> I still get stuttering and low quality all the time when using Bluetooth.

Bluetooth works great for me (good enough quality, no stuttering) - what kills it is latency. Latency makes watching videos very uncomfortable. There's also faint static in nearly every pair of bluetooth earbuds I've tried (and not just cheap ones, $100+ ones do this too).

I haven't had any of those problems with the AirPods. No static, no latency.

There's some issues with reliably connecting though.

I had barely any issues with Airpods on iOS 10, but iOS 11 absolutely made them terrible. Constant stuttering, disconnecting randomly, falling to connect. Shame. I'll be moving to an Android now.

No issues here connecting at all with the AirPods. iPhone 7, Apple Watch, iPad, Nexus 5X, and even my old Nexus tablet all work beautifully.

The only issue I have w/ airpods on iphone 6 is stuttering when walking away from subway. What's up with that?

Have you considered that the problem (static, etc.) might not be on part of the bluetooth earphones, but rather on your phone's bluetooth hardware? I use an iPhone with bluetooth earphones all day and it's a great experience.

The ones I currently use have the same issues on both MBP and Nexus 5X, so I doubt it.

The problem I have with bluetooth is that it's a noticeable drain on battery. That's why I keep mine off all the time and avoid bluetooth devices.

This is exactly how I plan on acting too. I wish I had a way to tell these companies to attribute the lack of sale they normally would have gotten, to their decision to remove the headphone jack. I'm worried they'll attribute sales difficulties to some other reason.

I think bluetooth is absolutely there now... I've used bluetooth headsets for a number of years now and they are fantastic. You just need to buy a decent product! Currently I am using QC35s and there is no lag, no hiss, amazing quality all round.

Sometimes it is unavoidable though... for example my car's bluetooth implementation however is horrible - very laggy and sometimes unresponsive.

Your last paragraph hits the problem: it’s possible that a car exists with a release-quality Bluetooth stack but I’ve yet to use one. The same is true of most of the non-current or expensive devises, which turns quality into something you need to carefully seek out rather than a given.

In contrast, $2 throwaway headphones work 100% of the time. Sure, the audio quality isn’t great but it’ll be better than any phone speaker and you can drop only a little more for a big improvement.

This annoys me because I like the Bluetooth concept – and have since I bought my first BT-equipped phone around 2004 – but the tragedy of the commons has hit really hard. It’s 2017 and turning Bluetooth off and back on is still a useful way to fix problems FFS!

If Apple and followers want to make this switch, they need to start blacklisting or warning for buggy devices (“x is unable to play back reliably; contact VENDOR support” or “sound quality will be low due to …”) — after fixing anything hokey they’re still shipping, of course. Trying to paper over the skimping just tarnishes the entire industry.

I'm not an audiophile, but I can hear a difference between a good DAC through an headphone cable and a bluetooth set of headphones.

I was also just in an airline lounge last weekend and got a huge amount of drop outs on my bluetooth headphones. I'm guessing because of a strong wi-fi signal to the point where the music was stuttering badly.

So it's got a ways to go yet.

> You just need to buy a decent product!

And there's the issue, the 3.5mm works with something I can buy for a couple of dollars in the supermarket and it just works. A good bluetooth headset costs an order of magnitude or two more and I can't find out if it's good until I take it home and open the packaging.

Even streaming from my phone to my PC is something I've found to be incredibly laggy.

True - but the similar issues people complain about with BT audio are going to be present with $5 cabled headphones... crackly audio, dodgy cables might cut in/out with movement etc...

What about $145 cabled headphones?

Complexity has its price — it’s hard to get right and corner cases continue creeping in with wider use.

If there’s a popular example of over engineering, the replacement of a dirt cheap 3 foot cable that works perfectly 100% of the time, with zero lag and zero signal loss, with an expensive, battery powered wireless signal solution which lags, cuts out, creates security issues and dies after a few hours of use must be it.

Is it really unavoidable? Have you ever had a car 3.5mm port not work?

Yes. Not in a car, but in other devices.

In at least one of the cases, this was because of stuff (some sort of gunk) getting into the port. Before anyone says that wasn't a problem with the port itself, having a physical port allows problems like that to happen. Problems of that sort don't exist with wireless technologies.

Heh I know it's technically possible if you jam a candy bar into it, or spill coke on your phone, etc. It's much less pervasive than Bluetooth cutting in and out because you put your hand over the antenna and similar problems, though.

> Heh I know it's technically possible

it's not merely "technically possible". I've had this actually happen to me, and I'm sure others have too.

Sorry, what I meant by that was that it is sometimes unavoidable using a less than stellar bluetooth device :)

I got what you meant, I just meant that if you had a 3.5 mm jack, you wouldn't have these problems, it would just work. We've replaced a very simple, cheap solution that works very well and has very high fidelity with an unreliable, expensive, complicated one that has worse sound quality when it works. Your problem could very easily be avoided with very old tech.

And we've just got Bluetooth 5.0, which doesn't seem to address any of those issues. Instead it focuses on range, likely because that benefits local stores' advertising.