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Personally I feel like makers saw an opportunity on 1) boost sales on new headphones 2) get rid of the cable hanging around. I can understand and feel your fath

Personally I feel like makers saw an opportunity on 1) boost sales on new headphones 2) get rid of the cable hanging around. I can understand and feel your fathers frustration trying to use wireless headphones, on the other side if they never ever get rid of the headphone jack then users are going to end up never getting trained on how to use wireless headphones. Generally with leaps in tech there are leaps in reduced accessibility for older people, and with how fast tech is changing I can’t see the current older generation getting more familiar with tech. Although give it a generation more and people that are currently 40 will be able to adapt new tech much easier and accessibility is going to be much less of an issue for the foreseen future. Also at the end of the day I think there are adaptors that convert the jack into whatever port your phone has. I know it’s not ideal as you get more pieces to carry around and you might lose them but again there is a solution. Also I have to state the fact that I was highly against not having a headphone jack as I own several pairs of good headphones with jacks and also I just didn’t like that change. I adapted and tbh I am much happier with Wirless headphones right now and not having those cables around me. Battery life could improve which am sure it will with time and I won’t need to charge them every so often but over all I am admitting that I was mistakenly thinking that wireless headphones and no jack sucks.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
> I can understand and feel your fathers frustration trying to use wireless headphones, on the other side if they never ever get rid of the headphone jack then users are going to end up never getting trained on how to use wireless headphones. But why do you want to get rid of the headphone jack? For iPhone, this is a direct downgrade, loss of very useful functionality. That's why people are complaining; while companies seem to like trading utility for fashion all the time, this case was unprecedently blatant. > Also at the end of the day I think there are adaptors that convert the jack into whatever port your phone has. That's the trick though. Someone's gonna make money on the adapters :). Also, I start to think this was a move meant to "disrupt" the headphones market. Suddenly the perfectly good headphones no longer work for a big and rich chunk of people, and out come new wireless options. The conspiracist in me wonders whether people responsible for this decision have any ties to people selling AirPods and their alternatives :).
- fouc 8y ago
  > But why Sometimes you have to take a step back to take two steps forward.
  - nathan_long 8y ago
    > Sometimes you have to take a step back to take two steps forward. And sometimes you have to take a step back because someone pushes you. I'm old enough to remember getting a cordless home phone. Being able to walk around the house and talk instead of sitting by the phone jack was awesome. And there was very little downside, because whenever you weren't using the phone, you put it on the cradle and it was charging. Ethernet to WiFi was similarly good. I like that I can sit anywhere in or near my house and use the internet. There's not much downside. But headphones? If I'm listening to a podcast on my phone, I'm going to have my phone on me. I'm not going to walk away from it because then I couldn't control the playback. A wireless connection to something I'm going to be touching while I use it anyway doesn't do anything for me. I get zero freedom of movement from that. It just means another thing to configure, another thing to charge, another way things can be incompatible or fail.
    - lparry 8y ago
      > If I'm listening to a podcast on my phone, I'm going to have my phone on me. I'm not going to walk away from it because then I couldn't control the playback. Every set of wireless headphones I’ve owned have let me control play/pause/skip from them, which makes up 95% of the playback controls I ever use. The last 5% I can do from my watch. Roaming about the house listening to stuff without a care where my phone is seems totally normal to me these days. I would never go back to wires now I’ve lived with the benefits of wireless. FTR I was equally skeptic before I bought some cheap $10 Bluetooth earbuds to try running without wires tugging with every stride, and found myself wanting to use them all the time in spite of their awful sound quality so I bit the bullet and got some decent ones
  - joombaga 8y ago
    What is the step forward?
tripzilch 8y ago
So I am in a few years nearing 40, and I remembered when I first used a bluetooth headset, it was like seventeen years ago, so I was in my early 20s Though it was (a tiny bit) more "magical" back then, pairing devices sucked then and still sucks. Has anything even changed with how Bluetooth works? Cause I keep giving Bluetooth new chances, "well it's X years later, and it still exists, surely they must have found a way to make it suck less"--and every time it's a disappointment. People still fiddling with pairing their devices, taking too much time, always at a most inconvenient moment (either in groups with everyone waiting and the device making funny noises, or when you're busy with the task Bluetooth was meant to free your hands for). Did they fix or improve anything about Bluetooth over the years? Cause it feels to me the attitude has always been what you said: people should just get used to it better. Because what Bluetooth promises sounds like an awesome idea and why shouldn't we have that? But the reality is that it sucks too much and people aren't getting used to it. To constrast with Bluetooth, I also remember when Wifi started to appear. It also used to suck a bit. It was often difficult to connect to, very unreliable, connections dropping, etc. You wouldn't want to have to rely on it for connectivity, so bring an Ethernet cable for your laptop, just in case. But nowadays, Wifi works brilliantly. You can bring your laptop for a presentation and safely depend on there being Wifi (or your/someone's phone mobile hotspot). Even older people can connect to new Wifi networks (at a restaurant or friends') without too much trouble. And that's including having to select the correct network manually and type in a password. Ask yourself this: You're at a new place, there's a Wifi network you haven't used before, but you know the name and password. Also there is a Bluetooth device that you have never connected to before. Which of these are you most confident about you can connect to and use without trouble? Why is this different? Did Wifi improve in significant aspects in the past two decades where Bluetooth didn't? Why is that?
- ConceptJunkie 8y ago
  I don't remember the transition from serial cables to USB being as bad. Yes, you needed adapters or new hardware, but USB has always "just worked". There are corner cases and limitations to it, of course, but USB was never (at least in my experience) anywhere near the headache that Bluetooth was... and still often is. I use Bluetooth, and in most cases I even like it, but it's still way more of a hassle than it should be, especially for something that's been around as long as it has. I didn't realize it was around as long as you described.
ConceptJunkie 8y ago
New tech needs to be easier and better, or it's not worth having. Forcing people to use bluetooth is not easier, and it's not better, so it' a bad idea. Period. This is about what's good for Apple (and other companies making a similar change, plus the people who sell the peripherals), and not what's better for the users.
zrobotics 8y ago
>>Although give it a generation more and people that are currently 40 will be able to adapt new tech much easier and accessibility is going to be much less of an issue for the foreseen future Unfortunately no, it will not. My father would have no conceptual issue operating a smartphone, but he does not have the dexterity required anymore, in fact he has issues just using a keyboard. These things happen with age, accessibility concerns aren't going to dissappear simply because people know how to operate the devices. FWIW, this is a man who knew how to touch-type, but as he has gotten older he is simply less dexterous. There is more to accessibility than just hoping people know how to use the software.
lazerpants 8y ago
Which wireless headphones do you find to but up to the task of matching the quality of your wired headphones?

TeMPOraL 8y ago

> I can understand and feel your fathers frustration trying to use wireless headphones, on the other side if they never ever get rid of the headphone jack then users are going to end up never getting trained on how to use wireless headphones. But why do you want to get rid of the headphone jack? For iPhone, this is a direct downgrade, loss of very useful functionality. That's why people are complaining; while companies seem to like trading utility for fashion all the time, this case was unprecedently blatant. > Also at the end of the day I think there are adaptors that convert the jack into whatever port your phone has. That's the trick though. Someone's gonna make money on the adapters :). Also, I start to think this was a move meant to "disrupt" the headphones market. Suddenly the perfectly good headphones no longer work for a big and rich chunk of people, and out come new wireless options. The conspiracist in me wonders whether people responsible for this decision have any ties to people selling AirPods and their alternatives :).

fouc 8y ago
> But why Sometimes you have to take a step back to take two steps forward.
- nathan_long 8y ago
  > Sometimes you have to take a step back to take two steps forward. And sometimes you have to take a step back because someone pushes you. I'm old enough to remember getting a cordless home phone. Being able to walk around the house and talk instead of sitting by the phone jack was awesome. And there was very little downside, because whenever you weren't using the phone, you put it on the cradle and it was charging. Ethernet to WiFi was similarly good. I like that I can sit anywhere in or near my house and use the internet. There's not much downside. But headphones? If I'm listening to a podcast on my phone, I'm going to have my phone on me. I'm not going to walk away from it because then I couldn't control the playback. A wireless connection to something I'm going to be touching while I use it anyway doesn't do anything for me. I get zero freedom of movement from that. It just means another thing to configure, another thing to charge, another way things can be incompatible or fail.
  - lparry 8y ago
    > If I'm listening to a podcast on my phone, I'm going to have my phone on me. I'm not going to walk away from it because then I couldn't control the playback. Every set of wireless headphones I’ve owned have let me control play/pause/skip from them, which makes up 95% of the playback controls I ever use. The last 5% I can do from my watch. Roaming about the house listening to stuff without a care where my phone is seems totally normal to me these days. I would never go back to wires now I’ve lived with the benefits of wireless. FTR I was equally skeptic before I bought some cheap $10 Bluetooth earbuds to try running without wires tugging with every stride, and found myself wanting to use them all the time in spite of their awful sound quality so I bit the bullet and got some decent ones
- joombaga 8y ago
  What is the step forward?

tripzilch 8y ago

So I am in a few years nearing 40, and I remembered when I first used a bluetooth headset, it was like seventeen years ago, so I was in my early 20s Though it was (a tiny bit) more "magical" back then, pairing devices sucked then and still sucks. Has anything even changed with how Bluetooth works? Cause I keep giving Bluetooth new chances, "well it's X years later, and it still exists, surely they must have found a way to make it suck less"--and every time it's a disappointment. People still fiddling with pairing their devices, taking too much time, always at a most inconvenient moment (either in groups with everyone waiting and the device making funny noises, or when you're busy with the task Bluetooth was meant to free your hands for). Did they fix or improve anything about Bluetooth over the years? Cause it feels to me the attitude has always been what you said: people should just get used to it better. Because what Bluetooth promises sounds like an awesome idea and why shouldn't we have that? But the reality is that it sucks too much and people aren't getting used to it. To constrast with Bluetooth, I also remember when Wifi started to appear. It also used to suck a bit. It was often difficult to connect to, very unreliable, connections dropping, etc. You wouldn't want to have to rely on it for connectivity, so bring an Ethernet cable for your laptop, just in case. But nowadays, Wifi works brilliantly. You can bring your laptop for a presentation and safely depend on there being Wifi (or your/someone's phone mobile hotspot). Even older people can connect to new Wifi networks (at a restaurant or friends') without too much trouble. And that's including having to select the correct network manually and type in a password. Ask yourself this: You're at a new place, there's a Wifi network you haven't used before, but you know the name and password. Also there is a Bluetooth device that you have never connected to before. Which of these are you most confident about you can connect to and use without trouble? Why is this different? Did Wifi improve in significant aspects in the past two decades where Bluetooth didn't? Why is that?

ConceptJunkie 8y ago
I don't remember the transition from serial cables to USB being as bad. Yes, you needed adapters or new hardware, but USB has always "just worked". There are corner cases and limitations to it, of course, but USB was never (at least in my experience) anywhere near the headache that Bluetooth was... and still often is. I use Bluetooth, and in most cases I even like it, but it's still way more of a hassle than it should be, especially for something that's been around as long as it has. I didn't realize it was around as long as you described.

ConceptJunkie 8y ago

New tech needs to be easier and better, or it's not worth having. Forcing people to use bluetooth is not easier, and it's not better, so it' a bad idea. Period. This is about what's good for Apple (and other companies making a similar change, plus the people who sell the peripherals), and not what's better for the users.

zrobotics 8y ago

>>Although give it a generation more and people that are currently 40 will be able to adapt new tech much easier and accessibility is going to be much less of an issue for the foreseen future Unfortunately no, it will not. My father would have no conceptual issue operating a smartphone, but he does not have the dexterity required anymore, in fact he has issues just using a keyboard. These things happen with age, accessibility concerns aren't going to dissappear simply because people know how to operate the devices. FWIW, this is a man who knew how to touch-type, but as he has gotten older he is simply less dexterous. There is more to accessibility than just hoping people know how to use the software.

lazerpants 8y ago

Which wireless headphones do you find to but up to the task of matching the quality of your wired headphones?