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.
