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Comment by epa | Hacker News Reader

Move on, wireless is better. They have usb-c adapters as well.

Yeah OK, let me know when Bluetooth latency is the same as a physical wire connection. Or when a good Bluetooth pair costs the same as a good wired pair.

Anecdotal: I'm not a power-user, but I never really had bluetooth problems (latency, connectivity etc) between my phone and bluetooth devices.

I do however have the rare bluetooth connectivity problems with laptops, even the newer ones, but that could be a problem with Linux.

Also, I've accidentally damaged my wired headphones before by walking around and the wires getting hooked onto something.

Besides, I find it convenient to keep my phone in one place and walk around while making phone calls, or listening to stuff. Like, cleaning my house while listening to stuff.

I agree that it would be better to have both BT and a headphone jack.

Every time I run with Bluetooth headphones, the connection will drop out for a few seconds whenever a certain type of car/bus/ambulance goes by. Certain traffic lights seem to set it off too. Really irritating.

I'll take wired over wireless any day of the week.

This. I constantly struggle with connectivity. It's ridiculous how amateur the connectivity area is. I'm sure things will.be different if they get better at it.

This may be "adaptive audio" in action. You may experience similar with babies crying.

A few higher-end commercial headphones now support Bluetooth AptX LL (low latency).

Probably won't sway you, but it exists.

- Still sounds like garbage when side-by-side compared to by ATH-AD700X's, or ATH-MSR7NC's though.

- Still more irritating to have to keep charged rather than just plug in. Still more irritating to switch back and forth between my phone and my laptop and my desktop though.

- Still more irritating (or even impossible) to share my single audio source with someone else's headphones though.

- Still more irritating to pipe into the mixer and play back over big speakers though.

I had a phone with only USB-C for a while. Sure, dongle's exist. They also get buggy and drop out occasionally, since they've got firmware. They also make it challenging to charge and listen simultaneously. They also get lost easily.

There's a lot to recommend a simple 3-wire electrical connection with a standard plug. I don't begrudge people who want to use bluetooth at all, we can all coexist, just keep the headphone jack available so we can. :-)

BlueTooth is basically a necessity in a modern phone for many reasons, not just headphones: fitness trackers, automotive system integration, etc. all use BT. And BT doesn't need any physical space on the edge of the device.

But yeah, the venerable 3.5mm headphone jack is simple and effective and doesn't have many of the problems that plague wireless headphones.

Any good phone should have both.

Bluetooth latency has never been low enough for music production in my use case

But then you can't charge with the USB-C port and listen to headphones at the same time.

Use a wireless charging setup.

It has been standard on most flagship phones for a few years now.

I rarely (if ever) use the port to charge my devices anymore. They just look messy, wear out and take more time to plug in and un plug.

You probably don’t carry a wireless charger with you on the go, which is incidentally when you’re most likely to need this. You’re not going to wirelessly charge your phone while you watch a movie on a flight or a train, but you sure do want to charge it so you have power left at your destination.

If that's something that's important to you, you can:

https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Wireless-PowerCore-Portable-Com...

And you then need to make sure that it doesn’t get jostled around enough to disconnect from the phone on your flight or train.

I’d rather just plug a cable in.

Wireless charging is nice but has a few problems. A cable charges my phone ~3x faster, generates less heat, and wastes less electricity. On the go, a USB-C cable is also more useful than a wireless charger.

>A cable charges my phone ~3x faster

You need a faster wireless charger. The high-power ones aren't as slow as this.

But still, you're right: wires are more efficient and faster. And the big factor is that no one brings a wireless charger traveling with them. A cable is much smaller and lighter, and the wireless charger still needs the cable and power adapter anyway.

Or use a USB-C headphone adapter that allows charging too. There are lots available.

When I first got a phone without a headphone jack, I bought one such dongle. It didn't work. My two subsequent phones have had headphone jacks, so I'm not going to worry about this problem again for a while, but at the time at least it was certainly not as simple as buying a dongle and knowing it would work.

Every answer here is "buy this other thing, no wait, that may not work for your use case, buy this other thing to lug around or that makes your laptop effectively a desktop".

This is strictly worse than the previous status quo.

This is such a weird complaint.

Firstly, yes, you can can get USB-C to headphone adaptors that allow charging[1]

Secondly, the scenarios where this is an issue are combinations of edge cases. You have to choose not to use wireless headphones, not have a wireless charger AND for some reason be unable to spare the 30 minutes to do a rapid boost charge.

If that's really a problem then by all means get the charger that allows both.

[1] eg, first result: https://www.amazon.com.au/UGREEN-Headphone-Adapter-Charging-...

These are a bunch of solutions with their own pluses, minuses, and degree of knowledge that you have to have to even be aware of, in addition to seperate products that you have to purchase - in order to fix a problem that didn't exist before. It's very weird to not understand that people don't want this in their lives in return for little or no benefit.

But there is a big benefit! Less connectors save costs and reduce wiring in the phone allowing manufactures to make it smaller.

For most people who prefer wireless (I don't think anyone actually likes wires) this is a pretty reasonable compromise.

I prefer wires to wireless in pretty much every situation except for chargers.

- ethernet vs wifi? ethernet wins hands down

- headphones? corded wins hands down

Honestly, even for chargers, I still use a wired one anywhere except my home office, because it would be annoying to carry a wireless charge around.

I'd say you prefer the experience you get with wires, not the wires themselves.

That's a reasonable position to take.

>You have to choose not to use wireless headphones, not have a wireless charger AND for some reason be unable to spare the 30 minutes to do a rapid boost charge.

Yeah, this sounds like me when I've traveling anywhere, whether it's across the world or just into town. I'm not going to haul around a wireless charger in my backpack, and I don't have 30 minutes to sit around waiting for a charge. And that's exactly the time I want to have headphones available, not when I'm sitting at home where I might have a wireless charger handy. At home, I just use speakers connected to my computer or my home-theater setup. Why would I use headphones at home?

So, pretty much every time I get in someone else's car for a trip longer than "tot he store" and want to listen to something on my phone.

Either their car has a 3.5mm input jack, in which case they probably already have a 3.5mm male to male cable (unless you carry that too?) with an adapter or 3.5mm to adapter cable or they don't have the jack and you just pair with their car bluetooth.

I have the male to male cable; though I keep one in my wife's car, too. As for pairing with the bluetooth

1. In the cases I'm talking about, I want to use headphones + a USB-C charger.

2. I don't like bluetooth for sound; it's inferior in every single case I've tried.

3. I have yet to be able to configure things so bluetooth is used for media/music, but not for phone calls. And I don't want to use the car/speakerphone for phone calls when I'm in someone else's car.

Look, I get it.. with _enough_ adapters and random other things, I can jump through a dozen different hoops in order to get music out of phone. But life would be a lot simpler and easier if I just had a headphone jack. Only they removed it, and now I'm stuck with an objectively [1] worse experience.

[1] Yes, objectively; because prior to that I had both bluetooth AND a headphone jack. So there's no positive aspect of removing the jack. It is objectively worse to not have it.

So you are prepared to carry a male-to-male cable around for this one particular case but not prepared to carry a much smaller USB-C to headphone adapter which literally solves every single problem you have listed in this entire thread?

I just don't understand the reasoning.

> So there's no positive aspect of removing the jack. It is objectively worse to not have it

The benefits of removing the jack form the phone are clear: less connectors mean simpler and cheaper manufacture (so cheaper devices) and larger batteries/smaller phones.

Any cost saving from reducing connectors haven’t reached consumers at all it seems, but that’s a different conversation I suppose.

For who don't satisfied with Bluetooth audio quality, I wonder is it fine to use internal DAC on a Phone rather than good quality external DAC via USB-C.

It's kind of amazing that you're clever enough to generate a complete decision tree for all the problems and solutions, and yet still have a blind spot for what the problem is, despite six people trying to explain it.

My point is that these "no I need a headphone jack" issues all take a complex decision tree to get to.

They are all things like "oh I have to ride in my friends car who has a 3.5mm input jack but doesn't have bluetooth input and also only has the cable without an adapter".

There's another comment about how the latency on bluetooth is bad, and this is a problem because they are a music producer who presumably produces on their mobile phone. Again, it's such a small subset and the fact it is solved perfectly with a $10 adapter makes me think the complaints are way overblown.

Wireless is worse in every way imaginable. Worse power use, worse quality, worse latency, much worse convenience (now you have to charge the headphones, too).

And I assume you type this on device connected to Ethernet, right? And no, Bluetooth headphones are convenient, how often do you think you need to charge them?

Of course I am connected to Ethernet, what kind of question is that?

Having headphones that turn out to be uncharged, or undercharged, when I try to use them even once is completely unacceptable. For what benefit, saving myself the 2 seconds of plugging a cable in?

Fuck everything about Bluetooth headphones.

My wireless headphones were working great until about two weeks ago. Now when I try to connect to them via Bluetooth, the connection fails, every time, due to an "unknown problem" and I should "try again later". Fortunately the detachable 3.5mm jack still works.

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