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After roasting Apple about headphone jacks, Google dumps it from Pixel 6A
- kgbcia 4y agohow about two usb ports. that way one serves as an output for Audio
- jmprspret 4y agoI feel like first some obscure or Chinese manufacturer will do it, then apple will copy it, ironing out any issues the previous manufacturer faced. Only then will the rest of manufacturers do follow suit.
- hindsightbias 4y agoAlways copying, never leading.
- rantallion 4y agoYou're talking about Apple, right? First smartphone, produced by IBM. First portable media player, produced by Archos. First tablet computer, produced by Cambridge Media. Apple are infamous for taking someone else's idea, giving it a bit more polish, than marketing it as though they came up with it in the first place.
- eesmith 4y ago"Leading" doesn't have to mean "first". VisiCalc wasn't the first spreadsheet program. It was, however, the leading spreadsheet program for a while. Lotus 1-2-3 wasn't the first spreadsheet program for the PC. It was, however, the leading one for a while.
- caycep 4y agoput it this way - would you have rather walked around with the IBM Simon in your pocket, or the original iPhone?
- technofiend 4y agoThe cargo cult stuff is what cracks me up: Me: May I tap to pay? Cashier: Yes. Me: Great. :pulls out Pixel: Cashier: Oh, is that Android? We just take Apple Pay. Never mind that Google Pay came out first, it's now dubbed Apple Pay like Apple invented it and cashiers are convinced the NFC reader only works with iPhones. Because Apple, apparently.
- scarface74 4y agoI wonder why Google Pay isn’t a household name? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Pay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Pay Maybe because it’s the same company that announced three messaging apps the same year and has the attention span of Dory.
- prepend 4y agoApple Pay was first by about a year (2014 vs 2015). Google had a payment product but it was browser based and not integrated into phones, didn’t work with tap to pay through existing nfc chips or anything special. They seemed to respond to Apple Pay by changing the name (of course) to Android Pay. And there were also specific payment methods for some manufacturers like Samsung Pay also coming out about a year after Apple.
- sahaskatta 4y agoThis is not accurate. I had a Nexus S 4G which debut in 2010. It had Google Wallet tap to pay (NFC). I don't exactly know when Google started offering NFC-based payments nor do I remember exactly what it was named as they keep disastrously rebranding their products, however it did come well before Apple Pay which launched in 2014. As per who popularized tap-to-pay in the U.S., there's no question that Apple wins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_S https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_S https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db5zNbD-QYs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db5zNbD-QYs
- philistine 4y agoThe fact no one seems to be able to exactly pinpoint the moment Android phones were able to support NFC payments kind of tells you why everyone credits Apple for making it popular. Because they did!
- rgovostes 4y agoYes, clearly the iPhone was just an IBM Simon[1] with a "bit more polish". Probably took just one or two weeks of engineering effort. Unclear why the IBM sold 50k and the iPhone sold 6M, perhaps just due to marketing budget? https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IBM%27s_SweetSpot_smartphone_prototype.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IBM%27s_SweetSpot_sm...
- gtk40 4y agoI mean there was plenty that happened in this space between 1992 and 2007. Smartphones were already ubiquitous for business users by 2007 but not for general consumers, including Blackberry, PalmOS, and Windows Mobile devices. As late as 2010 Blackberry was still dominant: https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press-Releases/2011/1/comScore-Reports-November-2010-US-Mobile-Subscriber-Market-Share https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press-Releases/2011/1/comS...
- philjohn 4y agoHaving moved from a Windows Mobile device (MDA Vario 2) to the iPhone 3GS it was clear that the former had no place calling itself a "smart" phone.
- scarface74 4y agoIt also had less space than Nomad. No wireless. Lame… And for the young folks. https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
- tempnow987 4y ago"Apple are infamous for taking someone else's idea, giving it a bit more polish, than marketing it as though they came up with it in the first place." This made me laugh. I bought the first iphone - full cash price - no contract, no crap. When I read this stuff you just realize how underestimated apple is and was.
- elsonrodriguez 4y agoAnyone who has held a Archos Jukebox in one hand and an OG iPod in the other knows why this comparison is laughable.
- Mehringotio 4y agoMake sure to watch the Google Io from yesterday to see what Google actually is about. Apple makes high quality luxury hardware and that's it. Google tries to save the world (android, maps, secure by default, 24x7 renewable...). Of course overstating a little bit as google is still just a company who earns money
- prepend 4y agoGoogle is an ad company, Apple is a hardware company. All else is marketing.
- tempnow987 4y agoYou do realize that google makes MOST of its money from corps (through marketing crap to you). Apple incentives are somewhat better aligned with consumers, as they make MOST of their money selling consumers actual stuff, including incredibly hardware!
- emkoemko 4y agoyou mean unrepairable walled garden hardware garbage? not that i am defending Google
- Mehringotio 4y agoGoogle anonymises data. Google gave us Google maps, android and plenty of other things before anyone else.
- philistine 4y agoRemember that time Google premiered an AI during the IO keynote that would call a business for you to take an appointment on your behalf? How often have you used this service since its been released? That's right, zero, Google never released the product. They always present things at IO they have no intention of doing. They're not trying to save the world, they're pretending that they're saving the world, one vaporware product at a time.
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- CosmicShadow 4y agoI feel like I'll be stuck never being able to buy a new phone. Everyone is removing basic features like headphone jacks and sd card slots.
- metadat 4y agoAnd tragically, the eventuality is you'll be forced to get a new device supporting 5g/6g/Ng in order to retain telco network compatibility. Why do the dominant manufacturers (Apple, Samsung) insist we not have a headphone jack and expandable storage? It's starting to feel rather stupid and like a huge ripoff. Wireless headsets are expensive, and after a year or two the batteries wear out and the entire thing is junk. What a ridiculously high tax on customer wallets over time, not to mention the e-waste. USB-C buds have been 100% crap on my experience. If you have recommendations in this department, please do share.
- NoPicklez 4y agoIt the unfortunate edge case where you aren't even close to the majority that find those things useful enough to keep them.
- CosmicShadow 4y agoThere is no shortage of people who have spent lots of money on good quality headphones that want to use them though, but that doesn't matter to companies like Google or Samsung or Apple because they don't make or sell those products, instead they want to sell you easy to lose, overpriced, sub-par quality, "they look cool and just work**" buds and the best way to do that is to just kill any other choice. Want big headphones or noise cancelling? Not our problem! They also finally realized that you can buy a 512GB sd card for like $100 bucks so no one was paying an extra $350 to get 128gb more space, so again, just eliminate the option because they literally can and no one can stop them. It's fucking bullshit.
- wilsonnb3 4y agoPeople who spend big money on headphones were probably using external DACs anyways, which you can still do just fine. Not to mention that the 9 dollar lightning or usb c adapters that Apple and google sell sound as good or better than the DACs they were including in their phones.
- gjvc 4y agoI have a Pixel 3 here. It doesn't have a 3.5mm jack either, and it's a pity.
- jfengel 4y agoI spent a lot of time with a Pixel 3, and I'm happy with my Pixel 5A. The latter has a headphone jack; the former doesn't. With my Pixel 3, I replaced the fancy headphones several times, at a cost of about $30. I really did like the Google-brand headphones (they stay in very well while running), and I didn't find it inconvenient to be unable to charge while listening. But I really like being able to use very cheap earbuds. They break or get lost, I buy more. And they're available anywhere, while the USB-C ones are a specialty item. I also use the USB-C port a lot, when I'm driving, and that works really well. I never did find a set of bluetooth earbuds that worked well enough when I was running.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoIt's a different market today. The mistake would be to stick to a 6-year-old decision.
- gfrff 4y agoI feel like there's an adequate market for a phone case with a high quality headphone jack, extended battery, sd slot, etc. It shouldn't more than double the thickness
- jmprspret 4y agoThis is a fantastic idea. I'm surprised nothing like this has caught on.
- Gigachad 4y agoThere used to be a market for battery cases that were double thickness but that pretty much dried up when phone batteries became good enough and chargers charged in minutes rather than hours.
- jhugo 4y agoIt's almost like features like card slots in smartphones are not particularly important to the mass market! The discussion on HN when headphone jacks come up is always quite amusing. The market has demonstrated now for years that removing headphone jacks from phones is a perfectly reasonable decision for a manufacturer to make. I wonder how much longer HN commenters will keep insisting that it's a terrible mistake.
- shusaku 4y agoIf HN was in charge your smart phone would have a floppy disk drive
- aunty_helen 4y agoAnd a physical keypad
- 10amxn10 4y ago
- jmprspret 4y ago
- guelo 4y agoI used to be such a Google fanboy that I made my career as an Android developer for the last 10 years. But nowadays I'm disgusted by the company and am cynical of every product announcement. I resent feeling like I have to pay attention to the soulless Google I/O. I'm thinking of switching careers even if it means a significant pay cut.
- philistine 4y agoJust to preach to the choir, do you remember that time they premiered an AI that would call a business and take an appointment on your behalf?
- LigmaYC 4y agoCould still be released, but that "product demo" was a few years too early.
- PausGreat 4y agoIts just a headphone jack
- shmde 4y agoIts just a headphone jack, Its just a removable battery, Its just expandable storage, Its just removable sim tray, Its just .....
- mecha_ghidorah 4y agoThis is a much pithier way of putting what I said elsewhere in this thread about "frog boiling themselves out of an audience"
- yumraj 4y agoI guess we need the mobile phone equivalent of Framework laptop, with interchangeable ports/slots.
- Sparkle-san 4y agoGoogle was working on that once upon a time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara
- KennyBlanken 4y ago> with interchangeable ports/slots. glances at the USB-C port ... ....... ..................
- colejohnson66 4y agoAren't the Framework laptop ports nothing more than a USB-C plug with space for a little converter box? https://images.prismic.io/frameworkmarketplace/8154e4f4-ac3f-48ee-ab06-cd4940abbf8b_insert-expansioncard-yellow.gif?auto=compress,format https://images.prismic.io/frameworkmarketplace/8154e4f4-ac3f...
- hitovst 4y agoThey're making it very easy to identify what we should avoid.
- draw_down 4y ago
- throw7 4y agoIf at all, the "-a" pixel phones should have traditional/stable features like headphone jacks, fingerprint sensors on the back (no experimental/slow in back of glass sensor) , and the "smaller" form factor. It's really disappointing that this "high/low" market is not exploited.
- faangiq 4y agoLow IQ headline. Apple did it two years too early.
- musicale 4y agoFor better or for worse, Apple is often ahead of the curve. They love to get rid of ports, but years after going all-in on USB C/Thunderbolt for 2016 MacBook Pro models they actually backtracked and added some of the missing ports back (though I wish they'd kept 4 - or more! - USB C/Thunderbolt ports!)
- NoPicklez 4y agoI never understood why they removed MagSafe, fair enough it meant you should use USB-C which is more standardised. But it was an excellent feature, which kept my charger working for 10+ years.
- hutattedonmyarm 4y agoI'm incredibly happy with the solution on their redesigned Pros. MagSafe, but you can charge using USB-C if you want
- fuzzythinker 4y agoGetting rid of floppy drive was probably their first "get rid of ports" move.
- zerocrates 4y agoAround that same time they killed ADB in favor of USB.
- fuzzythinker 4y agoTotally forgot they didn't use PS/2
- taejavu 4y agoYes but they influence the curve too. I don't think the phasing out of 3.5mm jacks was inevitable - if Apple kept them so would have every other company!
- alphabettsy 4y agoSamsung did the same thing. Headphone jack: https://9to5mac.com/2019/08/08/samsung-ads-mocking-iphones/ https://9to5mac.com/2019/08/08/samsung-ads-mocking-iphones/ Charging brick: https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/23/22197394/samsung-deletes-ads-mocking-apple-charger https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/23/22197394/samsung-deletes...
- robgibbons 4y agoComparing the specs between the 5a vs the 6a right now, there don't seem to be any compelling reasons to wait. Other than the different placement of the fingerprint sensor, the only major difference seems to be the processor (Tensor vs Snapdragon). In fact, the battery in the 6a is a downgrade from the 5a (by sheer mAh if not by actual life), and you lose the headphone port. https://www.tomsguide.com/face-off/google-pixel-6a-vs-pixel-5a-whats-different https://www.tomsguide.com/face-off/google-pixel-6a-vs-pixel-...
- CameronNemo 4y agoYou would probably be paying for the extra couple years of updates. https://endoflife.date/pixel https://endoflife.date/pixel
- aasasd 4y agoI can only guess that no one at Google ever tried to use bluetooth headphones for anything serious. Or they would know that thanks to the gigantic latency, particularly on Android, with anything more demanding than videos those headphones are absolute trash, total garbage, useless junk and utter shit. But of course, Google never gave a flying fuck about audio on Android, so they didn't bother to check if it works reasonably. Bluetooth headphones make some noises when connected, so it must be fine.
- password4321 4y ago> Google never gave a flying fuck about audio on Android It only took 10 years: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36908622 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36908622
- Moto7451 4y agoI’m pretty sure it’s a move connected to both the industry trajectory and the Pixel Buds. https://store.google.com/us/magazine/pixel_buds_compare https://store.google.com/us/magazine/pixel_buds_compare I’m an iPhone user so I can’t comment on the Android audio stack in day to day use. Apple’s magic Bluetooth chips in the AirPods seem to work really well for me. I imagine the Google equivalent would work well with Google phones
- lynndotpy 4y agoAirPods definitely have significant latency on iPhones. (I'd estimate at least 100ms.) Perfectly fine for movies or podcasts, detrimental for calls, and awful for anything gaming related. They don't seem worse on the Pixel 4a, but they definitely don't seem better.
- xwa32 4y agoLooks like the AirPods Pro may address the latency issue. https://gizbuyerguide.com/are-the-airpods-pro-good-for-gaming/ https://gizbuyerguide.com/are-the-airpods-pro-good-for-gamin... “AirPods Pro and Powerbeats Pro that are wirelessly connected to an iOS device, such as an iPhone 11 or iPad Pro, should have very little, if any, latency in audio with respect to the visuals on the screen.”
- tonmoy 4y agoHaving worked on Audio Codecs and even though my livelihood depends on it, I would like to say 3.5mm jacks suck! You need to figure out how much resistive and how much capacitive load any headphone has. You need to detect if it has mic, if it does is it US or China standard. Need to make sure that the DAC and amplifier don’t consume too much power yet have a good dynamic range for arbitrary cable length. Let the phone send digital audio data along with power using USB-C and have the earpieces play the audio, it’d be much simpler IMO
- dhosek 4y agoI remember being a little shocked to discover that I had better battery life on my phone with Bluetooth than I did with a wired connection.
- kevingadd 4y agoThe dac is running off the batteries in your Bluetooth headphones, so that's a pretty natural outcome.
- akvadrako 4y agoThe size of batteries in two piece earbuds is miniscule and would not make a difference in phone runtime.
- dreamcompiler 4y agoAnd the power amp which probably consumes more power than the DAC.
- theshrike79 4y ago...and people still want to manually disable bluetooth on their phone "because it eats up their battery". Dude. You posting that message to FB took more power than your idling bluetooth will spend all week :D
- aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
- deanCommie 4y agoEveryone complaining about your phones no longer having headphone jacks or SD card slots: I remember when the first iMac came out and had the audacity not to have a floppy disk. I was appalled. Everyone was. Just sayin'.
- CameronNemo 4y agoWith UFS sizes where they are at, I can get quite a bit of media on my device these days even without an SD card. Back in the day when eMMC was topping out at 64 GB, with a hefty premium, it was a bit different. Expandable storage is definitely a nice longevity / future proofing feature, though.
- TheRealNGenius 4y agoI agree. HackerNews as a whole lacks vision.
- phatfish 4y agoMine has both and it is from 2021. Removing the ability to expand your phones storage locally is just a way to justify the cost structure Apple and others created around "more storage = more cost". When you can add 128GB via a card slot for $30 but Apple charge you many multiples of that to get the same as embedded storage it just looks stupid. It is also to get you to pay for iCloud when you run out of space on the cheaper iPhones. All my other electronic devices have a audio jack and it works perfectly fine, so why not a phone? Analog headphones are also cheaper and guaranteed to work so avoid the vendor lock-in and licensing scams Apple and others try to set up. I can also (shock) charge my phone AND have headphones connected without a stupid dongle. Floppy disks were worse in every way than a USB stick or CD. The headphone jack and SDcard slot are always a benefit (to the consumer at least, not to Apple/Google trying to sell you Cloud storage and overpriced accessories).
- tj_h 4y agothe worst thing to me about the push to replace sdcard based storage with cloud based one (as expandable and "sharable" storage) is how incredibly US-centric (or..."rich country" centric?) that is. Forget places like India even in the US there is a huge section of the population that live in places with very poor cell reception and are just starting to see post dial up speeds. Yea, cloud storage is cool if you're like me - i live in a major metro, never really venture outside of downtown and my wifi and internet could easily get me >1Gbps speeds if i really wanted but it's a REAL pain when i'm on vacation somewhere and have taken a bunch of photos and need to share it with people, or running low on storage so need to upload it to clear some space...you ever tried to upload 200 photos taken by an iphone 11 or whatever at a random resort in mexico somewhere? And those cloud data charges, yikes. I mean the lowest priced tier on both google and apple are $0.99/mth which is not gonna break the bank for most people but like, apple for example the free tier is only 5GB, that is absolutely nothing.
- shepardrtc 4y agoFor years I swore I would never get wireless headphones. I always made this mental mockery of running out of battery and not being able to use them. But now that I have a pair - and ones that have noise cancellation, at that - I can't imagine not using them. I plugged in headphones to my laptop once and it felt so clunky. Never thought I would say that.
- snvzz 4y agoGet Sennheiser HD600 (cabled!) and you'll recover your wired sanity.
- elsonrodriguez 4y agoFor those curious the correct way to pronounce this is "Hodo 6 Hungoes by old mate Senny".
- Groxx 4y agoopen-back headphones are rather different than noise-canceling ones
- bitcharmer 4y agoI've had them for a long while but find myself using my wireless Momentum 3's almost 90% of the time. The protruding cable is just annoying.
- ben-schaaf 4y agoI'm in the same position but have the opposite conclusion. They cut out when using the microwave or in busy areas of the city. The fact that they're not attached means I forget my phone on occasion and have to go back. Pairing with new devices is much more hassle than using the cable, so I only use bluetooth with my phone and cable otherwise. Even then it sometimes just doesn't connect. The battery life is amazing, but I have on many occasions just used the cable or my backup wired earphones instead because it was flat. In conclusion the noise cancelling is awesome, but the wireless for me is at best a very situational improvement and I wouldn't be less happy without it. I certainly will continue to use wired earphones and avoid products without an aux port.
- mym1990 4y agoI'm on my third pair of airpods, and have no plans to get another eventually. The first pair I misplaced(later to be found)...obviously my fault. But the second pair, the firmware is stuck in limbo where both buds have a different firmware version, both old. I took it to Apple and hilariously enough they have no process for forcing a firmware update. They literally said 'go home, try some stuff, hope it works, if it doesn't, come back and buy another pair'. The third pair the left bud has 50% audio. I still use it daily, but its ironic that a product that was supposed to be seamless is consistently operating at subpar level.
- google234123 4y agoTry using some rubbing alcohol and a brush on the airpod mesh speaker area . Also make sure your volume balance isn’t off in your settings
- hajile 4y agoBuy a decent Bluetooth DAC and plug in your favorite IEMs then never worry about that stuff again. Even a $30-50 DAC with good IEM will sound so much better and if you have Bluetooth issues, it’s not a huge replacement cost.
- guelo 4y agoI've blown close to a thousand dollars on lost and damaged earbuds. No wonder these anti consumer companies love them. But I'm not spending more, I've basically lost the functionality from my phone.
- philliphaydon 4y agoSometimes I read the comments about the headphone Jack and it’s like. How did we move from VHS to DVD to BluRay to Streaming with all these people who are so attached to the past they can’t move on…
- blitzar 4y agoWe didnt have the modern internet.
- jokteur 4y agoIf you are into music production, then you really care about audio latency. And no, the consumer wireless headphones you can buy have terrible latency. I wouldn't say that wired headphones are stuck in the past. VHS to DVD was a huge jump: you didn't need to rewind anymore, quality didn't suck so much, you could have multiple languages. Going from wired to wireless isn't so much an improvement in technology. There are still lots of advantages of wired technology: it is cheaper, you don't need to recharge, latency is better, no findling with Bluetooth problems.
- philliphaydon 4y agoSure but that’s audio production and people in audio production don’t tend to use a 3.5mm headphone Jack… on phones people more often than not can’t tell the difference in audio quality.
- schrijver 4y agoHeadphones meant for audio production tend to come with a 3.5mm headphone jack with screw thread that allows you to securely fit an adapter to full size jack. I find it very likely that people who are into audio production want to use their cabled headphones on their phone. I do. And the people who are into hi-fi too. It’s just that it’s too small of a part of the market.
- Puts 4y ago"I can't believe we managed to moved on from horse wagons to cars when people are so attached to wheels.." Everything that is old is not per definition bad.
- seydor 4y agoyou dont only lose the ability to listen to something when your earbuds are dead , you also lose FM radio
- Shorel 4y agoMy Xiaomi phone still has them. It is one of the reasons I bought it.
- stodor89 4y agoApple is the only company with some sort of vision for the smartphone. My issue is, I find their vision disgusting.
- FargaColora 4y agoIs my understanding correct, that any wireless solution uses a lossless codec. Therefore the highest quality audio iPhone is the original wired SE from 2016. Any modern iPhone will have lower quality audio by design, no matter how good the wireless buds are.
- ddorian43 4y agoLatency is also a big problem I believe.
- mabedan 4y agoYou can use lightening earbuds theoretically
- kalleboo 4y agoApple sells a Lighting to 3.5mm adapter that has decent (lossless) audio quality https://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/lightning-adapter-audio-quality.htm https://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/lightning-adapter-audio-qu...
- bryanrasmussen 4y agoIsn't that normal though, Apple makes some design decision, everyone talks smack, a few years later everyone follows. And I hate the lack of headphone jacks on things.
- thefz 4y agoWhat is good for a business does not necessarily mean it is for the customer too.
- bjoli 4y agoAnd the 5a has a broken jack. The volume up button starts the assistant and there is no way to configure it. If the assistant is disabled it does nothing. Whoever thought that was a good idea?
- yc-kraln 4y agoSomehow, my Zenfone 8 has a headphone jack and nevertheless is IP68 and thin. These days, I buy phones based on whether or not they're suppored by Lineage, and if they have a headphone jack or not. That's it; that's the criteria.
- blacklight 4y agoGood, and I'll keep avoiding phones that ditch the audio jack. And let me be clear - the 3.5mm jack is far from being the perfect way of transmitting and sending audio. It's a vestige from an analog world where you have to take impedence and resistance of the load into account, and I don't use it much myself. But the use-case where you have to stream music from your phone and you have just a humble set of speakers, an amplifier or some old headphones isn't that uncommon - especially for musicians like me: what happens when you're in a studio with your band, you want to play an mp3 on your phone, but you have no way of plugging your phone to the mixer or the amp? Pretending that such use-cases don't exist, and force all the users to figure out an alternative, is an act of sheer arrogance on the producers' side. And such arrogance isn't even justified by the claim of water resistance: it's technically possible today to have an audio jack port AND be waterproof.
- nhumrich 4y agoSo, buy a usbc to 3.5 dongle. Problem solved.
- LandStander 4y agoI've been using a dongle in my car(an older model with no bluetooth), and it is quickly wearing out my phones usb port. Keeps falling out. The headphone jack was a lot more resilient.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoSeems like your phone's manufacturer cheaped out on the port. I have an iPad Pro whose usb-c port still feels rock solid after 2.5 years.
- schrijver 4y agoProblem patched, more or less: you can easily forget or loose the dongle, and you’ve lost the ability to charge your phone at the same time. It still feels like a step back in functionality.
- 4y ago
- oftenwrong 4y agoThis does not seem to make sense given the sentiments I've seen from reviewers and consumers. Pixel 3A: widely praised for having a headphone jack Pixel 4A: widely praised for still having a headphone jack Pixel 5A: widely praised for still having a headphone jack Pixel 6A: no headphone jack Personally, I am not ready to give up the headphone jack. I wish I could go fully wireless, but bluetooth audio is too frustrating to use in many cases. For example, my family has a bluetooth speaker. Managing and switching whose phone was paired via bluetooth was so annoying. There was frequently a mismatch between the device we wanted to be connected, and the device that was actually connected. We eventually reverted to just plugging our phones into the audio-in port of the speaker. Unplugging and plugging is quick, simple, and doesn't require fiddling with device menus. Guests don't have to endure the tedious "pairing" ritual. Of course, we have to have dongles anyway... Another example is in rental cars. For one, pairing and switching devices with car media systems is dreadful. I've also had frequent problems, with multiple different phones and multiple different cars, where audio media and satnav announcements would not switch properly over bluetooth, such that the satnav announcements would get cut off. On the other hand, the "aux" port works flawlessly 100% of the time with no fiddling. Never travel without at 3.5mm audio cable. If the wireless audio implementations were more user friendly, I think many current headphone jack holdouts would happily cut the cord.
- neilsense 4y agoIt makes perfect sense. Reviewers want something to differentiate it from the iPhone and to rave about, so they choose the headphone jack. Whereas users, and Google absolutely has the data for this, are probably mostly using bluetooh ear pods or headphones and so Google knows real users don't care.
- GekkePrutser 4y agoThe times I use the 3,5mm jack on my phone are few and far between. However if I didn't have that option at those times I wouldn't have had anything else to hand (eg no Bluetooth headset nearby or battery dead) so those few times are really important to me. This is something you don't really get from just looking at data.
- oxplot 4y agoHeadphone jacks on mobile devices, especially mobile phones that you handle numerous times during the day, is a big problem. Personally, I almost destroyed my phone multiple times back when I wore wired headphones plugged into my phone. I'd get up my seat on a bus to get off and the wire would catch on the seat handle, pulling my ears and the phone off. I've damaged multiple headphone plugs this way and hurt my ears (I wore those stage in-ear monitors that go around the ear). Apple did a tremendous job pushing the industry towards wireless earbuds. I'm sure they did it partly (or if you ask some, wholly) to sell you more expensive stuff, but I'm happy paying more because not only has it eliminated the safety issues with the wired buds, but it's created completely different ways of using ear phones. I have one set of speakers in my ears, which I barely feel they're there, and I listen to content from my watch, my phone, my computer and my TV in what I can only describe as "magically". They take up less space and are much easier to take out and put away compared to their wired counterpart. I can walk around my home while on a phone call, meeting or just doing house chores. Oh and wait for it, I can share playback with my partner in a noisy environment or on a plane. Most of my use cases mentioned above is either impossible or quite cumbersome with a wired set. I am one of those who's happy as a hippo because of Airpods. And I used to own Senheisser over the ears, Shure in-ear monitors with stacks of DACs and amps, so there. Convenience and freedom for me outweighed the 2% extra detail I could hear with those setups.
- FractalHQ 4y agoNot having an audio jack sucks. They said it’s because Bluetooth is the future and my phone can be .01mm thinner. Well- I have AirPods and their battery life sucks. They die before I get home. I always lose the adapter. It may be a first world problem, but it’s still a measurable regression in my quality of life.
- JuanSucks 4y agoI've read through so many comments on the headphone jack debate throughout the years since they started removing them from phones, and I've still yet to see a fair justification for their removal. You can still use wireless earbuds perfectly fine on phones that include a headphone jack, so the argument that wireless earbuds are more convenient is moot. Arguing over the benefits and downsides of bluetooth do nothing to address the subject at hand, which is the removal of a feature that used to come standard on any phone on the market.
- rajnathani 4y agoIt's interesting that marketing teams at large companies sort of inherently lack long-term marketing consistency. Or at least, had the product team been in sync with the marketing team about their long-term vision of removing the headphone jack, then maybe they wouldn't have marketed the "roast".
- monsterofcookie 4y agoIt almost like business people no more honest than politicians.