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Comment by justin_oaks | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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?

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