Do some research first for your use case, but I suspect one can find one that will work for your machine + headphones.
Soundguys has a review from October up on this topic: https://www.soundguys.com/best-usb-c-headphone-adapter-10130...
It compares favorably against equipment hundreds of dollars more (focus on SINAD & Output Impedance graphs): https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r...
Admittedly this calculus may have shifted in Apple's favor a bit when they rolled out their own silicon.
I admit, I was one of these people, but when you look at incidentals (ironically the DAC such as this thread, but also things like keyboard, calibrated display, the nebulous concept of “build quality”) Apple is comparable in price to contemporaries.
The issue is that Apple computers are built like higher end business laptops, and people dont typically buy those: they look at the spec sheet and try to buy the best bang for the buck which makes all of the quality run out the door.
Apples lowest end machines generally are priced cheaper than equivalent machines, but Apple price segments (read: gouges) on upgrades.
A high end Macbook pro 14” and a Dell XPS (55xx) are comparable in price.
(I never had a charger or touchscreen break on me before, nor a battery wear so fast, so combined with the unusually low use, I'm pretty sure it's not my particular usage pattern that caused them to break way before due.)
Credits where they're due, though: it had a headphone jack and I loved the earphones that came with it! But what a piece of trash otherwise.
I'm sure there's good apple phones out there and our resident apple fanboy assured me I had an outlier, but I can attest that apple does in fact sell you garbage and not all the issues are hardware
If we look at the low-end, it is much worse: the cheapest Macbook Pro ($1600) gets 12CPUMark/$, while the Dell Inspiron 15 3535 ($420) gets 45CPUMark/$.
I know there's much more to laptops than their CPUs, but I think my point is still valid.
But really what I don't understand is how Apple can't just add an option to turn off the damn accessibility options entirely. Why does dirt or temporary bad connections cause this problem at all? They could just let you turn off the setting that it triggers so that it really doesn't matter. The fact that they don't care enough to do that tells me enough of how much they care about making their headphone adapter a good product. I never used to have to worry about issues like this with a regular headphone jack, but I certainly do with Apple's adapter. It's simply a poor product.
> There is absolutely no reason at all to pay more for a USB DAC, at least when it comes to pure sound quality with headphones.
It does mention the possible desire for more features, of course. And it's possibly worth mentioning the power output is half of what you get from other DACs, but you should consider whether that means anything to your setup. I have a pair of Hifiman Edition XS connected to a Schiit Magni and the Apple USB C DAC, and I never put the Schiit volume above about 30%.
(As to the amp: I do hear a bit of an improvement connected to the amp vs just the DAC. It's not huge, though; mainly I like having a physical volume knob.)
1: https://www.head-fi.org/showcase/apple-usb-c-to-3-5-mm-headp...
Although I must admit I did not expect the Apple USB-C to 3.5mm adapter to be so affordable. I don't have any Apple devices but I wonder if will work with Android/Linux.