Are we not well past a point where the Fairphone 6’s DAC for the 3.5 mm jack would be better for audio quality than Bluetooth 5.4 with aptX Adaptive/LDAC? When headphone jacks were being removed from phones around the mid-2010s, it was ridiculous, greedy, and premature. Now, though? I find wireless earbuds vastly nicer and more convenient for phones, and I would only go with wired, say, on a vacation where I can use a cheap $20 junk drawer pair and not mourn them if they get lost somewhere – at which point I can just use a dongle for a weekend or whatever.
I still always want a microSD card slot, but I’d prefer that my phone not have a headphone jack at this point. I think the people who still mourn the loss of the 3.5 mm jack are a vastly smaller minority than they think they are. Which is fine; you’re still welcome as a consumer to buy or not buy a phone based off that. But I also think that nagging Fairphone over the removal of the 3.5 mm jack with the Fairphone 4 in 2021 is “old man yelling at clouds” territory.
Idgaf about audio quality. I don’t have to charge wired headphones and the port is designed to spin unlike a dumbass dongle plugged into a USB c port. Let alone the environmental considerations.
Valid. Back in the mid-2010s, it was a prominent (and very strong) argument against removing the jack.
I don’t have to charge wired headphones
Also valid, although even budget wireless earbuds advertise 24+ hours of battery life. Mine advertise 30, and after over a year of usage, I’d say they get me through an entire day of uninterrupted moderate usage (no going back in the case) no problem. The case usually has a few full earbud charges and charges them very quickly, and at least my case charges via USB-C or wirelessly and doesn’t take long.
It’s less of an interruption and more of a fixed, very small factor in a nightly or binightly routine. Realistically, the lifespan of a baked-in lithium-ion battery is a headache, but to me, the battery life never has been. It can’t beat no charging, but having to recharge the earbuds is something I’m barely even cognizant of.
and the port is designed to spin unlike a dumbass dongle plugged into a USB c port.
I’m trying to remember the last time I had to readjust the rotation of a headphone cable on the bottom of the phone (top of the phone definitely sometimes, though). If you really need to, the tip of the cable can still be rotated inside the dongle. I can’t imagine this being an actual problem unless your use case is as a fidget toy.
Let alone the environmental considerations.
Shipping an audio jack that 95%+ of users will not ever touch with every phone sounds at least as environmentally unfriendly as the rare purchase of a 3.5 mm-to-USB-C dongle. The environmental consideration of the baked-in lithium-ion battery is definitely worse, but you also don’t have to use that or the dongle; good wired earbuds/headphones with a USB-C cable exist.
It’s again totally your choice to factor the jack into what phone you buy, but the jack is and will remain dead in the mainstream – now finally with decent reason – and no amount of being a vocal minority to Fairphone about how it’s too hard to spin your headphone cable is likely to change that.
I’m very likely the minority, but the reason I still have a phone with jack is that my custom mold in-ear, well… is wired (I’m a musician).
I don’t want to use a different headphone for hearing music, as this is a really good monitor (actually I think it has cost me 10x as much as the used phone I’m driving it with (LG V30)). An external DAC is annoying, as this for one drains the battery pretty heavily and - fewer adapters less worries…
There’s other reasons why you don’t want to use bluetooth, namely latency, although probably less important, for applications where this is really relevant, you would use a dedicated audio interface anyways…
Or well, just the fact that I know of a few people already that they lost their bud(s), quite a bit more difficult if everything is wired together.
Pushing wireless has been frustrating to me because of the fact that the batteries inside those tools will die sooner or later. Majority of the time, I am fine with being wired. The good news is that IEMs have evolved a lot over the past decade with great options even at $20 that include detachable cables from the earbuds. What’s even cooler is that you can choose for your audio connectivity to be USB-C for those that miss the 3.5mm jack. I’ll provide a $20 example below:
For me, I already have very good headphones from years ago, and they are all working. I don’t want to buy additional Bluetooth headphones just for a Smartphone. Why do I have to buy additional gears just to be able to use my perfectly functional old ones? Or do I have to accept that Smartphones nowadays are just not for music?
I don’t want to buy additional Bluetooth headphones just for a smartphone.
You don’t have to. You can still use a USB-C dongle. Phones in 2025 have considerably longer battery life and charge considerably faster than phones when manufacturers started phasing out 3.5 mm jacks in phones, so charging should rarely conflict – unless you’re frequently doing wired data transfers too. A dongle is about $20. You’re also entirely free to get a smartphone that still has the jack if it’s an important feature to you. As I said in my above comment, nobody’s saying you aren’t allowed to factor this into your purchase.
Why do I have to buy additional gears just to be able to use my perfectly usable old ones?
“Why do I need an external optical drive to read DVDs on my laptop? Why can’t they just build it into the device?”
A 3.5 mm jack is just more stuff that needs to go into the limited thickness of a smartphone. They also need to be made water-resistant, and it’s just another potential point of failure. And for those who don’t use them, they’re a useless lint trap. Overall, they just cost more to produce which puts more cost onto the consumer. And now that Bluetooth audio is so widely used because it’s no longer complete trash, the vast majority of users not using the 3.5 mm jack would end up subsidizing the very small minority that do.
Or do I have to accept that Smartphones nowadays are just not for music?
No, you definitely don’t. Like what? Wirelessly they’re better than they’ve ever been by a mile. If you care deeply enough about audio quality that even modern Bluetooth quality bothers you, your alternative isn’t 3.5 mm – it’s an external DAC via USB-C. Space and streaming bandwidth are basically no longer considerations for high-bitrate music. If you care about music, smartphones are in a much better position than they were when the 3.5 mm jack was thriving.
“Smartphones nowadays are not for music” is such a histrionic distortion of “I personally have to use a $20 dongle when I listen to music on my smartphone with the headphones I alreay own.”
What I mean by listening to music on the phone is, listening to lossless files from the phone’s internal storage using my old JBL or Sony. Even if wirless are better now a days, what if my old headphones are not bad too? A new Bluetooth headphone of the same quality cost a fortune too. Of course there are Smartphones still has the 3.5mm jack, like my current Sony. Or a USB-C adapter is the only way to go in the future? The problem is, why take people’s options away if you don’t care about ultra thin thickness? Fairphones themselves are not thin either.
And DAC is simply a different thing. If listening from home, there are different set ups for that with speakers. And my home sound systems are even older. They are not consumer products that you throw away every five years.
A 3.5 mm jack is just more stuff that needs to go into the limited thickness of a smartphone. They also need to be made water-resistant, and it’s just another potential point of failure. And for those who don’t use them, they’re a useless lint trap. Overall, they just cost more to produce which puts more cost onto the consumer.
Thus is straight up a lie. They cost less than a dollar to buy and put in a phone. Even the thinnest iPhone could have one without it impacting space and finally they are just as easy to waterproof as usb c port.
But yeah keep regurgitating the same facts big companies want you to use cause a extremely backwards compatible analog audio standard is less “convenient”
You can only use the USB-C dongle for as long as your USB-C port functions, which for my last 3 phones including the one I’m typing this on, isn’t for the life of the phone. So once that fails which it always does, how do I listen to music? I shouldn’t be forced to use Bluetooth headphones/earbuds when they are objectively worse options that the collection of wired headphones I’ve gotten over the years. What about when the phone manufacturers decide that contact charging is good enough now and remove your USB-C ports, where does the dongle go now?
Your point about optical drives on computers is fucking dumb, since computers are still 100% modular and customizable, the point is that phones are not. I CAN put an optical drive on my PC, I can’t put a 3.5mm jack on my phone.
(Different guy here) the same thing applies to 3.5mm jacks. I also the “slippery slope” argument on USB-C ports feels a bit premature, though I’ll never 100% say that a CEO wouldn’t ever do anything like that.
Their point about optical drives literally said the word “laptop” and no, laptops are not modular to the point where you can just slap any old disc-drive in them. You can, however, get an external one that will take a USB slot but you’ll live. It’s going to be hard to successfully argue against the other guy if you’re not even reading his comments properly.
I read the comments properly. Laptops are modular where you can slap any old disc drive in them, I have one in my basement right now where I can do exactly that. If I couldn’t swap it easily without taking apart the laptop, I can easily open the laptop and attach it to the board as well, something that I can’t do with modern locked tight phones without specialized tools. Last resort would be using USB and an external drive. Tech literacy is dead when people are arguing against having a 3.5mm jack and don’t know that you can open a laptop with a screwdriver.
When was the last time you saw an even semi-modern laptop? There’s no space to jam disc-drives in them and you’d have to cut the body for the slot if there was no option to switch out part of it for something that had one. I frickin’ love modifying stuff and tinkering but that’s just not a reasonable expectation to have for everyone.
I am aware of how to open a laptop, I even have all the bits to do it, I’m just not living in the early 2000s and understand that my needs and how I use stuff are not the only valid ways.
Yes, tech literacy had a small window and now we’re all dumb again but I don’t think it’s why you think it is.
You can only use the USB-C dongle for as long as your USB-C port functions
Sure. At that point, you have bigger issues than the headphones, and your phone is probably very well past its natural lifespan, but sure.
which for my last 3 phones including the one I’m typing this on, isn’t for the life of the phone.
??? Holy shit what? I had a phone with a micro-USB port that lasted nine years, and the plastic power button failed before the port did. My current USB-C port shows absolutely no signs of wear after nearly three years. USB-C is generally sturdier because it’s symmetrical, a bit thicker, and lacks sharp corners.
Dude, I’m sorry, USB-C phones started showing up in like 2015; generously, that’s about three years per phone. I don’t know if you just needed to clean the port and didn’t realize, but at some point that stops being bad luck or poor manufacturing and starts looking like user error.
So once that fails which it always does, how do I listen to music?
Bluetooth headphones until you get a new phone? Again, nobody said you can’t buy a phone with a 3.5 mm jack. If your use case is that you’re chronically negligent with your USB-C ports, then go off, king. But nobody’s going to consider this a half-decent argument for bringing it back to most phones.
I shouldn’t be forced to use Bluetooth headphones/earbuds when they are objectively worse options that the collection of wired headphones I’ve gotten over the years.
Okay, again, if you care about audio quality so much that the Bluetooth standard is your bottleneck, you’re using an external DAC plugged into the USB-C port anyway, not whatever DAC the manufacturer decided to throw in for the 3.5 mm port. Wired headphones are better than wireless at the high end, but that’s also when you’re not sending the audio through a generic smartphone DAC.
What about when the phone manufacturers decide that contact charging is good enough now and remove your USB-C ports, where does the dongle go now?
“What about this scenario that I made up in my head just now? What then?? How will I be able to select my audio playlist when the corporations take away the phone’s display and project it into my retinas with Bluetooth, liberals??”
Your point about optical drives on computers [sic] is fucking dumb, since computers are still 100% modular and customizable
Yeah, sure, I’ll just build an optical drive into my laptop whose bottom chassis is thinner than my smartphone. Wait until the engineers at Lenovo see how far I’ve pushed optical drive technology so I can watch Shrek 2 with director’s commentary while I check my email.
the point is that phones are not. I CAN put an optical drive on my PC, I can’t put a 3.5mm jack on my phone.
I can fit an optical drive into my laptop about as well as you can fit a 3.5 mm jack into your phone (but actually, it’d be easier for you). Your comment below talking about “unscrewing a laptop”… Hi, yeah, I do that all the time. The fact that you not only can’t see the giant problems with trying this but also equate installing an optical drive inside of a generic laptop that was never meant to have one with being able to pop open the lid is so egregiously fucking stupid that I don’t know how/if to entertain it.
I can honestly see how you broke your phone’s USB-C port three times in a row if this is how you understand technology.
What would you consider a natural lifespan for a phone? I’m currently using a Pixel 6 that I got in 2021, it’s still well within it’s 8 year lifespan (which is around what I would call reasonable for something that costs me $800) and the USB-C broke at around late year 2 early year 3. It’s been the same issue with each phone of the USB-C getting loose and eventually failing to charge. As for your point about the micro USB port outlasting the button, same vibe those ports were indestructible, this is an issue that has only come up and consistently come up when phones started switching to type C. My blackberry bold is still kicking and usable so you can call “user error” all you want but I’m not convinced I suddenly became bad at maintaining my phones suddenly when the port swapped.
So I’m supposed to solve the issue of not wanting bluetooth headphones by…using bluetooth headphones? For five years while I wait for my phones natural lifespan to pass? K. Like yes I get the audio quality argument, you’re going to use a DAC anyways as I do on my desktop, but having the possibility of my headphones dying on me, as well as the price to performance when compared with wired options is enough for me to not want to deal with it. Sure I can get 100$ bluetooth buds, but they’re going to not only not be high quality, they’ll sound like shit at best.
The “scenario I made up in my head” is coming in the next few years, guaranteed. I remember when “the 3.5mm jack is going away” was a stupid argument that wasn’t going to happen too.
Just like I can buy a phone with a 3.5mm jack (with increasingly limited options for that each year) that isn’t my only criteria when buying a phone, it’s about weighing pros and cons of it. Sure you can’t fit an optical drive in your razor thin Lenovo, but you have options to buy a laptop that can, it all depends if you’re priority is buying something functional or something pretty.
You’re probably right though, it’s on me for having a broken port on the only piece of tech that I can’t easily open and tinker with, I just don’t understand technology.
Now, though? I find wireless earbuds vastly nicer and more convenient for phones
Love the fact their tiny, non-replaceable lithium batteries means they’re quite literally disposable products you’ll have to keep buying and throwing away.
To me anyway, that’s basically a non-factor these days:
From the factory, phones generally have much longer battery lives than when 3.5 mm jacks thrived. For example (bit of an outlier), my S23 Ultra lasts me two days from 80%. And speaking of that, the battery life capacity over time is less bad now thanks to e.g. techniques like stopping charging early.
Phones charge much faster now than, again, when 3.5 mm jacks thrived. 10 minutes of charging could easily last me through several hours.
Wireless charging is a standard feature of modern smartphones, and it’s even decently fast (I’ve usually seen 15W).
So to me anyway, this conflict would arise and be frustrating in the case that: “Oh shit, I used my phone like crazy yesterday and forgot to charge it overnight. It’s so dire that I need to charge it now when I want to listen to something, and for some reason I can’t 1) just charge it wirelessly, 2) listen without headphones for 10-ish minutes, 3) listen on another device if I’m using/near one, or 4) go find something to do other than listen to music on my phone for the 10 minutes it takes my phone to charge another 20%.”
TL;DR: If you’re absent-minded as hell, chronically on your phone listening to music etc., unwilling to think even slightly outside the box, and impatient to the level of a small child, then USB-C headphones will be a devastating downgrade.
I like to listen to podcasts in bed, often falling asleep during. Therefore wireless ones are not feasible as they get lost.
I like to be able to charge my phone at the same time, as it’s a long period where I don’t use the thing and it’s in one place.
Could this be solved attentively? Sure, but changing the thing that is perfectly fine will force me to change my routine, against which I’m naturally hesitant.
Yeah, unless your headphone cable is very short and/or the nearest hard, flat surface is very far, I don’t see any reason why wireless charging couldn’t work as an out-of-the-box solution for this. Some phones nowadays even take 25W wirelessly, which is insane, but the seemingly standard 15W will still trivially top you off overnight.
We’ll take a worst-case scenario where you have an Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro (5800 mAh; very high), a 15W wireless charger, a phone that we’ll just call dead and assume you’re still listening to podcasts somehow for simplicity, you’re not capping at e.g. 80% to protect the battery, and you’re getting five hours of sleep because you were up watching a 3-hour alt history video essay theorizing what the Anglo-Zanzibar War would’ve looked like if both sides had nukes.
You’re talking basically like 30 Wh. So when you wake up in the middle of the night three hours later from chronic insomnia, your phone’s fully charged and there to tempt you away from falling back asleep.
Therefore wireless ones are not feasible as they get lost.
Samsung earbuds have a detection mode; you can make them make a noise if they’re out of the case, and GPS will tell you the address if you forget them somewhere.
They don’t help you if you left them inside the case in your house, but don’t know where.
Are we not well past a point where the Fairphone 6’s DAC for the 3.5 mm jack would be better for audio quality than Bluetooth 5.4 with aptX Adaptive/LDAC? When headphone jacks were being removed from phones around the mid-2010s, it was ridiculous, greedy, and premature. Now, though? I find wireless earbuds vastly nicer and more convenient for phones, and I would only go with wired, say, on a vacation where I can use a cheap $20 junk drawer pair and not mourn them if they get lost somewhere – at which point I can just use a dongle for a weekend or whatever.
I still always want a microSD card slot, but I’d prefer that my phone not have a headphone jack at this point. I think the people who still mourn the loss of the 3.5 mm jack are a vastly smaller minority than they think they are. Which is fine; you’re still welcome as a consumer to buy or not buy a phone based off that. But I also think that nagging Fairphone over the removal of the 3.5 mm jack with the Fairphone 4 in 2021 is “old man yelling at clouds” territory.
Idgaf about audio quality. I don’t have to charge wired headphones and the port is designed to spin unlike a dumbass dongle plugged into a USB c port. Let alone the environmental considerations.
Valid. Back in the mid-2010s, it was a prominent (and very strong) argument against removing the jack.
Also valid, although even budget wireless earbuds advertise 24+ hours of battery life. Mine advertise 30, and after over a year of usage, I’d say they get me through an entire day of uninterrupted moderate usage (no going back in the case) no problem. The case usually has a few full earbud charges and charges them very quickly, and at least my case charges via USB-C or wirelessly and doesn’t take long.
It’s less of an interruption and more of a fixed, very small factor in a nightly or binightly routine. Realistically, the lifespan of a baked-in lithium-ion battery is a headache, but to me, the battery life never has been. It can’t beat no charging, but having to recharge the earbuds is something I’m barely even cognizant of.
I’m trying to remember the last time I had to readjust the rotation of a headphone cable on the bottom of the phone (top of the phone definitely sometimes, though). If you really need to, the tip of the cable can still be rotated inside the dongle. I can’t imagine this being an actual problem unless your use case is as a fidget toy.
Shipping an audio jack that 95%+ of users will not ever touch with every phone sounds at least as environmentally unfriendly as the rare purchase of a 3.5 mm-to-USB-C dongle. The environmental consideration of the baked-in lithium-ion battery is definitely worse, but you also don’t have to use that or the dongle; good wired earbuds/headphones with a USB-C cable exist.
It’s again totally your choice to factor the jack into what phone you buy, but the jack is and will remain dead in the mainstream – now finally with decent reason – and no amount of being a vocal minority to Fairphone about how it’s too hard to spin your headphone cable is likely to change that.
I’m very likely the minority, but the reason I still have a phone with jack is that my custom mold in-ear, well… is wired (I’m a musician).
I don’t want to use a different headphone for hearing music, as this is a really good monitor (actually I think it has cost me 10x as much as the used phone I’m driving it with (LG V30)). An external DAC is annoying, as this for one drains the battery pretty heavily and - fewer adapters less worries…
There’s other reasons why you don’t want to use bluetooth, namely latency, although probably less important, for applications where this is really relevant, you would use a dedicated audio interface anyways… Or well, just the fact that I know of a few people already that they lost their bud(s), quite a bit more difficult if everything is wired together.
Pushing wireless has been frustrating to me because of the fact that the batteries inside those tools will die sooner or later. Majority of the time, I am fine with being wired. The good news is that IEMs have evolved a lot over the past decade with great options even at $20 that include detachable cables from the earbuds. What’s even cooler is that you can choose for your audio connectivity to be USB-C for those that miss the 3.5mm jack. I’ll provide a $20 example below:
https://hangout.audio/products/tangzu-waner-sg-2?variant=41999443132464
I switched to IEM’s with a Bluetooth DAC after someone stole my brand new galaxy buds.
It looks dated by today’s standards so people don’t want to steal it. Funny though because this setup is way better quality.
For me, I already have very good headphones from years ago, and they are all working. I don’t want to buy additional Bluetooth headphones just for a Smartphone. Why do I have to buy additional gears just to be able to use my perfectly functional old ones? Or do I have to accept that Smartphones nowadays are just not for music?
You don’t have to. You can still use a USB-C dongle. Phones in 2025 have considerably longer battery life and charge considerably faster than phones when manufacturers started phasing out 3.5 mm jacks in phones, so charging should rarely conflict – unless you’re frequently doing wired data transfers too. A dongle is about $20. You’re also entirely free to get a smartphone that still has the jack if it’s an important feature to you. As I said in my above comment, nobody’s saying you aren’t allowed to factor this into your purchase.
“Why do I need an external optical drive to read DVDs on my laptop? Why can’t they just build it into the device?”
A 3.5 mm jack is just more stuff that needs to go into the limited thickness of a smartphone. They also need to be made water-resistant, and it’s just another potential point of failure. And for those who don’t use them, they’re a useless lint trap. Overall, they just cost more to produce which puts more cost onto the consumer. And now that Bluetooth audio is so widely used because it’s no longer complete trash, the vast majority of users not using the 3.5 mm jack would end up subsidizing the very small minority that do.
No, you definitely don’t. Like what? Wirelessly they’re better than they’ve ever been by a mile. If you care deeply enough about audio quality that even modern Bluetooth quality bothers you, your alternative isn’t 3.5 mm – it’s an external DAC via USB-C. Space and streaming bandwidth are basically no longer considerations for high-bitrate music. If you care about music, smartphones are in a much better position than they were when the 3.5 mm jack was thriving.
“Smartphones nowadays are not for music” is such a histrionic distortion of “I personally have to use a $20 dongle when I listen to music on my smartphone with the headphones I alreay own.”
What I mean by listening to music on the phone is, listening to lossless files from the phone’s internal storage using my old JBL or Sony. Even if wirless are better now a days, what if my old headphones are not bad too? A new Bluetooth headphone of the same quality cost a fortune too. Of course there are Smartphones still has the 3.5mm jack, like my current Sony. Or a USB-C adapter is the only way to go in the future? The problem is, why take people’s options away if you don’t care about ultra thin thickness? Fairphones themselves are not thin either.
And DAC is simply a different thing. If listening from home, there are different set ups for that with speakers. And my home sound systems are even older. They are not consumer products that you throw away every five years.
Thus is straight up a lie. They cost less than a dollar to buy and put in a phone. Even the thinnest iPhone could have one without it impacting space and finally they are just as easy to waterproof as usb c port.
But yeah keep regurgitating the same facts big companies want you to use cause a extremely backwards compatible analog audio standard is less “convenient”
You can only use the USB-C dongle for as long as your USB-C port functions, which for my last 3 phones including the one I’m typing this on, isn’t for the life of the phone. So once that fails which it always does, how do I listen to music? I shouldn’t be forced to use Bluetooth headphones/earbuds when they are objectively worse options that the collection of wired headphones I’ve gotten over the years. What about when the phone manufacturers decide that contact charging is good enough now and remove your USB-C ports, where does the dongle go now?
Your point about optical drives on computers is fucking dumb, since computers are still 100% modular and customizable, the point is that phones are not. I CAN put an optical drive on my PC, I can’t put a 3.5mm jack on my phone.
(Different guy here) the same thing applies to 3.5mm jacks. I also the “slippery slope” argument on USB-C ports feels a bit premature, though I’ll never 100% say that a CEO wouldn’t ever do anything like that.
Their point about optical drives literally said the word “laptop” and no, laptops are not modular to the point where you can just slap any old disc-drive in them. You can, however, get an external one that will take a USB slot but you’ll live. It’s going to be hard to successfully argue against the other guy if you’re not even reading his comments properly.
I read the comments properly. Laptops are modular where you can slap any old disc drive in them, I have one in my basement right now where I can do exactly that. If I couldn’t swap it easily without taking apart the laptop, I can easily open the laptop and attach it to the board as well, something that I can’t do with modern locked tight phones without specialized tools. Last resort would be using USB and an external drive. Tech literacy is dead when people are arguing against having a 3.5mm jack and don’t know that you can open a laptop with a screwdriver.
When was the last time you saw an even semi-modern laptop? There’s no space to jam disc-drives in them and you’d have to cut the body for the slot if there was no option to switch out part of it for something that had one. I frickin’ love modifying stuff and tinkering but that’s just not a reasonable expectation to have for everyone.
I am aware of how to open a laptop, I even have all the bits to do it, I’m just not living in the early 2000s and understand that my needs and how I use stuff are not the only valid ways.
Yes, tech literacy had a small window and now we’re all dumb again but I don’t think it’s why you think it is.
Sure. At that point, you have bigger issues than the headphones, and your phone is probably very well past its natural lifespan, but sure.
??? Holy shit what? I had a phone with a micro-USB port that lasted nine years, and the plastic power button failed before the port did. My current USB-C port shows absolutely no signs of wear after nearly three years. USB-C is generally sturdier because it’s symmetrical, a bit thicker, and lacks sharp corners.
Dude, I’m sorry, USB-C phones started showing up in like 2015; generously, that’s about three years per phone. I don’t know if you just needed to clean the port and didn’t realize, but at some point that stops being bad luck or poor manufacturing and starts looking like user error.
Bluetooth headphones until you get a new phone? Again, nobody said you can’t buy a phone with a 3.5 mm jack. If your use case is that you’re chronically negligent with your USB-C ports, then go off, king. But nobody’s going to consider this a half-decent argument for bringing it back to most phones.
Okay, again, if you care about audio quality so much that the Bluetooth standard is your bottleneck, you’re using an external DAC plugged into the USB-C port anyway, not whatever DAC the manufacturer decided to throw in for the 3.5 mm port. Wired headphones are better than wireless at the high end, but that’s also when you’re not sending the audio through a generic smartphone DAC.
“What about this scenario that I made up in my head just now? What then?? How will I be able to select my audio playlist when the corporations take away the phone’s display and project it into my retinas with Bluetooth, liberals??”
Yeah, sure, I’ll just build an optical drive into my laptop whose bottom chassis is thinner than my smartphone. Wait until the engineers at Lenovo see how far I’ve pushed optical drive technology so I can watch Shrek 2 with director’s commentary while I check my email.
I can fit an optical drive into my laptop about as well as you can fit a 3.5 mm jack into your phone (but actually, it’d be easier for you). Your comment below talking about “unscrewing a laptop”… Hi, yeah, I do that all the time. The fact that you not only can’t see the giant problems with trying this but also equate installing an optical drive inside of a generic laptop that was never meant to have one with being able to pop open the lid is so egregiously fucking stupid that I don’t know how/if to entertain it.
I can honestly see how you broke your phone’s USB-C port three times in a row if this is how you understand technology.
What would you consider a natural lifespan for a phone? I’m currently using a Pixel 6 that I got in 2021, it’s still well within it’s 8 year lifespan (which is around what I would call reasonable for something that costs me $800) and the USB-C broke at around late year 2 early year 3. It’s been the same issue with each phone of the USB-C getting loose and eventually failing to charge. As for your point about the micro USB port outlasting the button, same vibe those ports were indestructible, this is an issue that has only come up and consistently come up when phones started switching to type C. My blackberry bold is still kicking and usable so you can call “user error” all you want but I’m not convinced I suddenly became bad at maintaining my phones suddenly when the port swapped.
So I’m supposed to solve the issue of not wanting bluetooth headphones by…using bluetooth headphones? For five years while I wait for my phones natural lifespan to pass? K. Like yes I get the audio quality argument, you’re going to use a DAC anyways as I do on my desktop, but having the possibility of my headphones dying on me, as well as the price to performance when compared with wired options is enough for me to not want to deal with it. Sure I can get 100$ bluetooth buds, but they’re going to not only not be high quality, they’ll sound like shit at best.
The “scenario I made up in my head” is coming in the next few years, guaranteed. I remember when “the 3.5mm jack is going away” was a stupid argument that wasn’t going to happen too.
Just like I can buy a phone with a 3.5mm jack (with increasingly limited options for that each year) that isn’t my only criteria when buying a phone, it’s about weighing pros and cons of it. Sure you can’t fit an optical drive in your razor thin Lenovo, but you have options to buy a laptop that can, it all depends if you’re priority is buying something functional or something pretty.
You’re probably right though, it’s on me for having a broken port on the only piece of tech that I can’t easily open and tinker with, I just don’t understand technology.
Love the fact their tiny, non-replaceable lithium batteries means they’re quite literally disposable products you’ll have to keep buying and throwing away.
Also, if you need wired you can get USB-C headphones.
Now you can’t listen and charge your phone at the same time.
To me anyway, that’s basically a non-factor these days:
So to me anyway, this conflict would arise and be frustrating in the case that: “Oh shit, I used my phone like crazy yesterday and forgot to charge it overnight. It’s so dire that I need to charge it now when I want to listen to something, and for some reason I can’t 1) just charge it wirelessly, 2) listen without headphones for 10-ish minutes, 3) listen on another device if I’m using/near one, or 4) go find something to do other than listen to music on my phone for the 10 minutes it takes my phone to charge another 20%.”
TL;DR: If you’re absent-minded as hell, chronically on your phone listening to music etc., unwilling to think even slightly outside the box, and impatient to the level of a small child, then USB-C headphones will be a devastating downgrade.
I like to listen to podcasts in bed, often falling asleep during. Therefore wireless ones are not feasible as they get lost.
I like to be able to charge my phone at the same time, as it’s a long period where I don’t use the thing and it’s in one place.
Could this be solved attentively? Sure, but changing the thing that is perfectly fine will force me to change my routine, against which I’m naturally hesitant.
Yeah, unless your headphone cable is very short and/or the nearest hard, flat surface is very far, I don’t see any reason why wireless charging couldn’t work as an out-of-the-box solution for this. Some phones nowadays even take 25W wirelessly, which is insane, but the seemingly standard 15W will still trivially top you off overnight.
We’ll take a worst-case scenario where you have an Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro (5800 mAh; very high), a 15W wireless charger, a phone that we’ll just call dead and assume you’re still listening to podcasts somehow for simplicity, you’re not capping at e.g. 80% to protect the battery, and you’re getting five hours of sleep because you were up watching a 3-hour alt history video essay theorizing what the Anglo-Zanzibar War would’ve looked like if both sides had nukes.
You’re talking basically like 30 Wh. So when you wake up in the middle of the night three hours later from chronic insomnia, your phone’s fully charged and there to tempt you away from falling back asleep.
Samsung earbuds have a detection mode; you can make them make a noise if they’re out of the case, and GPS will tell you the address if you forget them somewhere.
They don’t help you if you left them inside the case in your house, but don’t know where.
Plus if you care about audio quality you were using an external dac anyway