FWIW I've got some wired headphones I really love and I bought a dongle for them when I got my iPhone XS in 2018. I really don't notice it; it just feels like an extension of the cord.
The lightning+3.5mm bodge jacks retain the functionality at a reduction in usability, but just about work for a non-premium product.
An SE case with an upgraded processor would have been perfectly good.
All I'm saying is, lots of people who are going on and on about the headphone jack are upset out of principle, even though it won't actually degrade their user experience to a meaningful degree. I'm not saying it was the right decision, necessarily, but I'm saying you'll have a better time if you just accept it and move forward. It really isn't that bad.
Edit: Personally I only ever charge at night, and only ever use headphones when I'm walking around/driving somewhere. I guess battery life varies, but I also suspect that a lot of people are eagerly charging at every opportunity, even if they'd last the day without doing so. My XS lasts two days on a charge, usually.
Plugged in, with music. For as many hours each day as the power banks would allow.
Aside from headphones? March 15th, the last time I took a train (been at home due to covid since then)
> And when was the last time you needed to charge it and listen to music at the same time?
Last night, when I was watching futurama in bed
Now when it comes to both cases, the answer would again be March 15th, when I had my phone plugged into my laptop providing limited connectivity, my headphones plugged into my phone listening to (offline) spotify. I then unplugged my headphones from the phone and plugged into my laptop to listen to a short video, then back into my phone to continue to listening to music.
This is possible with a lightning+3.5mm jack dongle, but it's not as nice an experience as with the superior iphone of yesteryear.
With some Bluetooth headphones you could just listen to both devices at the same time without plugging / switching anything. It also has upsides.
I don't deny there are benefits of bluetooth, but there are benefits from a 3.5mm jack too.
A £50 mixer takes these inputs (almost all from 3.5mm sources) and brings them all together via a reliable tactile interface.
On the road of course I only tend to have to choose between 2 sources, so perhaps beats can approach the utility of a 3.5mm audio cable.
If a phone would have to cater to all these edge cases we'd still have serial ports on them.
As I say, I can live with a dongle for 3.5mm or serial (despite it being a regression), it's just another straw.
The certainty and simplicity of an audio jack is not valueless though, no matter how many people on HN say it is.
Nobody is saying that audio jacks are valueless in general, just that it's reasonable for a mass market device where it has value for a small % of people to not have it.
I hear a lot about the inconvenience of wired headphones, but as a daily user of wired headphones, that's not something I experience. And it certainly doesn't outweigh the costs (financial and environmental) of switching to Apple's disposable wireless headphones.
I was annoyed when Apple initially got rid of the headphone jack but I've been without it for quite some time now and it's not really a bother. Even if you have to charge while having the wired headphones in, there is a dongle for that. I suppose if that's a very frequent use case, I can see the annoyance.
My last iPhone that had the headphone jack required frequent cleaning of the jack or else it would get clogged with accumulated dust and make the speaker very quiet.
The downsides of "AirPods Pro"
1) They go in my ear, which is uncomfortable
2) They need charging
3) They presumably are trivial to lose
4) They cost about 50 times as much as hook earphones.
> Watching a show in bed, you won’t have cables tangling up
I don't have cables tangling up.
> You won’t be frustrated with trying to listen to music while charging your phone on a train
I'm not, because I have a jack on my phone and I don't use bluetooth and thus suffer from deciding which host they should be connected to at any given time
[0] https://www.teknistore.com/en/on-ear-and-over-ear-headphones...
That doesn't happen to my £5 ear phone because it's connected to my phone, which itself is connected to the mains.
Your comment is such a first-world response.
Not music, but phone calls. Working remotely means I spend a lot more time on the phone, and only recently I was frustrated by the fact that I could not charge my phone and use headphones on a call at the same time.
Well, I listen to audiobooks while walking in the Scottish mountains and 10+ hour days are possible and when running multiple apps (OS maps, Endomondo, Audible) I do need to charge and use my phone at the same time (I have a dual lightning/headphone adapter that supports charging and listening at the same time).
https://www.walkhighlands.co.uk/
And I've been watching these videos to stay (relatively) sane these last few weeks:
Prior to the last 8 weeks? Not very often.
Over the next 8 weeks? I expect every day still.
Over the next year or two? 40% chance that it'll still be happening regularly.
It's been a while, because I dropped my adapter down somewhere in the center console of my car, past the hand brake, so it's gone. I've been burning CDs instead. A CD burner only costs about as much as 3 of those adapters and the media's dirt cheap.
[EDIT] before that, daily.
What exactly is the benefit to not having a 3.5mm jack?
However, a wireless cigarette lighter adapter that supports Bluetooth is much more convenient either way.
For me personally, Bluetooth headphones in general and AirPods Pro in particular are much more convenient - especially going back and forth between my cellular watch when I am jogging or in the gym (pre-Covid),my phone, my iPad, my laptop, and my AppleTV. Besides cords get tangled, yanked out, caught on things, etc.
You're free to use Bluetooth headphones even if you have a headphone jack; being able to use them doesn't seem like a "benefit" of not having the jack.
People have been complaining about Apple getting rid of things since the original iMac got rid of the 3-1/2 drive. High end android phones from Google and Samsung got rid of the headphone jack also.
I've yet to see anything that makes the removal of a 3.5mm jack seem comparable. You couldn't use DVI or HDMI without replacing the port, which isn't the case with Bluetooth (which you can use regardless of having a 3.5mm jack or not).
A more apt comparison in my eyes seems like wireless mice/keyboards. They don't have cords so they're significantly nicer for cable management, look better on your desk, have longer reach, and probably have other benefits (as well as their own set of tradeoffs like latency, battery, etc). You can use them now or you can use wired versions... but just imagine if a company started selling computers where you could _only_ use wireless keyboard/mice unless you bought USB dongles. Sure, you could just buy the dongles and deal with the loss of choice/convenience, but... why would you want to?
You mean like the one port MacBook that once you plugged it in for power you had to use wireless accessories, the current MacBook Air and 13” MacBook Pro that only has two ports - but once you plug in power and a monitor you don’t have any ports left?
Anecdotally, it seems like each HN thread about new macbooks also has plenty of comments from people complaining about the lack of ports and/or wishing for more. I don't see a lot of people saying the equivalent of, "Apple's never gonna bring those ports back, get over it and get used to it."
Any time I get on a flight longer than 3 hours or so
When I've been using my phone a lot during the day but want to listen to music while I do dishes before bed
Even in newer cars, it's the same kind of choice reduction you see on phones, though. With a jack you can choose whether you want wired or wireless audio; without a jack you're still with wireless all the time, even when wired would be more convenient.
However I think use cases like air travel or just hanging out at home with a low battery are less rare. These can be partially mitigated w/ wireless charging, but when I use a wireless battery pack on a flight my phone and tablet don't do a great job actually staying in place, and necessities lowering the tray which is annoying
Connecting a portable music player to car radios tended to go
* 3.5mm cassttee input
* FM transmitter input (for cars with CD, not cassette)
* 3.5mm aux input
Power was a 12V cigarette lighter.
During all of this the output from the mp3 lpayer was a 3.5mm device.
It was only relatively recently (say in the last 7 years) that most cars started getting USB and bluetooth sockets that took audio connections. Even then there are issues - my 2016 skoda's airplay doesn't play music properly - it frequently skips, I have to use bluetooth to get skipless sound, which means not using maps.
Having USB audio input as standard was even more recently than that - I hired a newish car about 3 years ago which had nothing by a 3.5mm input and 12V jack.
More importantly, though, removing the headphone jack is just plain stupid. Why should I support stupidity with my hard-earned money?
I'm doing it right now... I do it multiple times every day... And if I wasn't at home due to Covid I'd be doing so even more often.
On planes - although I guess it will be a while before I go on a flight again.
But that is patently untrue.
1. I used to have a bunch of cheap, working headsets everywhere - laptop backpack, car, office, home. That whole use case and convenience is GONE.
2. If I was somewhere and needed to take a concall, I could just borrow anybody's headset. No longer the case.
3. Instead of having a good pair of headphones for 2 decades, I now have to buy new bluetooth headphones with unreplaceable battery and aging standards every few years, and worry about charging them etc.
My life has been so much worse since my employer switched to iPhone, that I wrote to my boss, project manager, practice lead, and in the end CFO. And not because "I'm one of those people" - I spend 3-6hrs a day on calls, and life just sucks now. (for those who think Airpods are "fine for calls" - yes. For YOU. Not for other 20 people on the call who have to hear everything happening in 5 miles radius of you. And heaven help us if multiple Airpods join the call!)
So even if we say life got worse for - whatever: 10%, 5%, 1% of population - how has it gotten BETTER for you guys that don't happen to have a need for a jack? The phone is not smaller, it doesn't have a better battery life, etc.
I just don't see the argument here other than "I don't need it, so nobody should have it".
I've now spent several hundred dollars on the best-reviewed, bluetooth headset for my conference calls, and it's nowhere near as good, or convenient, as my $29.99 wired headsets.
Yes we shouldn't have to, yes it's a step backwards, yes it's not as good, but I suspect it would save you a lot of problems.
Don't let perfect (a phone company making a phone with a standard cabled audio interface) be the enemy of good (a solution for your problem).
It now becomes either something I have to carry around with me always; or buy one for each 3.5mm headset I've stashed.
Add the poor reliability and performance, and we come back to your point:
"Yes we shouldn't have to, yes it's a step backwards, yes it's not as good"
Exactly. So I will absolutely do whatever I can to make my life easier - but I also refuse to pretend this does not make my life needlessly harder - once again, for no obvious gain for those who defend the decision.
Phone jack is inherently different than all the Firewire/Zip drive items. There are literally thousands of technologies, interfaces and standards that live and die like fireflies. But the phone jack is a century old and still works perfectly well, and we have replaced it WITH the technology of the day - who thinks their $300 Bluetooth Bose will work 20 years from now? Or seemlessly plug in to each device they use?
"I've now spent several hundred dollars on the best-reviewed, bluetooth headset for my conference calls, and it's nowhere near as good, or convenient, as my $29.99 wired headsets"
You could buy 50 3.5mm+lightning dongles for several hundred dollars, and stick them on the end of each headset, which sounds more convenient than messing around with bluetooth.
I was thinking of the terrible headsets that some collegues use -- they have USB-A plugs on the end, for laptops. Not sure what they do if they want to join a call from their phone (say out walking). My 3.5mm tip+ring+ring+sheild headphones works on laptops and phones, seems far superior to their single-use devices. But western economy is built around selling you something new every 2-4 years, so needs obsoleting.
Every single moment of "oh, I'll just plug my phone into the AUX... oh. right." is not "out of principle". It's made especially stark when contrasted with other devices: right now I'm 3.5mm'd into a 2019 MacBook for Zoom; I can trivially replug into the iPad next to me, but if I want to do the same with the equivalent era iPhone, I have to walk out of the room, root through a bag for the adapter, or go find the AirPods (hoping they're charged), probably re-select them as the output, while accepting the loss in quality from the old-school cans.
It's not some hypothetical: it's literally decades of habit and muscle memory, throwing away a simple and universal technology that worked insanely well. I can forgive this sort of short-term sacrifice for a transition to a better world: floppy for USB, HDMI for USB-C. One can debate whether the loss is necessary, but usually once we're on the other side, the new standard is inherently superior across every metric.
This is not the case for wired to wireless audio. Though I love the AirPods, they still have batteries, which still run down (short term, and long term). It's always more of a hassle to swap bluetooth connections than just replugging cables. If I want to not share my audio with the world, I can be 1000% sure of that by plugging in a cable, as opposed to the ephemeral "is my computer paired right now, and if so to what?", which could change at any moment when signal is lost or a battery dies. Sure, there's dongles, which is yet another piece of tech junk to juggle and find and lose, and which never seem to be around when you actually need it.
Imagine you went to your bookshelf to grab something to read, only to discover that your curated and beloved collection has all been pulped, and a Kindle with their contents is now in its place. Bezos enthusiastically tells you how much better the Kindle is, and how brave he is for "upgrading" you. That is how we feel. It's one thing to decide to make this sort of transition yourself; when a massive corporation does it on your behalf, "for your own good", yeah, we're gonna get peeved.
You just can't charge and listen to music at the same time...