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.