4 ms·

Still with SD cards and headphone jacks? The world has moved on, my man.

by vasdae 3y ago

atomicfiredoll 3y ago
This is a technical audience. This article is about people not upgrading phones. There are many technical and professional people that have chosen not to upgrade phones because of the lack of these features. Clearly, that group isn't the main reason for the decline (it's not even mentioned as a trend in the article,) but it really shouldn't be surprising that there are people on this site who still take these things into consideration when upgrading.
freedomben 3y ago
Oh yeah, moved on to what? What has replaced those things and rendered them obsolete? On-board storage sure didn't, that's small and not portable, and we already had that. Bluetooth headphones didn't, those require special hardware, have to be charged (battery), have higher latency, reduced sound quality (lower fidelity), packet loss, and spyware built in, and DRM capable. Not even close to a replacement for analog headphone jack.
- vel0city 3y ago
  The storage on the device is portable when the device is portable. There are very few instances where I'd find an SD card acceptably portable but a phone not so. Phones these days come in hundreds of gigs of storage. My current phone was a decently cheap one and had 128GB of storage, easily >100GB of usable space. On Android one can easily mount the storage as a USB drive and transfer data at high speeds. And given its a nearly permanently network device its pretty trivial to have it sync storage someplace else, including your own self-hosted infrastructure. I don't need to have my complete music library on my device everywhere I go, I just cache the playlists I'm in to at the moment and stream when I have network (which is the majority of the time). Same goes with consuming video content or listening to podcasts or whatever. Why save it locally when it can trivially be streamed? Why keep your entire photo and personal movie collection on your portable device which can get lost and broken when you can just connect back home and access even more storage with higher reliability anytime, anywhere? Between on-board storage ballooning in size and network infrastructure making it pretty easy to access things over the net, for me and many others having SD cards is entirely obsolete. I don't understand what you mean about "spyware built in" for Bluetooth headphones. All my Bluetooth devices do not have any other kinds of network connectivity, they don't phone home or anything like that. There's no app or anything like that needed for them. There's also no "DRM" for Bluetooth, the output of the Bluetooth audio doesn't have some kind of macrovision or something preventing you from recording it or anything like that. I've got Bluetooth receivers which output to S/PDIF and analog RCA connectors, its not protected or anything like that.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    > Why save it locally when it can trivially be streamed? If you usually have a network connection, then most of the time streaming is fine. However, not everybody does. About 50% of the time I'm not home, I have little to no service, and even sometimes when I have a strong signal, it will randomly just stop working unless I toggle airplane mode off and on to reforce a handshake with the tower. If we all lived in a big city then sure we could probably make that assumption, but some people live in Wyoming. With local storage I can download high quality FLACs from Bandcamp and get higher quality without having to even think about whether I'll have service. Offline playback of music is a feature the original iPod had! > Why keep your entire photo and personal movie collection on your portable device which can get lost and broken when you can just connect back home and access even more storage with higher reliability anytime, anywhere? I would guess most people have more than 100GB in personal photos and videos, so even for the average use case this seems wrong, but especially for people that record much 4K video, you'll run out of space very quickly. Those files can easily get multiple GB in size. If you're on a vacation where you have little or no network connection, you'll have to downgrade your video quality or limit what you record. How is that better? If there were an SD card slot, this is a non-issue because you can bring as many SD cards as you need, and swap them out as they fill up. Can you do that with onboard storage? Then it's not a replacement/obsolescence, it's just a feature removal. > I don't understand what you mean about "spyware built in" for Bluetooth headphones. All my Bluetooth devices do not have any other kinds of network connectivity, they don't phone home or anything like that. There's no app or anything like that needed for them. That's great, I'm really happy for you. But some bluetooth headphones do have spyware (especially some of the best ones in some people's opinions). If it requires you to use a special app to pair and/or access features, then it (probably) has spyware in it. Bose is a great example (or at least was, maybe things have changed). With a physical head phone jack, there's no pairing required and there's no way to force you to use their software. That's a hell of a feature IMHO. That you don't personally have a use case for a headphone jack, doesn't mean it's obsolete. There isn't a replacement for a physical headphone jack, only alternatives with different pros and cons. If that were the criteria, then the M3 macbook would be considered obsolete because I don't personally have a use for it.
    - 3y ago

Still with SD cards and headphone jacks? The world has moved on, my man.

by vasdae 3y ago

Still with SD cards and headphone jacks? The world has moved on, my man.

This is a technical audience. This article is about people not upgrading phones. There are many technical and professional people that have chosen not to upgrade phones because of the lack of these features. Clearly, that group isn't the main reason for the decline (it's not even mentioned as a trend in the article,) but it really shouldn't be surprising that there are people on this site who still take these things into consideration when upgrading.

freedomben 3y ago

Oh yeah, moved on to what? What has replaced those things and rendered them obsolete? On-board storage sure didn't, that's small and not portable, and we already had that. Bluetooth headphones didn't, those require special hardware, have to be charged (battery), have higher latency, reduced sound quality (lower fidelity), packet loss, and spyware built in, and DRM capable. Not even close to a replacement for analog headphone jack.

vel0city 3y ago
The storage on the device is portable when the device is portable. There are very few instances where I'd find an SD card acceptably portable but a phone not so. Phones these days come in hundreds of gigs of storage. My current phone was a decently cheap one and had 128GB of storage, easily >100GB of usable space. On Android one can easily mount the storage as a USB drive and transfer data at high speeds. And given its a nearly permanently network device its pretty trivial to have it sync storage someplace else, including your own self-hosted infrastructure. I don't need to have my complete music library on my device everywhere I go, I just cache the playlists I'm in to at the moment and stream when I have network (which is the majority of the time). Same goes with consuming video content or listening to podcasts or whatever. Why save it locally when it can trivially be streamed? Why keep your entire photo and personal movie collection on your portable device which can get lost and broken when you can just connect back home and access even more storage with higher reliability anytime, anywhere? Between on-board storage ballooning in size and network infrastructure making it pretty easy to access things over the net, for me and many others having SD cards is entirely obsolete. I don't understand what you mean about "spyware built in" for Bluetooth headphones. All my Bluetooth devices do not have any other kinds of network connectivity, they don't phone home or anything like that. There's no app or anything like that needed for them. There's also no "DRM" for Bluetooth, the output of the Bluetooth audio doesn't have some kind of macrovision or something preventing you from recording it or anything like that. I've got Bluetooth receivers which output to S/PDIF and analog RCA connectors, its not protected or anything like that.
- freedomben 3y ago
  > Why save it locally when it can trivially be streamed? If you usually have a network connection, then most of the time streaming is fine. However, not everybody does. About 50% of the time I'm not home, I have little to no service, and even sometimes when I have a strong signal, it will randomly just stop working unless I toggle airplane mode off and on to reforce a handshake with the tower. If we all lived in a big city then sure we could probably make that assumption, but some people live in Wyoming. With local storage I can download high quality FLACs from Bandcamp and get higher quality without having to even think about whether I'll have service. Offline playback of music is a feature the original iPod had! > Why keep your entire photo and personal movie collection on your portable device which can get lost and broken when you can just connect back home and access even more storage with higher reliability anytime, anywhere? I would guess most people have more than 100GB in personal photos and videos, so even for the average use case this seems wrong, but especially for people that record much 4K video, you'll run out of space very quickly. Those files can easily get multiple GB in size. If you're on a vacation where you have little or no network connection, you'll have to downgrade your video quality or limit what you record. How is that better? If there were an SD card slot, this is a non-issue because you can bring as many SD cards as you need, and swap them out as they fill up. Can you do that with onboard storage? Then it's not a replacement/obsolescence, it's just a feature removal. > I don't understand what you mean about "spyware built in" for Bluetooth headphones. All my Bluetooth devices do not have any other kinds of network connectivity, they don't phone home or anything like that. There's no app or anything like that needed for them. That's great, I'm really happy for you. But some bluetooth headphones do have spyware (especially some of the best ones in some people's opinions). If it requires you to use a special app to pair and/or access features, then it (probably) has spyware in it. Bose is a great example (or at least was, maybe things have changed). With a physical head phone jack, there's no pairing required and there's no way to force you to use their software. That's a hell of a feature IMHO. That you don't personally have a use case for a headphone jack, doesn't mean it's obsolete. There isn't a replacement for a physical headphone jack, only alternatives with different pros and cons. If that were the criteria, then the M3 macbook would be considered obsolete because I don't personally have a use for it.
  - 3y ago