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Comment by roywiggins | Hacker News Reader

I can skip tracks, pause, adjust volume without taking out my phone

There's absolutely no reason why wired headphones can't do that, you can buy ones with three-button inline controls. Ye olde Walkman could do it.

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The wired earbuds on my minidisc even had a little inline screen to display the current track.

Aww man, that just took me down memory lane. Minidisc was, imo, the peak of portable music players. Huge capacity, swappable/tradeable media, excellent sound quality, the little inline screen you mentioned. A quick Amazon search shows they're still available.

There are still simple MP3 players around, with SD card slots.

So you can have lots of music with you ... and have a smaller device and be able to jump around with it

Three button inline controls usually gets you pause, volume up and volume down. This is essentially 5 buttons: pause, forward, back, volume +, volume -. Sure there are probably wired headphones that have the same control capability, but I've encountered them rarely if ever.

I have literally never encountered a 3 button wired headphone that didn't have that capability. I have gone through many due to heavy usage.

And I've gone through at least three 3-button headphones that have only worked with volume and pause. I suppose one could use the volume for track control with some sort of special logic, like a longer button hold. But I've never encountered that. The Bluetooth headphones I have actually has another set of capabilities which is to not only skip or go back in terms of tracks but also fast forward and rewind within a track - very useful for podcasts.

It's usually long hold or double/triple tap and you get track forward/back. The iPhone buds do it for example. You probably never read the manual :)

The standard iPhone headphones since the 1g support all those. Click to pause, double click for forward, triple click for back. Long press on the second or third click for rewind/fast forward.

5 logical buttons with 3 physical buttons was something of a standard since time immemorial - the volume+/- buttons doubled up as next/previous when you held them.

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