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Comment by aredox | Hacker News Reader

Rose-tinted glasses strike again...

The audio chips in phones were woeful. Not every headphones could be driven by them. There was a whole cottage industry of DAC that you had to plug between your phone and your headset.

As a very deep hole, the jack was also a dust/lint catcher, almost impossible to clean. And because of its length, it had a lot of leverage on the board, requiring fairly heavy-duty soldering to avoid damaging the board.

And the first reason the jack went out is not thinness but water resistance.

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You aren't speaking to infants, we were all alive when the only real choice was wired headphones, and plenty of people still use wired headphones now.

I think it was wonderful when headphones always worked, usually sounded fine (sometimes magnificent), and were available for $10.

> There was a whole cottage industry of DAC that you had to plug between your phone and your headset.

If there was, it was minuscule. I've never heard of people doing that in the wild.

> As a very deep hole, the jack was also a dust/lint catcher, almost impossible to clean.

Back then, the products were expected to be used long enough for this to become a problem. After a decade, I bet some of those holes were pretty dirty, although who would know. Modern portable tech does not have the disadvantage of durability.

> because of its length, it had a lot of leverage on the board, requiring fairly heavy-duty soldering to avoid damaging the board.

True. Can't deny this.

>>because of its length, it had a lot of leverage on the board, requiring fairly heavy-duty soldering to avoid damaging the board.

Strawman?

I doubt many people even thought about it. For them, bluetooth was available. Now it is almost the only option.

Z stack strength and rigidity is a huge driver because it reduces charge back. Margins are super tight for a lot of OEMs and the PMs eliminate any non-profit features.

Off the top of my head, there are savings in: Pick and place Stack Assembly Testing Improved phones/hour and therefore shorter/cheaper factory runs Packaging, especially if you eliminate the shitty wired earpieces in the box Less weight/volume and cheaper shipping Reduced warranty / chargeback because things that don’t exist can’t fail

All of these savings are small. But remember that the goal is to make/sell 500K+ units. And, this is an industry where the bean counters will kill their mothers to shave a penny off of the BOM.

So, yeah, for the OEM eliminating headphone jacks is a complete no brainer.

Everything you said is true. But the cheapest phones still have the 3.5mm jack. People on a budget use wired earphones because they are harder to lose, price and even fashion (color n stuff)

Flagship phones on the other hand are sold to another population who seems happy to spend more money for a small inconvenience.

It’s always been a problem for any higher impedance headphones. Being able to drive 300 or 600 ohm headphones is quite difficult, and many headphone drivers are not capable of doing it at sufficient volume. Not technically hard, mind you, just costs extra money that most don’t want to spend.

Yeah but if you're buying those headphones you know you need an amp.

I do wonder how hard/expensive it would be to offer this as a configuration option though. Like if your favorite set is 300 ohms you could just configure your phone with an amp powerful enough to drive them. Or, maybe whatever they do in the MBPs to detect high impedance headphones would also work. I'm obviously out of my depth here.

It’s not complicated, it’s just a more powerful amplifier which costs more money, area, etc. it’s not in most phones because very few people have 300 ohm headphones. That’s the only reason.

The water resistance myth strikes again.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S8

Water resistance + 3.5mm jack + sdcard tray

We long ago got to the point where audio circuits in phones were perfectly fine for typical headphones. Especially considering the circuitry was mostly built into the SoCs. Good audio circuitry that is completely transparent is easy to design and been known for decades.

I had multiple phones with IPx7/8 water resistance and a headphone jack (e.g. LG G6 and Samsung S10) that is a bullshit excuse.

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