10 ms·

A Eulogy for the Headphone Jack

68 points by mparramon 9y ago

jacknews 9y ago
As per the article, they'll have to pry the jack from my cold dead hands...
rvense 9y ago
I honestly believe that the headphone jack is done. Done as in, we can just keep using it. It perfectly solves the problem of moving audio and similar from a device on or near my person to my ears. There's no need for any such device to be smaller in any dimension than the minijack allows. Wires are fine, they're so easy to understand. There is absolutely no need to keep working on this, it's fine as it is. They should still be making headphones with minijacks in a 1000 years - because maybe in time we would learn to make devices that lasted that long. In general I really wish our culture would become used to the idea of solved problems.
- AndrewDucker 9y ago
  Yup. Unless you can replace it with something which requires no power and costs £10 then I'm not interested in moving to a new technology.
  - pls2halp 9y ago
    The Apple dongle is just an external DAC(someone put the circuit in a phone) and costs $10US.
    - syrgian 9y ago
      It also seems to be unforgivably low quality: https://www.apple.com/shop/reviews/MMX62AM/A/lightning-to-35-mm-headphone-jack-adapter https://www.apple.com/shop/reviews/MMX62AM/A/lightning-to-35...
    - raverbashing 9y ago
      Yes, however there are several issues in having it in a dongle instead of inside the phone You're needlessly converting to 'lightning protocol' and back. DAC will be lower quality than an internal one (because of size and power constraints and the fact that you need one internal and one external)
      - emsy 9y ago
        In reality those constraints don't have any humanly discernable impact on the quality. Plus the part about the lightning protocol makes no sense whatsoever. Here's an idea: Try blind testing 10 songs or so and see if you can figure out which one is played from the adapter and which one isn't. I bet you won't hear the difference.
        snvzz 9y ago
        The real issue is the extra item to carry and plug. Headphones -> headphone jack in device is sensible. A dongle isn't.
        emsy 9y ago
        I have an iPhone 7. In reality even that isn't an issue. You can keep the dongle attached to your headphones and it will stick safely to it. I would really like to know how many people who find issue with the dongle have day-to-day experience with a headphone jack-less device. My bigger concern is that headphone jacks will vanish from headphones.
        solarkraft 9y ago
        Because I have broken all my headphones and then my phone's audio jack I am trying out the dongly life. So far it hasn't been that bad, but I suspect that there will be situations in which I'll want to charge and have an audio device connected.
        emsy 9y ago
    - krzat 9y ago
      I was using something similiar for my Siemens SX1. Who would have though that this 15 years old phone was equipped with such next-gen technology.
- sheraz 9y ago
  well said. That stupid apple dongle on iPhone. Amazing that I can't charge AND use my urban ears. Wtf. Or apple abandoning that cool magnetic charger! My mbp 2010 had that skinny one, and I never came off. Now we have usbc or whatever it is called, but waaaaay longer battery life, so that might be the answer there. Come to think of it, is there wireless charging for laptops yet?
  - zimpenfish 9y ago
    > Come to think of it, is there wireless charging for laptops yet? Amazon has a few Qi receivers with USB-C plugs outputting 1A - that's probably enough to (slowly) charge the 12" Macbook.
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    >Come to think of it, is there wireless charging for laptops yet? A docking station serves that purpose already, and it allows much faster charging than a Qi pad.
  - zeveb 9y ago
    > Amazing that I can't charge AND use my urban ears. I think Apple must have fired all of their UX engineers. That's the only thing that can explain the inability to charge & use headphones and the inability to charge & use a mouse[0]. [0] https://www.geek.com/apple/design-before-function-apple-magic-mouse-2-cant-be-used-while-charging-1636939/ https://www.geek.com/apple/design-before-function-apple-magi...
- dx034 9y ago
  Not to forget that wireless connections are less reliable, esp with a lot of devices or other sources nearby. Switching headphones off with cable is much faster than with bluetooth (just unplug it) and quality is about as good as it gets.
  - solarkraft 9y ago
    Except when you break all of your headphones while cycling ... And then your phone.
    - craftyguy 9y ago
      You can still break wireless headphones, your phone, and pretty much anything with you (including you) while cycling, so I fail to see how your point is relevant.
- skate22 9y ago
  Im a fan of wired headphones with the exception of excercise. If youve ever skateboarded, popped a trick, had the wire get caught on your knee, violently tug the headphones out of your ears, and get caught up in your wheels, then you know this pain.
  - arethuza 9y ago
    I managed to cut the cord on two pairs of headphones gardening before I decided to get a wireless pair - don't think I'd ever go back to wired headphones.
  - tomcooks 9y ago
    Keep phone in front pocket, with wire under clothes
    - solarkraft 9y ago
      Even that can get annoying. Movement is still limited.
    - skate22 9y ago
      The wire sticks to you when you start sweating and pulls out of the headphone jack. And wearing extra layers is not a great soltion
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  The minijack is essentially perfect, which I know is a word that shouldn't be used lightly. It's intuitive, durable, reliable, inexpensive and compact. In the 4-pole incarnation, it handles the addition of a microphone with backwards compatibility. A headphone-only plug works without issues in a 4-pole socket, and a 4-pole plug works equally without issues in a headphone-only 3-pole socket. Obviously you won't be able to use the microphone, but it will not mess up anything, only give you sound in one ear or something similarly weird and unexpected. There was a small issue with TRRS standards, OMTP on one side and CTIA on the other, where the mic and ground pins were switched in relation to each other. Everyone seems to have agreed on using the CTIA standard now, though. And a lot of headsets are able to accomodate both automatically. The minijack has stood the test of time.
  - wilsonnb 9y ago
    While I do love the 3.5mm jack (along with the 1/4", XLR, and pretty much any other analog audio connector known to man) it seems like it's redundant on modern smartphones and in the near future possibly laptops. If everything is already going to have a USB C port, and USB C can handle audio transmission, then I see no reason to keep the 3.5mm around. Sure, there's an argument to be made about keeping the DAC inside the smartphone, but once we are out of the transition period, any pair of headphones you want will either be wireless, come with a dongle, or forgo the 3.5mm entirely and just have a USB C cable. It would be nice if Apple would join the rest of the world (and their own Macbooks) by replacing lightning with USB C, but I think that will happen eventually.
    - zeveb 9y ago
      > … once we are out of the transition period, any pair of headphones you want will either be wireless, come with a dongle, or forgo the 3.5mm entirely and just have a USB C cable. Any pair of headphones I would want will be analogue, because I dislike audio delay & expense and I like audio quality. Adding DACs & dongles is just adding needless complexity. The analogue headphone is basically perfect: it doesn't need improving, and it can't be improved. Wireless headphones add expense, waste, complexity and quality/delay problems.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  I get the simplicity, but 1) I hate tangled wires 2) wire break, I take care of them but very often a minute crack will happen and your cable is now a random silence generator. Maybe there's a middle ground solution.
  - larkeith 9y ago
    There is - it's called providing both Bluetooth and minijack.
    - agumonkey 9y ago
      I meant something else but anyway.
      - solarkraft 9y ago
        What are you imagining? A dongle that runs over Bluetooth? Strapping the phone to your ear directly? Cables through your body?
        agumonkey 9y ago
        Something better.
- johnchristopher 9y ago
  Except minijacks on every devices (smartphones and portable media player) I have ever owned have become useless after some time because the plug starts working randomly. I am so much happier with a bluetooth headphones: free movement \o/. Software problems but you know what they say: software eats the world.
  - solarkraft 9y ago
    Too bad good Bluetooth earphones are still ridiculously expensive and the cheap ones (Taotronics ) keep breaking. I'll consider them again when the extra cost for the Bluetooth hardware (it shouldn't be more than 5€) gets to a manageable level.
- devit 9y ago
  An analog connector doesn't necessarily seem perfect since sound can degrade undetectably. I think what would be perfect would be something carrying both power and a lossless digital signal.
executesorder66 9y ago
> You can also tell companies that are getting rid of headphone jacks that you don’t like it. That your mother did not raise a fool. That aside from maybe water-resistance, there’s not a single good reason you can think of to give up your headphone jack. I don't understand how people can just accept this change. Why would you pay for a shittier experience? I feel like people get outraged by the stupidest things these days. But when it comes to issues that will actually affect them in their everyday life, most people don't seem to give a shit.
- empath75 9y ago
  If it actually affected them, they’ll absolutely complain. Most people just don’t care about the headphone jack. My car has usb, and I rarely use headphones and I like the airpods just fine.
- jmmcd 9y ago
  People don't care about the headphone jack enough to demand it. There may be a few people like the author here, but saying this -- > Tell them you see what they’re up to, and you don’t like it. You can say this part slightly deeper, through gritted teeth, if you get to say it aloud. Or, just italicize it so they know you are serious. -- is implicitly admitting defeat. Saying these loudly and italicizing in rants on social media won't change profit-driven decisions!
- gambiting 9y ago
  I was just looking for a replacement phone, and was told by multiple techy people that I should give up looking for a phone with a headphone jack, customers clearly voted with their wallets and it's a done deal now. I'm like....when did this happen? Two years-and-a-half ago, when I bought my last phone, there were no phones with no headphone jack - now, barely any time later, it's a "done deal"?? Are you kidding me? When was I supposed to "vote with my wallet", even if I wanted to? I guess I did in the end, because I bought the OnePlus 5T almost specifically because of the headphone jack, but this whole thing is beyond stupid. I'm normally not a fan of conspiracy theories, but I wouldn't be surprised if the removal of the headphone jack on the iphone was actually an attempt to make sure more people have bluetooth on so they can be tracked in shops using the bluetooth beacon tracking.
Theodores 9y ago
This is a eulogy for the 'headphone jack' and not 'analogue audio out'. How many Sony Walkman tape players and their clones did I break and where did they break? The headphone jack. How many headphones have I broken and where did they break? The headphone jack. As a student playing around 'on the decks' I found that anything with a headphone jack was liable to be responsible for that mains hum. I have fond memories of using the headphone jack of the 32x CD ROM that was in the front of that 'Compaq' PC that cost many thousands. But when was the last time I touched a CD? So that is another headphone jack we thought we needed but didn't. Had we moved to a magnetic latch as per the Apple power arrangement then I think that I would have got burned a lot less with the soldering iron and the purchase of hi fi kit and caboodle. Maybe with some optional VGA style screws if you really want the connection locked down hard. This could have been a much more 'jogging friendly' solution, waterproof too. I mourn the loss of analog audio but not the headphone jack. Maybe the latter is responsible for the demise of the former and maybe there was vested interest in the Walkman era in having the universal but breakable headphone jack. Incidentally the headphone jack seems much better engineered in computers and phones than in 1980's era Walkman style tape players. Maybe there was some lightbulb style conspiracy to ensure that headphone jacks only lasted '1000 hours' before failing, therefore maintaining sales of new tape players.
- dx034 9y ago
  Maybe if we switch from headphone jacks to a comparable digital method. But headphone jack to Bluetooth tends to create more problems than it solves, in my opinion. The only situation where wireless has clear advantages is when cable creates additional noise (e.g. running).
- lawlessone 9y ago
  > Maybe there was some lightbulb style conspiracy to ensure that headphone jacks only lasted '1000 hours' before failing Jogging damages them.
- hoopladler 9y ago
  Cables and switches always break first. It's the same in power tools - any component that you have a 200-pound gorrilla mucking around with every day will eventually break. You can mitigate this, but you can't eliminate it. It doesn't mean they're bad design. That said, I think a good, working bluetooth solution would be something I'd prefer. I like analog jacks, but honestly, cables are a bad solution for wearable devices.
mmjaa 9y ago
I find it fascinating that the music-making market is constantly ignored in the rush to make better consumer devices out of the iPhones/iPads and whatnot of the day .. as a musician with tons of iDevices, and lots of cables, I rue the day I won't be able to get a low-latency, high-power, perfectly usable audio signal from one of my devices. It really seems stupid that this market is being under-represented by the manufacturers .. perhaps they just want to sell more external-audio interfaces?
- delinka 9y ago
  In the system of Apple devices, iPhones aren't "supposed" to be content creation devices. iPads still come with headphone jacks. They've got bigger screens with space to use implements like styluses. Apple sees iPhone as a consumption device and iPad as a creation device.
  - styfle 9y ago
    I seem to recall one of the iPhone keynotes saying that the iPhone is most popular camera (as in most photos taken in a year) presumably by looking at EXIF. That sounds like Apple is aware of content creators using the iPhone.
JorgeGT 9y ago
Here in my uni we give future engineers their first taste of data acquisition and generation using the sound card as general purpose I/O. It's perfect because it's a very capable DAQ system (16 bit samples @ 48 kHz!) and almost every students owns one already so they can play at home.
- gugagore 9y ago
  Except you can't really get a signal in below 20Hz.
- solarkraft 9y ago
  Would having to use an external DAC be a real problem here? The Google pixel one costs 9€.
aestetix 9y ago
For a culture that claims to be rooted in logic and reason, the momentum to abandon a 100+ year old standard because "Apple did it" is rather illogical.
- tempodox 9y ago
  You're under a false impression. The culture you're talking about is rooted in maximizing profits and cornering a market. Logic and reason are only ever established in that framework.
- Jedd 9y ago
  Speaking of 100+ year old standards <sic> ... ask a photography friend who advocates Full Frame DSLRs why they think Full Frame is the holy grail of photography. Hilarity shall ensue.
  - amdavidson 9y ago
    Do you know people that think that 35mm is some sort of magical dimension or are you arguing that sensor size doesn't play into photography?
    - Jedd 9y ago
      I'm reasonably familiar with the physics and artistic implications of sensor size, and I know an unsettling number of people (typically Canon or Nikon fans) that don't know why they think 35mm is the perfect size for a sensor, but they know that it is, and they know they need one. There's two things I love about 35mm - first, along with most numbers used in photography, it shows Americans can cope with (and indeed embrace) metric, and second the origin is a 'let's get 16 frames to the foot of motion picture film' arbitrary decision made in the late 1800's. That it defines so many amateur photographers' desires 130 years later is perversely delightful.
tezza 9y ago
while i cling on to my audio jack personally, the article use cases would be trivially replaced by dongles and adapters there is the lightning dac for apple and equivalent for other brands there are oodles of audio <-> bluetooth adapters then i am sure there will be a raspberry pi / beaglebone / arduino with open source oscilloscope clients available.
dbrgn 9y ago
Well, the same thing counts for the serial (UART) port. It's incredibly simple, it's a license-free universal I/O port. And in spite of that, it has disappeared from computers and we now have the complex beast called USB instead. I'm not happy at all about headphone jacks disappearing, but I doubt the development can be stopped.
mhd 9y ago
I bet there will be someone selling $2000 gold plated 1/4 inch jack cables in 2118 (adjust for inflation/non-existence of USD).
iamben 9y ago
This, so much. I have bluetooth headphone for the gym, because exercising with a cable is a faff. But I hate then. I hate that they run out. I hate that I have to, and often forget to, charge them. From a purely practical standpoint, my year old phone barely holds a day of charge with a little usage. But at least now I'm still able to charge my phone and listen to music at the same time. I listen to music (on fantastic, wired headphones) for about 7 hours a day in the office. I can't imagine a world where I'd have to stop after 5 hours for 3 hours of charging before I could wire in again. Until you can give me phones and headphones that charge by themselves - nay - until you can replicate my current experience, just without the cables, I'm not interested.
- solarkraft 9y ago
  Hey, you could charge while you listen (my Bluetooth earphones didn't allow that).
oelmekki 9y ago
I see the point from both side, here. I guess both tech could live together as alternatives. There's one thing I would ask from manufacturers who go the bluetooth-only way, though: please first make sure a bluetooth receiver can handle multiple connections. I have bluetooth speakers at home that I've put on top of my sofa, so I can watch movies comfortably without annoying neighbors with loud sound. During the day, my phone is my media center, playing music. But I also want sometimes to play sound from my computer, like when I watch a youtube video. In order to do that, I plug the speakers' jack to the phone, and connect the laptop through bluetooth. This is awesome and is better than jack only speakers: I can easily plug two devices on it. But if everything was bluetooth only, then it would be a regression, as I could only connect one device. Could bluetooth multiplexing be a thing? (or are there reasons it couldn't happen?). I would also love to know if I'm an edge case, or if other people here are doing something similar as well.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- zimpenfish 9y ago
  My TaoTronics TT-BA08 can have two devices connected at the same time in receive mode (obviously only one can send data at a time). HOWEVER - and this is a giant caveat - the firmware[1] is really dumb about this because if A and B are connected, A is sending audio, and you move out of range of B, it'll start a plaintive beeping. [1] Might actually be a function of the chipset since it's happened identically on two different dongles that allowed two connections.
tjoff 9y ago
Those are good points, but I'm more outraged that I can't just hand someone an AUX-cable and let them play music. Nowadays you have to fiddle with bluetooth (which for some reason tries borrow your contacts) and it just isn't worth it. It is beyond insane to remove the headphone jack when we have no even half-decent alternatives. This is before the detail that today you can be absolutely certain that all your bluetooth devices are remotely hackable. Most people that don't seem to mind the disappearing of the headphone jack only seems to view it from their own very narrow perspective. Yes, you've just bought some decent bluetooth headphones and love the cordless freedom, I get that - it is awesome. But that is a very narrow use case that isn't going to hold long. I've alternating between cordless and wired headphones for many years and there is no reason even on the horizon to stick with cordless headphones. Also, you have to pay $100 extra for that bluetooth connectivity. So, a wired headphone for $100 will cost you $200 if you want it cordless, and that goes with the assumption that you have aptx. And I don't even have a clue of whether I have aptx. And a decent wired headphone will just last (spoiler, good headphones have better cables and connectors than that $25 headphones that break all the time), the cordless version will not be that cool when the irreplaceable battery dies. Also, I have to spend tons of money on adapters I have to carry with my all the fricking time just so my phone manufacturer can save a few cents, it's ludicrous.
- wilsonnb 9y ago
  The only issue I see is that iPhones aren't using USB C, at least not yet. If you go out and buy a new android smartphone and a new laptop right now, there's a pretty high chance that they will both have USB C. You can then use a reasonably priced USB C -> 3.5mm adapater with a DAC (the Google one is only 9 dollars, and your phone will probably come with one of these) and use your headphones with either device. In the past, laptops/desktops and smartphones/mp3 players didn't share any ports aside from the 3.5mm analog port. Now, they're going to share a USB C port so there's no longer as much of a need for the 3.5mm port. In the near future, I expect many more headphones to come with their own USB C adapter or to forgo the 3.5mm jack entirely. In the medium to far future, I expect Apple will replace the lightning port with USB C and from that point on, including a 3.5mm port on something will make about as much sense as any other legacy port that most people no longer care about. The exception will probably be professional audio equipment, which I expect will keep analog ports around forever because it actually makes sense in that field.
solarkraft 9y ago
Yeah, it's cool. And it's cool that the author thinks about it. You could repurpose what was meant to carry audio and do cool things with it. The problem is: You still can. You'll need an external DAC in the worst case, you needed extra parts before anyway. Except now, by communicating digitally, you get a more reliable signal and potentially higher throughout. It's a bit more effort to build a nice product, but DIY projects can still just use audio dongles. The removal of the built in audio jack won't hurt us much.
5555624 9y ago
Without a headphone jack, how do you use the built-in radio? All of my phones that had a working, built-in radio (NEC, Sony) used the headphone cable as the radio antenna. With a movement to get manufacturers/carriers to activate the built-in FM capabilities of the chips, what will they use as an antenna?
- zeveb 9y ago
  > Without a headphone jack, how do you use the built-in radio? I don't think Apple & Google want you to use the radio. They don't make money from it, so they don't see a reason to permit you to use it.

68 points by mparramon 9y ago

As per the article, they'll have to pry the jack from my cold dead hands...

I honestly believe that the headphone jack is done. Done as in, we can just keep using it. It perfectly solves the problem of moving audio and similar from a device on or near my person to my ears. There's no need for any such device to be smaller in any dimension than the minijack allows. Wires are fine, they're so easy to understand. There is absolutely no need to keep working on this, it's fine as it is. They should still be making headphones with minijacks in a 1000 years - because maybe in time we would learn to make devices that lasted that long. In general I really wish our culture would become used to the idea of solved problems.

AndrewDucker 9y ago
Yup. Unless you can replace it with something which requires no power and costs £10 then I'm not interested in moving to a new technology.
- pls2halp 9y ago
  The Apple dongle is just an external DAC(someone put the circuit in a phone) and costs $10US.
  - syrgian 9y ago
    It also seems to be unforgivably low quality: https://www.apple.com/shop/reviews/MMX62AM/A/lightning-to-35-mm-headphone-jack-adapter https://www.apple.com/shop/reviews/MMX62AM/A/lightning-to-35...
  - raverbashing 9y ago
    Yes, however there are several issues in having it in a dongle instead of inside the phone You're needlessly converting to 'lightning protocol' and back. DAC will be lower quality than an internal one (because of size and power constraints and the fact that you need one internal and one external)
    - emsy 9y ago
      In reality those constraints don't have any humanly discernable impact on the quality. Plus the part about the lightning protocol makes no sense whatsoever. Here's an idea: Try blind testing 10 songs or so and see if you can figure out which one is played from the adapter and which one isn't. I bet you won't hear the difference.
      - snvzz 9y ago
        The real issue is the extra item to carry and plug. Headphones -> headphone jack in device is sensible. A dongle isn't.
        emsy 9y ago
        I have an iPhone 7. In reality even that isn't an issue. You can keep the dongle attached to your headphones and it will stick safely to it. I would really like to know how many people who find issue with the dongle have day-to-day experience with a headphone jack-less device. My bigger concern is that headphone jacks will vanish from headphones.
        solarkraft 9y ago
        Because I have broken all my headphones and then my phone's audio jack I am trying out the dongly life. So far it hasn't been that bad, but I suspect that there will be situations in which I'll want to charge and have an audio device connected.
        emsy 9y ago
  - krzat 9y ago
    I was using something similiar for my Siemens SX1. Who would have though that this 15 years old phone was equipped with such next-gen technology.
sheraz 9y ago
well said. That stupid apple dongle on iPhone. Amazing that I can't charge AND use my urban ears. Wtf. Or apple abandoning that cool magnetic charger! My mbp 2010 had that skinny one, and I never came off. Now we have usbc or whatever it is called, but waaaaay longer battery life, so that might be the answer there. Come to think of it, is there wireless charging for laptops yet?
- zimpenfish 9y ago
  > Come to think of it, is there wireless charging for laptops yet? Amazon has a few Qi receivers with USB-C plugs outputting 1A - that's probably enough to (slowly) charge the 12" Macbook.
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  >Come to think of it, is there wireless charging for laptops yet? A docking station serves that purpose already, and it allows much faster charging than a Qi pad.
- zeveb 9y ago
  > Amazing that I can't charge AND use my urban ears. I think Apple must have fired all of their UX engineers. That's the only thing that can explain the inability to charge & use headphones and the inability to charge & use a mouse[0]. [0] https://www.geek.com/apple/design-before-function-apple-magic-mouse-2-cant-be-used-while-charging-1636939/ https://www.geek.com/apple/design-before-function-apple-magi...
dx034 9y ago
Not to forget that wireless connections are less reliable, esp with a lot of devices or other sources nearby. Switching headphones off with cable is much faster than with bluetooth (just unplug it) and quality is about as good as it gets.
- solarkraft 9y ago
  Except when you break all of your headphones while cycling ... And then your phone.
  - craftyguy 9y ago
    You can still break wireless headphones, your phone, and pretty much anything with you (including you) while cycling, so I fail to see how your point is relevant.
skate22 9y ago
Im a fan of wired headphones with the exception of excercise. If youve ever skateboarded, popped a trick, had the wire get caught on your knee, violently tug the headphones out of your ears, and get caught up in your wheels, then you know this pain.
- arethuza 9y ago
  I managed to cut the cord on two pairs of headphones gardening before I decided to get a wireless pair - don't think I'd ever go back to wired headphones.
- tomcooks 9y ago
  Keep phone in front pocket, with wire under clothes
  - solarkraft 9y ago
    Even that can get annoying. Movement is still limited.
  - skate22 9y ago
    The wire sticks to you when you start sweating and pulls out of the headphone jack. And wearing extra layers is not a great soltion
KozmoNau7 9y ago
The minijack is essentially perfect, which I know is a word that shouldn't be used lightly. It's intuitive, durable, reliable, inexpensive and compact. In the 4-pole incarnation, it handles the addition of a microphone with backwards compatibility. A headphone-only plug works without issues in a 4-pole socket, and a 4-pole plug works equally without issues in a headphone-only 3-pole socket. Obviously you won't be able to use the microphone, but it will not mess up anything, only give you sound in one ear or something similarly weird and unexpected. There was a small issue with TRRS standards, OMTP on one side and CTIA on the other, where the mic and ground pins were switched in relation to each other. Everyone seems to have agreed on using the CTIA standard now, though. And a lot of headsets are able to accomodate both automatically. The minijack has stood the test of time.
- wilsonnb 9y ago
  While I do love the 3.5mm jack (along with the 1/4", XLR, and pretty much any other analog audio connector known to man) it seems like it's redundant on modern smartphones and in the near future possibly laptops. If everything is already going to have a USB C port, and USB C can handle audio transmission, then I see no reason to keep the 3.5mm around. Sure, there's an argument to be made about keeping the DAC inside the smartphone, but once we are out of the transition period, any pair of headphones you want will either be wireless, come with a dongle, or forgo the 3.5mm entirely and just have a USB C cable. It would be nice if Apple would join the rest of the world (and their own Macbooks) by replacing lightning with USB C, but I think that will happen eventually.
  - zeveb 9y ago
    > … once we are out of the transition period, any pair of headphones you want will either be wireless, come with a dongle, or forgo the 3.5mm entirely and just have a USB C cable. Any pair of headphones I would want will be analogue, because I dislike audio delay & expense and I like audio quality. Adding DACs & dongles is just adding needless complexity. The analogue headphone is basically perfect: it doesn't need improving, and it can't be improved. Wireless headphones add expense, waste, complexity and quality/delay problems.
agumonkey 9y ago
I get the simplicity, but 1) I hate tangled wires 2) wire break, I take care of them but very often a minute crack will happen and your cable is now a random silence generator. Maybe there's a middle ground solution.
- larkeith 9y ago
  There is - it's called providing both Bluetooth and minijack.
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    I meant something else but anyway.
    - solarkraft 9y ago
      What are you imagining? A dongle that runs over Bluetooth? Strapping the phone to your ear directly? Cables through your body?
      - agumonkey 9y ago
        Something better.
johnchristopher 9y ago
Except minijacks on every devices (smartphones and portable media player) I have ever owned have become useless after some time because the plug starts working randomly. I am so much happier with a bluetooth headphones: free movement \o/. Software problems but you know what they say: software eats the world.
- solarkraft 9y ago
  Too bad good Bluetooth earphones are still ridiculously expensive and the cheap ones (Taotronics ) keep breaking. I'll consider them again when the extra cost for the Bluetooth hardware (it shouldn't be more than 5€) gets to a manageable level.
devit 9y ago
An analog connector doesn't necessarily seem perfect since sound can degrade undetectably. I think what would be perfect would be something carrying both power and a lossless digital signal.

executesorder66 9y ago

> You can also tell companies that are getting rid of headphone jacks that you don’t like it. That your mother did not raise a fool. That aside from maybe water-resistance, there’s not a single good reason you can think of to give up your headphone jack. I don't understand how people can just accept this change. Why would you pay for a shittier experience? I feel like people get outraged by the stupidest things these days. But when it comes to issues that will actually affect them in their everyday life, most people don't seem to give a shit.

empath75 9y ago
If it actually affected them, they’ll absolutely complain. Most people just don’t care about the headphone jack. My car has usb, and I rarely use headphones and I like the airpods just fine.
jmmcd 9y ago
People don't care about the headphone jack enough to demand it. There may be a few people like the author here, but saying this -- > Tell them you see what they’re up to, and you don’t like it. You can say this part slightly deeper, through gritted teeth, if you get to say it aloud. Or, just italicize it so they know you are serious. -- is implicitly admitting defeat. Saying these loudly and italicizing in rants on social media won't change profit-driven decisions!
gambiting 9y ago
I was just looking for a replacement phone, and was told by multiple techy people that I should give up looking for a phone with a headphone jack, customers clearly voted with their wallets and it's a done deal now. I'm like....when did this happen? Two years-and-a-half ago, when I bought my last phone, there were no phones with no headphone jack - now, barely any time later, it's a "done deal"?? Are you kidding me? When was I supposed to "vote with my wallet", even if I wanted to? I guess I did in the end, because I bought the OnePlus 5T almost specifically because of the headphone jack, but this whole thing is beyond stupid. I'm normally not a fan of conspiracy theories, but I wouldn't be surprised if the removal of the headphone jack on the iphone was actually an attempt to make sure more people have bluetooth on so they can be tracked in shops using the bluetooth beacon tracking.

Theodores 9y ago

This is a eulogy for the 'headphone jack' and not 'analogue audio out'. How many Sony Walkman tape players and their clones did I break and where did they break? The headphone jack. How many headphones have I broken and where did they break? The headphone jack. As a student playing around 'on the decks' I found that anything with a headphone jack was liable to be responsible for that mains hum. I have fond memories of using the headphone jack of the 32x CD ROM that was in the front of that 'Compaq' PC that cost many thousands. But when was the last time I touched a CD? So that is another headphone jack we thought we needed but didn't. Had we moved to a magnetic latch as per the Apple power arrangement then I think that I would have got burned a lot less with the soldering iron and the purchase of hi fi kit and caboodle. Maybe with some optional VGA style screws if you really want the connection locked down hard. This could have been a much more 'jogging friendly' solution, waterproof too. I mourn the loss of analog audio but not the headphone jack. Maybe the latter is responsible for the demise of the former and maybe there was vested interest in the Walkman era in having the universal but breakable headphone jack. Incidentally the headphone jack seems much better engineered in computers and phones than in 1980's era Walkman style tape players. Maybe there was some lightbulb style conspiracy to ensure that headphone jacks only lasted '1000 hours' before failing, therefore maintaining sales of new tape players.

dx034 9y ago
Maybe if we switch from headphone jacks to a comparable digital method. But headphone jack to Bluetooth tends to create more problems than it solves, in my opinion. The only situation where wireless has clear advantages is when cable creates additional noise (e.g. running).
lawlessone 9y ago
> Maybe there was some lightbulb style conspiracy to ensure that headphone jacks only lasted '1000 hours' before failing Jogging damages them.
hoopladler 9y ago
Cables and switches always break first. It's the same in power tools - any component that you have a 200-pound gorrilla mucking around with every day will eventually break. You can mitigate this, but you can't eliminate it. It doesn't mean they're bad design. That said, I think a good, working bluetooth solution would be something I'd prefer. I like analog jacks, but honestly, cables are a bad solution for wearable devices.

mmjaa 9y ago

I find it fascinating that the music-making market is constantly ignored in the rush to make better consumer devices out of the iPhones/iPads and whatnot of the day .. as a musician with tons of iDevices, and lots of cables, I rue the day I won't be able to get a low-latency, high-power, perfectly usable audio signal from one of my devices. It really seems stupid that this market is being under-represented by the manufacturers .. perhaps they just want to sell more external-audio interfaces?

delinka 9y ago
In the system of Apple devices, iPhones aren't "supposed" to be content creation devices. iPads still come with headphone jacks. They've got bigger screens with space to use implements like styluses. Apple sees iPhone as a consumption device and iPad as a creation device.
- styfle 9y ago
  I seem to recall one of the iPhone keynotes saying that the iPhone is most popular camera (as in most photos taken in a year) presumably by looking at EXIF. That sounds like Apple is aware of content creators using the iPhone.

JorgeGT 9y ago

Here in my uni we give future engineers their first taste of data acquisition and generation using the sound card as general purpose I/O. It's perfect because it's a very capable DAQ system (16 bit samples @ 48 kHz!) and almost every students owns one already so they can play at home.

gugagore 9y ago
Except you can't really get a signal in below 20Hz.
solarkraft 9y ago
Would having to use an external DAC be a real problem here? The Google pixel one costs 9€.

aestetix 9y ago

For a culture that claims to be rooted in logic and reason, the momentum to abandon a 100+ year old standard because "Apple did it" is rather illogical.

tempodox 9y ago
You're under a false impression. The culture you're talking about is rooted in maximizing profits and cornering a market. Logic and reason are only ever established in that framework.
Jedd 9y ago
Speaking of 100+ year old standards <sic> ... ask a photography friend who advocates Full Frame DSLRs why they think Full Frame is the holy grail of photography. Hilarity shall ensue.
- amdavidson 9y ago
  Do you know people that think that 35mm is some sort of magical dimension or are you arguing that sensor size doesn't play into photography?
  - Jedd 9y ago
    I'm reasonably familiar with the physics and artistic implications of sensor size, and I know an unsettling number of people (typically Canon or Nikon fans) that don't know why they think 35mm is the perfect size for a sensor, but they know that it is, and they know they need one. There's two things I love about 35mm - first, along with most numbers used in photography, it shows Americans can cope with (and indeed embrace) metric, and second the origin is a 'let's get 16 frames to the foot of motion picture film' arbitrary decision made in the late 1800's. That it defines so many amateur photographers' desires 130 years later is perversely delightful.

tezza 9y ago

while i cling on to my audio jack personally, the article use cases would be trivially replaced by dongles and adapters there is the lightning dac for apple and equivalent for other brands there are oodles of audio <-> bluetooth adapters then i am sure there will be a raspberry pi / beaglebone / arduino with open source oscilloscope clients available.

dbrgn 9y ago

Well, the same thing counts for the serial (UART) port. It's incredibly simple, it's a license-free universal I/O port. And in spite of that, it has disappeared from computers and we now have the complex beast called USB instead. I'm not happy at all about headphone jacks disappearing, but I doubt the development can be stopped.

mhd 9y ago

I bet there will be someone selling $2000 gold plated 1/4 inch jack cables in 2118 (adjust for inflation/non-existence of USD).

iamben 9y ago

This, so much. I have bluetooth headphone for the gym, because exercising with a cable is a faff. But I hate then. I hate that they run out. I hate that I have to, and often forget to, charge them. From a purely practical standpoint, my year old phone barely holds a day of charge with a little usage. But at least now I'm still able to charge my phone and listen to music at the same time. I listen to music (on fantastic, wired headphones) for about 7 hours a day in the office. I can't imagine a world where I'd have to stop after 5 hours for 3 hours of charging before I could wire in again. Until you can give me phones and headphones that charge by themselves - nay - until you can replicate my current experience, just without the cables, I'm not interested.

solarkraft 9y ago
Hey, you could charge while you listen (my Bluetooth earphones didn't allow that).

oelmekki 9y ago

I see the point from both side, here. I guess both tech could live together as alternatives. There's one thing I would ask from manufacturers who go the bluetooth-only way, though: please first make sure a bluetooth receiver can handle multiple connections. I have bluetooth speakers at home that I've put on top of my sofa, so I can watch movies comfortably without annoying neighbors with loud sound. During the day, my phone is my media center, playing music. But I also want sometimes to play sound from my computer, like when I watch a youtube video. In order to do that, I plug the speakers' jack to the phone, and connect the laptop through bluetooth. This is awesome and is better than jack only speakers: I can easily plug two devices on it. But if everything was bluetooth only, then it would be a regression, as I could only connect one device. Could bluetooth multiplexing be a thing? (or are there reasons it couldn't happen?). I would also love to know if I'm an edge case, or if other people here are doing something similar as well.

deleted 9y ago
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zimpenfish 9y ago
My TaoTronics TT-BA08 can have two devices connected at the same time in receive mode (obviously only one can send data at a time). HOWEVER - and this is a giant caveat - the firmware[1] is really dumb about this because if A and B are connected, A is sending audio, and you move out of range of B, it'll start a plaintive beeping. [1] Might actually be a function of the chipset since it's happened identically on two different dongles that allowed two connections.

tjoff 9y ago

Those are good points, but I'm more outraged that I can't just hand someone an AUX-cable and let them play music. Nowadays you have to fiddle with bluetooth (which for some reason tries borrow your contacts) and it just isn't worth it. It is beyond insane to remove the headphone jack when we have no even half-decent alternatives. This is before the detail that today you can be absolutely certain that all your bluetooth devices are remotely hackable. Most people that don't seem to mind the disappearing of the headphone jack only seems to view it from their own very narrow perspective. Yes, you've just bought some decent bluetooth headphones and love the cordless freedom, I get that - it is awesome. But that is a very narrow use case that isn't going to hold long. I've alternating between cordless and wired headphones for many years and there is no reason even on the horizon to stick with cordless headphones. Also, you have to pay $100 extra for that bluetooth connectivity. So, a wired headphone for $100 will cost you $200 if you want it cordless, and that goes with the assumption that you have aptx. And I don't even have a clue of whether I have aptx. And a decent wired headphone will just last (spoiler, good headphones have better cables and connectors than that $25 headphones that break all the time), the cordless version will not be that cool when the irreplaceable battery dies. Also, I have to spend tons of money on adapters I have to carry with my all the fricking time just so my phone manufacturer can save a few cents, it's ludicrous.

wilsonnb 9y ago
The only issue I see is that iPhones aren't using USB C, at least not yet. If you go out and buy a new android smartphone and a new laptop right now, there's a pretty high chance that they will both have USB C. You can then use a reasonably priced USB C -> 3.5mm adapater with a DAC (the Google one is only 9 dollars, and your phone will probably come with one of these) and use your headphones with either device. In the past, laptops/desktops and smartphones/mp3 players didn't share any ports aside from the 3.5mm analog port. Now, they're going to share a USB C port so there's no longer as much of a need for the 3.5mm port. In the near future, I expect many more headphones to come with their own USB C adapter or to forgo the 3.5mm jack entirely. In the medium to far future, I expect Apple will replace the lightning port with USB C and from that point on, including a 3.5mm port on something will make about as much sense as any other legacy port that most people no longer care about. The exception will probably be professional audio equipment, which I expect will keep analog ports around forever because it actually makes sense in that field.

solarkraft 9y ago

Yeah, it's cool. And it's cool that the author thinks about it. You could repurpose what was meant to carry audio and do cool things with it. The problem is: You still can. You'll need an external DAC in the worst case, you needed extra parts before anyway. Except now, by communicating digitally, you get a more reliable signal and potentially higher throughout. It's a bit more effort to build a nice product, but DIY projects can still just use audio dongles. The removal of the built in audio jack won't hurt us much.

5555624 9y ago

Without a headphone jack, how do you use the built-in radio? All of my phones that had a working, built-in radio (NEC, Sony) used the headphone cable as the radio antenna. With a movement to get manufacturers/carriers to activate the built-in FM capabilities of the chips, what will they use as an antenna?

zeveb 9y ago
> Without a headphone jack, how do you use the built-in radio? I don't think Apple & Google want you to use the radio. They don't make money from it, so they don't see a reason to permit you to use it.