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Google Is Latest Company To Ditch Headphone Jack In Its Newest Smartphones (cultofmac.com)
When launching its original Pixel smartphone, Google mocked the iPhone 7's missing headphone jack in its marketing material. According to Cult of Mac, Google won't be doing the same for the Pixel 2. "The company has decided to remove the aging port from its latest handsets," reports Cult of Mac. "A new leak reveals that the lineup will rely solely on USB-C for wired connectivity." From the report: Incredibly reliable leaker Evan Blass has published pictures and details of Google's upcoming Pixel 2 smartphones on VentureBeat. He has also confirmed that neither device will feature a headphone jack, which means users will have to rely on a USB-C adapter or Bluetooth. It also means Google will no longer be able to put out Pixel ads that take sly swipes at the iPhone's missing port. Blass says both Pixel handsets will be powered by a Snapdragon 835 chipset -- the same one found in the Galaxy S8, the LG V30, and other 2017 flagships -- not a faster Snapdragon 836 processor as originally planned. Other features are said to include 12-megapixel cameras, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB or 128GB storage options. The smaller Pixel will pack a 5-inch 1080p display with a 16:9, while its larger sibling will pack a 6-inch Quad HD display with an 18:9 aspect ratio. Is the lack of a headphone jack a deal-breaker, or do you think the Pixel's other features, like stock Android and front-facing stereo speakers, will make up for it?
Samsung, the biggest cellphone maker of them all, still supports the 3.5mm jack. My new Note 8 has one, and with the 256 GB MicroSD card installed I have a ton of downloaded Tidal albums...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Sony and Nokia have phones with the same processor but with the 3.5mm jack, expandable storage and water/dust resistance. Their software is close to Google's and Sony contributes to AOSP. Google loses. Oh, and if you want to make good photos, buy a goddamn dedicated camera. No phone comes close and none will due to the laws of optics.
Waka Waka!
It would be great if in conjunction with removing the headphone jack they were also releasing a bunch of affordable USB-C headphones. My current phone still supports regular headphones, but it also has USB-C. So every once in a while, I look to see if there are any USB-C headphones I can grab --- because I assume the audio quality will be better. But there's hardly anything on Amazon and what is there is more expensive than similar or better headphones that have the traditional plug.
And it's not much better in the Apple space, either.
I, like many /. readers I want a phone with a MicroSD slot and regular security updates for at least 2 years.
>"Is the lack of a headphone jack a deal-breaker"
100% yes. Although I am not happy with lack of SD cards, I can handle that if a reasonable storage size is available, 64+GB. I am never happy with a non-swappable battery, but it seems that is beating a dead horse. Certainly also unhappy that wireless charging is so rare. Other unhappiness- lack of NFC, thinness instead of battery size, pixel density instead of brightness and efficiency, huge screen instead of portability.
But I have to draw the line somewhere, and it is at losing a simple, compact, compatible, easy, reliable headphone jack. There is simply no really good reason to remove it. I don't know when I will or won't need it, and I don't want to carry a stupid adapter that also is expensive, easy to lose, sucks more power, is likely to break, makes the phone weak and awkward while using it, and prevents charging while using it.
Sucks to get stuck with Bluetooth if you want to travel, though... Many overseas airlines will not allow use of Bluetooth headphones, and technically the FAA did not allow them either (just BLE-based devices). And that's not even talking about the audio quality hit you'd get with Bluetooth unless you're running something decent like AptX or AptX HD (neither of which is available on iOS).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
This shouldn't come as any surprise considering how it was discussed in the context of DRM a decade ago. People choose the cloud, people loose choice.
My car has aux in. They talk about how 3.5mm Jack's are crap and wear out. Well now I'm going to wear out my charging port and turn my phone into a paper weight. I think about it every time I plug my phone in to it.
I use it in my car to connect to my oem head unit. I use to connect to some old powered PC speakers in the bathroom. I use it to connect to aux in on a few other devices. In other words, DEAL BREAKER.
Looks like we're going to need to go back to multiple devices soon.
What happens once you stop paying your Dropbox bill? I thought in such a case, files past 2 GB got deleted. And how well does Dropbox work when upstream is $5 to $10 per GB, such as satellite or LTE, or when upstream isn't available at all, such as between a laptop and tablet on a city bus?
We're talking about a plug which is on possibly billions of devices.
This isn't just headphones and headsets, this is being able to plug into the analog port on amplifier, this standard is used on boom boxes 20 years ago, on audio 'in' ports for the past 20 or 30 years on a plethora of devices.
It's all fine and dandy for smarmy tools to say "oh shut up, get USB-C headphones!" but USB-C headphones won't work on my OTHER devices easily and I sure as shit don't see them changing any time soon, literally billions of devices over the world.
It's even easier using Airdrop.
Just 2 years? I've had my current smartphone for 4 years, and I'm just starting to think about a new one. I think it's insane that we don't get at least 4-5 years of guaranteed security updates for a device that costs nearly a thousand dollars.
I don't personally care about a headphone jack or an SD card (although I understand why some people do). I can even live without a removable battery, even though that's the only part of my phone that's slowly degrading. It's the assumption that I'll only be keeping this device for 2 years that's killing me. It may even drive me to Apple for my next device, as they seem to provide better long-term support for their phones, which was quite surprising when I did a bit of investigation into this. Even so, the Pixel is still on the table as a possible next phone.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
That's ageism! Seriously though, what the fuck is wrong with companies? The headphone jack still works, digital wireless headphones have to use audio compression to have enough bandwidth and we're already listening to compressed audio in the first place. Are all new engineers deaf?
#DeleteFacebook
Why are people so blind and so quick to dismiss their elders? We didn't bitch and moan when USB replaced serial ports, parallel ports and PS/2 ports, because USB was clearly superior. We didn't bitch and moan when USB flash drives replaced floppy drives because we were already way past the 1.44MB capacity of those damn discs.
But ditching the headphone jack? Why? Bluetooth is not superior in any way: for losing the wire, all you gain is low-quality compressed audio, expensive headphones and yet another battery to recharge every day.
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In my house, I have a minimum of several dozen devices with standard 3.5mm headphone jacks. This includes my stereo, my TVs, my iPads (no intention of upgrading, they're good enough), my Windows tablets (we have at least 15 laying around the house), Kindle (for text to speech) ,etc...
To switch the headphones, I would need to replace about $40-$50,000 of devices.
3.5 mm jacks are imperfect and always have been. They're a terrible design but probably the best we could hope for given the manufacturing equipment of the time. The original 1/4" "telephone plug" or monaural plug dates to 1878. The 3.5mm jack dates from the 50's but I can't find anything more precise from Googling. The fact that something so small could be made in the 50's... especially when most things had to be hand-assembled back then is truly amazing.
So that said... given a standard that already dates back 60-70 years... I have no intention of giving up my headphones and their wires. They work well enough... I don't have to charge them... and since I prefer ear buds, I sure as shit don't want to lose them constantly because they're not physically attached to my phone.
Oh... and dongles are just plain stupid... I have Ajay 5 headphones and have bought 20-30 pairs of AJays over the years because they are more durable than most others. They don't make dongles of comparable strength or cable quality.
People who quote the horseless carriages in this case only show their own ignorance of history.
It took a good 30 years for the horseless carriage to catch on. By that time the costs plummeted and it started showing real advantages including actually being faster and more comfortable than the horse drawn counterpart. There was a long history before mass adoption where the horseless carriage was a piece of shit that was slow, useless, and in some cases even required a person walking in front of it to be used legally.
That is where wireless headphones are right now. There's not a single wireless headphone on the market that can out perform its wired counterpart in any metric other than not having a wire.
They have their use cases, but they are not in the general all encompassing case superior.