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A comment on Fairphone 5 scores a perfect 10 from iFixit for repairability. Parent comment

Re:Fairphone 5 scores a perfect 10 from iFixit for repairabi... by toast0 on Thursday December 07, 2023 @05:49PM (#38562873)
Looking at the GSM Arena Phone Finder [1], there's currently 494 cataloged phones released in 2023, and 286 of them have headphone jacks. I won't buy a phone without one, as I want to charge and listen to the movie I'm watching on a plane, and I'm not doing wireless headsets because I hate bluetooth and I hate unnecessary audio latency.

[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/search.php3

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Re:Fairphone 5 scores a perfect 10 from iFixit for repairabi... by PennRobotics on Friday December 08, 2023 @04:52AM (#38567157)
This feels misleading. As soon as you add a minimum price, there are 236 phones---implying those are probably prohibitively difficult to buy in the U.S. or West Europe.

Cursory browsing... There's Infinix (serves mostly Africa and Asia) and Tecno (popular in India) and a few other brands that are mainly released in Asia. Beyond that, can you really count all 14 "Redmi" as separate phones when some only differentiate "5G" or "not 5G"? Same with various "Fan" or "VIP" editions, which typically tweak one or two peripherals?

Are you really in the market for vivo, Realme, TCL, Oukitel? Or a specialist/rugged brand like Ulefone or Doogee?

Ironically, the most popular handset made outside of China for a worldwide market is the Galaxy A24, which has a horrendous single on-board speaker. So much for audiophilia! (In fairness, as soon as you restrict Chinese and Hong Kong headsets, you're down to just a few brands. Weird tangent, it's nice to see Nokia putting out spec-competitive mid-market Android phones. I might get one next because Asus and Sony are sticking with two OS upgrades.)

Then I fell into a rabbit hole and plotted the GSM Arena prices of phones with jacks and without: https://gitlab.com/PennRobotics/permalink/-/raw/main/handset...

From that, I can fathom that headphone jacks are largely bullshit features tacked on to devkit-derived bargain bin phones, which creates a huge peak in jacked sub-$150 units. From $300 up, where you expect good peripheral selection and a normal Android experience, it's clear that headphone jacks are in the minority.

I was in the same boat: gotta have headphone jack. The best player here was LG. Keyword: was. Now I'm convinced that until phone makers actually prioritize wired audio, the better path forward (and which won't be long-term obsolete) is picking the smartphone with the best overall specs/support plus a USB splitter and whichever grade of USB DAC you prefer to drive your headphones. It's easier for the manufacturer to waterproof their case and gives more room for battery, etc. This also lets you quickly transfer your preferred hardware to a tablet/laptop/desktop, which seems like a pain unless you're in love with something high-impedance like HD600, ATH-R70, DT990, etc.

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