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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).
Because I don't buy phones that don't have one.
Genius, isn't it?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I know I'm being unrealistic, but I wish free-market economics worked the way they theorize it should: that very few people would buy a product that doesn't have a 3.5mm port, and the demand would be filled by other manufacturers (unless you're Apple-addicted, then you're at their mercy). It bugs me to no end when the market bends and adapts to the supplier.
removing the headphone port is the most annoying "feature" ever. im ready to pay off my iphone 8 so i can sell it to get a cheap android phone with the headphone port. it's ridiculous. 3rd party dongles are cheap and not built to spec so they burn out and/or have terrible audio. apple charges too much for dongles. i cant charge and listen at the same time on road trips now. dumb. i should have never "upgraded". i am learning an expensive lesson.
USB sticks are superior in every way to a floppy disk; therefore invalid comparison.
Touch-tone phone ares superior in every way to a rotary phone; therefore invalid comparison.
Verdict: Point missed.
Because removing the headphone jack was a cynical move by phone manufacturers to upsell you a pair of bluetooth headphones. There is virtually no benefit to the consumer of such a move.
Same way the free checked bags will come back. Aviation kerosene prices are set to plunge in five years. It will remove all the nickel and diming from the air lines, 35$ for exit row seats, 25$ for guaranteed aisle seat...
But the 40$ late fee for credit cards will stay. The banksters are cruel jerks and they got poor people by their balls. They are not going to stop squeezing anytime soon.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I'm not sure that it's serious so much as a troll post. Anyone who felt that strongly about a headphone port wouldn't have purchased a phone without one. Judging by the amount of shit it's already stirring up, I'd say it's a pretty successful troll at that.
Maybe it's a me-too fad that will die off as people gradually realize they miss it and stop buying lame phones.
Table-ized A.I.
Like many aspects of Apple's newer business philosophies it is a blatant money grab. If they want to fix slumping sales then go back to putting the product before profits again. That's how they got to their position in the market today. Companies are constantly ripping us off. I used to look forward to Apple releases but now I just worry about what they're going to take away so that I have to buy more stuff (and I buy nothing new from Apple anymore).
How is it rational for me not to buy a device that, in total, is better than my current one. Sure, the lack of a headphone jack is a negative, and worse than the same phone with a headphone jack, but all in all, the new features may still make it a better phone.
It's not irrationality, it's coarseness of decisions. It's not like Apple offered two versions and let the market choose.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
The two ports:
1.) Analog mini jack for audio out and in
2.) Ethernet RJ 45
Mess with either and your business growth if used will suffer for sure.
Me it tops out iPhone 6s and forget the 7 and nice Xr Max OLED screen or even switch to Note a port be gone is a mistake for customer demand
Same goes for ports on network gear or even make it different for edge gear, security forces through App instead of at least a hard link to physical device, what?
USB-C is really just Ethernet flattened out looks like an interesting compressed compromised to be determined if it has staying power with a truce between Apple lightning/thunderbolt types with mainstreamed other makers gear.
However, under the hood all of us know it is still Ethernet with mangled frame identifiers and interconnection stack.
http://www.aisnota.com/slashdot/ Welcome to Logic and the Future
I'm not sure that it's serious so much as a troll post. Anyone who felt that strongly about a headphone port wouldn't have purchased a phone without one. Judging by the amount of shit it's already stirring up, I'd say it's a pretty successful troll at that.
Every purchase is a tradeoff, you rarely get everything you want.
A headphone jack could very well be important to some people, but not as important as other features.
There was a guy on youtube that lives in China that was able to source the parts, and free up enough room inside his iPhone to readd a 3.5mm jack. He used one of those lightning to 3.5mm passthrough dongles and stripped it down to the bare minimum. So if some guy in his bedroom could do it, apple could have done it.
What's ticking me off with the iPhone is that, aside from removing the headphone jack, is their size bias. I want a smaller form factor. I want the 5-series form factor back, and they're showing no inclination to go in that direction. I loved my 4S, which is now used by my wife, but Verizon is turning off their 3G network in '09 so that will have to be retired. I can give her my 6, which has a headphone jack which will work in her Subaru which doesn't have Bluetooth. So what then, I look for a used 5S?
We're not replacing my wife's car in the near future, and we're not interested in putting in a BT adapter to sync with her phone. I didn't like Apple's decision to get rid of the headphone jack then and nothing has shown me a compelling reason to like it now.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
A high density floppy drive held 1.44MB. You could get a 128MB USB drive for $0.25/MB in 2003 with a whopping $33 investment.
https://www.jcmit.net/flashpri...
A floppy drive was popular because there were no alternatives. Zip drives proved that.
... the lack of it was the first "fail" to me (it's a reason why I still keep my S5 [it shines with http://lineageos.org/ ] :P)
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.
I just walked through the electronics section of a general merchandise store and there are no fewer than 30 different phone models available within 10 feet of me right now. At least 27 of those have headphone jacks. Most of them are available at a much lower price than the iPhone. Rationally, people with different needs and desires would choose different phones. This LG on my left is probably the best choice for 3% of buyers, the more expensive LG two feet away is probably the rational choice for 2% of buyers, the iPhone is probably the best for 2% of people, etc. The difference between the 2% of people who *should* buy iPhones and the number who *actually* buy iPhones is the number of irrational iPhone purchases.
I've forgotten to charge my BT headphones, or just plain forgot my BT headset, or forgotten my dongle so many times that I just bought a couple of old iPods, converted them to flash, and carry them around with me.
I could care less about waterproofing. I dropped or placed my iPhone in water like 0 times in the last 11 years.
After evaluating my iPhone usage, I'll be moving back to an iPhone SE this year. I'll miss the camera, but I have a real camera that I can carry around now.
I have a headphone port and it is immensely useful while still being crappy in some respects. My phone is an LG V20. The audio system is excellent: it adaptively supports low and high impedance IEMs and headphones. It offers bit perfect decoding and playback of all the music I own (ranges from 16-bit 44100 kHz to 24-bit 88200 kHz derived from SACD as well as purchased 24-bit 96 and 192 kHz tracks. But the port/jack itself is a thowback, and especially bad on a portable device that is exposed to the elements, pocket lint etc.
Surely the ideal solution is not to force the decoding and amplification into a low power and inadequate chip, but to update the very simple physical interface from a crude jack into to one of pins with reliable connection and the capacity to be adapted and enhanced? It would also make converters very simple and cheap and universal. ....oh shit, I forgot....it's not about quality or customer satisfaction, it's about squeezing more money out of us cattle.
I don't buy phones that don't have one.
Tell that to someone who resolved not to buy phones that lack a QWERTY keyboard.
... a really long time if the only new alternative is a phone without a headphone jack. Use the H out of it, and am NOT going to buy a new set of bluetooth headphones or some cockeyed adapter. That's just the way it is. That is all...
The vast majority of FM radio is ads 24/7. Even the music is ads for the albums the songs are on.
If your file is smaller than 1.25 MB, $33 is a lot of money to spend to sneakernet one copy of a file to one person. It was also bigger than many email providers' attachment limit prior to wide availability of Gmail.
I work with tech and I see a lot of phones. There are many issues, like phone calls drop when enabling wi-fi sharing, or the screen turning black when enabling wi-fi sharing, etcetera, but the biggest problem I see with all phones? Cracked screens. Screw the water-resistant, high-def blue tooth, AI enabled smart voicemail crap. Make a more durable screen. The more edge-to-edge screens I see, the more they shatter. What's the point of getting a slim phone if you put a giant Otterbox around it?
I'm kinda shocked by this logic. Clearly, phones are unequal. There's no reason to use the total number of phone models as anything interesting. For one thing, Android models churn much faster, because Android model IDs change when the OS gets upgraded on the same hardware or depending on the carrier. What matters is how many phones are available in a store at one time.
The second issue is that subdividing similar products doesn't make each equally likely, because you ignore bucketing. If there were 10 Chinese restaurants, and 90 pizza restaurants, your logic would say that the Chinese restaurants (on a whole) do 10% of the business. But that ignores that how people actually decide things. They decide on pizza or Chinese first, then choose a restaurant. So, even if pizza was three times as popular, you would expect the Chinese restaurants as a whole to do 25% of the business. Which would make each chinese restaurant three times as busy. And that's not suggesting quality, it's saying that, as people choose, important questions (OS) are answered before minutia such as screen size,
Lastly, you're again assuming bullshit. you have this holy 37X better. Clearly, according to crowdsourced research, the answer is that about 1/3 people prefers an iPhone. That measure has real world implications, not naval gazing. If you want to demonstrate that those people are wrong, you have to show it some other way. For what it's worth, Samsung phones enjoy a similar premium in choice.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Walk into many audio shops, retail shops, dept stores, cheap stores, where they have dozens of headphones, ALL ARE 3.5s
No one at all stocks USB native headphones, or rarely at massive high prices.
Adapters? well... still rare to find, or 10x EBAY prices at retail stores.
Apple+Google+Others = Your are dicks, moron managers, who never listen to music, who ignore their engineers, and I bet even their own kids prefer a old style socket. So you might be rich ass fuckers, but your dumbass fuckers.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
You're looking at it backwards. From the designer's point of view, the beauty of breaking the phone is that someone gets to sell you a new one. If everyone jumps on the bandwagon, even changing vendors won't help. And you'll note that even Samsung and Google are beginning to suck down this particular mug of koolaid. Either you go without a phone (which most people won't do) or there's a brand new cause of planned obsolescence, plus they get to sell you more dongles, batteries, chargers, etc.
Follow the money. Pretty much always works. Also keep in mind that companies are like people: the people they are like are sociopaths and psychopaths.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The latency is usually a much bigger problem with bluetooth audio for me than the quality. It's generally mitigated on phones, since there is latency compensation on the OS level (at least iOS does) for video playback. On a PC, via bluetooth, there may not be the automatic latency compensation, though you can often adjust audio latency manually in some video players.
If neither the OS nor the player compensate for the latency, and you're not using a really low latency audio codec (there's a version of aptx for low latency, IIRC), then you may have lip sync issues with video, and audio latency can also cause problems for certain games.
All that said, there is, at least, a backup. If I'm trying to do something on my phone, and that thing is latency sensitive, and iOS doesn't correct for the latency, then I can always fall back on the dongle. Which, when you think about it, isn't all that different to how I need to use a 3.5mm to quarter inch adapter to use headphones on my desktop PC's DAC.