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The Year OnePlus Started Ignoring Fans (venturebeat.com)
OnePlus has made a name for itself selling devices that punch above the price class. The Chinese smartphone maker has also built a loyal fanbase by proactively reaching out to its users and incorporating the changes and suggestions they make in its product lineup. But as the company grows bigger and embarks on a new journey -- entering the United States -- it is increasingly turning a blind eye to its community. From a story: To get the whole picture, we have to look at all of 2018. OnePlus releases two phones per year, and it makes sure to hype these before each debut. This year was the same in this regard, except for the obvious fan backlash. I'm of course talking about notches and headphone jacks. In March, OnePlus cofounder Carl Pei tweeted that users should "learn to love the notch." The outcry was so great that Pei deleted the tweet. The OnePlus 6 of course launched in May with a notch. Earlier in March, Pei also tweeted his usual annual poll about headphone jacks. The OnePlus 6T, which started shipping in the U.S. on November 1 and will hit the rest of the world on November 6, has a smaller "teardrop" notch. But as you likely already know, it doesn't have a headphone jack. [...] It's a bizarre set of decisions given OnePlus has always prided itself on giving its fans exactly what they want. This year, OnePlus seems to be happily pushing its fans to Samsung, which at least for now still offers headphone jacks in all its phones and has completely ignored the ugly notch trend.
"The Year OnePlus Started Ignoring what this one particular guy told them to do."
There, I went ahead and fixed the headline for you.
Apple can make extremely dumb decisions: iPhone notch, removing the headphone port from iPhones and iPads, butterfly keyboards on MacBooks. Even after three generations of butterfly keyboards, they still suck.
Stop following Apple and their dumb decisions. Stop making phones, tablets and laptops thinner. Just as there's "good enough" with technology, there's "thin enough" for portable devices. What we need is lighter devices with the same capabilities, not thinner with thermal throttling and no space left for batteries.
#DeleteFacebook
The sales #'s will tell. I love my 3T, and a few coworkers also like their OnePlus devices (through 5). Not a single one of us plans on buying a OnePlus again. For me, the headphone jack is a deal breaker. The notch is just ugly. I want features for a decent price point. I don't want less features from a copy cat manufacturer. Bye OnePlus. I hardly knew ya.
Be Excellent To Each Other
Oppo designs & builds everything with a OnePlus label. It was a pretty ingenious marketing idea by BBK Electronics. Create a "small startup" called OnePlus. ONLY advertise on social media & their website. Create the hype by saying you have to have an INVITE to spend your money (because they are a poor little startup). Hype it up with things like smash your device (which went sideways) and a girls only thing (which went sideways), but, any coverage is "good" and FREE press. Make up with pretty high specs, but cut a few corners, sell it for "cost" and say any profit is put in to making more devices for devoted users. With each new device, tweak the price higher and higher and higher to the point it's NOT the bargain it use to be, or bargain, if you use Apple & Samsung as a benchmark. With pretty much NO customer service and NO testing before release, leave it to the customers to report bugs which get fixed, and use THAT to say look how many updates we push out. We "listen" to the customers (yeah because the phones didn't work like they were suppose to!) The phones are made by Oppo, and usually look just like some Oppo phone, but as a less expensive price. They can be good devices, after they've been in the wild for a while and the bugs are fixed. Oppo pulls the strings, OnePlus is just the puppet.
The notch allowed the phone to reduce in size by removing the top bezel, which we like, and removing a block of pixels in the middle of the status area, which we also want and which we generally use when viewing things full screen. It's hard to understand the mentality that it somehow allows for greater screen real estate - it doesn't, it rips out a little in the name of reducing the bezel, which in turn wasn't something anyone wanted removed.
The only reason a poll of iUsers right now would tell you "most people are not using it" is because iUsers can't. The vast, vast, majority of Android users use the headphone jack regularly. And the vast majority of iUsers used it before Apple made their "brave decision".
It was also a poor decision for another reason, which was Apple had, and has, no sane alternative. Bluetooth's poor audio quality makes it a subpar alternative, the standards for USB - even USB-C - are still so poorly followed that there's no system followed by USB headset makers or charger makers that would allow for daisy chaining both a charger and headset from a USB port, and, well, Apple doesn't use a standard USB connector, they use a proprietary one, so there's absolutely no way manufacturers would standardize on anything for that port.
On every practical and logical level removing the headphone socket for Apple was a dumb idea. They could have done it by switching to USB C, then either adding two USB C ports, or endorsing an extended USB C connector that allowed other connectors to be plugged into it, but instead they said "Hey fuckers, you're on your own, but, hey, we do own Beats Audio so if you want we'll sell you some seriously shitty bluetooth headphones to make up for it. And you're going to buy our shit anyway because we're Apple."
Why are you defending this?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I will never buy a smartphone with a notch. When I watched the Apple and Google keynotes, every time they showed a full screen photo or game on their respective new phones, I kept thinking, "This looks great...except for that stupid notch!" Previously I have liked many if not most of the designs Apple has introduced which everyone else has seemed to copy. But the notch is the worst design decision Apple has ever made. And damn all the Android vendors who copied that crap.