> then unplugged my headphones from the phone and plugged into my laptop

With some Bluetooth headphones you could just listen to both devices at the same time without plugging / switching anything. It also has upsides.

Bluetooth is a pretty ropey experience for multi sources - which device am I paired with, how do I change from one to the other, all of that goes away with 3.5mm.

I don't deny there are benefits of bluetooth, but there are benefits from a 3.5mm jack too.

“Bluetooth” in general maybe, but have you used AirPods or any of the Beats headphones with the H1 chip? They are extraordinary.

I'm fortunate that I have my own office so don't need to worry about headphones during the working day - just have multiple speakers. How do these extraordinary headphones cope with sources from a TV, computer, laptop, phone, and test kit, which I want at different levels and outputs?

A £50 mixer takes these inputs (almost all from 3.5mm sources) and brings them all together via a reliable tactile interface.

On the road of course I only tend to have to choose between 2 sources, so perhaps beats can approach the utility of a 3.5mm audio cable.

You do realize that what you are describing is an edge and most users don't have a use case for 5 connections including a "test kit" right?

If a phone would have to cater to all these edge cases we'd still have serial ports on them.

Wired headphones cater for these edge cases.

As I say, I can live with a dongle for 3.5mm or serial (despite it being a regression), it's just another straw.

The certainty and simplicity of an audio jack is not valueless though, no matter how many people on HN say it is.

> The certainty and simplicity of an audio jack is not valueless though

Nobody is saying that audio jacks are valueless in general, just that it's reasonable for a mass market device where it has value for a small % of people to not have it.

and you have to worry about whether your headphones are charged.

Sorry, but I think that's nonsense. I have an iPhone 11 and charge it completely wirelessly and even you're admitting that you haven't needed to plug something in for over a month. Your complaint requires you to willingly ignore the other options you have for accomplishing this, some of which may actually be easier/smoother if switching from device to device.

Your comment is such a first-world response.

So get AirPod Pros and be done with it. Watching a show in bed, you won’t have cables tangling up. You won’t be frustrated with trying to listen to music while charging your phone on a train. You’ll have a much better experience overall. Futurama isn’t streaming at some audiophile deluxe level of audio quality, so whatever wired headphones you are using aren’t going to beat AirPods Pro for the purposes you’ve mentioned.

I am not willing to spend $250 to solve a problem that Apple willfully introduced. I am also not willing to spend $250 on a product with a usable lifetime of 18 months max.

I hear a lot about the inconvenience of wired headphones, but as a daily user of wired headphones, that's not something I experience. And it certainly doesn't outweigh the costs (financial and environmental) of switching to Apple's disposable wireless headphones.

Use any other pair of bluetooth headphones on get lightning wired headphones or use the headphone dongle.

I was annoyed when Apple initially got rid of the headphone jack but I've been without it for quite some time now and it's not really a bother. Even if you have to charge while having the wired headphones in, there is a dongle for that. I suppose if that's a very frequent use case, I can see the annoyance.

My last iPhone that had the headphone jack required frequent cleaning of the jack or else it would get clogged with accumulated dust and make the speaker very quiet.

I use hook earphones at night [0], haven't found any wireless ones, but even if I did I'd have to keep them charged which seems like a retrograde step.

The downsides of "AirPods Pro"

1) They go in my ear, which is uncomfortable

2) They need charging

3) They presumably are trivial to lose

4) They cost about 50 times as much as hook earphones.

> Watching a show in bed, you won’t have cables tangling up

I don't have cables tangling up.

> You won’t be frustrated with trying to listen to music while charging your phone on a train

I'm not, because I have a jack on my phone and I don't use bluetooth and thus suffer from deciding which host they should be connected to at any given time

[0] https://www.teknistore.com/en/on-ear-and-over-ear-headphones...

They're not quite as easy to lose as you would think. Since they're so easy to cary around (rounded, small case), you don't end up putting them in strange places and it's not a problem to just keep them in your pocket.

This is the workflow when I want to watch something at night while I fall asleep. It would get lost in the sheets, or under the bed, or similar.

That doesn't happen to my £5 ear phone because it's connected to my phone, which itself is connected to the mains.