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'Two Years Later, I Still Miss the Headphone Port' (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader shares a column: I've been trying to figure out why the removal of the headphone port bugs me more than other ports that have been unceremoniously killed off, and I think it's because the headphone port almost always only made me happy. Using the headphone port meant listening to my favorite album, or using a free minute to catch the latest episode of a show, or passing an earbud to a friend to share some new tune. It enabled happy moments and never got in the way.
Now every time I want to use my headphones, I just find myself annoyed. Bluetooth? Whoops, forgot to charge them. Or whoops, they're trying to pair with my laptop even though my laptop is turned off and in my backpack. Dongle? Whoops, left it on my other pair of headphones at work. Or whoops, it fell off somewhere, and now I've got to go buy another one. I'll just buy a bunch of dongles, and put them on all my headphones! I'll keep extras in my bag for when I need to borrow a pair of headphones. That's just like five dongles at this point, problem solved! Oh, wait: now I want to listen to music while I fall asleep, but also charge my phone so it's not dead in the morning. That's a different, more expensive splitter dongle (many of which, I've found, are poorly made garbage).
Now every time I want to use my headphones, I just find myself annoyed. Bluetooth? Whoops, forgot to charge them. Or whoops, they're trying to pair with my laptop even though my laptop is turned off and in my backpack. Dongle? Whoops, left it on my other pair of headphones at work. Or whoops, it fell off somewhere, and now I've got to go buy another one. I'll just buy a bunch of dongles, and put them on all my headphones! I'll keep extras in my bag for when I need to borrow a pair of headphones. That's just like five dongles at this point, problem solved! Oh, wait: now I want to listen to music while I fall asleep, but also charge my phone so it's not dead in the morning. That's a different, more expensive splitter dongle (many of which, I've found, are poorly made garbage).
Here is the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA
This isn't an appropriately Luddite response for Slashdot, but I don't miss the headphone jack. Why? Because I don't miss one-half of my audio disappearing when I bumped the cable or, worse, the headphone jack just stop working for one ear because the contacts got messed up in the jack itself. I don't miss the cable flapping around. I don't miss bending/breaking the plugs that for some mind-numbing reason rarely were the 90-degree angle that would keep them from getting bent/broken.
Yeah, charging headphones is a bit of a pain. But so is charging my phone, my notebook and my tablet. I've learned to deal with that. If ditching the headphone jack truly was a trade-off to allow more room for a battery, I'm fine with it, I'd rather have the battery life. Perhaps if I was also a blogger for Tech Crunch or similar publication, I would have enough devices that the Bluetooth pairing issue described would be annoying, but I don't. For me, and my small universe of devices, Bluetooth headphones work well enough, even the cheap Ankers I use 90% of the time.
I don't see this as a freedom (or "bravery") topic or even a big deal. It's an area where for reasons of efficiency (or more likely, cost) the market moved away from something. For the audiophiles with $400 cans, they were complaining about the digitized music in the first place. For the people who miss getting cheap $10 headphones at Ross or Marshall's that they could lose or throw away without feeling bad, there are almost as-cheap Bluetooth alternatives. It sort of reminds me when physical keyboards went away. We adapted, and we're fine.
Enjoy it while you can. All the android phones are starting to follow suit.
and it sucks
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Try again.
The iPhone 6 had a headphone jack and was thinner than any model they've made without the 3.5mm headphone jack. Removing the jack has nothing to do with making the phone thinner.
And yet thinner phones (2mm thinner) already existed - and kept the 3.5mm jack. Not to mention a hacker added 3.5mm jack internally to an iPhone 7. Clearly it can be done, and clearly thinner phones can be made. It was dropped because Apple was spending $3.2 billion buying one of the biggest Bluetooth headphone brands in the world - Beats.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
And I'll also listen to my free FM radio that doesn't eat up my data plan or battery
But the FM radio in the phone uses the headphone wire, plugged into the headphone jack, as an antenna.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism