Two years later, I still miss the headphone port
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My iPhone 6s is fine. An older pixel will be fine too as soon as I figure out how to ditch iMessage.
This actually feels a lot like how Facebook seems to intentionally cripple their mobile site to try and get me to install their app so they can have more of my info. It's inconveniencing me very deliberately to try and hold my convenience hostage.
There's longevity in the devices, but not as much longevity in the software. Each update gets slower than the last and then you stop getting updates at all.
I got a pixel2 xl. like my dell, it charges via usb-c. a have a bt headset I use for both the laptop and the phone. The lack of cable, especially when I travel and sleep on a plane with music playing, is important. That 1mm of saved space? I'll take it - I wouldn't be using the headphone port anywise.
You - go buy any of the hundreds of phones with the heaphone port you want. No one is stopping you.
They're not crippling anything. They just don't care about you not buying their product, because when I looked to buy mine, I specifically looked for phones with just a usb-c port. like my laptop. for every one of you, there are one of me (probably more).
Do you complain a lexus is not good for moving couches? Or do you buy something else? Your line of reasoning is the middle finger to the consumer. What Google and Apple did are what I, their consumer wants.
I think they've also ditched the headphone jack in their latest models though. For a while it seemed like they'd hold out against glass backs and dropping jacks. But no.
That was my first and last Android phone however. If you think Android is a decent OS try removing Google from it.
If you are ok with Android, Sony hardware is good. Was my second favorite phone vs my X. The screen was 4K and the audio was great for a phone. It was on the heavy side but well built. Lots of battery.
Actually that was one of my favorite things about my Xperia XZ1 Compact: running LineageOS without Google services. The battery life was insane, like 10-12 hours of screen-on time. I simply did not have to think about charging the thing; I'd charge it every 2-3 days.
Having a device that I could readily bootloader unlock that also has official AOSP support complete with device trees direct from Sony was such a refreshing change for me after years of hacking together homemade device trees for various LG devices.
I regret trading that phone for an LG G7, with its mediocre battery life, heavily bloated, laggy software, and precarious glass build -- also cannot ever be bootloader unlocked, and even if it could you'd have to rely on some community approximation for the device trees, forfeiting fully-functional camera support.
https://www.androidpit.com/sony-xperia-official-android-upda...
I've largely stopped bothering with Android system security updates due to soft-bricking and just concentrate on keeping browser / e-mail and other Internet apps updated.
Apple seems to be the only game in town for more than 3 years from date of launch.
Plan B is accept that Android is just second tier stuff and buy a $350 Poco and accept binning perfectly fine hardware because it's so cheap that the price works out.
Currently the iPhone 5s, 6, 6 plus, 6s, 6s plus and SE all are still getting security updates. The iPhone 5s was introduced in 2013.
so, for whatever features you want, there is a phone. there are hundreds of phones. when you start combining them, you are personalizing a phone. products are made for target markets. that's why people customize cars.
get a phone with a jack, put your own android on it, update it when it's updated. done. If you want a large company to make something specifically for you, with the combination of exact features you want - they don't. same for cars. same for coffee makers.
Are security devices optional features for cars (and I am not talking about collection cars or similar niche items) ? They are not in first-world countries.
Security updates are, again unambiguously, an important feature. You might not care but plenty of people do, and there’s lots of well-documented reasons why that’s probably the saner choice.
Take two big, important features, and realise you can’t have both at the same time. One of those features used to be ubiquitous, and is still present in most devices, but is being phased out. You’re damned right people who care about both feel their device choices are crippled. I don’t blame them.
Aren’t you generalizing all consumers? I am also a consumer and I personally don’t care about jack because I’ve been using Bluetooth headphones for years and hated anything with wires ever since I tried Bluetooth. Not sure why people are trying to make a bigger deal out of it than it really is, it’s not a conspiracy theory against you.
So unless I missed something, that something being the music industry deciding that headphone jacks need to be replaced with lightening / usb-c ports, then Apple (and the industry follows) is unilaterally deciding to demote the music component of the iPhone.
That’s not a little thing and I don’t feel that explaining why it is not a little thing is necessary.
If you just want to be able to send sms/mms from your browser stuff like Pushbullet works fine if you're willing to pay the monthly fee. It's what I settled with when I left iOS when I switched to Fi 3 years ago (almost to the day).
I also use it when I see a site on my phone that I'd rather read on a monitor and just push it to open up at home so it is sitting there waiting for me, that alone is worth the price each month to me.
My refusal to buy a phone crippled in this way is also a middle finger to them. The only way to influence their decision is to vote with our valet. It might be easy for them to ignore the "vocal minority", sales results might deliver a stronger result.
Although, frankly, the probability of Apple admitting to making a mistake are sub-zero. Nevertheless, it may stop them from making a similar "courageously" stupid mistake in the future.
People grow attached to their obsolete legacy hardware. The nostalgia is strong. I recently wired my house for Internet with physical wires, most out of habit and irrationality. 99% of the Internet use in my household is Wi-Fi, but I'm stuck in the past where "Ethernet is better!" even if technically yes it's faster to my gateway.
Fortunately, for actual legitimate use cases of legacy hardware, we have a multitude of dongles to choose from.
FWIW, I use the port on my phone regularly and love never having to give it a second thought. Removing the port was the biggest reason I did not replace my old Nexus with a new Pixel. I'm just one person and am guessing the port is doomed sooner rather than later, but at least for now I can put my money where my mouth is.
I wonder if it is enough to NOT buy a device for a certain reason... How does the neglected company know why you didn't buy their device? Especially if you actually want that device and there is only one reason why you decide against it.
Maybe it is necessary to give ones opinion a voice and give feedback to those neglected companies. (Or a petition?).
When I put on my AirPods, I have no clue how long it's actually going to take until I can listen to my phone through them. Even when going into the output selection, and tapping the AirPods (it they even show up), I never know how long it's going to take. Many times, after 40-60 seconds of waiting for the damn things to finally connect, I put them back in their case, wait a few seconds, and then put them back in, hoping that resets whatever silly and incompetent Bluetooth implementation that prevents pairing.
They are really really terrible when it comes to connecting, just awful awful things. So infuriating. Yet, what else am I going to do in the Apple ecosystem? Apple provides no other option. Steve Jobs would not have put up with quality this poor. The executive team should be ashamed of shipping stuff like this.
1. Put AirPods in ears.
2. Hit play.
There's no step #3. I do honestly wonder how our experiences differ so greatly. For me, it's at the point where AirPods are more seamless than my IEMs, because instead of having to fiddle about untangling the damn cable, I just pop them in my ears and go.
As far as I know everyone I know with AirPods has the same experience as me. Perhaps you should take yours back to an Apple store.
It's important to point out that it's not every time. It's maybe 5% of the time, which is enough that I can never trust that they will actually connect. And the unusual, time consuming experience is the infuriating one that dominates the amount of time I spend thinking about the product.
It's also somewhat inconsistent between the sides, the left bud is somewhat less reliable than the right one.
I have some feeling that it may be some interaction with the MacBook Pro, which has some sort of weird interaction with the iCloud account such that pairings sync between iPhone and MacBook.
Wait, you can hear it, it's just really quiet. So you turn up the volume. Ohhhh it's coming out of my iPhone speakers. Now take headphones out to confirm, then put them back in. The AirPods found your laptop somewhere thirty yards away and had connected to that! Don't mind that the lid is closed and its asleep, and your iPhone is activated, in your hand, and playing audio.
Now on your phone:
0. Pause Podcast
1. Home button (close Podcasts)
2. Home button (first press didn't work)
3. Home button (get to first app page)
4. Settings App
5. Home button (because your finger slipped downward 1 pixel when you pressed the Settings App and iOS thought you wanted to search your phone instead)
6. Settings App
7. Bluetooth
8. Tap "AirPods"
9. Wait about 10 seconds
10. Double tap Home button
11. Find Podcasts app
12. Rewind 30 seconds
13. Hit Play
This happens to me all the fucking time.
One improvement is that if you're in the app, the mystery meat to look for if the concentric circles with a triangle on the bottom. That is the secret code for selecting the output source, which allows connecting to the AirPods.
I'd be mostly ok with this if:
1) it connected reliably when selecting the AirPods, and
2) pairing only took 2-3 seconds, rather than 10-15 seconds. 10-15 seconds is far too long for electronic devices to waste of a human's attention, especially for something that happens several times a day.
The absolute kicker: You cannot charge Apple's flagship smartphone with Apple's flagship laptop without an adapter that does not come bundled with either of the two!
I agree that it's annoying, but you can if you use a Qi charger.
At this point, I’d rather go without entertainment than carry around anything more than AirPods (or equalavent). I know it probably sounds pretty smug, but I use my AirPods ~5-10x more on average than I did wired headphones.
This, and parents' comment, is pretty much the archetype of misunderstanding the point being made by tfa and other 'I want the headphone port back' argument.
We all understand some people are happy without a headphone jack.
That's fine.
You guys can use a headphone jacked phone with low quality Bluetooth audio just fine, but we can't use a non headphone jacked phone at all -- hence the feeling of brutally enforced unfairness.
I'm not an audiophile but I don't think the cheap DACs in most phones are in any way superior to the quality that Bluetooth delivers these days.
There is no value to consumer in the option for 3.5mm jack not existing on their phone. The phones are not thinner, they are not cheaper, and they do not have better battery life. A phone with 3.5mm will do Bluetooth just as well.
So on what grounds is this decision defended? Whatever the portion of audience that benefits from it, what is the motivation from those who don't need the jack to so gleefully deny it to those who do need the jack?
I can list any number of reasons for why 3.5 jack makes my family's life easier - but why do I have to? Given it doesn't cost you anything, why not give it to me?
---
Reason why I like the option for 3.5 headphones and headset even though I don't always use it
Cheap quality headsets. I do hours of concalls and lots of travel. I have cheap wired headsets everywhere - at home, in office, in car, in backpack. They all sound better, on average, than any Bluetooth because they sound great always. Sooner or later any participant with Bluetooth will go digital or wonky and delay us all while hey reconnect or just remove the darn thing. They are just never 100% reliable to those who have to listen to you, even if you believe their convenience is worth it (and if they don't have a boom they pick up much too much extraneous noise - again which may not bother you but is certainly annoying to others) I can borrow anybody's wired headset and it'll just work instantly. I can change headsets easily and switch them between phones and tablets and other devices. I can purchase one cheaply and quickly if I loose or forgot mine. I can lend it to others with equal ease.
And oh yes the idea of dongles or inability to charge while talking is just ridiculous - apple never understood business users, with headphones on bottom next to charger that they kept moving even while they supported it - so you couldn't easily use it with a basic dock. The iOS not showing mute on same screen as keypad further shows basic misunderstanding of professional use case... But i digress
No, they don't.
They may sound better than cheap Bluetooth headsets.
But I guarantee they don't sound better than my Nuraphones, or the Sennheiser Momentum 2 Wireless/HD-1s I was using beforehand.
Note that I own both Shure 535s and 846s, as well. The Nuraphone sounds better than either of them.
I use my Nuraphones for business con-calls every day. They sound great on my end and I've been told they sound great on the other end(s) of those calls, as well. Same with the Sennheisers.
(and lest we go down the argument of "what, do you still need a parallel port" etc - this is a standard that existed, depending on how you count, anywhere between 50 years and a century, which still performs the function cheaply, reliably and conveniently; whereas that lightning to 3.5mm to charging dongle will, if all goes well, be in the dustbins of history in 5-10 years or less - and we'll see how well the Bluetooth headsets work with audio devices 10 years from now)
I'm the meantime I'll be keeping an eye out for the 3.5" jack in the future, I guess. I do think that it's very convenient to not fiddle with wires, but I like the choice I have now: Preferred shape/sound, vs all the friction associated with wires (sorry ;).
The way I see it, if wireless is here to stay, my situation should only last until someone comes up with a wireless product that I like more than today's lineup. It's just that I prefer my wired setup for the time being!
But for general entertainment purposes, I’m fine. Not being an audiophile, I can still say that using the right Bluetooth DAC makes a world of difference, and that you may need to go a bit upmarket for good sounding headphones, but the price differential falls more on the side of the hardware than the DAC.
(Higher-specked headphones are often dual wireless/wired models, too)
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/8ethpj/are_all_...
My Nuraphones sound great, as did my Sennheiser Momentum Wireless 2/HD-1 Wireless Bluetooth headphones before them. No static whatsoever.
Just because you're too cheap to pony up for decent Bluetooth headphones doesn't mean the rest of us are.
I might return it and stick with my first gen iPad.
You cannot charge Apple's flagship smartphone with Apple's flagship laptop without an adapter that does not come bundled with either of the two!
Joe Consumer will buy an iPhone, AirPods, and Mac Pro without thinking, and iCloud will manage the syncing, and the nightly charge most users require will happen overnight next to their bed. They'll never miss the iphone->mac cable because they'll never need it. Same with the headphone jack.
I really miss the 3.5" port, but I get why Apple did it. It's consumer unfriendly, but good for business.
So now Apple, instead of improving the ecosystem, is trying to make the alternative worse. Quite sad.
Or a wireless charging pad plus regular adapter.
(I'm a fine one to talk; I have an OG Pixel, and I use my headphone jack entirely for the headset functionality when doing a conference call while remote. A sub-$10 wired headset gets the job done... for now)
It feels like a recent thing to me, but companies (especially tech companies) have gone from:
"We will make the best product we can, and you will pay us for it."
(Or perhaps some graph where marginal profit is the highest)
To
"We will make the worst product we can get away with making because you don't have a choice."
The focus seems to have gone from what customers want to what customers will tolerate.
Instead, what really annoys me is the lack of a secondary port in a convenient location. If they replaced the headphone jack with some other accessory connector, I doubt anyone would complain.
OK sure it can be annoying that 0.1% of times when you want to read a CD to your computer, but then you can get a USB CD drive. Same with the headphone jack, it's an old piece of shit port that nobody really needs, but if you need it, get a dongle.
Nope, the port is not coming back. It's best to accept that and move on.
Touch ID never left… still around on the 2018 iPad (non-Pro) and the MacBook Pro/MacBook Air, but then the 2018 iPad is the budget version of the iPad line, and Face ID wouldn’t work on MacBooks because people don’t hold the front camera up to their faces the same way that people hold iPhones or iPads.
this "article" (if you can call it that, feels fitting to a blog) doesnt really touch on anything meaningful. The author echos the same tirades that we've seen since the announcement of the iPhone X.
Just buy a shitphone with a headphone jack. They exist! I have one. You'll live. Apple will get the message. Problem solved.
https://techcrunch.com/2010/02/18/jobs-flash-will-murder-the...
People were also complaining about Apple ditching the floppy and the CD ROM Drive.
Flash wasn’t an open standard and was a pretty poor standard at that. The main reason it wasn’t supported on the iPhone was that it was never designed to be used by touch devices.
The headphone jack is open, widely used, its design has been validated over decades of use, and is widespread.
Just yesterday I was the only person at an event who was able to play some custom music our family wanted to hear because my iPhone 6 was the only phone with a headphone jack that could then drive music to the DJ’s professional setup.
As was the floppy and CD drive...
Just yesterday I was the only person at an event who was able to play some custom music our family wanted to hear because my iPhone 6 was the only phone with a headphone*
And until last year, my parents didn’t have a single TV that could support HDMI for my boys’ game systems. Does that mean Sony and MS should still support RCA output?
How is that different than the lightning adapter to 3.5 inch headphone jack that came with the iPhone for the first two years after they remove the headphone jack? It’s still available for $10.
The difference here would be removing all input ports and requiring that you stream everything via your wireless internet. Then you'd have to charge your television but only when you weren't watching it. Everyone would think that was a stupid design choice.
The iPhone comes with wired headphones with lightning and there are plenty of third party lightning headphones and there is the aforementioned adapter.
Floppies I'm not sure what you're talking about... Optical drives are still supported externally, and one of the big issues with that was really the same issue as with wired headphones: lack of ports. It's not just removing a type of port, it's reducing the number of ports--although removing a centrally important type of port is problematic enough also.
Removal of wired headphone ports was a solution imposed in order to create the appearance of a problem. Bluetooth headphones don't provide as good of possible audio quality, and are more power hungry. With wired ports, if you wanted Bluetooth anyway for whatever reason (and there are many), you could have them.
Whenever a topic like this comes up, it reminds me of the Onion satire (maybe it was not the Onion) about the laptop with just one big button instead of a keyboard.
A better analogy than CDs or Flash in this regard might be tablets: for a time people talked about the end of the keyboard, etc. and how everyone would use tablets. Many of us thought this was absurd for heavy work, and our concerns proved true. Tablets still are useful in all sorts of ways in the same way Bluetooth will be but getting rid of a physical port for audio seems premature.
Well, let’s be fair, banning it is one thing, but Adobe also never produced a version of Flash than run acceptably on mobiles, didn’t chew the CPU and battery up, there’s no real way to have made the desktop-optimised experience of most Flash games work well on an iPhone or even an iPad due to the lack of a pointer, and Adobe quickly and quietly canned it anyway.
You can’t really ban what never really existed, not to the standard that people expected, nor the high bar that Apple set for mobile software.
> [...] gettigng rid of a physical port for audio seems premature
That word ‘premature’ is an interesting choice, but really, there’s never any good or easy time to deprecate something universal upon which people rely. Either you wait until the usage levels are low enough that nobody will miss it, which would never happen for the headphone jack, or you bite the bullet and just get rid of it, endure the few years of naysaying, and then after a while nobody remembers what the complaint was about.
I can think of two analogies, one a success, one a failure. The success would be when Apple dropped the floppy disk drive on the original iMacs in favour of networked storage, rewritable CDs and DVDS, early USB storage, and USB floppy disk drives. That was a significant; cotributor to accelerating the uptake of USB, effectively mandating that peripheral companies started making high-quality, reliable, and accessible USB devices for the general public — many of whom still didn’t come into contact with USB for another few years, parallel and PS/2 ports remaining the norm on PCs for years. But eventually, and rather quickly, the floppy disk was relegated to history. The only people who miss it are the ones doing clean-outs of their attics, finding old copies of DOS games that are easier to download off the web than source a floppy drive.
Then on the not-so-successful side, there’s Windows 8. There was Microsoft’s first real attempt to ditch some of the legacy stuff, ride the wave of mobile and tablet design with the Metro frameworks, and a rethink of what Windows is and could become in future. And of course, customers hated it; sales were low, Windows 7 remained the preferred operating system, and other projects like Windows RT were lambasted for apparently promising one thing but turning out to be another (which is why, I’m sure, Apple made sure to not officially refer to iPhone OS [as it was] as “Mac OS X” after the iPhone’s launch; iOS may share many technologies with macOS but it isn’t macOS, and customers don’t seem to show any confusion about this as opposed to the Microsoft-ian strategy of naming pretty much everything Windows, but I digress).
So Microsoft’s solution is to dial things back, ease off on what made Windows 10 unpopular, bring back some of what people liked about Windows 7, and confusingly offer something in between the legacy that they wanted to get rid of and the future that they no longer seem to believe in. Half the operating system is the new, fancy Metro stuff; the other half is the old, staid, stuff-from-the-past-but-somehow-back-again.
Now looking at Apple’s story with the headphone jack, it seems to me that although people miss it, need it, want it back, and will probably do so for a lot longer than people clamoured to have floppy disk drives back, Apple’s profits and sales don’t seem to indicate a Windows 8 scenario of having to go back on their long-term plan. Far from it, the story of the removal of the headphone jack shares a lot more DNA with the story of the demise of the floppy disk drive than it does with the story of how Windows 8’s successor was, eventually, Windows 7-with-Metro-apps.
Adobe claimed in 2007 that they could support Flash on the original iPhone. When Adobe finally did bring full Flash to mobile on Android, the minimum spec was 1Gb of RAM and a 1Ghz CPU. The original iPhone ran at 400Mhz and had 128Mb of RAM. It wasn’t until the iPhone 5 in 2011 that Apple shipped a phone that met those specs.
Adobe was repeatedly late shipping Flash to mobile. One of the biggest selling points of the Motorala Xoom - the first Android tablet to get any buzz - was that it would run “the full web” by supporting Flash. But it didn’t until after it was being sold. The same happened with Palm phones.
As far as floppies, there was a massive outcry when thr first iMac didn’t have a floppy in 1997.
The New Mactini: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGGOn-H7s3Q
https://www.wired.com/2016/07/vcr-officially-dead-well-never...
This would be like if Sony stopped selling VCRs in 1998 when they just happened to own the patent on blu ray, and a major movie studio.
Actually it's exactly what Sony tried to do with minidisc, except it worked.
Bluetooth is pretty ubiquitous and has been for a decade.
The charging case means I have to recharge them every ten days or so (so I don’t worry about it), the sound quality is good enough and I don’t get tangled any more.
The only disadvantage is switching between multiple devices can be a bit fiddly at times - which is where AirPods do come into their own.
And then there's the overengineered way that enables some companies to sell a much more expensive product with greater margins: let's replace those cheap speakers with two tiny computers. Each one of them needs its own DAC, its own battery and its own Bluetooth antenna. Now you have to recharge these marvels of technology after a few hours and maybe worry about pairing because Bluetooth is what it is. You still carry your smartphone around plus a charging station for your shiny new toys, which only can sound worse than what you used before someone convinced you it was obsolete because they said it was.