(The result for probably most other iPhone users is that they bought the damn AirPods and none of the other BT headphones)

> I care what my options are in the end, a lot more than ideology or something, and Apple worsened my options compared to before.

How did AirPods existing ruin your options? You can choose to not buy them, I don't, I like conductive head phones better anyways (non-Apple, before the AirPods came out, and they don't suck, so I don't get what you mean by apple producing the only BT headphones that don't suck?). Or do you mean you want to buy AirPods but you don't want to use an iPhone, or you want to use wired headphones only and don't care for dongles?

> The end result is I don't listen to music from my phone anymore.

Seriously, this is the mental gymnastics I'm talking about. None of this is really stopping you from listening to music on your phone.

So my chosen option before was to just plug my earbuds or car aux into my phone.

Now my choices are:

- AirPods, which I don't want to shell out more money for and deal with charging/caring for them, but otherwise they'd be the best option.

- Non-AirPod BT headphones. I have nice Bose ones from work. These lack Apple's extensions to improve pairing and headset (mic) mode. In headset mode, the earphone quality drops to like worse than early 2000s cellphone. Standard pairing is annoying. It's a bit annoying having to charge them. I also don't want to shell out more money for earbuds (the headphones aren't so portable).

- Dongles, which I tried. Turns out they don't work with inlined mics, don't work with older iPhones (so I can't leave them on a shared car aux), are fragile, and are really easy to lose. Can't charge while using one either, but that's nbd. My car seats ate two and the last one broke. It also just feels stupid having to use these.

- Old iPhone. I kept my 6 until it broke. I still have a spare 5, no longer usable with AT&T, which I use to play music in the car.

Yeah I want to listen to music on my phone, but they've made it sufficiently annoying that I don't anymore. It's a clear regression.

This sounds like a bunch of unique requirements.

You have a wired car aux solution that...provides a microphone, which I've never seen before but lets go with it. There are dongles that have microphone inputs (Cubilux Lightning to 3.5mm TRS Microphone Adapter with Headphone Jack), but I'm assuming you can't use those because the microphone and headset are sharing the same jack somehow?

Your car doesn't support bluetooth, and you use multiple generations of iPhones so you can't just leave the dongle in the car. This is unrelated to airpods since you can't use those while driving anyways.

AirPods are expensive, I get that, and you aren't satisfied with cheaper non-Apple options on amazon. I'm happy not using airpods, since I hate earbuds anyways, but I guess not everyone is like that. Would the non-existence of AirPods make things better? I haven't had trouble pairing my conductive headphones, I guess I don't notice any distortion because it is going through my bones anyways, and I'm not using mic.

The issue is removing the jack. AirPods by themselves aren't a problem, but Apple removed the jack to sell more of them, so I'm considering them related. Perhaps if Apple couldn't make proprietary extensions, they'd try to improve the BT standards instead, but I'm not interested in that.

> You have a wired car aux solution that...provides a microphone

No, by mic I mean taking calls and meetings on my earbuds/phones, which is a common requirement. Most earbuds have inlined mics sharing the same jack.

Car aux issue is separate. One of my cars does have BT, but that's even worse because the phones fight over it or the pairing sometimes doesn't happen. Maybe "pass the aux" is not a thing anymore and I'm the only one who wants passengers to play their own music sometimes, but this wasn't a problem before.

I’m with you on the dongle issues, it’s a tremendous pain to find consistently working equipment that allows charging, in-line mic, and durability.

That said, I hate BT more and have been using the same Bose QC20 wired earbuds and Belkin adapters for 4+ years. There are semi-decent options out there.

Weird, I think you left out the part where they did include the dongle for the 3.5mm jack for at least 2 generations after they removed it and still offer one. But to each his/her own.

Anyone who's actually tried the dongle doesn't consider it a solution, which I explained in a sibling thread. If it were, then people wouldn't buy AirPods, so Apple would get rid of the dongle like they got rid of the jack :)

Can confirm, dongle's not an actual usable alternative for most situations. IRL you'll lose the little fuckers, they'll be in the way for any devices without missing hardware (and get lost when you remove them for that device), they're fragile, and you'll never have them when you need them anyway. They're theoretically a replacement for the removed headphone jack, but in actual fact they're worthless.

I just use my phone for fewer music-playing situations than I otherwise would, and when I do use it for playing music, it's a mixed bag. Controls on the car console are nice (aside from that the UI sucks and exhibits all kinds of glitches, but that's not Apple's fault), but BT is BT, so, more annoying and less reliable than a cable. My $120 BT headphones are... fine, but I'd rather have better wired headphones for the same price and not have to charge them. Being able to connect to a bluetooth-enabled receiver across the room is handy, but also janky, because of course it is, because it's bluetooth.

If they'd just kept the jack, everyone could be happy. Except Apple, from the somewhat-lower sales of wireless audio devices and especially AirPods.

> IRL you'll lose the little fuckers, they'll be in the way for any devices without missing hardware (and get lost when you remove them for that device)

1. I plug dongle into car aux for my iPhone 12 mini to use.

2. Next day, girlfriend wants to play her own music from her iPhone 6, I say to plug the Lightning in.

3. Dongle doesn't work with iPhone 6 despite being same connector -_- She takes it off to plug into the 3.5mm.

4. Dongle falls beneath car seat and is never seen again. Presumably it's next to the other one that got lost the same way.

Went from "it just works" to screwing up the most basic functionality ever, plugging in the damn aux. And it's while you're driving.

Yeah, I lost my first one like a week in when it fell into the (automatic—I'm not cool, I don't drive a manual) shifter. It was so small it managed to fit into the little gap in the rubber guard around it. Lost forever, or at least until someone tears apart the center console of that car for some reason. Only time I've managed to lose something that particular way.

So you dropped your headphone converter next to your torque converter.

> Anyone who's tried it doesn't consider it a solution, and I described in a sibling thread why.

Universals are always wrong of course: we actually used a dongle for the kid's wired iPad headphones. It doesn't suck for us using a dongle, so I'm guessing our experience was really different from yours.

> If it were, then people wouldn't buy AirPods, so Apple would get rid of the dongle like they got rid of the jack :)

Nope, our 6 year old is not getting AirPods anytime soon.