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
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 :).