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Comment by gopalv | Hacker News Reader

> They're often the ones holding the gun.

Apple customers historically are often the most accepting of new things, even if that means change that involves spending more money, because Apple will cover the other end of change well (& expand a little that way).

The 3.5mm jack loss is tolerated because of airpods.

I'm old enough to remember the furor caused by Apple taking the 3.5 floppy drive when every publisher used Apple hardware for QuarkExpress & everything Adobe, replaced with this new-fangled usb thing.

The crucial thing over there was that Apple didn't bring in their own USB drive thing, but instead let IOMega try to deliver it & it went poorly for Apple customers who had big data swaps between them & others (DTP shops, magazine layouts, Photoshop artwork etc).

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Bluetooth earbuds are just not a substitute for wired heaphones. They could have supported both without compromising either but instead they started a trend of “we too have expensive-for-the-sound-quality branded earbuds” trend who’s two-year lifespan with little-to-no repairability will just be e-waste in the landfill. Thanks Apple.

Hilariously, this includes the everyone's favorite Fairphone 4 which did away with the 3.5mm jack marketed with sustainability despite the waste these earbuds produce compared to a good pair of wired IEMs with detachable cable that can last a decade. Likely users had a pair of fine headphones and felt compelled to consume and buy a new pair of earbuds just to overcome the hassle of losing dongles or having to choose between charging or audio.

> They could have supported both without compromising either

I find this a little hard to believe. If there really are no compromises to continuing to support the 3.5mm jack, then I would expect other phone manufacturers to continue support on their flagship devices, and hammer Apple for removing it.

I think in reality, mobile devices are so small, that having a single purpose port just doesn’t make sense. The 3.5mm port is larger in volume than a USB-C port, and USB-C is quite capable of carrying analog audio. I don’t see why any manufacturer would continue paying the cost of a 3.5mm port, when it’s so trivially rolled into other existing ports on the device.

I also suspect that the current domination of wireless headphone would have occurred even if the 3.5mm jack had stayed. After all it’s trivially easy to adapt a pair of wired headphones for a USB-C port or lightning port, and yet people still choose wireless headphones.

I don't disagree with your arguments but its hard not to point out the obvious conflict of interest with companies dropping the headphone jack while selling their own wireless headphones as the solution, both to the lack of headphone jack and to the fear of technical issues that BT headphones had at the time. I don't think we can really use the removal as evidence on its own when Apple, Samsung, Google, Xiaomi, Oppo, etc. all got a jump on a multi-billion dollar market because of their position as a device OEM.

The only real exceptions are Asus and Sony who are both targeting niche buyers with most of their phone offerings.

And if I can't find a feature phone soon that actually meets my needs, I'll be looking at picking up a last gen Asus or Sony phone when a new one drops to replace my aging/security-updates-no-longer-coming device. KaiOS 3.x phones are only in the US and aren't developer-friendly models. I'd love to see Linux phones take off, but having toyed around with Ubuntu Touch and postmarketOS, it's not really daily-drivable stuff that you could rely on. Luckily it seems OmniROM are consistently pumping out microG-supported options for Zenfones--whereas Sony the custom ROM scene appears weak likely due to the cost of the devices.

3.5mm audio jack is ubiquitous and universal--just like USB--and is audio is a very common, if not the most common, peripheral. Manufactures use port loss opportunity to try to push to you buy wireless new earbuds or a new wireless charging setup (that doesn't compete on wired charging speed or ubiquity). Consumers are probably choosing wireless earbuds though because the dongle adds weight and inconvenience to what would otherwise be a standard audio port popular for decades--and many low-to-mid-end and feature phones still have the port because the target demographics aren't ones that are going to just go out and buy all new gear just to support the lifestyle a phone is pushing on them; consumers certainly aren't choosing wireless for their price, sound quality, or build quality, or repairability in comparison to wired options.

I could get on board with the idea iff, phone manufactures had dual USB-C jacks (ideally one at the bottom and one at the side and this could make it easier to consume landscape content like movies/games). Right now you have to choose between audio or power delivery with one port (or have a massive dongle that's half the size of the phone).

If nothing else, they should return the headphone jack on their plus-size phones (& iPads, if they've also dropped it). I can buy needing the room for the battery on the normal-size and mini phones, but not the plus models.

1.44 MB 3.5" floppy drives were becoming problematically small in the early 1990s, long before apple dropped the floppy drive from the iMac in 1998.

Iomega's Zip and Jaz drives came out in the 1994 and 1995 and were pretty popular for a while until CD-R and CD-RW drives became cheap and reliable enough in the late 1990s.

Perhaps the DTP shops were complaining about the iMac dropping the SCSI port which all Macs had had up to that point for USB, obsoleting their existing external SCSI peripherals - scanners as well as various external drives.

You have to remember that this was pre-iPod — Apple did not have infinite money at that time; it had been not quite two years since it was nearly bankrupt. They really had to be careful with resources. Having third parties provide all of the interesting external peripherals might have been a simple necessity.

Nah, Steve was smarter than that. First, removing the floppy bought Apple millions of dollars worth of publicity - it seemed scandalous and people still remember it 25 years later just like he somehow got away with using public domain images of Ghandi and Martin Luther King to hawk consumer electronics. It was as if Albert Einstein personally thought you should really buy an iPod.

Second, as with all of Apple products, aesthetics concerns were more important than functionality. If you've ever dealt with that original iMac, it's a tight fit. The design ratios would be off with a floppy so it had to go.

Now I wish it didn't also have a bios battery that would freaking explode at about the 10 year mark, splattering battery acid everywhere and destroying the hardware but that's part of the long tradition of Apple's occasional exploding devices.

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