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100% agree with this. Its pretty interesting that I almost never use headphones anymore now because bluetooth headphones require a few things: 1) preplanning/fo

• S_A_P 8y ago
  I am happy to discuss with anyone who downvotes as to why they disagree with me. My comment may be tangental but is completely relevant to the discussion and reinforces points made in the article.
  • PhasmaFelis 8y ago
    There's a few people on HN who seem to have a weirdly emotional affection for the iPhone's lack-of-headphone-jack. One guy argued that it was all worth it because it reduces dust infiltration, another because it makes it more water-resistant. (Yeah.) I can see why someone who's never used wired earbuds wouldn't care one way or another, but I really don't understand this sort of attachment.
    • arvinsim 8y ago
      It's as if the presence of the headphone jack offends them. Like, what significant negative does having a headphone jack have?
      • elp 8y ago
        A more cynical person than me would suggest that its almost like some of them are being paid.
        • rusk 8y ago
          Careful now - that's the kind of sentiment that gets you flagged!
    • Izkata 8y ago
      > another because it makes it more water-resistant. This, at least, doesn't hold at all. My last flip-phone [0] was water-resistant and still had a headphone jack - it just had a rubber cover you had to pull up to reveal it. The charging port was also protected by the same cover. [0] https://www.cnet.com/reviews/samsung-rugby-sgh-a837-review/ https://www.cnet.com/reviews/samsung-rugby-sgh-a837-review/
      • ggg9990 8y ago
        I like my headphone jack but I’d rather have none than one of those janky condoms.
        • SSLy 8y ago
          My Samsung Galaxy S9 has a IP68 rating (it's water-resistant) and has a mini jack port.
  • ddingus 8y ago
    I agree completely. Digital video had advantages. Despite those, analog still makes some sense, if nothing but fewer resources being needed. Outside some niche uses, digital video really does make general sense. I hear and often agree with analog arguments. I keep analog gear, and in my own hardware projects will stay analog, perhaps also having digital, depending. But, overall? People largely benefit more from digital video, and with the loss of the CRT, adoption makes sense. Digital only gear makes sense. I have no concerns and can easily use an analog adapter in a pinch. With audio, it is inverted! A few niche uses benefit, most do not. They are equal or very modest gain at best. Video gear seems to age out more quickly too. Increases in resolution drive all that, and analog limits do too. Above HDTV 1920x1080, analog has real issues. Analog audio does not have those dynamics. There is no analog cliff to drive digital gear. Great stuff from the 70's remains entirely relevant. It always will. Ears are just not like eyes. I will never, ever buy something that only delivers audio digitally.
    • S_A_P 8y ago
      I think you are onto something here. DRM is probably a driver here. if you have an analog signal, you can "pirate"...
      • ddingus 8y ago
        Sadly, that will remain true digitally too. It is just not hard to tap the signal. I think you are right about the DRM. It will prove to be a waste of time. Audio is too easy. Seriously. Heck, I can make something to just write the stream to a file, and doing that is not hard. Costs less than a CD.
        • rusk 8y ago
          > Heck, I can make something to just write the stream to a file Not so easy if the analog signal only emerges at the earpiece ...
          • lloeki 8y ago
  • ggg9990 8y ago
    Unsolicited tip: cultivate some misanthropy so that you can relish downvotes.
    • dclowd9901 8y ago
      That deliciousness of righteousness against hatred.
  • bjoli 8y ago
    Try the same kind of comment in the apple support forums and you'll see what kind of mentality die hard apple fans have. The amount of "your opinions are wrong because apple is perfect" is staggering. I went online to get some help with what was revealed to be the infamous touch-ic issues, and I was told off in so many ways ("that's an old model, you should really get the new one", "if you get flexion based damage, you are using your phone wrong", "wow, another bend-gater. Stop bending your damn phone!"). This was after internal apple documents showed that they were aware of flexion damage before the phone was released to market.
• joelhooks 8y ago
  I just use the adapter and keep a couple in reserve for when I lose one. Works great.
  • wvenable 8y ago
    It's no wonder Apple's profits are so high.
  • umichguy 8y ago
    The thing is we shouldn't have to do this. The beauty of the 3.5 was the fact that you could've gone to pretty much any remote corner of the earth and you probably could've access to one if you lost yours.
  • S_A_P 8y ago
    Hahaha. That reads straight or as sarcasm. Well done! I’m sure there are a million reasons that the 3.5 plug was holding back the iPhone, but I have yet to see even 1/1,000,000th of them in the iPhone.
  • ddingus 8y ago
    Lets say I can buy music rather than adapters.
• nerdwaller 8y ago
  While “we” are in the 10% I try to think about the changes in the frame of the “90/10 rule” (also how I consider the impact of features in my applications). Anecdotally, dropping the headphone jack (and similarly adding the Touch Bar) has negatively impacted 0% of non-developers I’ve talked to about both. If I were a company, I doubt I’d change course immediately unless the larger data set said something significantly in the other direction. As developers are still, even with our more frequent “upgrade” cycle, not the largest piece of the pie.
  • kevincrane 8y ago
    > Anecdotally, dropping the headphone jack (and similarly adding the Touch Bar) has negatively impacted 0% of non-developers I’ve talked to about both. How does removing the headphone benefit users? Also how does being a developer affect how one would listen to music on a phone?
    • nerdwaller 8y ago
      Lacking negative impacts doesn’t imply that there’s benefit, my anecdata seems to be mostly neutral. The only thing that being developer hints at here is often that group is often more techie and either would be on wireless or have very strong opinions about their listening setup. But the same is likely true for audiophiles (likely skewing toward the 3.5mm). For what it’s worth, I’m not arguing for the jack to be gone - just sharing the reception I’ve seen in my network.
      • kevincrane 8y ago
        The point about developers is probably fair (I don't think I necessarily agree with it, but we're an insular enough group that it might not be inaccurate). The headphone jack issue just seems like a solution in search of a problem. No one was complaining about headphone jacks before, so in a very best case scenario there is no positive impact (you already have bluetooth headphones, you don't mind dongles, etc), but in a worst case scenario they made life measurably worse for users (you don't own bluetooth headphones, you don't want to have to deal with dongles, EarPods are super expensive for headphones; all of these are issues which disproportionately affect the less well-off of people who can't afford the headphone upgrades, which techies tend to not be).
• Bud 8y ago
  AirPods require neither of these things. The case is always charging them. You want to use your beyerdynamics? Fine. Your phone came with an adapter for them.
  • S_A_P 8y ago
    Its not that I "want" to use them. The difference is that I could use the same headphones to record drums, drum machines, guitar, Vox, or even my iPhone. Bluetooth is great! I use it in my car for phone and audio all the time. Wireless headphones are at a fundamental disadvantage in that they have less battery capacity than a phone. Those AirPod thingys you like? great. They don't fit my weird ears. My problem. but ear buds and I don't mix. Sorry, wireless and small are at odds with each other.
    • eksemplar 8y ago
      Why don’t you just plug your old headphones into the adapter and continue to use them?
      • PhasmaFelis 8y ago
        Because it's a pain in the ass to have to carry around another fiddly bit of tech gear which should have been completely unnecessary. Yeah, it's petty. But literally no one benefits from the absence of jack (or at least no user), so why inflict even a petty annoyance on some users with nothing gained for it?
        • eksemplar 8y ago
          Could they have build the iPhone XS with a jack? Because if they couldn’t, I’d argue that everyone who owns one benefits from it not having a jack. The real annoyance for me isn’t the lack of the jack, it’s that they haven’t also replaced the jack on the MacBook line yet.
          • city41 8y ago
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• mh8h 8y ago
  It's not like the old headphones can't be used without a headphone jack. The 3.5mm-to-lightning or 3.5mm-to-usb-c dongles are small and relatively cheap. I just keep mine hooked up to my wired headphones.
  • finnthehuman 8y ago
    >I just keep mine hooked up to my wired headphones. This works great, until... You leave the pair of headphones with the dongle behind by mistake and spend the rest of the day frustrated because you have access to a perfectly good pair of headphones but no the dongle. Or you stick to one primary pair of headphones and are frequently taking the dongle on and off making it even easier to misplace or leave behind.
    • mh8h 8y ago
      It's not supposed to be perfect. It's just a solution to that problem. Remember when optical drives where removed from laptops? We had to carry an external optical drive. Some times we'd forget it. It was inconvenient. But we survived.
      • jinushaun 8y ago
        No, “we” did not carry external optical drives. By the time Apple removed them, downloading music and software was already mainstream. Removing the headphone jack is not the same.
      • PhasmaFelis 8y ago
        > It's not supposed to be perfect. It's just a solution to that problem. It's frustrating to have to come up with solutions, however effective, to problems that should never have existed in the first place.
      • city41 8y ago
        But usb thumb drives and services like Dropbox are arguably superior to optical media. Bluetooth is not superior to wired.
• goldfeld 8y ago
  Use another brand phone? It couldn't really be simpler, free market and all. Wireless things suck, I've never considered bluetooth for anything and I really, really hate my bluetooth keyboards. They have nice keys and petite builds, but I haven't used any of them for years now (one Apple, another also with great build). Can't be bothered for batteries, can't be bothered with bluetooth for different linux distros, desktop environments etc. Habits with technology are easily broken even when we don't want to. Give me wired or I'll go without. Also, Wi-Fi internet at home just sucks (IoT/SmartHome I won't even go into, much less that joke called SmartTV [give me regular TVs back please that don't look after me in goody two shoe or shady ways]). Whoever thought Wi-Fi everywhere was a good idea? Reach sucks, gives everyone on the block cancer. Let's stop spamming waves around people. They're not not noise, even if not perceived (microwaves for instance make me want to leap out of the room, it's like a screeching feeling.) I wish ethernet cables were still something people regularly setup, really wish. I used not to hate technology, really did. Then the executives overdid it and the Wozniaks were put out on the side.
  • PhasmaFelis 8y ago
    > They're not not noise, even if not perceived (microwaves for instance make me want to leap out of the room, it's like a screeching feeling.) I don't want to second-guess you, but that sounds more like a high-frequency sound from the microwave mechanism than anything directly caused by microwave radiation. Can you hear the "mosquito sound"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKl_sTh0oHE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKl_sTh0oHE
    • goldfeld 8y ago
      I mean, it could be, but I meant like a completely silent sound feeling, there is no sound (well, the microwave oven is noisy, but that bothers me as much as a blabbering TV, which is nearly not as much as this complete screeching silence.) To add to it, it gets 100x more bothersome if I'm within a foot of the oven, whereas being in the same room is still very upsetting and being just outside the doorstep feels more comfortable.
      • 8y ago
• hacknat 8y ago
  I have a pair of Bluetooth headphones that can actually go both ways. It has a wired and wireless mode. The wireless mode is great for exercise and chores, but if I forget to charge them I can still use them.
  • msravi 8y ago
    Is the quality of sound still the same in the wired mode? I have one like this, but the quality of sound in the wired mode is too atrocious to even think of it as an option. So while it ticks a "feature" on the box, it is, for all practical purposes, simply a bluetooth headphone. Not sure, but it appears that the bypass around the amplifier (which requires power) is just not designed right.
    • minitech 8y ago
      This is almost certainly just a me thing, but just in case: I got some Bluetooth headphones that seemed to sound terrible wired, but it turned out to that the cable had to be pushed and rotated to lock into the headphones at that end. If you really mean atrocious atrocious (and especially if it’s Sennheiser HD 4.40 BT), this might be it?
    • cecja 8y ago
      The normal behaviour for Bluetooth headphones is that they have a better sound quality while wired. There must be something wrong with your phone/cable/headphones.
    • rusk 8y ago
      My experience was opposite. My car stereo has bluetooth and I would often listen to my phone that way because, well convenient .. one day I accidentally used the wired mode because I was charging my phone from it and boom the improvement in sound quality just blew me away. I looked into this, and the Bluetooth audio codecs just aren't that good. From heated discussions I have learned that the AirPod ones are in fact lossless because they use a grade of codec that isn't commonly available and thus never actually have to decode/reencode or anything like that. It's digital all the way to your ears. So maybe bluetooth is "as good as" line quality when you've all the pieces lined up; but line quality can be obtained "for free" at all times with commodity hardware. Just a thought.
• eksemplar 8y ago
  Weird, I noticed no difference between using the headphone jack headphones or the usb-c headphones I guess I can’t charge my phone and use headphones at the same time, but I really couldn’t before either considering the length of the charging cable. But I guess you must always be charging your phone since the usbport is occupied?
  • vinni2 8y ago
    > but I really couldn’t before either considering the length of the charging cable. The only place this really makes sense is on a long haul flight when you want to make sure you have fully charged phone and listen to music while falling asleep.
  • mattnewton 8y ago
    A common use case for me was in the car, where I want to be charging it but also use the audio port to interface with one of those tape deck adaptors, or just a rental with a terrible Bluetooth implementation (seriously, some of them scrape all your contacts assuming it is your car, and store them in the center console). I also have broken or lost over 3 adaptors now. This wasn’t broken and was pretty transparently done to increase the adoption rate of airpods IMO, so it is pretty frustrating. If I hadn’t had mind-blowing-ly bad experiences with samsung phones I would have jumped ship over this.
  • yellowapple 8y ago
    Personally, I regularly charge my phone and listen to music through the 3.5mm jack at the same time when I'm driving (my car doesn't have Bluetooth, so I have to use one of those 3.5mm-to-cassette adapters). Using a phone that doesn't have a 3.5mm jack would mean needing to burn quite a bit more money to somehow wire up my car for Bluetooth if I want to still be able to do these things.
  • eftpotrm 8y ago
    My 6yo car doesn't have bluetooth, and I regularly do long drives listening to podcasts and running satnav apps. Thankfully I have a sensible phone, but what's the benefit to me in having a phone that can have sound output or charging but not both?
• cageface 8y ago
  Latency is another issue. If you use your phone or tablet to make music then wireless headphones have an unacceptable delay. It's not a huge niche but there are a lot of us out there.
  • TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
    The way I read it, professional / amateur musicians and iPhones are the very definition of huge niche.
    • pjc50 8y ago
      Pro/am musicians and Macbooks are an absolutely massive combo and Apple get a lot of free advertising every time that glowing apple logo appears on stage. I wonder if they know this or will risk removing the jack from laptops.
      • franga2000 8y ago
        Most probably wouldn't care - they're usually using external DACs anyways.
• marzell 8y ago
  I also still use my DT770s as my daily headphones when I'm at my computer. I wish I had bought the Pro version way back when, as I believe it has detachable cables, and also higher resistance... it's difficult to modulate the volume on my desktop, as even 4-6% can be loud enough in some circumstances and there's not a lot of room for fine control at that level. In any case, I have had mine around the same length of time as you. However, I also really love my bluetooth headphones, and that's what I use when I'm not at my desk at home. They also work as wired headphones, but I acknowledge they are not affordable to most people. A charge lasts a really long time, and they have some nice features as well. I don't expect them to last 15 years, however. I bought a specific pair of wired earbuds with a mic to use for conference calls using my phone (Android). Now that my phone is failing and I'm forced to upgrade, I'm a bit concerned that the USB-to-3.5mm dongle for the Pixel 3 may not be compatible w/ the mic in my earbuds. In pictures it looks like it has a proper tip-ring-sleeve configuration so it might work, but at this point I'm just crossing my fingers until I can test.
  • lhl 8y ago
    Just as an FYI you can buy adapters that increase impedance on your headphones very cheaply on eBay. If you are looking to change sensitivity without changing impedance (which has some effects on sound signature), iFi makes the “Ear Buddy” and “iEMatch” products that are a bit more expensive, but do what they claim on the tin.
  • 0x38B 8y ago
    For what it's worth, I use the USB-to-3.5mm dongle with my Pixel 2, and my earbuds with mic work great.
  • cyunem 8y ago
    With regards to your desktop, I had/have the same issue with the volume being insanely loud and my options being either on at 2% or off since everything else was uncomfortable. I found https://equalizerapo.com/ https://equalizerapo.com/ (for Windows, similar things seem to exist for other systems based on a quick google search) fixed the problem and allowed a lot greater fine control. To get lower volume overall with Equalizer APO: install, reboot and change the Preamp line in EqualizerAPO/config/config.txt to -20 dB or whatever suits you. It should work as soon as you save.
• intended 8y ago
  Absolutely. Any headphone i use has to go through a converter.