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Comment by rargulati | Hacker News Reader

From the comments I've read here, I guess a contrarian take:

If the purpose of the decision was to get people to move to wireless headphones, then specifically for myself and my network of folks, this seems to have worked.

Initially I had the Oppo Wired headphones. Soon after removing-3.5mm-gate (and dealing with the adapter), I'm exclusively on wireless: the Airpods and the latest Sony over ear headphones.

Honestly, at the cost of sound quality (which used to be important to me), but gaining noise-cancelling and not having to wrangle with wires, it's such a convenience. Apple was right, and I imagine the trend will largely be towards wireless. That being said, experience still has a ways to go (connect, battery), and die-hard audiophiles will never be satiated.

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I don't see any reason wireless can't be identical to wired as far as audio quality goes on a phone.

If we were talking about wired vs. wireless headphones on a home stereo listen to LPs, then yeah, there might be something to talk about. There you have an analog source, and with wired the signal stays analog all the way to the transducers in the headphones. Going wireless will introduce an ADC on the stereo end and a DAC on the headphone end.

But with a phone you have a digital source, going to a DAC, and then to the transducers. The difference between wired and wireless there is that wireless puts the DAC closer to the headphones, and the digital signal goes over a wireless link.

I'd expect die-hard audiophiles to actually prefer wireless in theory, because with wired you are relying on a DAC and amplifier provided by the phone manufacturer. With wireless you are using a DAC and amplifier from the headphone manufacturer, which allows in theory for the headphone manufacturer to use a better DAC and amplifier than the phone provides.

Because Bluetooth simply cannot deliver what you're talking about.

The purpose isn't to convince people to switch to wireless headphones. Most people were already using bluetooth headphones when the iPhone 7 came out.

The purpose is to reduce manufacturing cost and complexity.

> The purpose is to reduce manufacturing cost and complexity

This argument doesn’t hold water for me because successive generations of iPhones have only become more complex. The X family has a tiny Kinect in the display!

The theory about pushing people to wireless makes much more sense if you look 5 years down the road and see e.g. an Apple Watch and some kind of AR accessory (or even AirPods and Siri as the AR accessory...) as the primary mobile compute devices, which everyone and their brother assumes is what Apple is trending toward.

die-hard audiophiles will never be satiated.

Very true. They will gradually die off, though...!

> They will gradually die off, though...!

Don't worry a fresh crop of flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, or gold-standard fanatics will spring up to fill that particular ecological niche.

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