Comment by makeitdouble
10 hours ago
The most frustrating part is when Apple dropped the jack we laughed at the "courage" bit, Apple's given reasons where already seen as bullshit, Samsung had their finger pointing moment.
And it just went on, Apple weathered the critics, the other makers also dropped it, and at some point there was just nowhere to go for anyone still wanted a 3.5 jack with a decent phone.
I agree the loss of the 3.5mm jack is a short-sighted and poor decision. There is at least one mitigation, which is the ability to recover the jack through a USB-C DAC. Apple sells them for USD10. I have several, in the car and in my backpack.
It's not a good solution though. In particular I find the USB-C port gets worn out pretty quickly. Its also easy to lose the dongle and of course it's more complicated to setup. (I'm not sure how to articulate the "it's more complicated" part. Adding the dongle elevates the action of "plug in headphones" from something you can do without attention to something that requires attention, and I don't like that.)
Get a set of wired headphones without a built-in cord. Then you can use any USB-C to 3.5 male cord like normal.
You can't use a passive cable for this - there may be a USB-to-audio standard, but it's not widely implemented anymore. You need a DAC.
Also, seemingly without exception, the dongle itself is fragile and ends up causing constant crackling after a while.
The jacks are a physical impediment for slim phones. An adapter costs $3 if you still want it. It’s not a bad trade.
I see the point for ultra slim phones. Except the only phones that are slim enough to have their thickest point thinner than that have only started to come up recently.
Imagine the same argument for USB-C: at some point phones will be too slim to allow for that port, should every maker start dropping it right now ? That would be nonsense.
On adapters, it's no panacea: you still want the USB port available. Split adapters exist, but most of them only allow for charging, and the charging rate is also usually miserable.
You could say people who appreciated that should just eat it and feel in their bones how much the world doesn't care about them, that would be fair. Now staying sour about it is also one's prerogative.
PS: The biggest part for me is every other devices I own still having a pretty good jack. Laptops still have it, game consoles, VR headsets, TVs, high fidelity portable players, cars etc. So keeping around a very good headphone pair is still an enjoyable thing, except for the damn phones. Even in XL sizes. They're the only one needing a dongle, and regardless of the price that sucks.
On slimness: wouldn't an alternative implementation be to "do the Magic Mouse" and put the USB C port on the back of the phone instead of the edge? Alternatively I could imagine MagSafe alignment / charging magnets plus an NFC like inductive communication (or contact pads) to allow for a range of "snap on" peripherals for phone backs that could be implemented on devices thinner than a USB C port.
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Maybe, but Apple doesn’t make them thinner anyway so the argument is invalid. iPhone 6S with headphone jack: 7.1mm thick. iPhone 17 is 7.95mm thick.
3$ adapter will have low quality DAC
The DAC in Apple's $10 adapter is higher quality than most "audiophile" DACs because Apple has a larger R&D budget and is better at manufacturing than the entire audiophile industry combined.
Same for Google's, though it's slightly less good iirc.
They aren't perfect - the maximum volume and impedance are pretty low so you do need an amp to electrically drive insensitive headphones.
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But the $9 Apple one is very high quality: https://www.audioreviews.org/apple-audio-adapter-review/
They’re just responding to the market. The vast majority of people don’t care about this. Personally, I’d rather have two minutes more battery life than a headphone jack.
It’s annoying to have non-mainstream preferences in an area where economies of scale mean every product needs to have mass market appeal. But you might as well complain about the tide coming in.
Do you have a source that supports your claim, that the market asked for 3.5 mm jacks to go away?
That's not what the parent commenter said. They said consumers don't care, not that they asked for the jacks to go away. You're misrepresenting.
But in terms of consumers not caring, yes:
https://www.androidauthority.com/ting-headphone-jack-survey-...
It's objectively not a popular feature or something the vast majority of consumers are looking for.
Most people prefer Bluetooth because you don't need to deal with annoying wires getting tangled, ripping your earbuds out, etc.
Again, it's not that the market asked for the jacks to go away, they just don't care. And when there's something that consumers don't care about, companies tend to remove it. The jack takes up volume. Not huge, but on phones every cubic millimeter counts. And it's one more thing that can break.
And if you really want a jack, there's a $9 adapter you can just keep attached to your headphones. So everyone wins.
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The source is the fact that very few phones have them.
There isn't some grand conspiracy to keep headphone jacks out of phones. Why would they do that? You think Samsung or Google wouldn't jump at the chance to sell more phones by putting in a headphone jack, if that would actually help them compete? No, the reason few phones have one is because few people care about it, at least enough to influence their purchasing decisions.
There are plenty of examples of market failures in the world where lack of competition or information prevents consumer preferences from being reflected in product offerings. But smartphone hardware is definitely not one of them.
Most ADCs in consumer products were crap anyway (with the exception of Apple, who for a long time used the widely beloved Wolfson DACs).
If you want actual quality... be ready to shell out a bit of money [1].
[1] https://www.amazon.de/Qudelix-Bluetooth-Adaptive-unsymmetris...