I think it's still the case that Bluetooth headphones cost more for the same quality, though.
Totally true!
I'm also baffled by the number of people who seem to lose anything that is not connected to something else with a wire.
Just the commenters in this thread that are just a tiny 3.5 mm jack away from losing their fifteenth pair of headsets... Amazing!
And… stop buying garbage products from gas stations? You are buying the most cheaply-built item possible from a manufacturer and merchant who have zero concern with repeat business. Pay a few bucks more once for something made by a manufacturer with a reputation and stop throwing more money down the drain.
Don’t know what those gas station dongles cost, but seems you might save money in the long run just adding Bluetooth to your car…
When you are buying smartphone, you can not selectively select the features. If you used iPhone and bought apps, you will buy iPhone even if it is missing jack or whatever.
I know that I disliked quite a lot about how phones were/are changing ... and when my phone life ends, I have to buy another one. I have no real choice when it comes to this.
On the plus side it has a 120 hz display that doesn't help me either.
What I do wish is if somebody at least made is a USB C phone dock similar to what Apple made for 30 pin and lightning iPhones with audio out jacks. There are dongles that let you charge and do audio out but not in nice dock form.
And yet, we are approaching the day very soon where there's no point in getting the next year's flagship phone. It's not faster. It's not better. It doesn't have a better battery. The camera's not going to get any better. It's going to be the same form factor.
At some point phones will stop charging ridiculous amounts of money for 128 GB of RAM, when a terabyte of storage is approaching $50 in retail cost.
More ports SD card. I can see all of it coming back on the table. Cuz you're going to want features if you get a nice phone.
It will certainly be interesting to see how the manufacturers continue to find ways to differentiate themselves. Right now, unsurprisingly, all the hype seems to be focused around AI. So possibly future phones will be ruthlessly optimised for running LLM models. But if, instead, the phone manufacturers just decide to use cloud-hosted AI (or if the hype around AI dies down), then they'll need something else. The foldable form factor is the only other one that occurs to me right now.
> If you’re a fan of the 3.5mm jack, it’s time to vote with your wallet.
Not sure why the author thinks this hasn't been happening already, and the 3.5mm jack is simply losing the popular vote. I really just don't think that many people care about it, in the scheme of things. If removing it helps make the phone even marginally thinner, cheaper or more waterproof, I suspect most consumers will happily make that trade-off. Bluetooth headphones can also be more convenient in that you don't have to remain wired to your phone or deal with tangled cords, etc. Like the author, I also have a Samsung Galaxy S10 that still has the headphone jack but a few months ago I finally caved and bought a pair of bluetooth earphones.