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.