The disadvantages of the bluetooth is by far outweighed by the wireless advantage. The mobility, flexibility and convenience of no tangles and accidental wire pulling and causing phone to drop - all worth it.
And wireless UX is only going to get better. Wired is dead.
You can thread the wired headphone/IEM cord under your shirt, or even over your ear and down your back [0] to prevent tangles and wire pulling that causes a phone to drop.
It's less convenient than wireless earphones, but it solves the problem, and comes with advantages (better noise isolation and sound quality with certain models, plus you don't need to worry about the batteries degrading and having to buy a new pair after possibly 2-3 years, so you save money). I'm considering switching back to wired after my current AirPods pair dies for these advantages.
>Wired is dead
Not at all. You can get high-quality, professional earphones (in-ear monitors or IEMs) that fit in a pouch in your pocket, which are great for people in loud environments (better than noise cancelling due to their noise isolation); who appreciate music (sound quality is noticeably better for any genre); or who do professional audio work.
— They never deafen me with connected/disconnected sounds (which can never be configured quiet enough) or music briefly playing at insane volume after switching or connecting.
— I know I get the source quality.
— I would never lose one randomly (always a chance with “true wireless” models).
— I don’t get weird phased low-frequency rumble from active noise compensation gone wonky.
— Most of all, their passive noise suppression with Shure’s black sleeves, depending on exact noise profile either beats or is on par with top-of-the-line active isolation (both according to rtings’ test benches and my subjective experience), and does not end when battery runs out inevitably at the most inconvenient time.
Addendum: 1) I connect them via a tiny Ikko Zerda DAC, which I started using way back when I still had a phone with a headphone jack (this is subjective, but with lossless sources I hear more detail—as in literally small instrument parts I didn’t hear before in complex arrangements—compared to built-in DAC). 2) I generally pass the wire under the top layer of clothing, and personally taking an earbud out and letting it dangle is about as difficult as switching on the transparent mode on AirPods (and without audio degradation inherent to such modes).
I couldn’t find a Shure original cable to replace mine with right away, so I got a compatible one and been rolling with it ever since. It’s slightly thinner, more flexible and without the thicker malleable parts near earbud connections. I was cautious about those differences at first, but in the end grown to prefer it more than the original, these thin wires wrap around my ears just fine.
As a side note, one of the things I treasure about the design of these IEMs is the replaceability of the cable. The IEMs themselves can probably survive for ages, which gives a nice feeling among the increasingly disposable electronics—I just hope the model would still exist on the market when something eventually happens to my unit.
Also, SE215 cost much, much less than US$800. More like $100.
For as long as we both live, manufacturers will make wired headphones, and people will buy them. Latency and quality might not be important to the casual user, but for some wired headphones and speakers will be, and will always be, essential.
"Wired compatibility" was ubiquitous before. It didn't have room to "improve". Removing the jack is what broke "wired compatibility".
Needing a dongle for sth is not an "improved" form of using it, when you could have just used it without a dongle.
Due to forces beyond the individual's control, it's highly unlikely that audio jacks will once more become ubiquitous, so the second-best outcome is for wired headphone users to start carrying an adapter.
And it Just Works. Although my Mac has a tendency to switch back to my speakers (also bluetooth) after ~15 minutes without my input, that's really annoying. Might have to do with the speakers turning themselves off?
So, what you're saying is, it doesn't just work!
I promise I’m not trying to be sassy! This is exactly the type of issue I always run into with wireless audio, and basically never experience with wired headphones. I hate these types of little, persistent annoyances.
I don't like wires either, to be clear, but I think they're a small price to pay for their reliability.
The point is predictability. Wires have it, bluetooth doesn't. Yes, they predictably snag on things sometimes. In my experience, this annoyance happens far less frequently than any of the many annoyances that bluetooth brings.
Obviously the airpods are great for a great number of people, and I bought them too. I think it's safe to say Apple made good tradeoffs for their business. I ended up switching back to heaphones with a wired option and then switching phones to get a headphone jack because the dongle annoyed me enough. I am very much in a minority - don't get me wrong, apple will not miss my business. But that they lost it should be a conscious decision as "this won't work for everyone, but it will work for most people really well by default" - not, "when people are ready for it they will see the light". The former forces you to acknowledge and quantify who it won't work for when finding product market fit, and the later assumes you don't need to do that.
There are two situations where earbuds are far more convenient:
Getting ready in the morning - I can put the earbuds in once I'm out of the shower and dried off and listen to a podcast. They don't get in the way of getting dressed, moving around etc.. This is just not workable with wired headphones and my partner has already started work so I can't use a speaker, and even if I could I'm moving between different rooms and floors of the house.
Driving - getting headphones out of your pocket, untangling them and putting them in is basically impossible to do (safely) while driving. But earbuds are never tangled I can just open the case and put them in all while my eyes never leave the road. Means I can make phonecalls or listen to stuff easily and safely. This is a particular case of them just being quicker and easier to put in than wired earbuds - no having to thread it down your jumper just because you want to watch a 5 minute YouTube video.
An open protocol would be excellent though.
I always wonder if the removal of the headphone jack was a ploy to get iPhone users to use Bluetooth so the find my network worked better..