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.)
Can't you just leave a dongle on any wired headphones you have? Assuming you only use them with your phone and computer and don't have a CD player or something.
I guess that's my question, what other devices are people using? I'm just curious where people need to remove the dongle because maybe I have bad imagination but not much comes to mind.
I listen to music on earbuds on my phone on the go, a laptop at a cafe, and on my computer at my desk - all these have USB-C.
Even modern DAPs like Sony Walkman have USB-C as they are typically based on Android.
That leaves all the "legacy" devices that only a small minority use - home hi-fi stacks, vinyl record players, iPods, CD players, minidisc players?
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.
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.
The survey asks whether people care about the headphone jack, though – it asks whether it's in the top three features they care about.
I care plenty about the headphone jack but still reluctantly bought a phone without one (which I regret) because I have more than three requirements to balance. I expect that the users who did include the headphone jack in their top three features still care that e.g. the screen, battery and radio are all in working order as well, despite not being in their top three.
> Most people prefer Bluetooth because you don't need to deal with annoying wires getting tangled, ripping your earbuds out, etc.
Thanks for this summary. I feel sad to be in a minority who prefer wired headphones. For me it's because all their failures you listed are issues I can understand and mitigate. But when bluetooth goes wrong, what do I do? Usually:
1. turn off both devices and then turn them back on again
2. try to reconnect
3. if step 2 failed, give up and try again another day
I don't learn anything. I feel infantilised and helpless.
Yeah, I think that's why a lot of people stick to same-brand or trusted brands -- AirPods "just work" with iPhones, in ways that other Bluetooth earbuds don't always.
I understand the figured sense that you describe. It reverses the logical suite of cause and effect. Instead of describing the true cause (Apple chooses to drop the jack) and the consequence (customers "don't care", which I believe is wrong), the conveyed message blames those without a choice: "customers don't care, therefore we should drop the jack".
The survey that you link is built on the premise that "you can pick only three things at most" as a manipulative trick. And since the headphone jack doesn't make it to the top 3, you use it as claim that consumers do not care about the headphone jack. This is not reasoning or stating objective facts, this is just a cop-out.
My claim is that the vast majority of consumers still need at some point in their use of their phone a way to plug 3.5 jacks into their phones somehow, and just put up with the enshittified new way: either buy some bluetooth adapter dongle, or a USB-C low quality DAC, or just give up and find a different solution.
"few customers care" is not the democratic ideal you make it sound to be.
It's the same as glued batteries, unrepairable phones. Few customers making it an absolute criteria for their phone choice still doesn't make mean the majority sees it as a positive thing nor they agree. At the time on the android side, only Pixel and Samsung's lines were serious about the camera or international NFC support, moving to other phones just for the jack came with huge compromises that had nothing to do with the jack itself.
It’s a competitive market. If removable batteries mattered to a lot of people, some company would take advantage of that to make a lot of money.
Feature combinations aren’t immutable facts of nature. Manufacturers make a conscious choice about what to include. If a good camera and international NFC combined with a headphone jack would attract a lot of buyers, don’t you think Samsung or Google would make a phone like that to better compete?
It’s nothing to do with “democratic ideal.” It’s about understanding that companies want to make money and if a feature is desirable, they will leverage that in their quest to make money. Some may fail to understand what their customers want, but all of them? It’s not plausible.
The "???" is "hey, Apple are doing it! since we already copy so many ideas from them, let's shave a few cents on the amp and jack receptacle, and if anyone complains, just claim that it's the trendy thing to do now".
And why didn't any of the multitude of phone makers say "turns out that people actually want a headphone jack, let's spend a few extra cents and steal all of our competitors' customers"?
Almost like there were at least three other features more important.
The most important letters in English are E, T and A. I'm sure you won't notice if we remove H from all keyboards, right? After all, the survey says it's not in the top three. And given a choice between a keyboard without E and one without H, nobody buys the one without H, proving they really don't need the H.
Why wouldn’t some keyboard manufacturer realize that a lot of people actually do need all of the letters, sell a keyboard with all of them, and make bank?
This theory that people want headphone jacks and phone makers won’t provide them makes no sense. It requires phone makers to be so cost conscious that they’ll remove a desirable feature to save a few cents, yet simultaneously so clueless that they won’t take advantage of consumer preferences to beat their competition. This sort of thing happens with individual companies, but not with every single company in a competitive market with many competitors.
I don’t know why people can’t just accept that they have a minority preference. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m sure it’s far from your only one (I have plenty of my own, just not this one). There’s nothing wrong with general complaints that the market doesn’t cater to your minority preference. But arguing that it’s actually the majority, when it plainly isn’t, it just weird.
Because a large number of “everyone” is buying keyboards from your competitors. If you make a keyboard with all the letters, you’ll get more of those sales.
No, I wouldn’t but a keyboard with a tm key because I don’t care about having such a key. Pretty much nobody would. That’s why such keyboards aren’t made. You’re making my argument for me here.
Counterpoint: if, instead of differentiating yourself, you copy Apple, nobody will fire you for that decision, even if it sucks.
Bonus: now that neither you nor Apple are including the jack, consumers resign themselves to a worse user experience and just buy your product (or theirs).
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.
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.
If we really engineer around the same connector with extra thinness the best bet could be on partly open ports: if the phone covered 75% of the barrel circumference by left out the other 25% exposed I assume it would still work.
I see it through the same lens as the cassette players like the Toshiba KT-AS10 that left part of the cassette outside for the absolute minimal footprint:
Phones are already way slimmer than they should be. Now we have top-heavy "slim" phones with huge bulges for cameras*, 50% less battery life, reduced performance because of thermal issues, glued together in favor of screws and rubber seals, wasting weight and space on additional strengthening and internal routing.
Just because people think it looks neater than the more practical alternative.
The S2 had an amazing form factor - also with a small bulge, but at the bottom. It's a thousand times nicer to hold and carry than pretty much anything that came after. The S5 was fine too (waterproof AND you could pop open the back to swap the battery, if you can believe it!)
It's silly how much more ergonomic phones feel that don't have to compensate for an extra half millimeter.
* Many phones had this, but it's getting really bad now. Older phones typically also had the lens recessed to protect it, with a slim border around it. No more space for that now.
I'm not even sure people think that. Apple's marketing department thinks that, and other company marketing departments seem to be implementing some kind of master-slave architecture, where they are slave instances to Apple's master server. Does anybody really check specs and deliberately choose the thinner phone? Or do people just buy new iPhone regardless of whatever decisions they make just because having the last iPhone is cooler? Of course, I don't know, but I somehow really doubt it's the former.
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.
nah, they are on par with other $10 chinese DAC, which is quite achievement for Apple tbh. I guess Apple decided to not apply "Apple tax" to those dongle.
DACs are very cheap. The BOM gap between "This DAC barely works" and "It won't sound any better if we spend more" for a headphone DAC is probably a dollar or so. This isn't some 1980s analogue technology where we need to spring for the best materials to get good results, and the components needed are all readily available from many suppliers today.
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.