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Comment by stouset | Hacker News Reader

I'm reminded of a quote: "the best camera is the one you have on you." People ditched their digital cameras en masse when smartphones became popular. Not because the smartphone cameras were better, but because they were convenient.

The market has spoken. People drastically prefer the convenience of Bluetooth over the quality that comes along with having to constantly untangle wires or having audio cut in and out from failing wires.

On top of that, universal adoption of noise cancellation has resulted in dramatically better quality in practice than what people were using in 2005. Yes, wired headphones with noise cancellation are even better, but not to a point that people are willing to sacrifice the convenience of going wireless.

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> People ditched their digital cameras en masse when smartphones became popular. Not because the smartphone cameras were better, but because they were convenient.

The early 00's transition from CRT to LCD monitors was similar. The early desktop LCD panels were expensive, had worse refresh rates, worse contrast, and worse colour rendering. To this day, even very good modern displays struggle to match CRT motion rendering.

But LCDs are so much thinner and lighter, and that was enough to overcome the disadvantages.

CRTs were also small at any reasonable price.

A 20" viewable area, 1920 x 1440 CRT in the late 1990s? $800 [1] and that was the king of monitors.

A 22", 1920 x 1080 flat screen today? $65 [2] and considered the most basic, mundane screen out there.

And inflation-adjusted? That $800 monitor was $1500 in today's money.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/comparison,497.html [2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CVM2GJCN

Ha, my mid 90s 21" Nanao CRT cost more than my used car was worth. I went on to get some high-end CRTs with Trinitron tubes after that at work.

But, as soon as I could get an LCD with DVI-D input, I never wanted to go back to a CRT. I just got whatever high resolution Dell LCD monitors I could find. I was much happier with perfect pixel addressing and zero bleed for rendering my text terminals and source code. I didn't care about color rendition and hardly cared about ghosting from scrolling.

There’s also the depth. A crt monitor would have a depth at least equal to the diagonal measurement which meant a lot of desk space lost to the monitor. On the other hand that also meant some prime cat nesting space that was lost with the lcd transition.

I think this is a great explanation. To add to it, I believe there is something durability too. My basic Jabra wireless earbuds from 2020 are just now getting faulty (just battery stuff). In a similar time period from 2010 and 2015 I went through at least 6 pairs of wired headphones or earbuds, the jacks would fail or the wires would just stop working.

> I'm reminded of a quote: "the best camera is the one you have on you."

Yeah, I think about that often when deciding on what to buy. It's often "what would I actually use" rather than "have on me".

For example, a corded vacuum is better on every metric than a cordless, but my house will be cleaner with a cordless because I'll actually use it.

Or, I really wanted a fully analog hi-fi amp, but realistically I knew I'd use it a lot more if it has bluetooth and airplay built-in and I can control it remotely.

And obviously airpods: I much prefer sound from headphones, but I just wouldn't take them with me most of the time whereas my airpods live on my keyring.

Yes, but my bluetooth headphones are not used often and are usually not charged and often lost.

Err, phones removed the headphone port, largely to sell more accessories.

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