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Comment by epberry | Hacker News Reader

Give it a few years I think most people will look at this like removing the CD. The wireless audio experience is mostly better. Airpods for example connect and disconnect effortlessly. Being able to walk all over the office while on the phone has done wonders for my pacing.

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It's already been a few years and people are still annoyed by it. Airpods are great, but they're also expensive. Saying wireless is better isn't a fair comparison either, because wireless is an option even with a headphone jack, and most people still use wired headphones anyway with a much less convenient connector.

Honestly I’m shocked that the headphone jack outrage is still a thing. When they removed the jack, I thought, “people will be mad for a few weeks then just forget about it, like they forgot about cassettes.” Here we are in 2019 and people are still complaining about it!

If anything, it’s been great PR for Apple. It has served as an anger lightning rod, distracting people from Apple’s other actual problems, focusing everyone’s rage on this other stupid thing.

I would be willing to take a bet that if you stood at one of the entrances to Times Square for 24 hours and tallied wired vs. wireless headphones, wireless would come out on top.

NPD had wireless overtaking wired in sales (obviously this doesn’t account for people using bundled earphones) for the first time back in 2016: https://qz.com/745108/wireless-headphone-sales-just-hit-a-ti...

When wireless is much more expensive, this is unlikely.

Even before the iPhone lost its headphone jack, NPD already pegged the share of wireless headphones under $50 at 30% of the (again, already larger) wireless market. The demand has only grown since then, and the market has responded.

The most popular pair of bluetooth headphones on Amazon is waterproof, has 4.5 stars, and only costs $20: https://www.amazon.com/LETSCOM-Headphones-Waterproof-Sweatpr...

I have to disagree.

CD's were easily replaced with usb drives and music streaming. However while you (and others) love wireless headphones and will never go back, so many others seem to hate them and refuse to use anything not wired (myself included)

This is the important point. CD's are not less popular because Sony or Toyota decided to stop supporting them - consumers stopped using them.

This headphone thing is putting the cart before the horse.

My wired headphones always work. Wireless has too many issues for me.

My $15 wired ear buds that just work VS $100+ wireless ... ill keep my wire.

The headphone thing is like dropping the floppy drive on the original iMac.

Which as we all know was a terrible choice, because floppies are still in use today..

Also for anecdotal evidence: I’ve gone through 3 or 4 sets of apple earbuds (including a pair of the more expensive in-ear ones).

I’ve had AirPods for about a month and couldn’t be happier.

>The headphone thing is like dropping the floppy drive on the original iMac.

What? That's the type of case GP was talking about. Everybody still uses wired headphones these days, they're not going anywhere. Professionals/musicians will never stop using wired headphones, and most casual users just buy the cheap ones, which are wired

Everybody still used floppies when the iMac dropped them. That was my point.

I don’t know how many musicians are making music on an iPhone.

Wireless headphones exist outside of the iPhone ecosystem.

Dropping the floppy on the iMac was an easily solvable annoyance for most people who were annoyed. Get an external and plug it in, once and you're done. Or, for computer labs, get a couple and lock them to the desk, once. The awful hockey puck mouse was much worse. The usb floppies worked at least as good as an internal drive (possibly better?)

Bluetooth has pairing, interference, and latency, and for headphones, another thing to charge. A dongle on a portable device is a bigger deal than on a device intended to stay in one place. Clearly, a lot of people like wireless, but it's a tradeoff without a clear winner, and people are likely going to be grumpy about it for some time.

As a counterpoint I would point out the number of tech-savvy early adopters who are still complaining about the missing headphone jack. Something that I don't recall happening when Apple came out with the iMac or the MacBook air.

Personally, I can't stand wireless ear buds. I've tried to like them on a few occasions, but the trade-offs never really made sense to me.

Then again, it's pretty rare that I use my phone for music (and when I do, it's plugged into the car) so I really have no dog in this particular fight.

It's 2019 and Bluetooth still has massive latency problems if you don't use Qualcomm's proprietary aptX LL extension. In theory it is possible to have a good wireless audio experience. Stock Bluetooth doesn't give you any of that and pretending so doesn't make the problem go away. Meanwhile almost any crappy Chinese $2 earphone won't suffer from this problem.

We've had 200ms (roundtrip!!!!) video live-streaming via WebRTC from one side of the globe to another for more than 3 years now but stock Bluetooth still cannot accomplish that same task within the same room. If all you're doing is listening to music on your phone you might not care. But audio latency during video games or even just learning vocabulary via Anki (which is basically the thing I use my phone for) is annoying as hell.

There is no clear upgrade path in which wireless is always better than wired. aptX LL is "adequate" but it's not the default. It often requires 50€ transceivers for specific devices like your switch console, desktop/laptop, etc. It's even less common than the headphone jack.

In comparison solid state storage is superior to CDs in almost every possible way. It's more compact, faster, less prone to scratches, can be rewritten and it is cheaper ($0.10 per GB for SSDs, $0.20 for a 700MB CD). There is no reason to still use CDs.

Meanwhile wireless (= stock Bluetooth), needs to be recharged (acceptable sacrifice), has worse quality, suffers from latency and there are multiple proprietary extensions that substantially improve the user experience but they are not guaranteed and even cost extra compared to regular wireless. The audio experience is not better in every case! There are enough substantial reasons to prefer wired headphones over wireless.

I'm not saying wireless can never be good. I'm saying that it's completely squandering it's huge potential but yet it keeps getting pushed down our throats before it's ready. But why on earth is it not ready? It's 2019. Why isn't "wired < wireless" true in every case?

I don't think they will, or at least they ought not to, because the situations aren't equivalent. At the time that Macbooks started shipping without CD drives, every use case facilitated by CDs was achievable via some other mechanism. Wireless audio doesn't cover all of the affordances of wired audio, since it's incapable of low latency transmission. For me it's noticeable enough to even make watching video with synced sound unpleasant, but what it makes basically impossible is any sort of music creation. Music production is a specialty market to be sure, but it's a non-trivial one, and basically everyone who uses their iOS devices for it is going to remain rightfully annoyed that the proposed successor product is literally unusable for their purposes.

> literally unusable for their purposes.

Unless you get the $9 adapter discussed here. I get your point, I use iOS devices as musical instruments, but it's a niche and as such a fair trade-off most consumers don't care about.

I'd rate the healthy app ecosystem for music creation on iOS much higher and more valuable than the somewhat annoying necessity to use adapters for niche applications.

Right, I didn't mean to say that they've made it totally impossible, but that the form factor they're trying to push as the "next thing," wireless audio, is not actually a replacement for that use case ("successor product" refers to wireless headphones, not newer iPhone generations).

But, yeah, I agree that the ecosystem makes it worth it -- it's not like there are any other viable alternatives, anyway.

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