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Bluetooth Won't Replace the Headphone Jack -- Walled Gardens Will (theverge.com)
Last year, when it was rumoured that the then upcoming iPhone models -- 7 and 7 Plus -- won't have the 3.5mm audio jack, The Verge's Nilay Patel wrote that if Apple does do it, it would be a user-hostile and stupid move. When those iPhone models were official announced, they indeed didn't have the audio jack. Earlier this week, Android-maker Google announced the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL smartphones that also don't feature the decades-old audio jack either, a move that would likely push rest of the smartphone makers to adopt a similar change. The rationale behind killing the traditional headphones jack, both Apple and Google say, is to move to an improved technology: Bluetooth. But there is another motive at play here, it appears. Patel, writes for The Verge: As the headphone jack disappears, the obvious replacement isn't another wire with a proprietary connector like Apple's Lightning or the many incompatible and strange flavors of USB-C audio. It's Bluetooth. And Bluetooth continues to suck, for a variety of reasons. Newer phones like the iPhone 8, Galaxy S8, and the Pixel 2 have Bluetooth 5, which promises to be better, but 1. There are literally no Bluetooth 5 headphones out yet, and 2. we have definitely heard that promise before. So we'll see. To improve Bluetooth, platform vendors like Apple and Google are riffing on top of it, and that means they're building custom solutions. And building custom solutions means they're taking the opportunity to prioritize their own products, because that is a fair and rational thing for platform vendors to do. Unfortunately, what is fair and rational for platform vendors isn't always great for markets, competition, or consumers. And at the end of this road, we will have taken a simple, universal thing that enabled a vibrant market with tons of options for every consumer, and turned it into yet another limited market defined by ecosystem lock-in. The playbook is simple: last year, Apple dropped the headphone jack and replaced it with its W1 system, which is basically a custom controller chip and software management layer for Bluetooth. The exemplary set of W1 headphones is, of course, AirPods, but Apple also owns Beats, and there are a few sets of W1 Beats headphones available as well. You can still use regular Bluetooth headphones with an iPhone, and you can use AirPods as regular Bluetooth headphones, but the combination iPhone / W1 experience is obviously superior to anything else on the market. [...] Google's version of this is the Pixel Buds, a set of over-ear neckbuds that serve as basic Bluetooth headphones but gain additional capabilities when used with certain phones. Seamless fast pairing? You need Android N or higher, which most Android phones don't have.
Not going to buy a new set because Apple - or Google wants me to. Fuck them. I'd sooner switch cell phones. Eventually, the manufacturers will get the message.
Good, then you'll be happy. I've used plain old headphones with my iPhone 7.
But hey, it's good to see a man of your convictions, have you considered a feature phone?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
was a depressed Goth teenager saying "don't bother... it's probably just going to suck anyways".
Mhmm. Right. One should think of the headphone jack as a simple electrical interface, rather than some sort of magical sound-transport medium.
Well there you are wrong. My audiophile friends and me have done the experiments, and the best sound possible is found when using the small headphone jacks. It lends a vibrancy and a sort of anti-listening fatigue to teh sound. The 1/8th inch phone jack also extends th ehigh and low end of any headphone, an dthe crispness efface due to the smaller spring metal used, can make a 5 dollar headphone bought at Big Lots sound much superior to a stutio headphone, sa a Beyerdynamic. Where after listening to test tones for a hundred straight hours had people tearing the phones off their heads and run screaming out of the room, while the 5 dollar Big Lot's phones and the exquisite 1/8th inch jack and plugs we had to turn off the test tones after two weeks because we were concerned about the wearers starving to death, and they sure didn't smell good by that time.
Audiophile approved as a critical component of anyone who isn't tone deaf.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
AptX is better than the current codecs used for Bluetooth but it doesn't give you analog quality.
This argument over audio quality from a cellphone is pretty funny. You folks are all novices. I'm a purist. I have a cellphone I built out of vacuum tubes because nothing beats the audio warmth you get from a vacuum tube amplifier. I power and charge my cellphone using a cable made from deoxygenated 8 gauge copper wires, because the oxygen in normal cables interferes with the highs and the high-current capacity of big wire can power the transient demands of good bass.
If you are someone who uses a cellphone as an audio source while you are sitting in your home theater, then you've admitted you don't care about the sound quality and complaining that it isn't perfection is just silly. You're going to buy the components to do the job right. If you are someone who is using the cellphone like the vast majority of people, to provide distractions from having to deal with other people while you walk or ride the bus or drive in the car, then your listening environment is so full of extraneous sounds that you will never get purity in your sound.
And that's why this whole debate over sound quality is silly. Convenience, yes, argue that, but arguing that the high frequency reproduction from your bluetooth earbud while you're riding the bus is clearly inferior to a wired studio monitor analog headphone with 1/4" TRS connector is, well, wasting a lot of everyone's time.
but they do mean that dongles are a bit of a pain in the ass.
You're using them wrong! /me hides.
Yes, nothing sends a message like 3% of your least-profitable customers banding together to found an organic juniper berry & desert reclamation profit-sharing co-operative.