Comment by blacklight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blacklight | Hacker News Reader

Good, and I'll keep avoiding phones that ditch the audio jack.

And let me be clear - the 3.5mm jack is far from being the perfect way of transmitting and sending audio. It's a vestige from an analog world where you have to take impedence and resistance of the load into account, and I don't use it much myself.

But the use-case where you have to stream music from your phone and you have just a humble set of speakers, an amplifier or some old headphones isn't that uncommon - especially for musicians like me: what happens when you're in a studio with your band, you want to play an mp3 on your phone, but you have no way of plugging your phone to the mixer or the amp?

Pretending that such use-cases don't exist, and force all the users to figure out an alternative, is an act of sheer arrogance on the producers' side. And such arrogance isn't even justified by the claim of water resistance: it's technically possible today to have an audio jack port AND be waterproof.

"especially for musicians like me: what happens when you're in a studio with your band, you want to play an mp3 on your phone, but you have no way of plugging your phone to the mixer or the amp?"

Is this common? what percent of the population would you estimate has this issue?

You build devices for the masses, not the very rare "use cases".

So, buy a usbc to 3.5 dongle. Problem solved.

I've been using a dongle in my car(an older model with no bluetooth), and it is quickly wearing out my phones usb port. Keeps falling out. The headphone jack was a lot more resilient.

Seems like your phone's manufacturer cheaped out on the port. I have an iPad Pro whose usb-c port still feels rock solid after 2.5 years.

Problem patched, more or less: you can easily forget or loose the dongle, and you’ve lost the ability to charge your phone at the same time. It still feels like a step back in functionality.

I've tried that, but it's not quite as convenient as I'd like. It sticks out in ways that make the phone harder to carry around. It doesn't fit in some of the bags I use to carry it, for example.

That's a small inconvenience, of course, but we're talking about a device that's with me all the time, and small annoyances add up.

Don't you have to, ya know, store your headphones somewhere? Keep the dongle on your headphone cord

No. I listen to music via headphones while falling asleep, and require my phone to charge at the same time. The dongles available are complete garbage: they only work with the connectors in certain orientations and sometimes just don't work outright. Designers that remove useful features without a consistently working replacement are selfish assholes and should be fired.

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