4 ms·

Why is it not time yet? When I lost my Pixel on a trip, I switched to an iPhone 7 + airpods and it's been great. I don't want to go back to wired headphones. Ap

Why is it not time yet? When I lost my Pixel on a trip, I switched to an iPhone 7 + airpods and it's been great. I don't want to go back to wired headphones. Apple certainly seems to have nailed it. I can't imagine Google + HTC can't too.

eropple 9y ago
It's great that they work well for you, but AirPods and the like don't work well for me at all. The audio quality drop is noticeable to me; interference is a perpetual problem even when I'm just walking down the street or walking through my apartment. Bluetooth on both Android and iOS is clunky and annoying (and it's not totally their fault, the devices and the protocol have something to say about that) that the physical act of jacking headphones into a device makes unambiguous and easy. I very much want to be able to take the headphones I use on my computer and just go rather than play the pairing/reconnect dance or whatever. If I don't care about what I'm listening to that much (podcasts etc.), wireless headphones are fine, don't get me wrong, but the usability across-the-board still sucks, while not in any way or at any level improving the experience for me. It is a strictly worse experience.
- kpxxx3 9y ago
  > The audio quality drop is noticeable to me. I'm not going to get into an audiophile/golden ear flamewar, but I am always skeptical of this claim. Yes, SBC is not the world's best, but it supports bitrates upto 500 kbit/s. I'm not going to claim it is completely transparent, but 9 times out of 10 it is being used with shitty bluetooth headphones (where the alternative is shitty wired headphones)... at that point the quality of the headphones (wired or not) has far more to do with the audio quality than anything. And yes, I doubt most people will notice an audio quality drop in a pair of high quality Sennheisers going from wired to SBC (there isn't convincing evidence that aptX is much better than SBC). I wouldn't be too surprised about a conflicting experimental result, but skeptical for now. Anyway, most people are not hooking up high quality headphones to their phone, or they are purposefully using phones tuned for a particular lo-fi response (Beats)... who cares about whatever SBC does at 350 kbit/s at that point. Edit: And walking down the street is hardly a hi-fi listening environment.
  - eropple 9y ago
    The audio quality issue is not due to encoding. It's due to garbling and interference from, you know, the two feet from my pocket to my headphones while sitting at home in my apartment. This has happened in every apartment I've lived in since getting Bluetooth headphones. It happened in my parents' house with a quarter mile to any neighbors. It happens when walking down the street. It happens at the gym. It happens at the office. In an optimum environment it's fine. In the real world, having my headphones make farty noises in my ears two or three times in a ten-minute walk is silly and we live in the future and it should be better than that.
    - lambda_lover 9y ago
      I ride the subway in NYC every day, and this is especially bad on my commute. The interference is absolutely unacceptable, and has convinced me that bluetooth is not ready at all for my use case.
  - smileysteve 9y ago
    The airpods themselves, sold as a premium experience, lack the additional comfort and noise isolation of quality headphones. The mere prevalence of people enjoying the stock iphone, ipod, cheap airline, and wireless headphones -- versus isolation quality you can get in a $20 pair of sony's suggests I'm a minority when it comes to audio quality.
  - hajile 9y ago
    The issue has nothing to do with bitrate. The first issue is that the signal cuts out randomly due to interference. The second is that you have to convert the signal to analog and DAC quality matters. To increase battery life, you have to go with more simplistic conversion which reduces quality. To reduce the cost of 2 DACs (one per ear) you have to use worse hardware. The net result is that the onboard DAC is basically guaranteed to be better and the amount of interference over wired headphones will be minimal.
mattnewton 9y ago
I’m chaffing at the naked push towards buying apple’s expensive wireless earbuds here. I buy apple because they are the best phone out there, but lately I have been very frustrated with headphone dongles and looking elsewhere. I don’t want to buy more apple hardware to solve a problem apple created, and my other Bluetooth headphones are a nightmare to keep paired and charged.
technojunkie 9y ago
Battery life. I cannot even use bluetooth headphones for a full workday before they die.
tstrimple 9y ago
You're really asking why overpriced wireless devices with mediocre to atrocious battery life and substandard audio quality are not a sufficient replacement for devices you can literally buy in any convenience store around the world for tens of dollars? There is room for a headphone jack in these phones (video below). The only reason they removed them when they did is to push accessory sales. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA
- kpxxx3 9y ago
  > substandard audio quality > literally buy in any convenience store around the world A substantial drop in audio quality is most likely completely psychological (not saying it isn't a real problem for some). But wired convenience store headphones typically are not great sound quality wise, the SBC codec of bluetooth likely has very little to do with sound quality at that point. Maybe, if you're comparing actually good monitors. But to bitch about bluetooth sound quality when comparing to typical cheap earbuds is a bit silly.
- threeseed 9y ago
  > The only reason they removed them when they did is to push accessory sales This is baseless and ridiculous. They did it because people are expecting more out of their phones e.g. better cameras, better screen, battery life, TouchID, FaceID all whilst demanding the same thickness. Something has to give. First it was the 30-pin adapter, now it's headphone, next will be SIM. And Apple makes so little from their accessory sales compared to everything else they do so it is illogical they would intentionally cripple their flagship device to make a few hundred million.
  - tstrimple 9y ago
    > They did it because people are expecting more out of their phones e.g. better cameras, better screen, battery life, TouchID, FaceID all whilst demanding the same thickness. Something has to give. First it was the 30-pin adapter, now it's headphone, next will be SIM. Way to completely ignore the fact that there is room for a headphone jack in the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 8. It was not removed in order to make room for anything. See the video I posted above.
tomtheelder 9y ago
Well for starters we are still at a point where the majority of owned headphones use a 3.5mm. Bluetooth is becoming more popular, sure, but 3.5 is still the norm. Now I have to carry around an adapter to use any of the nice pairs of headphones I own? Alternatively I have to buy a pair of $200 airpods that sound like garbage to get the full experience? The market isn't ready.
deep_concern 9y ago
Because they don't need to remove it. A headphone jack wouldn't stop you from having your airpods.
craftyguy 9y ago
My biggest problem with this is that I do not want to have yet another device that requires batteries and/or charging in order for it to function. Wired headphones powered through the audio cable are simple, don't quit working if their battery drain, don't require charging, and you can find them anywhere if you need a replacement.
- JohnBooty 9y ago
  Yeah, I definitely have "charging fatigue." I have... I don't even know. 20? 50? devices that need to be charged on a regular basis. I really don't want to charge anything besides my phone and my laptop. I don't want the ritual of taking 2 or 5 or 10 different things out of my bag at the end of the day, plugging them in, and then unplugging them and rewrapping the cables and putting them back into my bag. That is not "convenience" in my book. There's also a small level of cognitive overhead involved with remembering which devices were charged when. We're not talking rocket science here but most of us are IMHO already in a constant state of distraction thanks to information overload, and I don't want more variables to think about.
drewrv 9y ago
For me it's not time yet because it's a clunky and annoying process to switch bluetooth earbuds from my phone to my laptop and back, at least compared to the simplicity of unplugging something. This is something I do multiple times a day. Apple is the only company that has figured out how to make it easy, but it requires a iphone/macbook of course.

eropple 9y ago

It's great that they work well for you, but AirPods and the like don't work well for me at all. The audio quality drop is noticeable to me; interference is a perpetual problem even when I'm just walking down the street or walking through my apartment. Bluetooth on both Android and iOS is clunky and annoying (and it's not totally their fault, the devices and the protocol have something to say about that) that the physical act of jacking headphones into a device makes unambiguous and easy. I very much want to be able to take the headphones I use on my computer and just go rather than play the pairing/reconnect dance or whatever. If I don't care about what I'm listening to that much (podcasts etc.), wireless headphones are fine, don't get me wrong, but the usability across-the-board still sucks, while not in any way or at any level improving the experience for me. It is a strictly worse experience.

kpxxx3 9y ago
> The audio quality drop is noticeable to me. I'm not going to get into an audiophile/golden ear flamewar, but I am always skeptical of this claim. Yes, SBC is not the world's best, but it supports bitrates upto 500 kbit/s. I'm not going to claim it is completely transparent, but 9 times out of 10 it is being used with shitty bluetooth headphones (where the alternative is shitty wired headphones)... at that point the quality of the headphones (wired or not) has far more to do with the audio quality than anything. And yes, I doubt most people will notice an audio quality drop in a pair of high quality Sennheisers going from wired to SBC (there isn't convincing evidence that aptX is much better than SBC). I wouldn't be too surprised about a conflicting experimental result, but skeptical for now. Anyway, most people are not hooking up high quality headphones to their phone, or they are purposefully using phones tuned for a particular lo-fi response (Beats)... who cares about whatever SBC does at 350 kbit/s at that point. Edit: And walking down the street is hardly a hi-fi listening environment.
- eropple 9y ago
  The audio quality issue is not due to encoding. It's due to garbling and interference from, you know, the two feet from my pocket to my headphones while sitting at home in my apartment. This has happened in every apartment I've lived in since getting Bluetooth headphones. It happened in my parents' house with a quarter mile to any neighbors. It happens when walking down the street. It happens at the gym. It happens at the office. In an optimum environment it's fine. In the real world, having my headphones make farty noises in my ears two or three times in a ten-minute walk is silly and we live in the future and it should be better than that.
  - lambda_lover 9y ago
    I ride the subway in NYC every day, and this is especially bad on my commute. The interference is absolutely unacceptable, and has convinced me that bluetooth is not ready at all for my use case.
- smileysteve 9y ago
  The airpods themselves, sold as a premium experience, lack the additional comfort and noise isolation of quality headphones. The mere prevalence of people enjoying the stock iphone, ipod, cheap airline, and wireless headphones -- versus isolation quality you can get in a $20 pair of sony's suggests I'm a minority when it comes to audio quality.
- hajile 9y ago
  The issue has nothing to do with bitrate. The first issue is that the signal cuts out randomly due to interference. The second is that you have to convert the signal to analog and DAC quality matters. To increase battery life, you have to go with more simplistic conversion which reduces quality. To reduce the cost of 2 DACs (one per ear) you have to use worse hardware. The net result is that the onboard DAC is basically guaranteed to be better and the amount of interference over wired headphones will be minimal.

mattnewton 9y ago

I’m chaffing at the naked push towards buying apple’s expensive wireless earbuds here. I buy apple because they are the best phone out there, but lately I have been very frustrated with headphone dongles and looking elsewhere. I don’t want to buy more apple hardware to solve a problem apple created, and my other Bluetooth headphones are a nightmare to keep paired and charged.

technojunkie 9y ago

Battery life. I cannot even use bluetooth headphones for a full workday before they die.

tstrimple 9y ago

You're really asking why overpriced wireless devices with mediocre to atrocious battery life and substandard audio quality are not a sufficient replacement for devices you can literally buy in any convenience store around the world for tens of dollars? There is room for a headphone jack in these phones (video below). The only reason they removed them when they did is to push accessory sales. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA

kpxxx3 9y ago
> substandard audio quality > literally buy in any convenience store around the world A substantial drop in audio quality is most likely completely psychological (not saying it isn't a real problem for some). But wired convenience store headphones typically are not great sound quality wise, the SBC codec of bluetooth likely has very little to do with sound quality at that point. Maybe, if you're comparing actually good monitors. But to bitch about bluetooth sound quality when comparing to typical cheap earbuds is a bit silly.
threeseed 9y ago
> The only reason they removed them when they did is to push accessory sales This is baseless and ridiculous. They did it because people are expecting more out of their phones e.g. better cameras, better screen, battery life, TouchID, FaceID all whilst demanding the same thickness. Something has to give. First it was the 30-pin adapter, now it's headphone, next will be SIM. And Apple makes so little from their accessory sales compared to everything else they do so it is illogical they would intentionally cripple their flagship device to make a few hundred million.
- tstrimple 9y ago
  > They did it because people are expecting more out of their phones e.g. better cameras, better screen, battery life, TouchID, FaceID all whilst demanding the same thickness. Something has to give. First it was the 30-pin adapter, now it's headphone, next will be SIM. Way to completely ignore the fact that there is room for a headphone jack in the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 8. It was not removed in order to make room for anything. See the video I posted above.

tomtheelder 9y ago

Well for starters we are still at a point where the majority of owned headphones use a 3.5mm. Bluetooth is becoming more popular, sure, but 3.5 is still the norm. Now I have to carry around an adapter to use any of the nice pairs of headphones I own? Alternatively I have to buy a pair of $200 airpods that sound like garbage to get the full experience? The market isn't ready.

deep_concern 9y ago

Because they don't need to remove it. A headphone jack wouldn't stop you from having your airpods.

craftyguy 9y ago

My biggest problem with this is that I do not want to have yet another device that requires batteries and/or charging in order for it to function. Wired headphones powered through the audio cable are simple, don't quit working if their battery drain, don't require charging, and you can find them anywhere if you need a replacement.

JohnBooty 9y ago
Yeah, I definitely have "charging fatigue." I have... I don't even know. 20? 50? devices that need to be charged on a regular basis. I really don't want to charge anything besides my phone and my laptop. I don't want the ritual of taking 2 or 5 or 10 different things out of my bag at the end of the day, plugging them in, and then unplugging them and rewrapping the cables and putting them back into my bag. That is not "convenience" in my book. There's also a small level of cognitive overhead involved with remembering which devices were charged when. We're not talking rocket science here but most of us are IMHO already in a constant state of distraction thanks to information overload, and I don't want more variables to think about.

drewrv 9y ago

For me it's not time yet because it's a clunky and annoying process to switch bluetooth earbuds from my phone to my laptop and back, at least compared to the simplicity of unplugging something. This is something I do multiple times a day. Apple is the only company that has figured out how to make it easy, but it requires a iphone/macbook of course.