduce costs to the customer by eliminating an obsolete feature they don't use but, instead, as a way to increase the money they can squeeze out of customers by forcing them to replace perfectly good headphones they are currently using with new headphones hopefully made by Apple or Google.

I'm honestly not surprised by this. Headphone technology hasn't really changed for many decades. A good pair of cans made a very long time ago are probably still a good pair of cans. I have some Audio Technica woodies that I absolutely love and are still going strong after more than a decade. To Apple and Google, this is a state of affairs that cannot be allowed to stand! Where's the planned obsolescence and constant product turnover? Apple tried to make their earbuds a disposable commodity that need to be replaced frequently, but people caught onto the fact that it was just due to bad build quality and kept buying stuff from other companies. So, change up the connectors and force wireless standards that are, quite frankly, not that good for audio and ripe for eventual upgrade (i.e. bluetooth) into headphones so people won't be able to use the same pair for decades. Profit!

So what should consumers do if they like their current headphones or just don't want to deal with adapters, charging bluetooth devices, or sorting out multiple incompatible connectors? Buy phones that still have headphone jacks, like the Samsung S9.

I hate the direction they are moving with the port situation on their products, which is to nickel and dime you for the privilege of using different connections. I can buy a brand new iPhone and macbook, and come home with no way to connect them with the supplied cables, I need to buy a dongle. I can't use the same headphones with my computer and phone anymore, either; apple doesn't include the 3.5mm dongle with their phones anymore and instead would gladly tack on $10 for 1-inch of cable that should have never existed on this earth in the first place.

Its sad to see the contortions my boyfriend makes to support his purchase of a headphone jack free android, despite his desire for high quality audio (he hates bluetooth with a passion). USB C to 3.5mm adapters are cheap, but break at the drop of a hat. His integrated speaker meanwhile has blown, and makes for terrible calls.

Headphone jacks serve a useful purpose, most phones could still have them without compromising other properties, but its been made fashionable to go without.

> but its been made fashionable to go without.

fashionable implies people are making a choice. i guess you can say they are, somewhat, but... if you want larger storage and good camera in a portable device while maintaining any investment in a particular ecosystem... you have to do without a jack.

i've stuck with my iphone se and plan to for a while longer, hoping apple will eventually put out another device with headphone jack. or perhaps i can find an android device i like well enough that still has a jack (those seem to be harder to find too)

Reminds me recently when I was out and was asked to use my phone to play some music through one of those external speakers for an event, went to plug the cable in to my phone... Oh that's right, my new Pixel 2 requires a dongle which no one carries around with them.

If he desires high quality audio he should buy a separate DAC/Amp or a dedicated audio player. DACs in cell phones are mediocre at best and you can get better sound (and headphone jack support) elsewhere.

This is not true. Apple, LG, both have/had audiophile grade dacs, and I suspect many others do as well.

Rather than getting into the ins and outs of why they did it, who misses the jack, who doesn't, why can't we just agree based on the wealth of commentary here and elsewhere that for a significant minority - possibly even a very large minority - this removal represents a disproportionately high impact change?

It's like admitting that people are entitled to mourn the removal of the jack is part of a slippery slope toward admitting that Apple - gasp - made a mistake, and that's just untenable.

Apple makes a ton of money from this - they're one of the main BT headphone vendors - so I actually don't consider it a mistake on their part (they know exactly what they are doing) but for other manufacturers it makes no sense. No-one buys a phone because it has no jack. Some people though will rule phones out for dispensing with the jack. So why do they do it?!

For me for example, it's literally the first thing I now consider: I will not buy a jack-less phone while alternatives are available. Don't care about camera, brand, etc - any mid range Android with a jack will pretty much suit me.

As a owner of a mid range Android phone with a phone jack, I had the same opinion. But now I see there's more to it, the quality of the DAC makes a huge difference.

Interesting - which devices have you found to be good and bad, and how does the difference manifest?

I tend to notice drop offs for sampling bit rate, and can hear the difference with Bluetooth, but I've personally never connected to any device playing decent quality streams/downloads and noticed a difference. Not saying no-one can notice it, just find it interesting I've never done so!

FWIW I listen through some AKG 550s, which I can highly recommend.

I currently have a Motorola Z2 Play, and before that had a iPhone 6. Even using a pair of Apple's earpods I can tell the difference.

Will take a look at the AKG 550s, thanks for the recommendation.

While we're whinging about loss of headphone jacks, lets add latency! Apple have always pushed their kit as being friendly for musicians and such. Now try playing an iOS MIDI instrument over bluetooth - with ~200ms delay between you hitting a key and hearing it. Useless and infuriating. So back to the dongle it is. Except of course if you want to charge and listen at the same time (which, you know, tends to happen when you are running a few power-hungry audio apps).

The Y-cable that allows charging+headphone simultaneously is widely available for $13 or so. I simply don’t understand why everyone in this narrow use case finds this to be such a monumental hassle.

It is a hassle to add yet another dongle, but more that it's just annoying that we have a perfectly good solution and it got removed, its a step backwards with few clear benefits. It's doubly annoying that Apple is heavily promoting its wireless headphones as the solution, while simultaneously promoting its 'Creatives' cred, and in no way acknowledging that their favored solution just doesn't work for the use case they are promoting.

It is not universally agreed that an analog, unbalanced headphone jack is a "perfectly good solution".

It really is. The only people arguing are contrarians, fanboys, and companies out to sell digital media (see closing the analog hole), or wireless devices.

One of the reasons people buy expensive tech is that it comes "batteries included" so to speak, the idea that to do something as simple as use headphones requires making another purchase after you've just spent $1000 is pretty antithetical to that.

Modern headphones are wireless, and, incidentally, literally have batteries included.

Slightly ironic that the whole point of the original comment is that wireless headphones are junk if you need low latency for music production.

The most annoying thing about the missing headphone jack, is the missing headphone jack on other people's phones. The people who ride public transport blaring bad music without headphones. Because Bluetooth headsets are a pain and the overlap between a) the type of person willing to annoy an entire carful of passengers and b) the type of person unable to manage the planning of wireless headphone charing ahead of time is nearly 100%.

And now that the cultural prohibition against making unnecessary noise is broken, it won't be coming back easily.

Thanks Apple. Thanks...

USB-C audio wouldn't suck if:

a) there was a standard protocol for a USB-C DAC that everyone supported (across desktop and mobile OSes) such that an end consumer could purchase a USB-C DAC and be reasonably confident that it'll work universally,

b) phones came with more than one USB-C port, such that playing and charging at the same time wouldn't be an issue

If anything, USB-C should've been a revolution, pushing the DAC closer to the speakers can help improve audio quality and getting rid of the DAC in the phone helps to level the playing field between devices. But the OEMs dropped the ball hard.

After saying I'd never get a phone without a headphone jack until Bluetooth codecs improved, I ended up getting a Pixel2XL through "reward points". It's a great phone ... and I've "only" been needed a headphone jack a dozen or so times in the six months I've had it. Not for headphone, but for other audio input or output requirements.

What an absolutely idiotic idea. I've started leaving those stupid dongles everywhere, but even they don't for with everything. Fashion over function, with an eye to more lock-in.

The more I have my pixel 2 xl the more I miss the headphone jack.

I lost the dongle long ago and have no idea where to buy a new one. Google doesn't seem to sell them and everywhere online says the don't even work.

Maybe your baby ate the dongle?

A simple google search returns this as the first result:

https://store.google.com/us/product/usb_c_headphone_adapter?...

It's been a few months since I checked, maybe they just happened to not have them when I was looking, thanks!

BT codes are already pretty good. You can use AAC@256kbps. The only thing better is basically lossless.

I'm holding onto my 6s+ with a death grip.

If they had replaced the 3.5mm with another lightning port, I would have upgraded by now. This single port thing is just silly. Same thing with the latest Macbook Pros, the switch to USB-C doesn't bother me, the low number of ports does.

Same with my iPhone SE.

I was looking for this, I think it's crazy there isn't a phone with dual USB-C ports - one top, one bottom. Not only is it a thinner port for audio, but you can use a wired peripheral while charging, or use a charger from the top if it is more convenient.

I guess it's not something enough people would care about, but it seems like at least one company would have done it by now.

I used to always carry a Y adapter so I could share my music with whoever I'm traveling with. No more of that :(

If any of you know Asian style box karaoke (small private rooms for 4 to 16 people) some places let you plug in external input... but of course they only have headphone cables so none of that anymore. I suppose they're supposed to some how setup Apple TV/Chromecast in every room?

Here in Tokyo anytime I enter a crowded train station or a crowded intersection my Airpods basically cease to function cutting in and out, mostly out, for the until I get out of the crowded area. Didn't have that issue with my wired headphones.

I actually mostly like my Airpods but I do wish my phone kept the headphone jack.

Right now if you buy a macbook and an iPhone, you will get:

An iPhone with no headphone jack, a pair of lightning headphones, a lightning to usb charging cable

A macbook with a headphone jack and no usb ports.

Out of the box you cannot charge your phone with your laptop, or use either headphones for either. They could very well be made by separate companies. They have Zero out of the box connectivity with each other. I don't care what anyone has to say about usb-c and the future: this is a step backwards for those of us in the present.

I'm voting with my wallet. My household will never have a phone that is missing the 3.5mm jack.

This comment is bound to age poorly ;)

Unless 3.5mm headphone jacks will be around in 50 years who knows.

They were already around 50 years ago:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/apple-iphone-headphone-ja...

i mean, people buy turntables nowadays. new ones, not just vintage and antiques. Audio equipment tends to age veery slowly

That's not how it worked. Turntables became obsolete then they become popular years later because everything about them is inferior.

but also because people have old vinyl disks which they can revive. and people complained about the cold sound of CDs forever. it's not like tech, where you don't really see people crying over their burnt memory chips.

Especially for audio connectors, i don't think it is a coincidence that the 3.5mm jacks and its fatter brother have not changed since forever. people wanted to use it with their older stuff.

That's becoming increasingly more difficult on the Android side, with so many high-end vendors looking to remove the headphone jack too.

Hell, OnePlus ran a campaign eight months ago laughing about others removing the headphone jack, only to remove it six months later on the 6T.

I bought the OnePlus 6 because I wanted a good phone with a close-to-stock OS and a headphone jack. Nowadays, I think you'll struggle to get both, and I think that we're one manufacturer away (Samsung) away from the market joining Apple and Google in getting rid of the jack.

I'll support it for as long as I can, because I use the jack every single day, but I fear that in three years time the high-end market will have left us behind.

LG is keeping the minijack too for now, unlike Samsung, whose rumours indicate that are dropping it next year.

An unrelated note: there seems to be lot of comments in this thread that are downvoted just because people disagree with them.

I would prefer a culture where comments that you agree with are upvoted, comments that you disagree on you offer an alternative point of view, and only comments that are completely deragatory to the quality of discussion are downvoted.

Thanks!

And yeah, I love my 3.5 mm jacks, sometimes tech matures to a point where it really does not need to change for centuries.

I have lobbied for years that downvotes should only be enabled if A. You respond B. You upvote a response to the comment. This would bring all the nasty bias to the surface, which I feel is why its not implemented.

My questions are:

1. What's the value of a wireless connection to a device you'll be touching when you use it anyway?

2. Assuming you value "no cord tangles" so highly that you're willing to put up with Bluetooth, charging your headphones, risking dropping your AirPods down a storm drain, etc, why can't the rest of us just have the jack as an option? Nobody's saying "remove Bluetooth."

3. What about the value of loose coupling and backward and forward compatibility? Given a couple adapters, I can plug my current iPod into a 1970s stereo, or plug a record player into my car stereo, and instantly have them working. Brand and device age are irrelevant. BlueTooth compatibility isn't guaranteed between two devices made today.

I've hung onto my first generation Pixel for largely this reason. There isn't a lot in the new models to entice me to switch however the loss of the 3.5mm port was the tipping point for me not to purchase either of the updates. I just put a new factory battery in my Pixel ($90 CAD) and it's back to like new again. At the moment I think I'll hold on to it for at least another year.

I don't miss the headphone jack a bit. Apple forced me into trying bluetooth headphones and so far I've not looked back. For cases when I want a cabled connection after all (like in airplanes), I just use the adapter.

I had it a few times in the past that I used cabled headphones, ripped on the cable and smacked my phone on the floor by accident.

Glad it worked out for you. They could have just sold you the product the way they used to though: I would have bought airpods after trying them out since I trust apple, not because I was forced to abandon my perfectly good wired headphones after breaking or losing all my adaptors, and all the collateral damage with that.

Personally, the one time where the lack of a headphone jack is especially annoying is an airplane, especially the planes that only have "person device entertainment". You can't charge the phone and listen to the movie at the same time.

You couldn't make the decision to try bluetooth headphones yourself??

Apple's removal of the headphone jack wasn't "courage." Courage was Steve Jobs determining that pen tablets weren't viable back in 2000 and knowing later just when touch tablets were ready for the public. What Apple did was fail to realize that Bluetooth headphones are still a bit awkward and not quite ready for mainstream ubiquity. Instead, they took away something that just works and replaced it with something a bit over-complicated that is nifty in a propeller-head way. It was the opposite of what Apple is supposed to do.

I still want to be able to charge my phone and listen to music using the headphone jack. How is that not even a use case anymore? I don’t like the AirPods because they are too easy to lose, and I’m so clumsy with headphones that I buy cheap ones every month, which comes with headphone jack only.

I think Apple made a very bad UX, and never cared about users. I moved to Android phones as a result, which frankly aren’t as inferior as they used to be 4 years ago.

> I still want to be able to charge my phone and listen to music using the headphone jack

I guess they want you to buy the wireless charging dock?

I am an audiophile and I don't miss the headphone jack at all. I've always hated the headphone jack on most phones since most of them are inherently low quality. If you have a high end headphone then the weakest link usually is the DAC ( Digital to Analog ) chip on your device. While there are some devices which are made with high fidelity audio in mind ( LG V30 which does come with a headphone jack ), most of the devices in the market aren't. Also good high fidelity headphones usually have higher resistance ( I use DT770 Pro regularly with is rated at 250 ohms ) and almost none of the phones in market today can drive them to the best of their ability. Historically I've always carried a mini amp(Fiio A3) to use my headphones with headphone jacks in my phone to be able to get good audio quality from headphones. Mobile devices just don't have enough juice to give you good sound quality and drive high end headphones to the best of their ability. Even headphones rated at 32 ohms can benefit hugely from a higher audio output.

So for me, audio from a mobile device comes down to 2 use cases:

1. Calling and other low-fidelity tasks

I have a sennheiser bluetooth headphones which supports AptX for these purposes. Bluetooth is lossy and AptX gives you much better audio quality. They are rated at 10+ hours and usually work pretty well for calling and other light uses.

2. Listening to audio

I carry a portable DAC ( Fiio X3) but there are many portable ones available in the market. If you have an iPhone you can get the Fiio i1 which is based on apple's lightning. A portable DAC will usually come with it's own Amp and the audio output will be far better than what a standard phone is capable of. If you have high end headphones you'll be pleasantly surprised at how much difference a good DAC+Amp combo can make. I exclusively use TIDAL for audio streaming since their lossless audio has much higher fidelity compared to other streaming providers.

Using phone audio in a way that benefits from that extra increase in audio quality is the minority case (based on my observations). Most people listen on the their phone when they are 'out and about', walking in town with car noise in the background, on the subway etc.. In those environments, the returns diminish quite quickly past a decent pair of noise isolating in ear headphones.

This is the case for which the new situation is the unarguable improvement, but I think it's rare enough that consumers as a group have lost more than they gain.

I’ve tried AirPods, which sounded ok, but they fall out. The included headphones don’t sound good (and also fall out) compared to any of the headphones I already own. I’ve been to the Apple store four times in the last year and had to sit and wait to get a dongle replaced. Once, while in another country the adaptor just quit working. They had a certified Apple store, but the dongle was out of stock so I had to wait four days for one. The second day of waiting was in a motorcycle accident which left me in a hospital bed with no headphones.

I start a lot of audio/visual sketches on iPad I can’t use Bluetooth headphones because of the quality and latency...

Get it together Apple, I’m really tired of this dongle adaptor’s poor quality and the kludgy nature of Bluetooth.

I don't think I've ever used my phone headphone jack (still 3.5mm), but I will absolutely never buy a laptop without 3.5mm.

The article is spot on, no-one is served by this change, except manufacturers.

Except people who don’t use headphones now don’t have to carry a heavier, bigger, power hungry power ADC everywhere they go.

An ADC weighs a fraction of a gram, costs next to nothing in volume, and consumes microamperes at most when not being used.

In fact, it may even be integrated on the SoC, meaning it's still present but with nothing to do. Would need to have a look at some teardown photos to be sure.

How does the microphone on the phone work then?

I'm assuming he really meant 'DAC' rather than 'ADC', referring specifically to the part that drives the headphone jack as opposed to the built-in earpiece transducer. Some people use the terms interchangeably for whatever reason, even though it's not technically correct.

At this point I'd take a MacBook with a lightning jack, because now I have to carry a separate pair of headphones for my iPhone and my Macbook. I'd prefer 3.5mm everywhere, but if you are going to drop it, make it consistent across product lines.

I'm stuck in the two pair camp as well and I cannot for the life of me understand why Apple makes a 3.5mm to lightning adapter but won't make a lightning to 3.5mm adapter. I have a great pair of headphones that use the lightning cable but I travel a lot and my MacBook along with every airplane uses 3.5mm so I can only use them with my phone. It's maddening.

I flat out will not buy a phone without a headphone jack, and I cannot see this changing in the forseeable future.

Anything that could be added to a new phone model—a better screen, a faster processor, a better camera, etc—will not be enough to offset the inconvenience of being unable to listen to an audiobook on the subway because I inevitably forgot the damn adapter.

As long as there is one phone with a headphone jack, that is the one I will buy. If the only options are older devices, I will buy the least-old one.

Just bought an iPhone 6S four days ago because of this and the physical home button. $140 brand new.

Haha, I literally just got Amazoned this £130.00 order to enable me to use headphones with HQ sound AND mic WHILE charging my new iPad Pro 11", which only has USB-C:

  - http://amzn.eu/d/dm8vC88
  - http://amzn.eu/d/0o5f4JK

And I KNOW I'm going to have a 50% chance this works, and 0% chance this works without either software or hardware problems. I'm psychologically for the random audio drop-outs and glitches when I slightly reposition the orgy-of-dongles (that is the collective noun right?)

I'm all over wireless as a concept, but BlueTooth can't seem to handle High quality sound & mic so, I consider removing the audio jack on the iPad pro to be a mistake. I don't hate Apple, I don't think they are offending me, I don't bother trying to guess at why. I just plain think they have made a mistake.

And god damn, when I plug my headphones into an old iPad and ... "it just works" ... god damn.

EDIT: The above config of hardware works for sound! Yay! Not tried mic yet.

It feels to me like Bluetooth consumer products are a lot like consumer printers; for 90+% of users they will be obsolete before they "just work" to any layperson's definition.

Every Christmas, you will have to fix your parents printer/wireless home device which hasn't worked for months and won't work in 2 months.

This hasn't bothered me in the least and I was fine with the change.

Before I bought an iPhone without the headphone jack I bought a SoundBlaster bluetooth adapter for my wired headphones - which I'm quite fond of - and so continued to use my wired headphones. I've only got the one set of headphones, so they stay permanently plugged into the Sound Blaster device. I'll keep it until my wired headphones die or until there are a set of bluetooth headphones with a good fit and good battery life.

https://us.creative.com/p/sound-blaster/sound-blaster-e3

I still use the FM tuner built into Snapdragon phones.

I guess everyone else streams their radio these days.

My phone has an FM tuner built-in but, for whatever ridiculous manufacturer reason, it's disabled by default and can only be switched on in some kind of debug mode which won't allow it to play in the background whilst doing other things on the phone.

I could stream the local radio station, sure, but that's a fair whack of data just doesn't need to clog up my internets / quota.

I have a lovely pair of Bluetooth headphones, yet when I bought a new phone the other month I deliberately went for one that still has a headphone jack. Why? Because much as I love Bluetooth, I still use the jack. Maybe not every day, but if I want to plug into pretty much anything that's not my headphones or my car then I need a jack.

Apple make a lot of money from phones. They also make a lot of money from Bluetooth headphones. It makes a lot of sense for them, from an ecosystem building perspective, to push people from cheap wired headphones to expensive Apple headphones. I'm less certain what non-Apple manufacturers expect to gain.

RHA TrueConnect is the best AirPods alternative I've seen. Fits different ear sizes (this was my problem w/ AirPods -- RHA's come with many sizes of covering, including one that you can shrink and expands inside your ear like earplugs), good audio quality (RHA is good at it), look sleek and have a great case, use Bluetooth 5. Just wish I could use AAC and aptX with it for lower latency (I know they say they don't support it -- I tried just for kicks and it removed the latency but added weird artifacts -- only noticed latency originally w/ macOS btw, not on iOS).

If you miss the headphone jack don't buy an Iphone. When buying a product you are actually validating its design with your purchase. Every dollar is a vote and money is the only language companies talk.

The problem is many Android manufacturers are also following suit for no apparent reason.

More than the lack of headphone jack, I actually hate the lightning / usb-c / 3.5 mm inconsistency between the iPhone and Macbook. I mean, I usually would keep the dongle on my headset. But when I need to get on a Webex call or listen to music from you computer, I have to remove the dongle. I have misplaced them a few times because of this reason.

Although, I would say that the one upside of removing the headphone jack has been the release of Airpods. One you use them, there is no going back to wired headphones.

At the end of the article I find it amusing that the author states

> I won’t start about how many times I’ve tried to use wireless headphones only to find them dead, because anything wireless is just another battery to worry about.

The same logic points that his _phone_ is also wireless. Maybe we should add a cord to that?

The responsibility to have the foresight to charge a device has, in my life, proven to be a small and reasonable request.

In many android cases (unsure about apple) you can even charge your head phones using your phone as a battery.

I don't agree. Just because a phone needs foresight and charging, doesn't mean that it's not a massive disadvantage if other accessory also require the same effort. It's just an additional hassle and more things to charge.

That logic doesn't scale.

It is my strong opinion that Apple's "design courage" is business driven than actual innovation. The reason being is that it was released the same day as the Apple AirPods. A similar comment can be said for Google's "design courage" for the Pixel 2, when on the same day they released the Pixel Buds.

If they were concerned about space and waterproofing, could they have just made a magsafe lightning port instead of a hole taking that amount of space at the bottom?

I don't miss the stereo jack on my motorola, I have wireless headphones, a car with BT and a jeep without BT. Walmart has these at the check out line, I use it in my jeep.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/EliteMailers-Bluetooth-Receiver-T...

The missing jack is all about expanding sales for Apple. Had they not bought Beats we would still have the jack. By removing the jack they can sell a hell of a lot more headphones to people by telling them that the new tech will make the music sound so much better.

Previously 150 dollar headphones seemed expensive. Now 150 dollar beats feel like the norm, even cheap.

We won't be getting the jack back. Good for Apple but sucks for suckers -- sorry I mean consumers.

YES! I could have written this exact article. It rings true daily. Such a massive PITA, the number of dongles I've bought / lost, etc. is unreal.

I remember using my adapter only once but I still manage to lost it!

I swear, these things are so easy to misplace.

The headphone jack is still also the main way to guarantee your laptop wont make a sound when someone sends you a youtube video in a deathly quiet office!

But why can't Bluetooth be fixed?

Imagine a protocol, where the phone broadcasts a low power wireless signal, encrypted, for anyone to listen to. The headphones decode this signal and plays the sound. No synchronizing, no fuzz.

The Bluetooth protocol does something royally error prone. My Windows computer will only connect to my headphones if and only if I tell Windows to connect and then very quickly turn the headphones on.

Based on all the other comments here I'm probably in the minority, but I still think the author should just get some decent Bluetooth headphones.

I have AirPods and Sennheiser Momentums. I'm looking forward to another year of my life when I don't need to untangle a mess of wires in my jacket pocket every day. Battery life is very good, and I haven't had any problems with running out of juice on these.

That's great, but that's not the point. The point is

> And no human’s life is measurably better since Apple had the “courage” to remove the 3.5 mm jack. But a lot of our lives are just a little worse.

The headphone jack don't disable BT you know.

https://youtu.be/utfbE3_uAMA

video from "Strange Parts", which after multiple tries brought back a headphone jack on a iPhone 7. It is described as not ready for prime time (see at the end https://youtu.be/utfbE3_uAMA?t=1872 )

+1 for one extra battery to keep charged. I don't like that. That's precisely why I stopped using my Apple Watch after a few months.

I use a six dollars worth 3.5mm to blutooth reciever to convert my good old headphones into a wireless one. Didn't regret since.

People just love to find things to complain about. There are a number of great options:

1)Get a different phone or keep your old phone. Noone's forcing you to use one without a headphone jack. You could even use an older iPhone if innovation frightens you in general and you're happy with your old setup

2)Get/use an adapter. THey're not expensive and sometimes come with the phone

3)Get/use headphones with the new style of plug. You could probably use some new headphones as they get pretty janky over time

4)Use wireless. In lots of ways it's objectively better. Yeah you may need to get used to a new thing, but being good at adapting to change is an important muscle to exercise.

Honestly every time there's innovation there are all kinds of complaints, especially on here.

"Why do I have to change to USB-C? I'm fine with my old peripherals" (well your old computer still works with your old peripherals and if you want to use a new computer there are adapters).

"Why do I have to change to wireless headphones?" (you don't. Your old phone still works with old headphone jacks and there are adapters)

The idea that older people are completely unable to handle plugging a headphone adapter in but are somehow able to plug a headphone jack in is just bizarre. You can just pretend that the adapter is part of the cable with the headphones and always keep them together.

You could even use an older iPhone if innovation frightens you in general

Putting aside your unnecessarily snarky tone, it is not innovation to remove something from a phone. It's just not.

Get/use headphones with the new style of plug.

What, with the proprietary Lightning connector that works with nothing else but an iPad or iPhone? (Not even a Mac! Oh, but there's another dongle for that...)

What if I also have an Android USB-C device that needs another connector, and then since I'm interested in music I also have amps or other portable players that take the standard 3,5 mm plug? I now need buy three pairs of headphones instead of one that works with everything from the past forty years? Is this innovation or is it just marketing garbage to sell people more shit they don't need that will end up in landfills in three years?

In lots of ways it's objectively better.

In lots of ways it's objectively worse.

Bluetooth audio is compressed and objectively worse than uncompressed audio over an analog cable.

Wireless headphones require batteries, which means less flexibility and more mental overhead.

The batteries age and are generally not easily replacable, which contributes to waste. We don't need to make more disposable electronics with lithium batteries that end up in landfills.

Bluetooth introduces latency which makes it entirely unsuitable for musicians.

Also, Bluetooth in 2018 is still janky as hell (susceptible to interference, forgets pairings, etc.) and not nearly as reliable as just plugging a cable into a thing and having it work always and forever. It also drains a non-trivial amount of battery. I usually have Bluetooth switched off because I never use it, and enjoy better battery life as a result.

>> Use wireless. In lots of ways it's objectively better

In a lot of ways it isn't. First, as everyone pointed out, there are connectivity issues everywhere, and even when you are able to connect, the audio quality is inferior to what comes through the headphone jack. People have already talked about problems with the other options you listed.

1) There are many reasons to get a new phone, the biggest one is battery life, after a few years your phone will not last as long as when you bought it. Also a smaller reason are security updates, since they are quite needed due to the increased processing power available.

This also depends on where the market goes, because pretty much all phone manufacturers follow Apple's lead to some extent. Removing the headphone jack, the notch and curved screen corners, and the non-replaceable battery are all features that Apple popularised.

So it may not be possible to get a phone without these features any more in the future.

1) so the solution is to have a second phone that you have to charge and update and install apps on and keep them updated and then just bring around with your main phone? and also probably have to bring two charging cables as well, 1 usb-c and 1 micro-usb for your old phone. can you honestly see everybody doing this?

2) that only makes sense if you have 1 pair of headphones. if you have say headphones and earbuds then you either have to buy two dongles or else remember to swap it, which you will eventually forget at some point. if you want to listen to music in your car reliably then you will need to buy one for there as well

4) ive been using bluetooth in my car since its been available and its better in some ways and worse in others. a few android updates in the past have caused problems and i couldnt connect for months until the next update was released. currently my phone connects ok to my car stereo the first time, but if i stop the car and start it again there is nearly always connection issues and i have to turn bt on/off to get it working again and try various other things. if this what you mean by adapting to change? yea im definitely getting good at fixing it at this stage but its a bit much to expect others to go through the learning process

just pretending the adapter is part of the cable doesnt help much when you want to charge your phone and the port is being used by your headphones

you mentioned "great" options? you clearly havnt put too much thought into this but you got to complain about people complaining which is probably the main reason for your comment.

ps. as others have stated, taking away useful features is not innovation

> Apple ditched the 3.5 mm headphone jack in the iPhone 7 for a Lightning connector

If this had only been the case, I would have been happy. Then we would have had two lightning ports on the phone, which would have been nice. No, all they did was take away a port, similarly to the 15" macbook pro, where they went from 8 ports to 5. A very sad trend IMO.

15 years ago most phones didn't have a 3.5 jack and you had to have a dongle. I don't want to go back to that time.

Curious, what did they have then? As far as I can remember, my two first phones around 14 and 12 years ago both had headphone jacks.

The primary reason I want it back, is because audio though the jack of has usually been of better quality than audio though Bluetooth with another DAC. The difference can be enormous. Therefore it feels as a big downgrade to me.

And don't forget that all these USB C and wireless options are possible without removing the jack at all.

One thing I don't understand is that if the port size is really a problem, why don't the big tech companies agree on a smaller format?

The same applies to ethernet. Pretty much all laptops have dropped the ethernet port, mostly because it too bulky for modern formats. Why can't they simply agree on another socket?

Agreeing on a standard is hard. Meanwhile, while no agreement exists, there's plenty of space for people to make money on incompatible standards, each trying to become the dominant solution.

Frankly, I'm sometimes surprised by the amount of things that _are_ standardized between platforms, especially when that standardization isn't forced by regulation.

in ethernet's case, having another connector would be useless because all the other devices still use good old rj45.

RJ45 connectors are in terms of their size, already not that large considering the size of the cable they deal with. (CAT cable is far larger then a 3.5mm headphone cable).

It doesn't matter what the other device uses, all you need is cables terminating with the new socket. Like mini and micro usb cables.

A typical RJ45 female socket is more than the height of a modern laptop.

We need a powerbank with a built-in Bluetooth to 3.5 mm audio interface. People tend to carry a powerbank around anyway, and having the Bluetooth thing built into it will ensure that this device will never run out of battery. Yes it's going to be a niche product, but some people will love it a lot.

This isn't important to most people and it is just an annoyance.

All of my devices have a headphone jack, BECAUSE I buy my devices with a headphone jack.

I have a LG V20 which had the best headphone jack on the market. People didn't buy it. People don't care about headphone jacks enough to buy headphone jacks in devices.

I cannot use wireless headphones. The battery on them dies within 15-20 minutes in sub-zero temperatures.

I would definitely understand if we were at a stage where AirPods battery would last half a year but we are not.

Battery-less cable beats wireless 2 hours of talk time quiet easily.

Wireless is the correct path but it was too early to get rid of the working standard without having a better alternative in my opinon.

3.5 Audio jacks are standard, just like the USB charging cable is a standard. Not using 3.5 audio jacks, leads to tremendous amounts of industrial waste in the form of old head phones with proprietary connectors.

I think it would be better if cellphones had both 3.5mm jacks and Bluetooth.

Next, get rid of the USB jack and get 100% hermetically sealed units? Apple already has Qi charging.

They could get rid of the screen, too, and call it iBrick.

The iBrick can still run truly side-effect free programs.

One of the big reasons given was to make a slimmer phone, but I've got the iPhone SE I use personally here next to the iPhone 7 I use for work, and, if you were to run your hand over them, you wouldn't detect a difference in height off the table.

I believe the 7 was the slimmest iPhone. The notch phones are noticeably heavier as well.

i love "my not so expensive and average quality" earphones. i simply plug it my iphone 6s, then my work laptop and when i'm home i use it while gaming with my MBP 2015. i sometimes forgot them in my pocket and find them while ironing my pants; they smell good, look very clean and work like a charm when i plug in to my phone. if i lose them or somehow they don't work, i can buy the same for a few bucks. if i want i can use a cool bluetooth earphones but i really don't want, and moreover i really don't want to be force to do so

There is an easy solution to this problem. Not bying smartphones without a 3.5mm jack. So simple, so straightforward, and yet people complaining but still pretty much voting for being abused with their wallet.

Am I the only one that had issues with headphone jacks on multiple devices, from multiple headphones, with audio either not working at all or working on one channel only until I rotate the jack for awhile?

I would miss the headphone jack if I ever bother upgrading my iPhone. As it is, I use my Bluetooth headphones a lot at home. Noise canceling and no cord is pretty nice.

But for very good audio I use my normal sennheisers

When Apple first removed the headphone jack I was a big opponent of what they had done. It didn't affect me personally though, as I had an old laptop and phone both with headphone jacks and no plans to upgrade. Still I was quite vocal about how stupid it was to remove them.

At the time I was working at home, and had an old set of Sennheiser headphones with a 3m long cable that I usually used for music. Occasionally I'd end up tangled up in the cable, all attempts to prevent it failed. For calls I had a cheap Sennheiser headset which did the trick, and did (what I thought was) a pretty decent job of blocking out noise when travelling.

Earlier this year I went back to the office, and needed some noise cancelling headphones, so got Sony MDR-1000X which are Bluetooth. The noise cancelling really puts the old headset I had to shame, when on an aircraft if I play light music I literally can't hear any outside noise. They are comfortable to wear all the time (a few times in summer my ears did get a bit sweaty) and I usually charge them once or a maximum twice a week, even though I'm using them most of the day. When they say they are low I still get a few hours usage, so just put them on charge at lunch when it first warns me.

Compared to my old headphones the noise quality is about the same, but these have built in volume and track controls, and a microphone. Bluetooth just works for me, and the range is not a problem. I can easily have my phone on one side of my apartment, and listen to music on the other. I have them paired with my phone and computer, and can easily switch the source without major issues. It just works (apart from some weird Linux bug where it uses the wrong audio profile, but on other OSes it's fine).

A few months ago I got a new phone and it didn't come with an audio jack. I tried to find one that did, but this had the best specs for what I wanted, so it was a sacrifice I would have to make. The phone come with a dongle, but I haven't even removed it from the packaging in the box. I just haven't needed it, and don't care that it's gone.

Same thing on my laptop, it has an audio jack (output only) but I don't care if it's removed as I never use it now. On my PC I had to buy a cheapo USB sound card as the built in audio jack had lots of static, so I don't really care if that's removed either.

Bluetooth is good enough, it's just going to be a while until a $15 set of Bluetooth earphones are at a similar quality level to a $15 set of wired earphones. I do agree the execution could have been done better by Apple (e.g. lightning headphones, which you can't use on all Apple hardware) and it was possibly a bit premature, but eventually we would have reached this point.

As for the so called audiophiles who need it, wouldn't you be better off with an external soundcard, rather than relying on whatever $0.50 chip the manufacturer can find?

Well, I don't like the pushiness of it. Just take how this story dropped off the front page like a brick. If someone slapped me on the butt or head and said "hey there, you look like you really want some nice ice cream", even if I actually were up for ice cream, I would lose my currently existing appetite for ice cream until the memory of that creep has faded.

It doesn't matter if someone else accepts being treated that way, or didn't quite catch what is going on.

I also don't like how the general shift to selling experiences and status symbols instead of tools. The sheer inability to leave people alone and in peace with what works for them, just because it some marketing people have an idea how to get them to "engage" some more and buy more stuff. For example it's kinda nuts that laptops and smartphones are advertised with how thing they are, they're thin enough either way. In a context of humanity hardly even beginning to address the problems our consumerism caused, this is all just lethal circus. All that went on before the removal of the headphone jack, but that is part of it.

Since the Iraq war I avoid flying when I can, even before climate change became scary real, of course I'll avoid products of companies whose attitudes are incompatible with a rational marketplace. Because either that will end, or humanity will end. Just like I don't rely on a $0.50 chip, I don't rely on the "ideas" of equivalent thinkers, or the "awareness" of the mass of people.

> this had the best specs for what I wanted, so it was a sacrifice I would have to make

Well, to me that is entirely backwards. Customers are looking for something, but are denied that thing because companies have other "visions" for them. People find the story interesting and it garners a lot of votes quickly, so it is dropped to the second page just like that... Nothing spells "courage" like that kind of stuff. I just checked, just in the time it took me to write this it dropped from the middle of the second to the third page, but still managed to garner more votes. If the companies treat their fanbases as children and they end up acting like this on their behalf, flagging and downvoting what they don't want to hear, and/or if the companies themselves fuck with online discussions and the consumers look the other way, I'm against it by default either way, before we could possibly get to any technical details.

In short, there is a difference between a good reason for something, and a rationalization of something that was pushed onto you. Yes, I also use an external soundcard and like wireless headphones, but not for mobile devices, and the discussion isn't about "why did most people buy devices withouth headphone jacks once those became available too", this is about things being pushed unilaterally, for sheer profit.

> Well, to me that is entirely backwards. Customers are looking for something, but are denied that thing because companies have other "visions" for them

I don't think that is really fair. If I really needed a headphone jack, I could have got a new phone with one, but one of my requirements which was more important than a headphone jack was price, so it was a trade off I was happy to make. Maybe if you want to stay in the Apple ecosystem you are out of luck, but this is the sort of thing Apple has always done (floppy drive, optical drive, soldered ram, battery). If you want to stick with their ecosystem, you should be willing to follow whatever they decide is best - it should be expected from them. You could argue it is wrong, but from a financial perspective it is most definitely working, and many people are still willing to support them.

On a similar note earlier this year I switched (around the same time as I got the Bluetooth headphones) from an Apple laptop to a Thinkpad laptop. I couldn't justify the price increases and limitations Apple has put in-place in a quest for thinness, and the way MacOS seems to be heading. For nearly half the price of a new Macbook Air (the previous gen), I got a new machine which is more powerful, has better battery life, has more ports, is smaller (in area, not thickness) and lighter. For the work I do, Linux provides a much more friendly developer environment than MacOS.

(For me this post is still #6 on the front page)

I wasn't speaking of just Apple though, that desire to "lock in" is very common. It took actual regulation in the EU get get unified charging cables. Customers should be ahead of regulation in protecting their own interests.

> You could argue it is wrong, but from a financial perspective it is most definitely working

By that point you're arguing squarely on behalf of the bank account of the company, the customer is completely removed. They are just someone who "should be willing to follow whatever they decide is best", even if it's just best for the company profits, which in the case of Apple they kinda hoard.

> many people are still willing to support them

If that makes my opinion invalid, by the same token my opinion makes theirs invalid. Since I have my opinion, the fact that people assume the position as a helpless consumer, rather than a equal in a fair transaction, be it with Apple or others, is the problem, not the solution.

> (For me this post is still #6 on the front page)

Yes, that was shortly after my comment, but before that it dropped really quickly, down to page 3.

Bluetooth is great until it isn't. Settings get lost. Drivers need updating. Pairing gets confused. Congested environments can lock you out. You need to power cycle the device.

All solved with a cable.

Clearly the solution is not going back to a 3.5 mm audio jack, but to invent a new standard that everybody will support. We could alsa call it pulse jack and audio will be fixed forever.

Not going to happen until Apple stop being ridiculous

hmm my 65 year old dad figured out bluetooth pairing with his car, and a JBL speaker i got him, BUT takes 10 minutes of fiddling around with car menus to pair my phone when im borrowing the car, AND when you pair more than one device to the speaker, there's no easy way to switch other than going to bluetooth menu and finding the device (re-pairing each time).

i wish it was proximity aware and just chose the nearest device instead of trying to connect to most recent or nothing at all.

I still use an iphone with a headphone jack, but when the time comes I think the solution is to buy a bunch of dongles that dangle (hah) from every headphone cord I have.

Been hanging on to my 6 Plus for dear life for this very reason

A heretical idea would be to actually have two lightning or USB-C ports on the device.

No ports is a more probable future for the phones but I could see something like this on an iPad.

I find all reasons for ditching it excuses. "Water proof" - no, there are devices that can do both.

I would have been fine with this, if we would get 2 USB-C connectors then.

I bought a new TV recently and it still has a headphone socket and no option for bluetooth.

I would find it more useful to have a Bluetooth headset for my TV than I would for my phone.

The irony in all of this is that while trying to push for a wireless and one universal port(USB-C), we ended up with more cables, dongles and adapters than before.

I like headphone jacks. They're small, harmless, useful, and work easily. A good idea would be to put them in a phone for customer and listener convenience.

I'm still pining for my old brick phone, where I could text with the phone still in my pocket, the battery lasted for a week, and the signal was strong.

Answer: Samsung Galaxy phones with better waterproofing IP68 vs. IP67 and they did it WITH a headphone jack. I expect S10 will also have 5G NR plus OS 9

Someone should make a high end smart phone geared toward audiophiles that has a 1/2" jack and an interface to plug in a tube amp.

I just need the headline. This is 100% what I wish I had in my damn phones.

im nowhere near elderly and have been using bluetooth in my car and with headphones for years and I still run into trouble a lot of the time. its just not ready yet

stares at Ember mug in hand You don't know me!

"arg, hold on one second, I can't find my headphone dongle"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XSC_UG5_kU

iPhone SE:

- It’s got the jack plug - I can type with one thumb - it doesn’t bend in my pocket - it’s way cheaper

I can’t think of anything the X has I am missing on the SE.

Headphone jack, water resistance, pick one.

Just buy a phone with a headphone jack.

Well! Buy the Galaxy S9 then. Easy.

I really wish it was a comparable product. My SO had absolutely terrible support experiences with them and I don’t want to buy a phone with preloaded NFL or 3 email apps again

Sounds like a Carrier problem, not a Samsung issue.

We don't get that in Europe. The phone is smoking.

apple ditched the floppy drive with the release of their g3 hardware, the ethernet port with the macbook air (and built in cd/dvd drive), before that they ditched the serial & parallel port, etc.

any of us still missing those?

needless to say that it kinda sucks when a new device forces you to buy new adapters / peripherals, but in the long run, is this really an issue?

As I mentioned in another comment, those were computer standards. 3.5mm is an audio standard. It's an important difference.

standard comes and go. ethernet is not a standard anymore these days.

heck even if my laptop comes with a ethernet port, i still couldn't use it at my workplace.

I miss my ethernet port.

I still miss the ethernet port whenever I'm staying in a hotel with dodgy wifi (many of which have ethernet).

I still miss having a dvd drive every couple of weeks, when I want to watch a video that isn't on a streaming service.

I still miss the serial port when I'm fiddling with bits of hardware (and my old graphing calculator).

Parallel port we're well shot of though.

I would miss a built in ethernet port. (My Thinkpad X230 FTW)

Anyways, your examples are not exactly the same as this situation. In the cases of removing the floppy drive and CD/DVD drives, it was upgrading one technology for another which was able to hold more data, was a more stable medium than the predecessor, and was generally more reliable. The 3.5mm->bluetooth was not an upgrade in stability or reliability, and the ethernet->wifi change was not an upgrade in anything except 'mobility' (but systems with ethernet jacks at that time typically had wifi too, so, again, it was a general downgrade in functionality).

Loss of the ethernet port is a real pain. The cat5 dimensions are awkward for a thin laptop so you can accept it for a machine that does basically nothing locally. But as soon as you have a hundred GB of stuff on your laptop you need to transfer you wish you still had wired ethernet. In fact, 10G. And then you buy a Thunderbolt to 10G dongle. It is brilliant that the new Mac Mini has 10G on-board.

Back in the day serial and parallel were very useful for interfacing to real world machines. Now everyone uses a simple linux board like an rpi, but in the interim it was seriously inconvenient to interface. USB1 is absolute rubbish, USB2 not much better.

The blutooth headphone is a different device than a regular headphone. They have worse sound quality, which might not be so noticable, but they also have to pair and the wireless connection isn't reliable. The headphones are also another device that needs to be charged and has a battery, and in the case of the AirPods, the battery is in bad shape after a year and the device must be replaced.

In the case of the ports you've mentioned, there were other improved connections to move towards. The blutooth headphone is not improved over the 3.5mm cable unless you are so vehemently opposed to the idea of a cable that you would live with its shortcomings. Market leaders like Apple and Samsung have made investments into this market (beats, for example), and to try and dominate market share are extorting their users into buying extraneous, disposable accessories that aren't an objective improvement of existing standards, all while parading the recycled content of their latest 128gb dual core laptops.

I use my AirPods a lot (like 1h to 2h daily for commuting and chores) and after one and a half year, I have no battery issues. I don’t recall depleting the battery ever.

Why not instead use the 3.5mm standard for serial port and charging capability as well? now that would make a lot of people happy

What a well-articulated piece!

Deleted comment

Why bother? I won't buy iphone anymore

So you're okay with hurting other people, especially the elderly, disabled and poor, because you get something.

I guess admitting that takes "courage" as well?

[People downvoting this, care to explain what you think is incorrect or invalid about the points it makes?]

You need to explain how Apple removing headphone jacks from their phone hurts these people.

And why do you think it couldn't provide any benefit to any of them, either? (e.g. read the bit about AirPods here https://www.apple.com/lae/accessibility/iphone/hearing/ . Or consider how not having cables might help prevent accidents with the elderly, because there's no cables to get caught on things).

The most laughable thing about your comment is the notion that Apple is somehow forcing phones without headphone jacks upon people. Because of course it is not possible to buy any phones that have headphone jacks.

(do you also realise that it is still possible to use 3.5mm headphones with all Apple phones? So how much harm can be done even if people do want to use such headphones?)

Your comment is a great "think about the children".

Making fast cars, downhill racing bikes and hang gliders all hurt the elderly, disabled, and poor, too, by that logic.

This comment broke the site guidelines by being a personal attack, and by not doing this:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

We ban accounts that don't follow the guidelines, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and do so from now on.

"Without a doubt, even from the vantage of today, 2016 will go down as one of the saddest sack years in recent history. A reality show billionaire was elected president."

Right off the bat, in the first paragraph, with an unnecessary political statement. Turns off half the audience right there. Everything said thereafter is taken with a giant grain of salt.

Is this person living in such a bubble that he can't have a conversation without mentioning Trump?

No, but the editor insisted on some SEO.

Meanwhile normal people outside the tech and HN bubble have moved on and forgot what a headphone jack is.

Citation needed.

"By now, we forgot what a headphone jack even is." (People outside tech and HN bubble, 2018)

Apple, and all the other phone companies on board with this, seem to have made the gamble that there's a whole bunch of other stuff people care about more than headphone jacks. And they seem to have been right.

I don't miss my headphone jack - my phone still has one. If people really wanted headphone jacks, they'd buy phones with headphone jacks. But if you care more about the social stigma of having a blue bubble in iMessage or being seen with a previous-gen phone, I guess you're stuck with no choice but to complain.

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