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Comment by brokenmachine | Hacker News Reader

I believe that it should be obvious that the headphone jack was removed purely as a self-serving business decision because Apple wanted to sell more overpriced accessories, and not because customers didn't want it.

I'd also like to make the comment that almost all high-quality headphones are made for analog jacks.

So as a person who values high-quality audio, I am not interested in wireless headphones of any kind, cheap shitty USBC headphones, or needing to use an ugly inconvenient dongle to use my good headphones.

Lucky for me I'm not an Apple customer anyway for a myriad of reasons, but I'd argue there are no good alternatives for what would be my use case.

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The ATH-M50xSTS StreamSet is fantastic. And it works perfectly via USB-C.

[1] https://www.audio-technica.com/en-us/ath-m50xsts

That's why I specified cheap shitty USBC headphones.

I also note that those need a large ugly USBA to USBC adapter.

If I'm honest, the design of those also doesn't personally appeal to me, and I've tried AT headphones before and I didn't find them comfortable and didn't like the sound. For phone use I'd be looking for IEMs and not over the ear models too.

I am aware that there are good USBC headphones out there, but the available options are so much fewer than analog headphones.

Also, I already have good analog headphones.

If you don't want cheap, shitty USB-C headphones... don't get them? I really don't get your point.

3.5mm to USB-C adapters are tiny and can include a much higher quality DAC than most phones reasonably will. Into those, you can then plug any headphone your heart or ears desire.

Audiophiles are such a niche market all things considered, and on top of that they seem to prefer their own DACs and/or headphone pre-amplifiers anyway – why waste space and money for a headphone jack that most users wouldn't use, and the ones that do would augment with external dongles anyway?

And for users that just don't want to deal with charging and pairing Bluetooth headphones, cheap headphones and adapters do just fine as well.

Now I need to buy three dongles, one for my car, one for home, and one for my go-bag, and do a silly scramble when I misplace the tiny. Plus buy USB-C replacements now that Lightning is dead. The dongle is also ugly (doesn’t match my phone or earphones) and easily broken, with an incredibly thin wire.

It’s just a worse situation all around. The DAC and amp built into the iPhone previously was of similar quality. Now life - especially working with audio gear - is more complicated and annoying, so that Tim could sell more e-waste.

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