I use AirPods. I even like them. ... but you do realize that the case isn't a magical source of energy, right? You have to charge that thing... and the airpods themselves last a remarkably long time, but they don't last that long, so I find myself having to do this awkward dance in the middle of meetings where I take one out and charge it while relying on the other one, and then I swap to charge that one... I have lightning earpods, but then I can't charge my phone at the same time, so at some point my phone starts running out of battery and I'd have to switch to the airpods anyway (lol). I have tried buying multiple brands of lightning splitters, and they all suck and often the phone isn't quite able to charge even though it says it is charging.

I honestly don't care if I have a "headphone jack": I totally agree with Apple that it was a shitty jack. It was a fragile hole that made it impossible to waterproof the damned phone. How about they just give me two lightning ports? Or a lightning port and a USB-C port, to make my dreams finally come true of only having to carry around one (USB-C) cable while still getting to be compatible with all of the stuff Apple already sold for these devices?

> made it impossible to waterproof the damned phone Was that what Apple told their customers? Because it's utter bullshit. Sony, Samsung, LG, even those ultra-rugged CAT phones had headphone jacks and at least IP-68 (5m, 1h).

I love my CAT S41 because I don't have any of the issues in this thread and I expect this to stay true for another 10 years.

As a workaround I use an inductive charger while using headphones. Not a great solution because it only works at my desk, but better than nothing.

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.

Why don’t you just plug your old headphones into the adapter and continue to use them?

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?

I don’t use wired headphones, but I imagine that I would just leave the adapter on them 24/7?

>but I imagine that I would just leave the adapter on them 24/7?

Except people often use same headphone with both - phone and pc, so you will have to remove the adapter anyway.

Thats one of the most fatal flaws. Apples proprietary plugs aren't even standard across their own devices.

I'd rather keep the 1/8" to 1/4" adapter on it. Lightning or USB C means now I have two adapters to carry around.

It shouldn't be required either way, but I've occasionally zip-tied two adapters together so I can swap between them quickly.

I think it might be slightly annoying to have a two-inch-long dongle hanging off your phone at all times, particularly on a brand of phone that's specifically marketed (and purchased) for being sleek and clean-lined.

Correct. It really isn't a big deal.

Until you want to charge and listen to music at the same time, which I wanted to do on a flight recently. I had to charge up to what I thought was enough and then put the headphones in. Annoying.

My wife also brought Lightning headphones, which didn't work with anything except her phone, leading to her using the cheap airline ear buds for the in flight entertainment system.

Alternatively you can pick up a dual-port adapter and charge while you listen:

For example, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E5AHZYA

I take it you only use one set of headphones and that you only ever connect them to the phone?

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.

Why couldn’t they build it with a jack? Due to the thickness?

I’m typing this out on my iPhone 6 (which I will keep until it disintegrates because of its headphone jack) and it is plenty thin. I think only Apple themselves are obsessed with thin devices.

Heh. No. It's about DRM. Incrementalisim is powerful. They just pretend it's not.

The 6 is the thinnest of them, 6S and onwards are all thicker

Thinness and waterproofing are the two things I've heard that lead to removing the jack.

Neither seems insurmountable, but if you want to try and remove as many obstacles as possible in the search of those two things then the headphone jack is apparently one of the simpler ones.

Speakers, camera lens, physical buttons, charging, and data transfer are the remaining ones I can think of, and many of those have already been replaced in some models.

Samsung's been shipping waterproof (or at least water-resistant) headphone-jacked phones for years now.

Yeah, I mean it's not like they need to allow air to pass to the interior of the phone. All you need is a couple of exposed metal tabs, no different than the USB/lightning port.

Exactly, I think there are solutions for more or less everything I listed, or solutions could be found if necessary.

I think the headphone jack is a very practical component of the phone, and miss it regularly, but removing it does remove a few limitations on the designer.

At some point, in perhaps the not too distant future, I wouldn't be surprised if phones had been reduced down to look like not much more than a piece of glass. Maybe even a piece of flexible glass!

That's definitely been the trend for a while now, and things like edge to edge screens and wireless charging move us further in that direction. Thankfully neither of those seem to have necessitated the removal of some other function. There have been other casualties other on this path to simplification, such as the removal of the physical home button, but I don't think any which leave as big a gap as the headphone jack.

That would definitely be cool, we see them fairly often in modern scifi films/shows too nowadays.

Can't be thinness because the thinnest iphone ever is the 6s, which has a headphone jack and it can't be waterproofing because android makers seem to do waterproof phones with jacks just fine some of them even thinner than iphones too.

Nooo. Don't take my headphone port from my MBP!

In my home office, I have it wired to my simple mixer and amp with which two other computers also connect to. And from that split into my speakers and a pair of headset.

All non-digital and no USB involved with other things that can go wrong. I am no Hi-Fi buff, I just like one volume and power button when I need to silence or amp things.

Whilst commuting on the train I also use the headphone jack, even though I also have a Bluetooth headset, but it is limited to two sources which are already used up by my iPad and phone.

I don't want to yet again swear internally whilst standing on a busy tube with 1000 other people with Bluetooth devices, and having to reset the pairing on my iPad/iPhone.

Ps. I have an old phone with a 3.5mm jack, but I never use it. I use audio on my phone only when commuting or walking and then use Bluetooth. But my old iPad and MBP are stationary so I only use 3.5mm devices with them.

>Wireless headphones are at a fundamental disadvantage in that they have less battery capacity than a phone.

I’ve been using a pair of beats for over a year now, and have never run out of batteries with them, even on multi-leg long haul flights. I use them constantly, and almost exclusively charge them when I have to go to a meeting, which doesn’t usually happen more than once a day. I used AirPods before then and their battery life was even better.

> Your phone came with an adapter for them.

Not anymore

https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/12/17827970/no-more-free-iph...

Removing this dongle is Apple's next "act of courage" :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_fvQpyuK78

"AirPods" also cost about the same as one of my phones (a Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 running LineageOS [1]) which comes with a 3.5" jack. With one fell swoop I get a phone which does not phone home (other than through the radio firmware blob of course), which runs for a week on a single charge and connects to all those things with 3.5" jacks which I happen upon, be it headphones or cassette adapters or older car radios without bluetooth.

To paraphrase some marketing slogans from the days of yore:

IBM said "Think" [2]

Apple said "Think different" [3]

I say "Think wisely"

[1] https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/whyred

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_(IBM)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different

I have had mixed results with AirPods on a 2015 MacBook Pro. The earbuds themselves are great, the case is great, but they just don't know how to bluetooth with the laptop of the same company. Every time I put them on, the hunt for a BT connection starts. Sometimes I have to reboot my computer to make them work. It's such a shame that a behemoth like Apple can't make BT work between two of their products. In fact, it's deplorable. How could they ship such a shitty wireless thing?

Try resetting the bluetooth card in your mac, I was having problems with mine taking several attempts to sync (and my magic mouse point blank refusing). Shift-option then click on the bluetooth icon, debug, reset bluetooth card.

I know every trick because I researched many times, but they don't work. Most of the times the bluetooth just disconnects on its own right after connecting, or hangs during 'connecting'. Such a pity that these famous earbuds fail at their basic function - of producing sound.

Could be you just have a duff pair and need them replaced. Apart from this one issue with the mac (which I've now fixed) they've been flawless.

> Fine. Your phone came with an adapter for them.

No, no, no. Can we please get rid of this adapter hell? It's awful and just way too much overhead. In every situation. No matter if phone or laptop

The new iPhones do not come with a headphone adapter anymore.

What charges the case?

No need for a phone that requires an adapter. There are great phones that drive all audio gear nicely.

Those phones will win in the market too.

Cost / benefit ratio is more favorable. Has been, will continue to be, and that will be true because digital audio does nothing new.

Video does! We have great reasons for DV.

Those do not apply to audio. Ears are not like eyes.

> No need for a phone that requires an adapter. There are great phones that drive all audio gear nicely. Those phones will win in the market too.

Why do you say they'll win?

They won for me at least, given that I'm typing this on a phone with a headphone jack (a OnePlus 5T).

As someone who also EXCLUSIVELY buys phones with minijacks I'd say that they're definitely losing, considering that the brands that carry them right now seem to only be Samsung (rumored to drop them next year) and LG. Currently I use the oneplus 6 but they dropped it for the 6T so they're out of the race. It's starting to look like the next time I upgrade it'll have to be to LG and that's assuming they stick to it.

> Samsung (rumored to drop them next year)

Again? Samsung "dropped" the headphone jack once already and then decided to reintroduce it in their current line of phones. At least that is my understanding of their products with the S7/S8 having removed the headphone jack and the S9 once again featuring a headphone jack.

It should go without saying that a fact about a single person's purchase says nothing about what phone characteristics will win out in the market.

What overwhelming Advantage does digital-only audio deliver to the market that's worth the cost of transition to digital only audio?

With video, there's a lot of those. And today in the market we have a mix of analog and digital, mostly digital, and it mostly makes sense.

That isn't really true of audio. And it's not true because audio works very differently.

Why are you asking me? What about my comment, or its grand-parent comment makes you ask me that?

Replied at wrong level. I am going to leave it.

No pressure.

ok

Late, but I ran into "posting too fast", which can be frustrating at times when a discussion is good enough to warrant more participation, but I digress.

I said it in my comment(s) above.

Video, for example, works differently than audio does. Digital video brings advantages that generally outweigh costs in the majority of use cases. Analog video, like audio, does take fewer resources and can still be indicated for projects, depending.

For ordinary consumers, DV is a general win. They will move willingly and their older gear will age out and become not so useful.

DA is not a general win. Their gear will not age out, will not become less useful, etc... Unless that is artificial!

And that is exactly why "no headphone jack" is so contentious right now! Most forced migrations make sense. This one really doesn't, and it's due to the nature of audio, existing gear investments, and the fact that going digital really doesn't get a person anything new.

Above that we've got some real spiffy bits. No wires is probably the best of the lot. That's a win, but the cost of it, when one is forced to adopt only a digital path is much higher than it needs to be and everyone knows it.

Should the entire electronics industry abandon analog audio, there will be startups who embrace it. 70's era gear remains entirely relevant. And it will, again, unless forced artificially.

70's era video is marginally relevant. NTSC / PAL at SD resolutions, and on analog gear, have a few sweet spots left, but for almost everyone, using that gear does not make too much sense today.

This is absolutely HUGE.

Put another way, the winners from "no headphone jack" are largely the people not wanting to include a headphone jack. Ordinary people can get all the spiffy stuff and abandon analog as they see fit without ever being required to do or spend on things having basically no value.

I don't get anything new, and my personal cost and risk exposure related to audio goes up! And this is true for very large numbers of people.

That's a losing proposition.

I just happened to think of a great parallel: HD Radio. It's got some nice advantages, but basically does nothing new, and it does so at a very significant cost to everyone.

Said that one would fail, and it basically has. Nobody needs digital radio, and what they failed to understand was that (due to commercials and other annoyances already impacting radio), and how people use radios, and the value of the installed base of radios out there now.

Right now, if you get one of those expensive radios, there are literally give away stations, no commercials! That's how poorly the dynamics surrounding radio are understood by the bigger players. They can't give it away!

I know I would not take a free phone, sans the jack. It's way too much of a hassle to be outside a production proven, time tested, high value, audio ecosystem.

These are all reasons why people who don't really get how their customers do things are going to lose in the marketplace.

Heck, I have not even read a single reason why it has to be done!

Big content wants it, because piracy. (laughable at this point, and that's no joke)

Apple wants it, Google probably wants it, because friendly to big content, also up selling, accessory replacement selling.

Samsung shows us it's entirely possible to make an awesome phone with the jack in it. I own one, and it is actually an awesome phone. Apple has nothing on my Note 8. (But I do love Apple's approach to user data security / privacy.)

There just isn't any value added here. Worse, the cost "savings" from removing the jack is what? $50 bucks tops?

How much do adapters, new earbuds, and related bits cost over the life of the phone? What about a person's time, existing knowledge, investments in gear?

Losing proposition across the board. Again, that's why I do not see a win on this.

The battery degrades pretty badly in a year.