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Comment by petsfed | Hacker News Reader

Counterpoint:

The material and monetary cost of the number of wired headphones I've destroyed in the 6 years before I got wireless head phones (because there was no realistic way to stow the cabling for the activity I was involved in) probably approaches the cost of the 2 pairs of wireless headphones I've owned in the last 6 years.

I don't think they cut the headphone jack just to sell these headphones. While it is true that you can make a headphone jack as water-resistant as the rest of the phone, every hole you put in the phone adds to the design and assembly cost to maintain the same IP rating. And each hole significantly adds to the complexity of repairing that phone in such a way that it maintains that IP rating after the repair.

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Counterpoint:

I've lost either the earbuds or case of so many wireless earbuds during the past 4 years that I could have afforded 2-3 much higher quality wired earbuds.

do you also lose phones themselves? keys? pens?

I probably outed myself as an old with the latter question ;)

It's way easier for me to lose something the size and weight of a nickel than a phone. Not to mention ear buds do on occasion come lose and fall. With wired headphones, they dangle, but wireless buds fall into all manner of nooks, drains, and bottomless caverns.

If my phone hung off my ears and weighed so little that I could miss it, then I would be very nervous about it.

Phones: if not for Find My, oh god yes.

Keys: All the time. Now I have a tile on them.

Pens: lol yes, it’s why I’ve never tried to get into very-nice pens.

I’d have lost my AirPods several times without find my. I’m certain I’d not have managed to keep both buds more than a couple months if I weren’t very diligent about putting them back in the case when I’m not actively using them.

Same. I've been using a tiny pair of wireless headphones for ~5 years. If anything were to break, it is fairly easy to order replacements on Ebay which causes nothing new to be manufactured.

A set of small wireless headphones uses far less material than a large pair of wired headphones. Not saying it is a direct replacement, just that everything has some environmental impact, and fretting over one tiny device misses the forest for the trees.

Wait, can you not just replace the wire?

Don't get me wrong the replacement cables can often run like $50 but still, it's not exactly breaking the headphone

I love my wxm4s but I'm on my third pair due to battery life. Wish they had user replaceable batteries... Heck at least for the case

people seem to forget that having a headphone jack doesn't preclude one from using wireless earbuds. if you grind thru many wired earphones for some reason, great, you do you. for others, they will hang onto it much longer and it will be more sustainable and cheaper.

And I'm not speaking to the fact that you can use wireless headphones with a phone with a 3.5mm jack.

I'm saying that for the objectives Fair set out for themselves, dropping the headphone jack is low-hanging fruit. Its one more piece that fails, it fails as a consequence of normal use (there's no way to baby the headphone jack, or the power jack, in such a way that it doesn't eventually fail from repeated usage. Indeed, they're explicitly rated for number of cycles (typically around 5000 for a headphone jack, which is consistent with daily usage for 3 years, well below their 5 year warranty. By comparison, I'm seeing 20k cycles for a cheap usb-c port, which is a lot more defensible for a 5 year warranty)), and it makes maintaining their IP rating after a repair much harder (doubly so, given that they want users to be able to repair their phones).

All for a feature that, given the price point, won't even be used by the majority of users.

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