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Comment by jszymborski | Hacker News Reader

> Headphone jacks were a major wear item on older smartphones

I've had the area around jacks get scratched over the years, but I've never had them fail due to mechanical wear. Is this common for others?

I've certainly had the micro and mini USB ports fail on me over the years though.

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I think it varies a lot from product to product, and much of it is the mechanical design of the phone housing, and the durability of the jack they selected. Plus it’s really easy to accidentally put a lot of mechanical strain on it when the cable gets tugged.

MiniUSB was a busted connector design from the start, which is why the industry moved to Micro USB so quickly. Many MiniUSB receptacles in the wild were failing after thousands or even hundreds(!) of insertions.

It was a constant problem in my PC & Android days. They’d stop making good contact before long. Sometimes, they never would.

Not a problem (like, never) once I switched to Apple… but then they removed the jacks.

I haven't had a single headphone jack fail since my 2nd gen. original iPod (and I'm an avid headphone user). It had this special variant with a remote connection in an outer ring around the headphone jack, resulting in a weak plastic ring which broke a bit too easily from wear if you omitted the wired remote, and plugged your headphones straight into it.

But as others have mentioned, I too have had quite a few Micro-USB and USB-C connectors fail over the years. But almost never the trusty old and dearly missed minijack.

For me the Jack plug from the headphone would always break. Could repair it a couple of times with my own clunky soldering work, but eventually would just wear out too much and I would buy a new headphone. Since wireless I haven't looked back.

Yeah, never had headphone jack issues, it was always the USB port, including with type C now. Sounds like a ridiculous assertion to me, but maybe I use my phone differently.

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