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Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

And tragically, the eventuality is you'll be forced to get a new device supporting 5g/6g/Ng in order to retain telco network compatibility.

Why do the dominant manufacturers (Apple, Samsung) insist we not have a headphone jack and expandable storage? It's starting to feel rather stupid and like a huge ripoff.

Wireless headsets are expensive, and after a year or two the batteries wear out and the entire thing is junk. What a ridiculously high tax on customer wallets over time, not to mention the e-waste.

USB-C buds have been 100% crap on my experience. If you have recommendations in this department, please do share.

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They want to get rid of the headphone jack because it is a brilliant bit of open hardware design. You can plug a device with a headphone jack into near limitless devices and that is a problem for profit when you can force people onto bluetooth and break compatibility when it is convenient.

Does it also take up a lot of precious space relative to it's function for the average user mostly using Bluetooth now?

Is the average user mostly using Bluetooth now? Genuinely curious if there's any empirical data.

And regardless of the numbers, I also wonder at what rate people are actively switching to Bluetooth because they want to vs. because that's what their preferred phone line is forcing them into.

Every time I do an on the street observation, I see that wireless headphones are pretty much universal. It would be 100 wireless to one wired user. Sure, some of that may be because the jacks are removed, but the average person has chosen to use wireless instead of the $9 adapter or picking a phone with a jack.

The average user does not care at all. HN has a tendency to attribute everything to some global conspiracy from the elite’s to make you use technology their way. It’s inconceivable that most people just don’t care about flac quality audio or having to charge their AirPods once a week.

Then why is USB so prevalent in (almost) every device?

USB devices can still be controlled by the OS. iPad has USB C but you can't use everything on it, some external SSDs don't work, displays don't work etc. You can still control it.

3.5mm has one purpose, but you have no control over what is using that audio device. Less control = Less $$$ to be made. NOBODY bought Apple earphones after-market before AirPods were a thing, and even though the iPad has a USB C, most people are buying apple peripherals due to locks.

Nobody is going to be removing support for lightning or USB c to 3.5mm adapters with DACs, so this point is kind of moot.

No difference between having an internal 3.5mm jack and one connected via USB.

Breaking or losing a dongle is nearly infinitely easier and more likely than breaking or losing the in-phone 3.5mm jack.

I break both with similar frequency

External displays do work on iPadOS. I use an HP USB-C to Displayport adapter today.

Because it saves money/increases profit by not having to include a charger.

As opposed to the near limitless devices that support bluetooth now? Including most refrigerators sold today?

Bluetooth still is flakey af. Astounds me how bad it is still. Audio dropouts on the reg. Terrible documentation for design n dev also. Legit PITA technology.

It’s certainly not a technology without flaws, but being overly locked down is definitely not one of them, no? Too many things have Bluetooth now, rather than the reverse.

Makes the argument that the headphone jack was removed for lock-in reasons pretty weak when the replacement will probably start coming with your produce in a couple of years. There is certainly no lack of Bluetooth headphones you can buy, even if they have all of the flaws above. The lock-in is not the problem.

A lack of lockdown does not absolve the adoption of shit standards.

Yeah but that wasn't OP's argument. Their argument was that Apple removed the headphones to lockdown their phones. Bluetooth can be crap, and also the antithesis of an Apple controlled standard.

May I point you at the MFi program? Its a program which prevents some accessories from being used with iOS without registering with (and paying) Apple.

One of the biggest usecases for the 2.5mm jack was the square cc readers. Guess what has to be MFi certified now?

All 4 Apple laptops I've owned in recent years have had significant latency with my Sony WH-1000XM4's too. Like, sometimes over a full second. I have to regularly disconnect and reconnect to address.

And then Apple removed Bluetooth Explorer from Xcode 12, meaning I have no real way to even diagnose that on the newest macOS releases.

Depending on what codec your headphones use when talking to a Mac, a mere second of latency is a good result.

The only thing you can do is use apps like IINA which have delay features to allow you to account for the latency (I needed to use sound delay recently when watching a movie that fell off the back of a truck, even with Airpods).

The future might be brighter, with Apple seemingly designing its own bespoke wireless sound standard to support uncompressed and latency-free headphones.

I guess? But I did not used to suffer these problems, they don't occur on my Windows or mobile devices, and they're temporarily addressed on macOS by reconnecting.

At the risk of being conspiratorial, does this latency exist for Apple bluetooth devices?

There's no conspiracy. Apple has their own proprietary bluetooth chips, the W1, and it pairs better with Airpods than with any other brand's headsets.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/what-is-apple-w1-bluetooth-...

Bluetooth also cannot deliver HD audio and act as a microphone at the same time.

> HD audio

Lossless 96khz/24bit one? It can't do that without microphone either.

But this is like complaining that 'the road does not support two lanes of traffic and traffic both in directions at the same time'.

If that is needed for the situation at hand, like it is with headphones, why would it be unreasonable to complain about a road that doesn't fulfill the basic requirements?

What? However many lanes you put in a road, it'll always be true that you can have more traffic going in one direction if you disallow any in the other.

I hated that my Pixel 3 had no headphone jack, I swore I'd never buy a phone without one, but when my Nexus 5X broke and I needed a phone, I got the Pixel 3. I didn't even realize it didn't have a headphone jack until I got it.

It came with a USB-C->headphone dongle and then I discovered that USB->headphone dongles were cheap, so I bought one for each of the headphones I used regularly, and it was really not a big deal.

But now I've switched almost fully to bluetooth headphones, except for my old expensive Etymotics that I use on airplanes since they are small and easy to pack, and the in-ear style is great at blocking noise.

I remember those. They all broke within a few days of use, and google sent me like 20 of them after 6 months, because they weren't very good at tracking requests.

I'll never get another phone without a headphone jack after that

I have noticed that the main reason my phone screen breaks is due to headphone wires though. It'd be great to have a magnetic equivalent to the wired headphone

They want to get rid of it because the inside of a smartphone is very space constrained and they can use that space for other things.

Considering you can use a lightning or usb c to 3.5mm with a built in DAC that sounds as good or better than the ones they were putting in the phones, the 3.5mm jack was pretty redundant.

I mean, they've had enough space inside to keep it until now...

No, I like this idea.

Strip the phone down to the bare minimum. Obviously they just want me to buy a separate pocket PC instead, and only use the phone for emergency calls and businesses that don't have websites.

Back to the dumb-phone days.

Not sure if you're joking but I bought a media player and a point-and-shoot camera within the past few years. I wanted to reduce the influence of a smartphone on my life.

They're both next level when compared the the capabilities of a smartphone. The camera has Zeiss lenses, has amazing optical zoom, all kinds of manual and automatic modes, and takes far better night shots than any phone. The media player's battery lasts weeks, plays every file type, and has actual hardware playback buttons and a volume knob. Oh, and it drives all kinds of nice headphones perfectly well.

And neither of these devices interrupts me with notifications or demands any amount of my attention.

I don't think I'll get another smartphone until I absolutely have no choice. It's better for my mental health anyway to not have some magic device that I rely on for everything and I can't stop pulling out of my pocket whenever my brain needs stimulation.

> And neither of these devices interrupts me with notifications

Not to take away from your valid experience but my phone doesn't interrupt me with notifications because I turned off everything I am not 100% bothered about (which leaves just a couple of messengers, phone calls, and bank transaction notifications) and all those are silenced 2000-0800 (or during workouts.)

Phones are bigger without the headphone jack though.

Dumb phones had headphone jacks

I'll take the lack of space from 3.5mm jack inside the phone over the headaches and awkwardness of an external device (which now I also have to pay for)!

I know of at least one YouTube channel that added one back into the original iPhone that removed it, so I'm not sure how much "necessity" can explain it away.

Yeah, well when they removed the headphone jack on iPhone 7, which has the same shape and dimensions as iPhone 6, it turned out they just put some piece of plastic in the place where previously the jack was. Youtube channel Strange Parts managed to implement working headphone jack on iphone7:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA

So I call BS on space constrains, I call BS on waterproofing (waterproofed phones with 3.5mm jack exist). Conveniently, when Apple released iPhone 7, they also released 1st gen AirPods :-)

> They want to get rid of it because the inside of a smartphone is very space constrained and they can use that space for other things.

Then stop trying to make paper thin personal devices.

I think the industry is hostage of some "visionaries" thinking hey will eventually make movie-like holo devices with no need for electronics, while the reality of engineering is much more complex and laden with trade-offs.

It's crazy to me that the modern headphone jack has in some form been in use since the 1800s. And now the lack of competition is causing this incredible invention to disappear, in favor of shitty bluetooth buds (with the exception of AirPod Pros which are great).

And Anker P3s, and probably a ton of others.

The vast majority of wired earbuds are so awful they are almost a crime. Passive ones have no cancellation and very few have passive isolation. Even moderate background noise makes them unusable without dangerous sound levels.

Phone earbuds are mostly used on the go. Having a cable is way too much of an inconvenience in the age where Bluetooth exists.

Especially if it reduces the waterproofing or increases cost to add the jack.

I do find it interesting that here, on the techiest, nerdiest forum there is, people are lamenting the loss of a physically large jack. Did you think it would be around for all of time?

If in 5/10/50/∞ years, phones never get smaller than 3.5mm thick, how does this community respond? It's classic 'where's my jetpack?', right? I'd like to think that we all want phones that don't exist other than as a chip in our arm, or as a component of a ring, or as a wafer on our sleeve, or as our glasses, or [whatever other techno nonsense you fancy].

Those of you who want the jack are saying that this is it. For all of time. Three-point-five-mils is as thin as any of our devices can be. It's weird! :-)

I don't want my phone to be thinner. If having a 3.5 mm jack means that I will have headphones that just work without fuss / charging / bluetooth codec ass, and it prevents phone designers from making my phone wafer thin, then I consider that a win-win.

And obviously, I wouldn't be advocating for a 3.5 mm jack in an implantable device. That would be silly. There can be multiple classes of devices, each with different features. For the class of phones that are rectangular objects that live in my pocket, I want a 3.5 mm jack.

I don’t know, but considering that iPhone gained thickness and iPad earned bendgate when they lost the jack, we still have plenty of time until the diameter of the jack is going to be a major concern.

Tbh I’d take a few mm shorter or narrower; phones seem to be much bigger now than they were when they had a headphone jack.

That companies have responded to increasing narrowness by making foldable phones suggests there really isn’t much demand or even usefulness in a razor thin phone.

> I'd like to think that we all want phones that don't exist

Definitely, I begrudge every single moment I am forced to use my phone and intentionally don't bring it with me as often as possible.

> ... other than as a chip in our arm ...

Oh. Count me out.

Actually, while I was a wireless headphone skeptic, I don't feel I'm missing 3.5" audio jack much. There are two reasons for this.

First of all, Apple's own adapter is a brilliant DAC. It's output is really nice, and when I need wired audio, I can get very good sound with it and a couple of nice monitors (RHA MA750i) or high-ish end buds (Sennheiser MM70i).

However, wired headphones are not limitless in life either. My MM70i set is almost unusable because the jack has worn down from so much use, and one channel is not making contact on 8/10 systems I plug it in.

Secondarily, entry level wireless headphones came a very very long way in terms of sound quality and battery life (both per charge and total lifetime terms).

I have two wireless headsets. A Philips SHB 3075 (Made by Gibson Electronics IIRC) and a Sony WH-CH510. Both are entry level systems. Philips should be lasting 8 hours or so per charge, but it lasts at least twice long. I use it every day at office and plug while leaving, and it never told me I need to charge it.

Sony is a completely different beast. I could only use half of its charge if I really try to. They forgot to tell that it needs to use the charge in the battery.

In terms of sound quality, both are excellent for their price points. Philips is not the most detailed, but it's very nicely balanced and non fatiguing. Sony really hits above its price point. It's enjoyable even in focused listening if the source material is mastered with some minimal effort.

I say time to time, but as a person who played in orchestras and an owner of an old school component Hi-Fi system, modern wireless headsets are miracles in sound quality terms.

Apparently matching the amplifier and the driver at the design time has a really big effect than we have thought. Bang Olufsen was right to add ICEPower amplifiers to their speakers and sell them as tuned units. It changes a lot.

I also want to add that Apple's sound dosimeter is a very nice technology which presumably works by getting some metadata from the headphone to calculate noise levels for protecting the hearing, which is extremely underrated.

>However, wired headphones are not limitless in life either. My MM70i set is almost unusable because the jack has worn down from so much use, and one channel is not making contact on 8/10 systems I plug it in.

That's why you buy wired headphones with replaceable cables.

> That's why you buy wired headphones with replaceable cables.

Headphones with replaceable cables don't make sense from a price or size point of view for the most people on the move, incl me.

Getting 10+ years of life from any equipment is generally acceptable esp. when both RHA and Sennheiser systems' size and the abuse they go through is considered.

Using such sets for desktop and studio settings changes the requirements drastically, and both price and size are justifiable in that case.

You don't even need to replace the cable: top-quality replacement 3.5mm plugs cost a few dollars and take maybe 10 minutes to hand-wire.

If only the cables were not actually a couple of hair thick strands for each channel.

I'm handy with soldering otherwise.

It the unfortunate edge case where you aren't even close to the majority that find those things useful enough to keep them.

There is no shortage of people who have spent lots of money on good quality headphones that want to use them though, but that doesn't matter to companies like Google or Samsung or Apple because they don't make or sell those products, instead they want to sell you easy to lose, overpriced, sub-par quality, "they look cool and just work**" buds and the best way to do that is to just kill any other choice. Want big headphones or noise cancelling? Not our problem!

They also finally realized that you can buy a 512GB sd card for like $100 bucks so no one was paying an extra $350 to get 128gb more space, so again, just eliminate the option because they literally can and no one can stop them.

It's fucking bullshit.

People who spend big money on headphones were probably using external DACs anyways, which you can still do just fine.

Not to mention that the 9 dollar lightning or usb c adapters that Apple and google sell sound as good or better than the DACs they were including in their phones.

I think it's less than you think in terms of the overall customer base. Most people are happy with the Bose noise cancelling headphones, or AirPods, or Sennheiser earbuds/headphones. Just look at the highest selling headphones.

I don't think they "finally realised" Apple has always had internal storage. Samsung Android devices have been on both sides of the coin and have backflipped before.

The problem with SD cards, IMO from having worked at a Telco, is that the OS and SD card for the devices doesn't integrate seamlessly for the average end user. What people want is to be able to add an SD card to their device and have a uplift in storage across the entire device. I can't count the amount of times a customer would come in asking why their devices storage didn't increase when they added an SD card, not knowing that they needed to configure the device to take advantage of it or copy their photos across too it. I'm sure times might have changed but that's how it was 5 years ago.

The average and I would say the majority, don't want to deal with buying more storage, they just want the right amount of storage from the get go and smartphone companies know this. I would prefer to buy a 128GB phone than a 32GB phone and have to add an additional 128GB SD card anyway. Also, if you have 512GB of storage filled on a mobile device, surely you have that backed up no? So why not just stream it from the cloud.

> So why not just stream it from the cloud.

Because I don't always have a signal and it consumes more battery.

I have expensive Bose noise cancelling headphones and they are wired and I don't want to rebuy for a new phone. BT and wireless is usually nothing but trouble and crap quality in my experience, so I never would intend to buy wireless if I can help it.

I can understand a Telco pressuring phone makers to do things to reduce their support burden (which is probably also reducing their own support burdens) because of the dumb way SD cards interact with the phone OS, but it's an annoying situation where the people who know what they are doing and have valid use cases are held hostage at the mercy of those who do not. All I hear from people is that they run out of space on their phone, especially on Android which creeps worse than windows did for sucking up space.

If you know how much SD cards cost, then it's very hard to think, hmm yeah, I'd rather spend $300 for an extra 128gb then get 500gb or 1tb for like $100 and I can remove it and add files to it 1000x faster on my computer.

If a feature has always been there and provided value, then removing it to save $0.05 in design costs seems ridiculous unless there are ulterior motives like, we need to sell more expensive phones and/or get these nubs off of our call lines (if you can even get phone support with phone manufacturers).

I know that obviously they don't give a shit about people who know what they are doing, because it's a minuscule part of their market share. It's all about the bundling and upsells. Fuck the entire headphone market if we can get another $100 by selling our buds. Fuck the entire storage market if we can get another $250 with our internal only upgrades. Fuck the consumer, they'll just buy a new phone in 2 years and lose our buds and buy new ones, we can only win here because no one can stop our oligopoly where everyone just copies each other to have "modern", "best-in-class" design choices and features. Teens don't know what good features or quality are, they'll just get their parents to buy them new stuff over and over forever and the parents don't fall for the constant upgrade trap as hard and stick with their S9's with headphone jacks that you just plug in and they work.

headphone jack reduces water proof/resistance ability or so I heard.

There are waterproof jacks. If this was a real issue then they should also remove USB and side buttons and force everyone to use wireless charging.

Pretty sure Apple is on it already.

When air charging is optimized/perfected charging port will be the next to go

No they cancelled their wireless charger

They cancelled one version they couldn’t get to work as they imagined it should have been working. MagSafe is available and working https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MHXH3AM/A/magsafe-charger

Apple and Samsung had waterproof headphone and charging jacks before.

It probably does. Then again, I accidentally tossed my phone in the laundry a few years back and it somehow managed to survive. While it is no longer in daily use, I still keep that decade old device around as a backup and it has outlived several phones since then. Something tells me that the vast majority of phones fail for reasons other than water seeping in through the headphone jack.

I wash my phone's regularly. Lol kind of need to if you drop it in a fresh cow poo which I've definitely done hopping over fences.

Xiaomi phones have had good water resistance for ages. Hell I don't even turn it off. But then again I wash lots of electronics. It's generally fine as long as stuffs not got any active or residual power.

to make it waferproof, you just fill it with some grease

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