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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.
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.
... 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 don't buy phones that don't have one.
Tell that to someone who resolved not to buy phones that lack a QWERTY keyboard.