I had a friend sync with my car bluetooth-stereo, it took a while and from the steering wheel I couldn't be of enough help. But it worked in the end, was quite frustrating though.

Then later when I tried to use my phone again it had been lost from the receiver (eventhough it can support two concurrent connections and I've only ever paired with two devices). So now I had to go through the whole dance that it was only paired in one device.

Thing is, anything that literally takes more than 3 seconds is a disaster. After a minute of fiddling with it I remembered I had an AUX cable. And then I could patiently fix it when I had time for it.

Bluetooth is a nightmare for temporary connections. Removing the headphone-jack is akin to removing a fire-alarm system because "it isn't used anyway". Well, the times you need it it is indispensable and it doesn't cost anything.

And the problem is that this happens regularly unless you never switch any device, which in reality doesn't happen, because nobody wants to buy nice headphones for every audio source. Bluetooth is a mess, and I'm glad I stayed with headphone jacks so far.

Thing is, anything that literally takes more than 3 seconds is a disaster.

In 2008, Apple introduced iPhone and promised us a future where everything "just works," and where the user and UX are paramount. Taking stock of the last decade, we're basically back to The Inmates are Running the Asylum.

http://a.co/d/59GsyEk

I think it's cyclic. The rejected "IBM guy" in the short sleeved shirt portrayed in the Steve Jobs biopic was once the innovative young turk. Now, the typical mobile and web app developer are that "IBM guy," just with a different set of subcultural aesthetics and a different over elaborated UX language which has left ordinary users behind.

It's very telling that about half the time, I start getting hidden contempt from developers when I give them feedback. They're never wrong. I'm obviously deficient and dim. Never mind that I'm a programmer, and I'm pretty darn good at predicting how fellow engineers think. About half the time, that's where the developer starts from. No questions. No curiosity. It's just like in the old days when the command line was the fancy new easier interface. It's the same as long after GUI interfaces hit a wider public and the public started grousing about computer help desks.

(Directed to the 3rd party reader: Don't be that programmer. Seek not so much to be understood, as to understand.)

And just to add onto this, the problem isn't that Bluetooth pairing takes three seconds, per se.

The problem is that we already had an instantaneous, reliable, and universal solution. In it's place is an option that may be better in some ways (namely, wires are gone), but is worse in many others. And for what? A tiny sliver of extra volume within the phone?

Seriously? Both OSes knew the version of the bluetooth protocol they needed to use to communicate, and it still doesn't work? Never had that problem with a headphone jack.

I second that. I use my Bluetooth headphones on three devices. But I can only save two connections. So one device I always use via jack to avoid having to repair several times a day.

No wireless technology is a replacement for the headphone jack. It will probably be decades before we have anything decent (though I'm not hopeful).

If they were a pain, I would stop using them, but they are much less hassle than the many pairs of corded headphones I have. This said, other Bluetooth headphones are much more hassle.

That's an extremely narrow use-case. If that was the only thing people used the headphone jack it wouldn't have been the big travesty that it currently is (and will be for the foreseeable time).

Am I missing something? There's still a headphone port on phones, it's just not dedicated. People can still plug headphones in to their phones right? I'm asking because the tone of these comments makes it seem like new phones have removed the ability to listen to music without bluetooth.

Not that it matters, I still didn't have it with me half of the times it turned out I needed it.

I actually considered buying like 10 of them. Now we are talking about 100 USD of the crap and a MASSIVE and daily inconvenience just because the manufacturer decided to save a couple of cents. This shit is just ridiculous.

And that's even if you only use one pair of headphones.

I hardly use the Sonys but if I do, I will just borrow the adaptor from my Apple buds in my laptop bag. For listening to my Grados I use an amp with a headphone socket.

If I wanted to plug them into my phone I would need the Apple lightning adapter and also one to the smaller headphone jack! This doesn’t bother me. If I want to do that, I’ll just do it.

I’ll even spend another £9 on an adapter to leave connected if I do it often enough.

None of this seems terrible to me and I’m not sure how unique this set of circumstances is. What are the tons of situations where this gets tricky?

2. Since I had to constantly borrow my adapter from my regular headphones it happened that I forgot them connected to another headphones. So I often had my headphones with me but missing the adapter. Wasn't frustrating, promise.

3. I don't know when I'm gonna need it. I made a long trip by train and thought that some nice bluetooth noise cancelling phones would be nice. Well, at my destination we took a drive and I was asked to play some music. Ooops, no adapter.

4. At work my bluetooth headphones lost battery, no worries, you can still drive them with a headphone jack. Ooops, no adapter.

5. I dance, one day when arriving to practice the people responsible for it were running late. No worries, just connect your phone! Ooops, no adapter.

6. If your going social gathering with friends to a cottage you might not think to bring your headphones. But while there some music would be kind of nice. Ooops, no adapter.

Situations like that happens all the time, and it's nothing one thinks about because it's just a given that everything works. Well, was... So now I actually did bring my adapter even in cases when I didn't need my headphones. Which was another source of (2).

The above inconveniences all assume that it works as expected when you do have your adapter. But it doesn't. You can not charge and listen to music at the same time and while I love USB-C to bits it is way too clunky to be used while in your pocket. The connector did actually start to show signs of wear from having the adapter connected while walking. Luckily I had no issues charging my device but I actually don't know if data still worked.

Think about it, that alone is also completely unacceptable.

And that's all assuming that it would be kind of okay to even have an adapter at the end of your cord, even that just isn't.

See (1).

I think OP was talking about people plugging between the headphone socket of their phone and the AUX input of the car stereo - not wearing headphones in the car.

Don't get me started on the cryptic pairing manual in the glove compartment.

Jacks are more reliable and definitely plug-and-play. Unless it has a physical failure, your jack socket always just works. As you state it, bluetooth requires you to "Turn on Bluetooth on your phone, then turn on your headphones, then hold down the button to pair, etc", for no benefit. Oh, and now you need batteries on your headphone.

Look at professional musicians: you won't find anybody connecting his guitar to the amp through bluetooth. They are using good old wires and jack sockets: why is that? Are they too old?

Latency. When you're making music and interacting with it directly, you can't afford any noticeable latency. When you're passively listening to it, that doesn't really matter. For phone/tablet users the main place this matters is games, due to their interactive nature.

And price: a jack is dumb tech and cheap (cheap anough that I always had about 10 extra jacks of all kinds with me when I was doing a gig).

But to be fair, wireless transmitters/receivers do exist for musicians. They don't use bluetooth ofc, but that means that the latency can be bearable with wireless. It's made for live playing though (freedom of movement), no point using that in studio

The bluetooth implementations all suck. My $40k car is about as reliable and predictable from a bluetooth perspective as Chinese knock-off Jawbone copycat from 2007.

Who decided to use such a flaky protocol for audio and such, and then remove the reliable connection?

Add to that great complexity at Layer 1, and constantly changing specs. Bluetooth 1, 2, and 4 are all radically different than each other.

Compare with WiFi, which only has to do one thing (Layer 1-2). Cellular is much more complex, but that's why releasing a new phone involves endless rounds of (usually mandatory and very strict) carrier certification.

I want non crappy Bluetooth mice that don't require a separate USB dongle. :(

Edit: To be clear, I'm sure ethernet cables are an entirely different thing and there's actually a very good reason why wireless makes everything more complicated. But, well, maybe that's one of the reasons people would like to stick with wires.

Everyone gets what they want, except for the end user!

Even though wireless transmitters have gotten a lot better than previous times (in the 1980s one of the Spinal Tap spoofs was getting radio interference in their wireless guitar system if I recall correctly), now using similar frequency bands wi-fi does with proprietary protocols from what I see (definitely not Bluetooth!)... you still see reviews of reliability problems in some circumstances. You'd definitely want to carry around a standard guitar cable as a backup if you have one.

Moving parts and physical connections are fragile. Wireless connections solve that fragility. Agreed that pairing sucks, but that's a solvable problem.

The music industry standard for instrument cables is 1/4" TS for unbalanced instrument audio, 1/4" TRS for a few things like monitoring headphones, and XLR cables for most everything else. XLR in particular is a very durable system, unless you get a very badly made XLR cable or jack I would never call this system "fragile". Even 1/4" is quite an improvement durability wise over 3.5mm.

XLR is not exactly a very portable jack, but a mini-XLR jack does exist -- not as portable as TRS 3.5mm, of course. But if increasing jack durability is such a concern on a more portable device, this connector is an option. Same with using 1/4" TRS, this is a connector which has the advantage of having more headphone options with this option built in (most headphones marketed for studios should be 1/4" TRS or at least have that option).

None of the above are as portable as 3.5mm and I think this connector is "durable enough" to where I doubt it is such a priority for most phone consumers to give up some phone thickness for better durability. But in professional music applications there is a reason why 3.5mm is relatively rare.

I mean, at some level, come on and use your imagination. People riding the metro don't always have total control over getting their belongings situated properly when the train's packed and there's a lot of bustling around. I assure you this experience is not unique to me.

So, I guess there are tradeoffs -- and fixing pairing means everyone can enjoy freedom from one more wire, while keeping on using a wire means we keep adapting our behaviors around a wire.

So I end up needing to find a CRT to play them.

I also saw this on the Nintendo Wii emulations of SNES games on new flatscreens.

1. The amount of lag is consistent (check, as long as you're not using Bluetooth)

2. The game is not key-sounded (pass for DDR)

3. You know how much lag there is.

Since rhythm games are deterministic, you can just offset the visuals and audio output to compensate for the delay. Keysounded games are imperfect, but it's rarely an issue unless there's a lot of lag.

The real problem is #3. Without extra, expensive equipment, there's no way to know exactly how much lag there is. It's annoying that the only real problem comes down to an inability to measure.

You'd think HDMI would be able to use ARC to send a signal back, since the TV would know the exact moment it is displaying the image.

Unfortunately, no one with the resources to really tackle this problem seems to care enough to do it.

I should also note that what many games do do is offer some type of user calibration, ie, press the notes with as good timing as you can manage, and we'll assume the average is the amount of delay in your setup. This kind of works sometimes, but it's imperfect for obvious reasons.

After going through the rigmarole of choosing a new TV recently, TV manufacturers seem very keen on discouraging actual comparison of specifications.

This wouldn't work for most games, because in, say, Mario Kart, the world needs to immediately react to the player's input. But in a Rhythm game, no one will notice if the visual feedback comes in a few ms late, as long as inputs are being read at the perceived-correct time. (Delayed audio feedback may be slightly noticeable in particularly bad cases, hence my note about key-sounded games.)

N.B.

1. This doesn't make the timing window more forgiving. Presses made at +0ms are counted as too early, because it is too early on the player's display.

2. I say "display" for simplicity, but IRL it's often a mistake to assume that audio and the display are delayed by equal amounts.

-----

Edit: To be clear, you can't fix this—the developer has to add user-adjustable latency settings. PS2 games designed for zero-latency CRTs and will never work properly on laggy LCD screens.

New games, however, usually let you adjust for latency. Although, they often make the mistake of not accounting for audio latency, or not allowing visuals and audio to be adjusted separately.

Btw, I've heard that the newer Rockband games in particular can auto calibrate for latency via hardware built into the peripherals.

It's still pretty depressing that they've added so much cruft that the overhead and resultant lag are an issue at all.

For comparison, for Virtual Reality ≤ 20 milliseconds is usually considered the target latency.

And Playstation 2 developers couldn't have predicted how display technology would change.

Remember, this is lag added by the television software, not the PS2 system. We know this because if you take the pure hardware approach of component cables, there's no noticeable lag.

VR has an excuse. VR has to do an expensive computation to decide where all the pixels have to appear to seem real to the human eye. The TV just has to take a signal and display it on the screen. That's the identity function.

>And Playstation 2 developers couldn't have predicted how display technology would change.

Rather, they couldn't have predicted slowness of upscaling and refusal to implement an optimize-for-time option.

This can be solved if both earbuds connect directly to the main device, no? This is how the Airpods work.

Aside from exercise, there isn't one.

OTOH, as you note, there are a large number of serious drawbacks -- battery failures being the biggest and most obvious. The other thing is that, heretofore, you could rely on a dumb audio jack if you wanted to play music with almost any device. Now you're limited to things with Bluetooth, and you have to extend some amount of trust in making that connection.

I use almost exclusively higher-end headphones -- say, $300 and up. Bluetooth has effectively zero presence in that market. There's a reason for this.

I also own AirPods, but their job is about 60% gym and 40% conversations. For serious listening, I reach for the Grados or the Etymotics or the Sennheisers.

The first example that comes to mind is Angus Young, who has said that he considers his wireless rig to be part of his "sound". If any rock musician qualifies as "old", well, Angus ain't running around on stage like he used to. Anyway, that's just one example. Pros use wireless rigs all the time. They're not BT, though.

I am having a lot of trouble with my works laptop /docking station using usb for skype - To the point where I am going to try brining in a real sound card and use one of my Shure dynamic mics with a 1/4 inch jack

What does that mean? What would it mean if I said "Unless it has a physical failure, your car always just works"?

I've had lots of problems with wired headphones and jacks. More often it's the headphone that's the problem, but I've have several issues with the jacks themselves. They can get stuff jammed into them, but they can also just not work properly. I don't know why exactly, but I've had it happen.

It means you can have two perfectly functional wireless devices and not be able to make them communicate at all, but it won't happen with an analog wired connection.

The big pro is that it's fully portable and gives you a freedom of movement that is difficult to match. Most of the cons are associated with poor care (corrosion, stuff jammed in there) or poor quality devices (which is a "con" shared with wireless).

There are real cons as well. Wireless devices are 5x more expensive than a wired device of equivalent quality, is susceptible to a variety of forms of interference, introduces pairing problems particularly as devices age (ie. A 6-10 year capital asset like a 2014 Honda Odyessy may randomly not work with your iPhone Xs), higher latency, unpredictable latency with different endpoints, etc.

The rage issue here is that by taking away the jack, your profoundly reduce the flexibility of the device. The only meaningful benefit is to drive revenue for Apple's secret weapon -- high margin accessories. Those $30 earbuds have a cost that is probably <$3.

> The only meaningful benefit is to drive revenue for Apple's secret weapon -- high margin accessories. Those $30 earbuds have a cost that is probably <$3.

As I've argued in many other places in thread, removing the headphone jack will speed the adoption and price-reduction in wireless headphones. While this is not a pro for a lot of people, it is for others, including myself.

I don't agree with the argument that the only thing is to drive revenue to Apple, as there are many different brands of wireless headphones, just as there are with wired headphones. I own non-apple bluetooth headphones.

Apple doesn't need to own the whole wireless vertical, but they are adept at cross selling within the product line.

The Bluetooth standard is trash; no stack/device [combination] just works as it's supposed to do.

If BT worked, I think accessibility would pose no problem; ultimately, the intended workflow is: 1. turn on BT on the host device (if required); 2. turn on the client device; 3. listen to music.

As the BT committees and implementers keep pushing features rather than taking care of the stability, for a stable BT to ever happen, it would require all of them to be exiled and replaced by a new generation; I don't think this will ever happen.

how does that work in a crowded space, e.g. public transport, where I'd wager most people are using BT headsets nowadays ?

aka public transit...

On the other hand, this is what mass adoption of wireless headphones will lead to, and it shows how ridiculously bad this is compared to the tried-and-true wire.

There are some BT devices that have poor antenna designs and underpowered transcievers, where the proximity of other humans — or even your own body — can significantly attenuate the signal. But this isn't a problem with the spec itself, and there's plenty of devices that have shown it's possible to do it right.

Considering that WiFi and Bluetooth both run at near 2.4GHz - I’d assume that areas with a lot of wireless networks could (and have in my experience) interfere with BT.

This wasn’t limited to 1 set of devices though. Tried it with my AirPods and a pair of NC Sennheiser headphones. Both cause issues when walking into busy (in terms of WiFi) areas.

Seems like it's possible for bluetooth to handle up to 78 users in 10m space without interference.

(Hint: it starts with an "i" and ends with "Phone".)

It may take a while to get used to a different OS, but I've seen my parents switching between iPhone and Android without problems so I don't think your father (about the same age) will have more difficulties.

*$500 for a phone is suddenly midrange- let's not forget phone prices shot up 25% on average in the last 2 years, likely because other manufacturers realized Apple could get away charging $1000 for a phone and followed along.

No, they don't. China doesn't even let AWS operate in China without having all the network traffic filter and land in China. Nothing about the Apple network is different. Still towers in China, still servers in China.

The problem is that App Store performance is a much noisier feedback channel back to Cupertino.

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.

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 :).

It baffles me that people are arguing about the merits of bluetooth and the ease of wireless when, in reality, it was a profit move!

I'd say that in order to get rid of cabled headphones at some point in time, you have to start somewhere. I do think that wirless headphones is the future and that headphones with a cable will cease to exist in a few years. I can't argue that there are financial decisions involved into it and that they are not making a killing with it. But someone needs to start somewhere.

I think this apply to any technological advance we've made so far as humans and its part of evolving.

This is completely ridiculous. Latency issues are not cheap to solve without cable, and watching movies or any video / playing games just can't handle latency. Congestion problems in public transport are frequently mentioned in these HN threads already, and we are nowhere close to "fully wireless world".

I hope phone makers are not this delusional ... They already jumped the shark with phone sizes, it will be getting ridiculous trying to keep alive 6y ild phone just to not downgrade :/

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.

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

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?

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.

I remember plenty of issues with USB device compatibility. Mostly when someone failed to follow the standards, of course—fully compliant devices and host controllers have generally worked well together, at least since USB 1.1. But there are a lot of non-compliant devices out there. Bluetooth isn't much different in that regard: if both devices follow the spec it tends to work well, but it's much more likely that one or both of the devices takes a "shortcut" or two in the name of saving a few cents. The fact that Bluetooth devices are typically battery-powered and thus strongly incentivised to cut corners to save a few milliwatts doesn't help.

However, the standards certainly aren't perfect even when implemented correctly. The most awkward aspect of the Bluetooth experience, in my opinion, has to do with pairing. There shouldn't by any limit to the number of simultaneously paired devices. They should just exchange signed credentials during the pairing process, and either device (but typically the more general-purpose one, such as the phone or laptop) should be able to present these pairing credentials later to establish a connection. The headphones, car stereo, or other special-purpose, storage-limited device shouldn't need to remember anything about the devices permitted to connect.

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.

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.

Gratuitous animation, new "social/platform" features, notification-spam, new "design languages", and etc. benefit the elderly even less than they benefit the rest of us - rather these things actively hurt them when basic things suddenly become confusing and difficult without warning. We've made digital technology mandatory for most people, and we've made it unnecessarily bewildering for a big subset of them, basically by pretending that all users are youngish, digitally-fluent, time-rich, and open to unasked-for "innovation".

My iPhone came with an adapter, though. I continue using the same headphones as I did with my old phone.

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

Where this is particularly frustrating is when you are on a particularly long conference call and your phone starts to run out of charge. This happened regularly enough for me ditch the iphone.

I'm sure there yet another dongle you can buy to address this shortcoming though.

I really don't understand people who change entire platforms over such small amounts of money. I know for me personally my investment in apps and content is significantly more than just $2.65.

It's a matter of practicality and convenience.

I don't want to have to worry about remembering the phone, the charger, the earbuds AND a dongle. In my opinion it's simply one concern too many for basic functionality. Functionality we used to have.

But yeah, we used to have the convenience of both (bluetooth and wired), now we pay more $ for less functionality and increased inconvenience. Holding on to my SE for the foreseeable.

And you can permanently attach it to your headphones.

I can't permanently attach it to everything I might otherwise plug into my headphone jack, including things that I use occasionally but neither own nor have exclusive control over.

Sure, if I have one set of headphones, and use nothing else with the jack, the “you can permanently attach it” mitigation is, actually, something of a mitigation.

Also, Apple's adapter seems (from reports, including reviews at Apple's site) to either not support inline controls and headset mics consistently and/or to require plugging the adapter into the phone before the headset for some to work. And that's not even going to some cut-price, third-party charge+adaptor device.

† five actually (100-300€ price range), two of which the cord is replaceable (which I did) but how long will that specific cord be available?

If you can't do these things your self there is probably some cheap electronic repair shop nearby. Most likely cheaper than shipping new brand cable or replacement parts.

On side note plastic in one of my shure 840 joints broke and I managed to fix it by modeling and 3d printing it. They're working fine now. The only official way to fix that was to buy original head assembly and ship it, but that's almost as expensive as getting a new pair.

Repair is possible, just sometimes you need to be a bit creative.

Indeed, and I attempted to do so myself since I know how to handle a soldering iron... yet some of them were in-ear, one was over ear but cracking its case was a one way destructive operation; some had those hair-thin copper wires downright coated with an insulating material that makes soldering a pain, if at all possible. I swear it's made on purpose to thwart attempts at repairs.

I bet I have broken more jacks in a couple of years than during the 20 years before that. Crazy.

Anyway that doesn't change the fact that before that I never thought about having a small, cheap jack-to-jack part in between the headphones and the playing device, as using the adapter was the first time I happened to do something similar, but that's not a property of the adapter itself; or rather, DAC, really, and I find it nice that there are alternative DACs available, at which point if I always have a DAC at hand, well it's less of a problem to not have a jack embedded), but really, I'd rather still have the jack, or having the removal of the jack coincide with the replacement of Lightning with USB-C (together with the USB-C situation not being such a bloody mess) and have some new universal standard emerge across all devices.

Why don't you change the way you put it in your pocket?

Isn't it a generic 3.5mm to 2.5mm jack for nearly most of them? All headphones with replaceable cords I own and have owned have this cable.

When I walk into the bathroom wearing my Bluetooth headphones, my podcasting app starts detecting disconnections and pausing, so I have to turn off the feature to stop playing on headset disconnect. This makes everything else work poorly. My podcast player also often crashes when I connect a Bluetooth device.

My problems get a lot worse when I try to pair a speaker or headphones with multiple devices. I often have to factory reset the device to get it to work again when switching sources.

I'm clearly not the only technically-minded person dealing with random nasty Bluetooth issues, as evidenced by this article and https://xkcd.com/2055/

I prefer the method of Samsung in this case, they clearly state for the monthly update that it is mostly a security update. Where Apple seems to apply marketing by promising 'the best experience yet' and shiny new features with each major version bump.

edit: typo

Sure it is, but this is what you get for not separating security and feature updates. I tend to avoid updating applications (both on desktop and mobile) for that very reason (though I do update the OS).

If each vaccination you took came with mandatory remodeling of your house, directed by whims of some "artists", you'd see much more antivaxxers too.

> I prefer the method of Samsung in this case, they clearly state for the monthly update that it is mostly a security update.

I have an S7 and my experience doesn't confirm this, though I don't know whether it's Samsung's fault or operator's (Orange). Either way, I find most updates I get to be indistinguishable by their description. I'm not worried though, because I haven't caught any of them installing bloatware. That said, from what I understand, they're still linear - you're expected to apply one patch after another. I see no way of opting out from feature updates, and sticking only to security ones.

Anyway; why oh why it's so hard to include a changelog in an update?

I cannot concur strongly enough. (And I will likely steal this lovely analogy in the future!)

Security is important, and installing security patches is a good practice. But companies use this as an excuse to force the adoption of all sorts of other crap. I'm not willing to put up with that.

I understand that back-porting patches requires some amount of additional effort. But asking gigantic tech companies to support major releases for a few years at minimum should not be too much to ask.

In this regard, Microsoft and Windows 10 are by far the worst offenders. Microsoft develops and releases security-only patches for 1607 and will continue to do so until 2026, but these patches are only available to enterprises. Normal consumers need to either use Microsoft's problem-ridden biannual updates, or be insecure.

Actions speak louder than words. If Microsoft actually held security in such a high regard, they wouldn't hold security patches hostage in order to push other corporate interests. I thus don't feel the least bit of guilt about opting out of MS's entire update process.

A lot of users? iOS has the fastest and widest adoption rate for new releases of any mobile or not OS. Android specifically used to have awful fragmentation issues and phones never updated by the vendor 3 and 4 releases behind.

APPLE IOS 12 HAS SEEN THE FASTEST ADOPTION RATE, RUNNING ON 50% OF IPHONES AND IPADS (Oct 12)

https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/apple-ios-12-ha...

iOS 11 is now installed on 81% of Apple’s over a billion active iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices in the wild, up from the 76% adoption rate reported on April 25. By contrast, Android Oreo versions powered less than six percent of active Android-driven smartphones and tablets that had been accessing Google’s Play Store during a seven-day period ending on May 7, 2018.

https://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/06/05/ios-11-adoption-rat...

Frequent vocal complainers on internet forums probably only account for less than 0.01% of their installed base.

"Apple’s latest mobile OS hitting 50 percent adoption across eligible devices in 23 days (via VentureBeat).

For comparison, iOS 11, released on September 19th, 2017, didn’t hit 52 percent adoption until November 6th of that year, taking 48 days, or over twice as long as it took iOS 12 to hit its own 50 percent mark."

So now it is probably higher, though I didn't find any fresh stats.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/11/17965302/ios-12-install-...

Android was 6% after much much longer.

First, "fanbois" is something 15-year olds emotionally invested into "my side is better" would use. Just state what you want to state, and don't assume some magical group of mindless drones or paid shills behind statements that point to deficiencies in a platform. In general, drop "lol", "lonely fanbois" etc from your vocabulary if you want your statements to be taken seriously.

>It makes no difference to Android users as the version of Android you run and the apps you can install/websites you browse are entirely unconnected.

Tons of Android developers have been lamenting fragmentation. It's about having a coherent platform to be able to know what features to count on, and not to have to support several older versions of the OS because most of the buyers are still using it.

Also tons of Android uses have lamented mobile vendors not providing updates for their older models.

https://insights.dice.com/2017/11/16/android-fragmentation-r...

https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/what-is-android-fragmen...

https://hackernoon.com/android-fragmentation-makes-every-and...

Thanks for the advice but I appear to be immune to this "social networks and digital media causes depression" issue, as I couldn't give a fuck what anyone thinks about me.

There's a second separate settings page for "Pair new device" that shows currently connected devices and has the same option to pair a new device as the Bluetooth page. It doesn't let you control the current device's name, but it does have a weird link to a general connection preferences page that includes a link to the first Bluetooth one, as well as links to similar pages for NFC, Android Beam, Cast, Printing, Received files, and Chromebook.

I had a lot of trouble finding both of these pages, and the fact that these are two different settings pages does not help at all. They've really made this a lot more difficult and confusing in Android Pie.

Admittedly, far more expensive. But wired headphones come with iPhones

Because iPhone sales aren't dropping because of the headphone jack and people seem to be enjoying Bluetooth headphones given how popular those are.

As for sales dropping, smartphone sales do drop. Or at least, the upgrade cycles are becoming longer. It is mostly because phones are becoming "good enough" for many years, but the removal of the headphone jack may have played a tiny part.

I think the heart of the problem lies here. It's the fact that we have to pay solid attention to the UI when we make these changes- and we have to care about the UX. This thread is focusing on bluetooth, but I had this experience when iOS updated their text-message interface. I guess there are more buttons to push now, but what is missing is being able to attach a photo that you've already taken by tapping an icon next to the text entry. Now that only opens a camera, and you have to go to the "lower level" to attach a pic that you've already taken.

No big deal, right? Now, if you were going to change your UI and add an icon that signifies attaching a photo, what would your icon look like? If you were going to hunt for one, what would you expect to look for? They use something that doesn't call to mind photographs in my mind[1]. It took me an annoying amount of time to figure out this change because I was in one of those situations I was trying to get the picture off quickly.

In fact, this whole trend of replacing labels with icon and having no mouseover fallback is a huge time-sink. Now, that might have been Apple's icon for a long time, but the fact is I never needed to know that before. It was in a place that was obvious (next to a camera or something, I really don't remember what it changed from).

I mean, am I seriously supposed to know what this means[2]?

[1] http://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/photos-ap....

[2] https://boilingpointdev.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/game-cen...

I have several BT devices, and I never know how they're going to work in the next month, when the next software update is going to be applied.

Ubuntu's BT stack (bluez) is well-known to be trash, however, I was surprised when my Android phone BT's stability took a dip after some "security" updates.

they're only "doing it" with their own limited hardware combinations. the experience of pairing any random bluetooth devices even in ios is still mediocre overall.

[1] Cricut Air but then it also has trouble talking Bluetooth reliably to my Windows 10 desktop; I'm not blaming this on iOS just yet.

Because I bought the Sony 1000MX3 and its pairing at least with one device is much faster and more reliable than Airpods. It definitely is worse with multiple devices however.

In my personal experience they have decent sound, pair reasonably easily (through NFC and "normally"), and the connection is pretty stable.

Pairing partner were various Samsung Galaxies.

I recommend Sony BT headphones.

That said, I also use the 3.5mm jack regularly :-)

Apple used to use Samba, but had to drop it in MacOS 10.7 when Samba switched from GPLv2 to GPLv3. I can't really fault them for making a change based on licensing concerns.

Have they stopped including it? My latest iPhone is an iPhone X and it certainly came with the adapter, as well as the 7 I had before it.

(Digressing, I wonder how much radiation incidental WLAN use on a phone causes, compared to a bluetooth headset. I mean things like googleplay chancing to upgrade a few apps via WLAN while you're holding the phone against your ear.)

Where does the force come from? Are you required to use this kit for your job?

Or an overweight person, for that matter.

Actually you see several such persons. E.g.:

Ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPv9jFWhzGE

WWDC video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgk_Jawzdwk

Also Apple has the greatest accessibility track record (and tons of awards on such matters), and e.g. blind people etc swear by its products (as opposed to at it).

Blind person describing his use of iPhones etc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlbIF7IOb_Q

Or the "Designed for ..." series?

Meera https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d6zKINudi0

Andrea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoEUsUWihsM

Patrick https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whioDJ8doYA

Todd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PoE9tHg_P0

?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/08/01/decade-smartphon...

> People are on average online for 24 hours a week, twice as long as 10 years ago, with one in five of all adults spending as much as 40 hours a week on the web. > > This is partly due to the rise in use by those aged 16 to 24, who average 34.3 hours a week on the internet.

1. https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/01/27/apple-honored-wit...

How about smokers, while we're at it?

Anecdotally often it's pretty obvious who the smokers are from skin/complexion/teeth.

Would this be too complicated too? You can get the EarPods with a lightning connector. If that’s too complicated then maybe you can draw a picture explaining it?

If you have a phone that doesn't come with a 3.5mm headphone jack, then you're able to spend €10 on a dongle to make your $4 set of 3.5mm headphones work. If you cannot afford that, then you have one of the many phones that do have a headphone jack. I'm sure that, if in the future everyone for some strange reason got rid of the integrated headphone jack and there's no company that sees it as a USP while people still want to use 3.5mm headphones, that the price of dongles will be next to nothing.

At the price you could just buy like 5 and permanently attach them to each pair of headphones.