I went shopping for a new mobile phone this year. Excluded anything that did not include 3.5mm headphone jack.
I don't own wireless headphones, and while I grant it does solve the various problem of wires it clearly introduces the problem of batteries and charging.
(Can you even replace batteries in wireless headphones that aren't holding charge anymore? Never mind, don't answer that, I can guess).
Anecdotally I feel like wired headphones run the battery down less than bluetooth broadcast.
I bought a Motorola something or other. Works fine.
I want to love these but at the price point you can basically buy 3-4 sets of (likely) technically comparable wireless earbuds that will (likely) last a year or two. How long can I expect fairbuds to last? I can't imagine it would be close to a decade even with replacing batteries
I guess that's also kinda my poorly made point -- I imagine that these earbuds are like any other electronic device in the fact that they'll break in a handful of years and end up being irreparable in some way that results in just replacing them. I'm not sure what the answer is to any of this of course
I got a set of Fairbuds XL at work because it made sense to buy something that could last a long time and be repaired and I really wanted to support Fairphone's basic premise — repairable gadgets with long support. Here's my experience with them that nobody asked for.
First of all, the sound is fine. Nothing exceptional but certainly not bad. I'd say they compare pretty well to my Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro (80 Ohm) or my old Sennheiser Urbanite XL. They also sit pretty well on my head for extended periods of time, which is nice, but will obviously vary from person to person. They don't have any fancy Teams-integration, which is a plus for me but a deal-breaker to others. They hold battery very well. I haven't tested it in depth but I've used them for maybe 3 full workdays without charging them, so maybe around 24 hours of active use and they still had some juice left.
But the firmware... What a disappointment. The headphones have 3 settings, ANC, ambient and "normal". I personally prefer "normal" but the headphones don't remember the setting across restarts, so every time I turn them on I have to sit through the boot sound (because system sounds can't be interrupted), wait for the audio feedback to finish saying "connected", and if a second device is connected, "second device connected", then click a physical button, wait for it to finish saying "ambient sounds", and finally click a third time to hear it say: "noise cancelling off", and _then_ I can start using them. It's OK the first 5-10 times but then it just gets really, really annoying.
I went to their forums about a year ago to suggest it as a feature but learned that Fairphone actually don't interact with the forums, it's just user-to-user interaction, so suggestions don't really make it further from there. That's fair, so I contacted their support about it instead. They suggested that I contact the store that my workplace bought the headphones from. (I didn't think that was really going to solve the issue, so I chose to just ignore that.)
They've released 2 firmware updates since then, but no storing mode across reboots. They did however manage to glitch out the boot sound in one firmware update, so it played 2/3 of the audio only to interrupt itself and play the second half of the sound again. The last firmware update fixed that at least.
And before someone suggests that there might be no place to store aforementioned setting, they can store bluetooth pairings and EQ presets on the headphones. The noise cancellation preference could be stored in less than a byte. Unfortunately the firmware isn't OSS so I can't even fix it myself.
Wait, the firmware isn't OSS? Did they ever mention why? I completely understand that they can't open source stuff like a phone's modem firmware, but I don't get it here. Was it written in house or did they use some off the shelf solution (would explain why they can't open source it).
I mean, I know that fairphone doesn't market themselves as OSS centric (like purism does for example), but you'd think that it would fit their ewaste reduction goal in this case.
I agree. Making it OSS would definitely fit the spirit of their business, IMO, but the best we can do for now is to suggest that they open source it and hope.
I used to be on the wired only train until I got bone conducting headphones (shokz). Those became 90% of my usage. I don’t really have problems with battery life or charging now that I’ve switched.
Since they lack noise isolation over ear or tight fitting buds this can be a problem. I have the OpenSwim Pro and they are fine outside except for really high noise. But while on a treadmill in the Gym they could not overwhelm the background noise.
They do compete with external sound. If there’s noise you want to drown out you can do it by turning up the volume. You can also plug your ears or wear ear plugs which I will do on occasion, like when grinding coffee while listening to a podcast.
Likewise if you want to be able to hear the outside world you have to turn down the headphones. On the quieter side you can hear what people are saying to you but you probably want to pause to talk. Medium volume i can hear people talking to me but cant make out what they’re saying. Louder volume they gotta be close or shouting.
They’re mostly used in situations where you want to hear your surroundings. On a plane I use airpods with anc. Around the house or on a run I use shokz. I can wear them all day unlike airpods which I hate the sensation of having the world dulled and something in my ear.
Probably the single best piece of tech I’ve found since getting a smartphone. I wear the all the time, if they break I’m buying a new pair same day. They kinda suck for music but i would never use anything else for spoken word unless I was on a plane or something.
I had a pair of those and loved them until I charged them over night once. I forgot that you're not supposed to do that (or never read the notice, idk) and they were dead in the morning. Severely disappointed now. It's just such a basic feature that you can forget about devices on the charger.
I have been using my current Beyerdynamics for about 8-9 years now, still going strong. I changed out the velour pads and they feel like new. I've lugged them around across the world and commuted with them day in day out.
They have no place in this world of planned obsolescence but I'm still more than happy with them.
Didn't realise motorola's made 3.5mm phones. I have been bound to Asus and Xperias who made smaller phones with water resistance and a 3.5mm jack. Now I think I'm back to Xperia again because Asus have vacated the small phone segment
Charging is barely an issue these days.
I use nothing ear 2a earphones. They last 7/8 hours on a charge but I've never noticed this as they charge when I put them in the case (the case has 40 hours charge I believe). I think, since April, I've plugged them in twice.
I switch between these and Sennheiser headphones, which I've probably charged 3 times in the same period.
Some of the other brands have wireless charging for the case too, so if you've set up the charger somewhere convenient that the case is used, honestly I don't think you'd notice it has a battery.
I'm sure you'd like my (over-ear) Sennheisers. A battery lasts around 20h (2-3x that on newer models), I can just insert a 3.5mm cable and they work, and I have successfully replaced the battery and the earpads. Been using the same pair since around 2017.
The only reason I'm seriously considering it's time for an upgrade is that they charge via a micro-B cable, which was quite frankly unacceptable for a "premium" brand even back in 2017. The question I keep asking myself for the past two or so years is: is that enough of a nuisance to spend another €400?
I finally had to update from a phone with a jack to a phone without and it sucks as much as I expected...
The three first dongles I bought produced static noise in the background, the only that works is the apple usb-c to jack but it's super flimsy and doesn't allow full volume on android.
For the same reason as you I will never buy wireless headphones, it's the epitome of disposable tech, at best you'd get 3-5 years of use, then you'd have to trash them because there is no easy way to replace the batteries
I changed the batteries in my Sony WF-1000XM3 earbuds without too much trouble. Unfortunately I don't think you can easily replace the battery in the case, so I still had to charge the case pretty often.
It's disappointing seeing the slow decline in the number of devices that include a 3.5mm headphone jack. Personally I don't want any hassle from my headphones, I just want to plug them in and use them.
Does it apply to usb-c headphones ? I am quite happy with the AKG usb-c wired headphone I got w/ my samsung phone (I even bought a second set as a replacement for when I misplace them).
Yep, and then they are much easier to lose, step on, have drop out of your ear while you are running and disappear.
I have literally found a half dozen sets of airpods out in the world, whereas before wireless earbuds became popular I never found a single pair of abandoned headphones.
The bigger headphones dont have this problem as much but they are significantly heavier because they have to include all the electronics and batteries in them.
Yep, and then they are much easier to lose, step on, have drop out of your ear while you are running and disappear
Somewhere on a rails-to-trails at the foot of the Cascade Mountains is a single Beats Powerbeat that was flung to the ground in the middle of a 50 mile race after I pulled a piece of clothing over my head. I was leading the race, so I spent just the barest amount of time looking, but never found it. Damned things ain’t cheap, either.
I should have just thrown the other one to the ground, so at least someone might have a matched set. At the same time, if I had to dick around with wired headphones, I wouldn’t have used them at all.
I've come around on USB-C headphones, which seem to be reeeeasonably decent and which, as an added bonus, bypass the absurdly terrible sound chip on my laptop to provide decent quality audio for two of my devices. But until phones ship with two of the ports, they fail to solve the "use while charging" issue, and there's still the secondary issue of 3.5mm devices being absolutely everywhere on this green earth, and not in the remotest way compatible with this fancy new USB-C thing. There's not a reverse dongle, and there really can't be, as the 3.5mm jack doesn't provide power.
As much as I agree generally that headphone sockets are great, there's a couple of missed disadvantages with including them in your phone: waterproofing and thickness.
> The first manufacturer to make a point of dropping the headphone jack (I believe) was not Apple – as is commonly believed – but Oppo, and back in 2014. Their reason for doing so was at least a credible technical one: they said it made their phones about half a millimetre thinner. Maybe that was a selling point, maybe it wasn’t. But Apple couldn’t fall back even on this claim, because people found ways to fit a 3.5mm jack socket into the iPhones that lacked one, and even posted videos on Youtube showing how they did it. It wasn’t easy, but it was clearly possible. If Apple genuinely thought that omitting the jack would leave more room for other features, they didn’t actually provide any.
> Some manufacturers claimed that the presence of the headphone jack made it difficult to keep their phones waterproof; but there’s a whole range of good-quality phones from around 2019-2020 that are waterproof to a reasonable degree, without sacrificing the jack.
Many phones had great waterproof ratings with a headphone socket. Nearly all phones today are thick enough for sockets, a 3.5mm would fit fine on my Pixel 7 pro. The thinness wars ended when too many people sat on their phones and bent them.
Did you even read the article? The author points out both of those points are essentially just excuses. Phones haven’t been made thinner, and you can still fit 3.5mm jacks in most phones, and there are plenty of waterproof phones with a 3.5mm jack.
Dude, no one ever claimed that you can't have a waterproof phone with a jack, the point, which is fairly obvious, is that it's much harder to make a highly waterproof phone when you have a big ass hole in it for a 3.5mm jack.
I.e. it's cost benefit analysis. It's annoying, hard, and expensive if you want to make a phone which is say waterproof to 10m or 15m while having a 3.5mm jack hole in it, which most people don't care about anyway. So easy solution, stop having the jack.
You can make them waterproof and the last thing I want right now is a thinner and even more fragile phone.
I want the old Nexus 5 just with newer chips and camera. Indestructible poly-carbonate shell w/non-slip rubberized coating, good sized screen, headphone jack, really good battery life, no nonsense OS.
Nothing added to newer phones (Pixel or iPhone) have improved my experience, all have made them worse in various ways. Newer phones are less durable and more expensive because they are made from fragile "luxury" materials like glass. They are thinner and have crappy battery life as a result (though this is getting better as batteries have caught up to design ambition). The thinness is rendered moot by needing a case. I didn't need a case on my Nexus 5, it was already indestructible. New phone + case is definitely thicker as a result.
Actual advantages of USB-C or BT audio mostly come down to a higher quality DAC in those devices vs crap they put on a lot of phones/laptops/etc.
Thing is that doesn't need to be the case, you can totally have a properly good DAC on-board. Especially if you aren't fighting for thinness and can put it on an isolated daughter board.
IMO the enemies of a good phone design are thinness and aluminium + glass construction.
It turns what should be a utilitarian device into a fashion accessory and because that is what the high-end looks like there is nothing but a sea of copycats doing the same thing but worse.
I used to own LG V-series of mobile phones. They had a better-than-usual DAC and a headphone socket. Then LG stopped making that series. Now I have a pixel.
Now I have a USB external DAC (TempoTec Sonata HD pro) that used to work with Spotify, but now the only way I can use it is with a specific USB DAC application that hooks into Tidal. I'm assuming Android updated its audio stack in such a way as to break my external DAC. It's the same with my little desktop DAC, a Schiit Modi.
I just want to be able to listen to music on my preferred headphones, using a good quality DAC!
Obviously there is the cynical explanation of forcing consumers to buy pricey wireless headphone, but what are the stated arguments that manufacturers give for not including the jack? Is it literally the space requirements? (But ofc my wireless headphones and their charging case take up much more room.)
Separately on this:
> The way to discourage companies behaving this way is for us all to take our business elsewhere. It’s still possible to get decent cellphones from Motorola, Asus, and Sony that retain the 3.5mm jack.
Choosing the most important tool in your life based on this one hostile feature seems like a high price to pay. (Should I vow to never do business with Google in any form?) Maybe just better to commit to buying wireless headphones from an opposing company? That removes the manufacturers incentive.
I went to (Edited) A Mainstream Chinese Brand now that Samsung dropped the ball. I dont get audio jack, either, but I have IR blaster and double physical sim
I think you've missed the point a little or are perhaps are being slightly obtuse. Of course it's POSSIBLE to make a phone with waterproofing and a 3.5mm headphone jack, and of course it POSSIBLE to make a modern thin phone with a 3.5.mm headphone jack taking up extra space...
The point is, it's simply harder and more expensive to make a highly waterproof and slim phone, while having to have another large hole in the phone which requires a long connector to fit inside it. And when you consider that extra expense and R&D required to design the phone shell and internal architecture, versus the actual demand for wired headphones (basically zero these days), it's obvious why major phone makers don't bother to include it.
It's simply a matter of cost benefit analysis. Lots of cost, very little benefit. No mystery.
"These days" that wasn't the case four years ago when they arbitrarily took it away. How would you know what the level of demand is? I would selectively purchase a phone with a headphone jack over one without, but that demand is meaningless without an option. Apple led the pack with the highest R&D budget of them all, with a premium smartphone. They, uniquely, took the headphone jack away while launching airpods.
The waterproof 3.5mm jack connector isn't an R&D cost, it's just a standard component you can buy from Digikey; comes with an o-ring. A whole generation of waterproof phones had them, like the Sony Xperia.
Yeah, that might not be the best example. Normally you’d want a double seal or really tuned compression to reliably hit IP68. And the o-ring adds a manufacturing step. And you have to design the case to properly compress the oring. And case assembly is harder because screwing up that interface will increase chargeback. And you’ll need to modify the audio test fixtures to add a jack. And the audio test has to include a headphone test. Any failures increases rework, so you gotta budget for that too. Probably need to add a cheap earbud to the box, so you gotta add a packaging step and a bigger box. And once you sell the phone, any failure within the contracted return window will increase chargeback.
Seems like a lot of faf. I tell you what, why don’t we wait for a bigger OEM to remove the darned things, and if it doesn’t hurt there bottom line we’ll just quietly scrap the idea?
You're implying it's because of cost-savings, but OEMs still typically offer 3.5 mm jacks on their lower-end models (even waterproof ones, like the Xperia AceIII). It's the expensive flagships they've removed them from. I think a better explanation is that high-end models are fashion items while lower-end models are functional items, and it's fashionable to copy Apple.
But phones aren't really that thin, especially with the camera lenses. Why didn't they just put the 3.5 mm jack on the other side from the cameras, protruding a little bit from the rear housing, exactly enough for the phone to rest stably on a flat surface without rocking?
The iPhone 14 has a glass case while the iPod Touch 4th gen had a metal case. That alone accounts for a significant difference in thickness of the internals of the device.
I've read speculation that because the jack can pick up electrical fields, you have to design the phone around it. Otherwise the user will hear buzzing in their headphones.
...except when you can't make good contact and you wind up with one stereo channel muted and you have to fidget manically to fix it....which seems to occur with every damn headphone jack on every device without exception.
Amen; I'm surprised more people aren't bringing this up. I like the idea of having a wired headphone connection to my phone and other audio devices but I don't like the 3.5mm TRS headphone plugs/jacks. Make it a magsafe-style connector or something that's immune from wearing out or bad connections and I'd be delighted.
> Some manufacturers claimed that the presence of the headphone jack made it difficult to keep their phones waterproof; but there’s a whole range of good-quality phones from around 2019-2020 that are waterproof to a reasonable degree, without sacrificing the jack.
i don't get why the author makes it out to be some big conspiracy, many people including myself are very happy with wireless headphones and would never go back to the hassle of untangling wires
also there are wireless headphones which have 24 hour battery life
I recently tried out wired headphones (over a USBC adapter) after years of using true wireless ones and was blown away by the sound quality difference. I forgot how amazing things can sound, when I chose convenience. Apart from limitations of Bluetooth and the confusing landscape of codecs, there are physical limitations - wireless sets have to make room for antennas and batteries and chips that could otherwise be used for pure sound quality instead.
Belkin, along with Anker, make pretty good things and I trust them... I don't know how to criticise a "charge whilst playing music" thing as it does both of the things it claims to do and I've not tried silly things like chaining this with other dongles.
Bluetooth headphones seem to add sufficient lag that they prevent me from playing an instrument (like a synth) over them. I'm not sure bluetooth can solve this problem, but I'd be pleased to be surprised.
Bluetooth builds in some buffering to deal with contention on the airwaves and packet loss while keeping the audio stream going. That buffer is the lag you are hearing. It is quite substantial, and there is a natural tradeoff here - you can use more power to (theoretically) reduce buffer size by improving the SNR of the signal, but if you run out of buffer, you are going to drop samples.
Even USB audio has some buffering to handle bus contention, but it is quite small in comparison.
I don't know what changes behind the scenes, but it does improve latency. The only downside I noticed is the reduced range, eg, it stops working on a different room where normal mode still works.
Voting with your wallet probably isn't going to work, because you probably represent a drop in the bucket of sales.
If you want this changed, start a campaign and write to your representative in Congress. If the EU could make Apple put USB-C on the iPhone, maybe you can get the 3.5mm jack back on your phone. But you won't get there by kidding yourself thinking your individual sale matters.
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I'm seeing any number of dongles that include a charge port on Amazon, like this one: https://a.co/d/hwiLAqp
Wireless charging for your phone is also an option.
Voting with your wallet by failing to purchase a phone from a huge corp like Samsung, is not something that will change Samsung's behavior, I agree.
Voting with your wallet by buying a phone with a headphone jack, especially from a smaller maker like Unihertz, is impactful and helps ensure those alternatives stay around.
But I checked Unihertz's site and it seems like their newest upcoming release, the Jelly Max, will be lacking a headphone jack too: https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-max
To their credit, it appears to come with an adapter.
My guess is that Unihertz, among others, is probably either reselling an existing design or contracting minor changes to an existing design. So unless you're voting with your wallet hard enough to shift the tides of the entire white-label phone manufacturing industry, I think I'm still doubting the impact here.
I don't think that Unihertz is reselling white-label phones; I've seen no other phone that remotely resembles theirs, and considering their form factor I don't think the innards are reusable without a lot of design rework.
The lack of the headphone jack on the Jelly Max is disappointing, though.
> Voting with your wallet probably isn't going to work, because you probably represent a drop in the bucket of sales.
I mean... it worked. People voted with their valets and the side who likes tangled cables to listen to music from their phones lost the vote. That is literally voting with your valet in action.
I understand that you probably mean "voting with your wallet won't work" in the sense that it won't change the situation. But it is also a bit like saying that democracy doesn't work because my party didn't win, because there were not enough people supporting it. A bit against the principle of the thing.
It's nowhere near as widely used, but there is such a thing as a 2.5mm jack, and you can buy a converter from 2.5mm male to 3.5mm female. Has any telephone handset ever had a 2.5mm headphone jack?
(Presumably no telephone handset has ever had a ¼-inch jack, even in olden times?)
My Bose QC 35 headphones have a 2.5mm socket but on the headphones end for when you'd want to use them wired. It came with a cable with a 3.5mm male plug for the source device and the 2.5mm male plug on the side that goes to the headphones.
Never seen a wired headset with 2.5mm male plug that goes to the source device however.
Not headsets, but Bose ANC headphones have used a 2.5mm jacks for years (and still do). They give you a 2.5 to 3.5mm cable, though. I imagine this is likely just to drive cable sales, though, as there isn’t any real reason you need the 2.5mm jack on their relatively big headphones.
I use to own expensive (~250+€) bluetooth earbuds, with ANC and all that jazz. I broke them by trying to clean them one time (my ears are very "waxy" and every earbuds always ends up coating in nastiness from my ears very quickly, so i need to clean them regularly).
So I went back to the cheap wired (but still USB-c) earbuds I got.
I do resonate a lot with this article. Wired earbuds just works. With wireless earbuds I cannot count how many time I had issue with bluetooth. The microphone on every wireless earbuds is awful because you cannot put it right to your mouth like you can with wired ones. You have a limited battery time. Wireless earbuds are bulkier so they get out of your ears easier, ...
The only thing I miss is the ANC, which was surprisingly working well on trains and planes.
And yeah, I which I still had a jack on my phone. My best wired earbuds use jack, so I have to carry this annoying dongle, usb-c is also flimsier, and I am way more worried about breaking it, since I also need it to charge my phone and transfer files.
I'd probably like bluetooth headphones more if they actually worked more than 50% of the time. Probably because the rooms where I use them are filled with RF noise from so many other devices, they just don't work reliably enough to be usable. They work for a while and then drop out, or simply can't connect at all. Luckily Sony still sell wired headphones.
While it is hard to do damage to a 6.3mm TRS socket and plug, I wouldn't say the same of the 3.5mm one. As a kid / teenager I damaged a number of sockets and bent a number of 3.5mm male TRS plugs.
So I wouldn't call it a "just works" technology as it is far from perfect.
This happened to one of my phones after a few years, turned out it was a bunch of lint compressed into the port preventing the cable from going in all the way. I got it all out with a staple (only thing I could find that was small enough to fit), then the cable started snapping into the port like new.
Just use wireless charging. It works fine. I've 3D printed a little cover for my USB C port as I just don't need it for anything. Will keep that little port fresh for years...
I'd choose a smartphone that offers wireless charging because that is the state of art and it just works. It makes my life easier. I can just rest it on a little charging pad and move on. No worries about broken cables, broken USB ports and whatnot. Yeah, maybe there's inefficiency while loading, but we're talking about so little energy that gets lost, I don't really care.
Just like Bluetooth just works and makes my life easier. My little Anker earbuds charge in their case, they can live in my gym bag without getting lost, sound quality is fine, no connection issues at all, even across the gym (like 20 meters) with dozens of other BT earbud users around. Oh, and the case also has three LEDs to show me how full the battery in the case is. Charge it an hour with a USB-C cable and I'm good to go for weeks.
True, but I find the 6.3mm to be overkill (except for commercial use). I'm hoping for the 4.4mm plugs that are used on hifi headphones to replace 6.3mm.
I've worn out more USB-C earphones in the 2 years since I've been forced to use them, than I have 3.5mm earphones in the 30+ years since I first got a Sony Walkman. The connectors and wires are so stupidly fragile. They're bulky. They're rectangular and can't rotate in the way the cable is pulled (unlike a 3.5mm jack). They always stick straight out (at least I haven't seen any 90° angled versions).
Converters only make the problem worse, because now you have a fragile USB-C dongle sticking out and a 3.5mm jack so it's extra bulky and prone to damage.
The wireless ones bug me to no end. Two more batteries to manage, two more single points of failure. Maybe I should dust off that old walkman.
I too like the simplicity and standardisation of the 3.5mm headphone jack, and think it's a shame that it's fallen out of fashion in smartphones. But I think this is something that a small number of people get really disproportionately angry about. It's most obvious every time Fairphone crops up in discussion here, and all you see on HN are people furiously shitting on it over its lack of headphone jack.
> If you’re a fan of the 3.5mm jack, it’s time to vote with your wallet.
Not sure why the author thinks this hasn't been happening already, and the 3.5mm jack is simply losing the popular vote. I really just don't think that many people care about it, in the scheme of things. If removing it helps make the phone even marginally thinner, cheaper or more waterproof, I suspect most consumers will happily make that trade-off. Bluetooth headphones can also be more convenient in that you don't have to remain wired to your phone or deal with tangled cords, etc. Like the author, I also have a Samsung Galaxy S10 that still has the headphone jack but a few months ago I finally caved and bought a pair of bluetooth earphones.
This is definitely a solution, but for whatever reason using these destroys my charging port over time - and I’ve experienced this over multiple devices now. :(
A USB-C headphone adapter from apple is $9. I love my wired headphones. My iPhone 15 has an extremely capable headphone jack. This is such a solved problem.
My car is too old for bluetooth audio, so I have to connect either the dongle or the charger. The dongles i can buy from gas stations always break after about two months, while the gas station aux cable they connect to has lasted years. I also always run out of power on long drives.
Dongles exist which allow you to charge and play audio at the same time.
And… stop buying garbage products from gas stations? You are buying the most cheaply-built item possible from a manufacturer and merchant who have zero concern with repeat business. Pay a few bucks more once for something made by a manufacturer with a reputation and stop throwing more money down the drain.
> Not sure why the author thinks this hasn't been happening already, and the 3.5mm jack is simply losing the popular vote.
When you are buying smartphone, you can not selectively select the features. If you used iPhone and bought apps, you will buy iPhone even if it is missing jack or whatever.
I know that I disliked quite a lot about how phones were/are changing ... and when my phone life ends, I have to buy another one. I have no real choice when it comes to this.
Same, one generation 3.5mm was a given, next time I needed a phone I have no choice. Who asked me? I would have, if given the choice, bought a phone with wired headphones, an SD card slot, and an IR blaster like my previous phone had but none of those were options. Now the phone I have is bigger than I wanted, has worse battery life, and kills my run tracking apps once the screen has been off for 2 minutes with no option to disable that behavior (obviously spackling over the pitifully small battery by annoyingly killing anything using power)
On the plus side it has a 120 hz display that doesn't help me either.
I used to care, but eventually got good Bluetooth earbuds and haven't looked back. Credibly waterproof phones are a big selling point although there's still fine print on warranty coverage.
I think it's still the case that Bluetooth headphones cost more for the same quality, though.
The war has already been lost. Headphone jacks are basically only in low end phones now. They used to be in mid range devices too, but even there they are gone. You have to really compromise to get it which is a shame.
What I do wish is if somebody at least made is a USB C phone dock similar to what Apple made for 30 pin and lightning iPhones with audio out jacks. There are dongles that let you charge and do audio out but not in nice dock form.
It is truly bizarre that flagship phones are the ones that are dropping the most features.
And yet, we are approaching the day very soon where there's no point in getting the next year's flagship phone. It's not faster. It's not better. It doesn't have a better battery. The camera's not going to get any better. It's going to be the same form factor.
At some point phones will stop charging ridiculous amounts of money for 128 GB of RAM, when a terabyte of storage is approaching $50 in retail cost.
More ports SD card. I can see all of it coming back on the table. Cuz you're going to want features if you get a nice phone.
I think the flagship manufacturers' approach has always been to find the two or three things consumers will pay most for and aggressively optimise for them. So phones got thinner, cameras and screens got progressively better, for a few generations at least. Other features that got in the way and didn't add a huge amount to the phone's mass market appeal got dropped.
It will certainly be interesting to see how the manufacturers continue to find ways to differentiate themselves. Right now, unsurprisingly, all the hype seems to be focused around AI. So possibly future phones will be ruthlessly optimised for running LLM models. But if, instead, the phone manufacturers just decide to use cloud-hosted AI (or if the hype around AI dies down), then they'll need something else. The foldable form factor is the only other one that occurs to me right now.
Isn’t adding a headphone jack introducing another pathway for liquid to enter a device, or would well-constructed hardware prevent that from happening?
> Some manufacturers claimed that the presence of the headphone jack made it difficult to keep their phones waterproof; but there’s a whole range of good-quality phones from around 2019-2020 that are waterproof to a reasonable degree, without sacrificing the jack.
I own at least ten pairs of headphones, as well as some small amps and a DAC, but I end up going back to the $19 Aukey Bluetooth earbuds from Amazon. They sound good enough, battery still lasts 5 hours and they must be six years old, and they're cheap enough where I don't care if they are damaged or lost, but I haven't managed to lose them.
Sure, on an airplane I'll drag along some noise cancelling ones, and I keep a wired set of Sennheisers in my bag for a backup, but I never use them otherwise.
The audio chips in phones were woeful. Not every headphones could be driven by them. There was a whole cottage industry of DAC that you had to plug between your phone and your headset.
As a very deep hole, the jack was also a dust/lint catcher, almost impossible to clean. And because of its length, it had a lot of leverage on the board, requiring fairly heavy-duty soldering to avoid damaging the board.
And the first reason the jack went out is not thinness but water resistance.
You aren't speaking to infants, we were all alive when the only real choice was wired headphones, and plenty of people still use wired headphones now.
I think it was wonderful when headphones always worked, usually sounded fine (sometimes magnificent), and were available for $10.
> There was a whole cottage industry of DAC that you had to plug between your phone and your headset.
If there was, it was minuscule. I've never heard of people doing that in the wild.
> As a very deep hole, the jack was also a dust/lint catcher, almost impossible to clean.
Back then, the products were expected to be used long enough for this to become a problem. After a decade, I bet some of those holes were pretty dirty, although who would know. Modern portable tech does not have the disadvantage of durability.
> because of its length, it had a lot of leverage on the board, requiring fairly heavy-duty soldering to avoid damaging the board.
Z stack strength and rigidity is a huge driver because it reduces charge back. Margins are super tight for a lot of OEMs and the PMs eliminate any non-profit features.
Off the top of my head, there are savings in:
Pick and place
Stack Assembly
Testing
Improved phones/hour and therefore shorter/cheaper factory runs
Packaging, especially if you eliminate the shitty wired earpieces in the box
Less weight/volume and cheaper shipping
Reduced warranty / chargeback because things that don’t exist can’t fail
All of these savings are small. But remember that the goal is to make/sell 500K+ units. And, this is an industry where the bean counters will kill their mothers to shave a penny off of the BOM.
So, yeah, for the OEM eliminating headphone jacks is a complete no brainer.
Everything you said is true. But the cheapest phones still have the 3.5mm jack. People on a budget use wired earphones because they are harder to lose, price and even fashion (color n stuff)
Flagship phones on the other hand are sold to another population who seems happy to spend more money for a small inconvenience.
It’s always been a problem for any higher impedance headphones. Being able to drive 300 or 600 ohm headphones is quite difficult, and many headphone drivers are not capable of doing it at sufficient volume. Not technically hard, mind you, just costs extra money that most don’t want to spend.
Yeah but if you're buying those headphones you know you need an amp.
I do wonder how hard/expensive it would be to offer this as a configuration option though. Like if your favorite set is 300 ohms you could just configure your phone with an amp powerful enough to drive them. Or, maybe whatever they do in the MBPs to detect high impedance headphones would also work. I'm obviously out of my depth here.
It’s not complicated, it’s just a more powerful amplifier which costs more money, area, etc. it’s not in most phones because very few people have 300 ohm headphones. That’s the only reason.
We long ago got to the point where audio circuits in phones were perfectly fine for typical headphones. Especially considering the circuitry was mostly built into the SoCs. Good audio circuitry that is completely transparent is easy to design and been known for decades.
I had multiple phones with IPx7/8 water resistance and a headphone jack (e.g. LG G6 and Samsung S10) that is a bullshit excuse.
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[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadI don't own wireless headphones, and while I grant it does solve the various problem of wires it clearly introduces the problem of batteries and charging.
(Can you even replace batteries in wireless headphones that aren't holding charge anymore? Never mind, don't answer that, I can guess).
Anecdotally I feel like wired headphones run the battery down less than bluetooth broadcast.
I bought a Motorola something or other. Works fine.
[0] https://shop.fairphone.com/fairbuds
[1] https://shop.fairphone.com/fairbuds-xl
First of all, the sound is fine. Nothing exceptional but certainly not bad. I'd say they compare pretty well to my Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro (80 Ohm) or my old Sennheiser Urbanite XL. They also sit pretty well on my head for extended periods of time, which is nice, but will obviously vary from person to person. They don't have any fancy Teams-integration, which is a plus for me but a deal-breaker to others. They hold battery very well. I haven't tested it in depth but I've used them for maybe 3 full workdays without charging them, so maybe around 24 hours of active use and they still had some juice left.
But the firmware... What a disappointment. The headphones have 3 settings, ANC, ambient and "normal". I personally prefer "normal" but the headphones don't remember the setting across restarts, so every time I turn them on I have to sit through the boot sound (because system sounds can't be interrupted), wait for the audio feedback to finish saying "connected", and if a second device is connected, "second device connected", then click a physical button, wait for it to finish saying "ambient sounds", and finally click a third time to hear it say: "noise cancelling off", and _then_ I can start using them. It's OK the first 5-10 times but then it just gets really, really annoying.
I went to their forums about a year ago to suggest it as a feature but learned that Fairphone actually don't interact with the forums, it's just user-to-user interaction, so suggestions don't really make it further from there. That's fair, so I contacted their support about it instead. They suggested that I contact the store that my workplace bought the headphones from. (I didn't think that was really going to solve the issue, so I chose to just ignore that.) They've released 2 firmware updates since then, but no storing mode across reboots. They did however manage to glitch out the boot sound in one firmware update, so it played 2/3 of the audio only to interrupt itself and play the second half of the sound again. The last firmware update fixed that at least.
And before someone suggests that there might be no place to store aforementioned setting, they can store bluetooth pairings and EQ presets on the headphones. The noise cancellation preference could be stored in less than a byte. Unfortunately the firmware isn't OSS so I can't even fix it myself.
/rant
I mean, I know that fairphone doesn't market themselves as OSS centric (like purism does for example), but you'd think that it would fit their ewaste reduction goal in this case.
How is the external sounds impact your hearing? i.e. can you process the shokz audio when there is too much external/extraneous audio?
Likewise if you want to be able to hear the outside world you have to turn down the headphones. On the quieter side you can hear what people are saying to you but you probably want to pause to talk. Medium volume i can hear people talking to me but cant make out what they’re saying. Louder volume they gotta be close or shouting.
They’re mostly used in situations where you want to hear your surroundings. On a plane I use airpods with anc. Around the house or on a run I use shokz. I can wear them all day unlike airpods which I hate the sensation of having the world dulled and something in my ear.
Probably the single best piece of tech I’ve found since getting a smartphone. I wear the all the time, if they break I’m buying a new pair same day. They kinda suck for music but i would never use anything else for spoken word unless I was on a plane or something.
They have no place in this world of planned obsolescence but I'm still more than happy with them.
Didn't realise motorola's made 3.5mm phones. I have been bound to Asus and Xperias who made smaller phones with water resistance and a 3.5mm jack. Now I think I'm back to Xperia again because Asus have vacated the small phone segment
I switch between these and Sennheiser headphones, which I've probably charged 3 times in the same period.
Some of the other brands have wireless charging for the case too, so if you've set up the charger somewhere convenient that the case is used, honestly I don't think you'd notice it has a battery.
When I had to upgrade my iPad only one had a 3.5mm jack option and was fortunately the cheapest.
The only reason I'm seriously considering it's time for an upgrade is that they charge via a micro-B cable, which was quite frankly unacceptable for a "premium" brand even back in 2017. The question I keep asking myself for the past two or so years is: is that enough of a nuisance to spend another €400?
The three first dongles I bought produced static noise in the background, the only that works is the apple usb-c to jack but it's super flimsy and doesn't allow full volume on android.
For the same reason as you I will never buy wireless headphones, it's the epitome of disposable tech, at best you'd get 3-5 years of use, then you'd have to trash them because there is no easy way to replace the batteries
I have literally found a half dozen sets of airpods out in the world, whereas before wireless earbuds became popular I never found a single pair of abandoned headphones.
The bigger headphones dont have this problem as much but they are significantly heavier because they have to include all the electronics and batteries in them.
Somewhere on a rails-to-trails at the foot of the Cascade Mountains is a single Beats Powerbeat that was flung to the ground in the middle of a 50 mile race after I pulled a piece of clothing over my head. I was leading the race, so I spent just the barest amount of time looking, but never found it. Damned things ain’t cheap, either.
I should have just thrown the other one to the ground, so at least someone might have a matched set. At the same time, if I had to dick around with wired headphones, I wouldn’t have used them at all.
> The first manufacturer to make a point of dropping the headphone jack (I believe) was not Apple – as is commonly believed – but Oppo, and back in 2014. Their reason for doing so was at least a credible technical one: they said it made their phones about half a millimetre thinner. Maybe that was a selling point, maybe it wasn’t. But Apple couldn’t fall back even on this claim, because people found ways to fit a 3.5mm jack socket into the iPhones that lacked one, and even posted videos on Youtube showing how they did it. It wasn’t easy, but it was clearly possible. If Apple genuinely thought that omitting the jack would leave more room for other features, they didn’t actually provide any.
> Some manufacturers claimed that the presence of the headphone jack made it difficult to keep their phones waterproof; but there’s a whole range of good-quality phones from around 2019-2020 that are waterproof to a reasonable degree, without sacrificing the jack.
I.e. it's cost benefit analysis. It's annoying, hard, and expensive if you want to make a phone which is say waterproof to 10m or 15m while having a 3.5mm jack hole in it, which most people don't care about anyway. So easy solution, stop having the jack.
I want the old Nexus 5 just with newer chips and camera. Indestructible poly-carbonate shell w/non-slip rubberized coating, good sized screen, headphone jack, really good battery life, no nonsense OS.
Nothing added to newer phones (Pixel or iPhone) have improved my experience, all have made them worse in various ways. Newer phones are less durable and more expensive because they are made from fragile "luxury" materials like glass. They are thinner and have crappy battery life as a result (though this is getting better as batteries have caught up to design ambition). The thinness is rendered moot by needing a case. I didn't need a case on my Nexus 5, it was already indestructible. New phone + case is definitely thicker as a result.
Actual advantages of USB-C or BT audio mostly come down to a higher quality DAC in those devices vs crap they put on a lot of phones/laptops/etc. Thing is that doesn't need to be the case, you can totally have a properly good DAC on-board. Especially if you aren't fighting for thinness and can put it on an isolated daughter board.
IMO the enemies of a good phone design are thinness and aluminium + glass construction.
It turns what should be a utilitarian device into a fashion accessory and because that is what the high-end looks like there is nothing but a sea of copycats doing the same thing but worse.
I used to own LG V-series of mobile phones. They had a better-than-usual DAC and a headphone socket. Then LG stopped making that series. Now I have a pixel.
Now I have a USB external DAC (TempoTec Sonata HD pro) that used to work with Spotify, but now the only way I can use it is with a specific USB DAC application that hooks into Tidal. I'm assuming Android updated its audio stack in such a way as to break my external DAC. It's the same with my little desktop DAC, a Schiit Modi.
I just want to be able to listen to music on my preferred headphones, using a good quality DAC!
Separately on this:
> The way to discourage companies behaving this way is for us all to take our business elsewhere. It’s still possible to get decent cellphones from Motorola, Asus, and Sony that retain the 3.5mm jack.
Choosing the most important tool in your life based on this one hostile feature seems like a high price to pay. (Should I vow to never do business with Google in any form?) Maybe just better to commit to buying wireless headphones from an opposing company? That removes the manufacturers incentive.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S8
So, no. Waterproof casing is an excuse.
I went to (Edited) A Mainstream Chinese Brand now that Samsung dropped the ball. I dont get audio jack, either, but I have IR blaster and double physical sim
The point is, it's simply harder and more expensive to make a highly waterproof and slim phone, while having to have another large hole in the phone which requires a long connector to fit inside it. And when you consider that extra expense and R&D required to design the phone shell and internal architecture, versus the actual demand for wired headphones (basically zero these days), it's obvious why major phone makers don't bother to include it.
It's simply a matter of cost benefit analysis. Lots of cost, very little benefit. No mystery.
You're right about there being no mystery there.
They look like this: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/cui-devices/SJ-35...
Seems like a lot of faf. I tell you what, why don’t we wait for a bigger OEM to remove the darned things, and if it doesn’t hurt there bottom line we’ll just quietly scrap the idea?
And that’s how we got here.
https://m.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=12773&idPhone2=...
This is the datasheet of a generic 3.5mm It is thinner than that: 3.2mm.
https://www.cuidevices.com/product/resource/sp-3530.pdf
...except when you can't make good contact and you wind up with one stereo channel muted and you have to fidget manically to fix it....which seems to occur with every damn headphone jack on every device without exception.
> Some manufacturers claimed that the presence of the headphone jack made it difficult to keep their phones waterproof; but there’s a whole range of good-quality phones from around 2019-2020 that are waterproof to a reasonable degree, without sacrificing the jack.
also there are wireless headphones which have 24 hour battery life
See how easy your low effort comment was. Why bother?
A USB-C adaptor for mobile phones to allow charging whilst listening on a 3.5mm headphone jack.
Even USB audio has some buffering to handle bus contention, but it is quite small in comparison.
I don't know what changes behind the scenes, but it does improve latency. The only downside I noticed is the reduced range, eg, it stops working on a different room where normal mode still works.
If you want this changed, start a campaign and write to your representative in Congress. If the EU could make Apple put USB-C on the iPhone, maybe you can get the 3.5mm jack back on your phone. But you won't get there by kidding yourself thinking your individual sale matters.
---
I'm seeing any number of dongles that include a charge port on Amazon, like this one: https://a.co/d/hwiLAqp
Wireless charging for your phone is also an option.
Voting with your wallet by buying a phone with a headphone jack, especially from a smaller maker like Unihertz, is impactful and helps ensure those alternatives stay around.
But I checked Unihertz's site and it seems like their newest upcoming release, the Jelly Max, will be lacking a headphone jack too: https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-max
To their credit, it appears to come with an adapter.
My guess is that Unihertz, among others, is probably either reselling an existing design or contracting minor changes to an existing design. So unless you're voting with your wallet hard enough to shift the tides of the entire white-label phone manufacturing industry, I think I'm still doubting the impact here.
The lack of the headphone jack on the Jelly Max is disappointing, though.
/s?
I mean... it worked. People voted with their valets and the side who likes tangled cables to listen to music from their phones lost the vote. That is literally voting with your valet in action.
I understand that you probably mean "voting with your wallet won't work" in the sense that it won't change the situation. But it is also a bit like saying that democracy doesn't work because my party didn't win, because there were not enough people supporting it. A bit against the principle of the thing.
It is not like anyone is forced at gunpoint to buy apple phones.
(Presumably no telephone handset has ever had a ¼-inch jack, even in olden times?)
Never seen a wired headset with 2.5mm male plug that goes to the source device however.
The only thing I miss is the ANC, which was surprisingly working well on trains and planes.
And yeah, I which I still had a jack on my phone. My best wired earbuds use jack, so I have to carry this annoying dongle, usb-c is also flimsier, and I am way more worried about breaking it, since I also need it to charge my phone and transfer files.
So I wouldn't call it a "just works" technology as it is far from perfect.
I'd choose a smartphone that offers wireless charging because that is the state of art and it just works. It makes my life easier. I can just rest it on a little charging pad and move on. No worries about broken cables, broken USB ports and whatnot. Yeah, maybe there's inefficiency while loading, but we're talking about so little energy that gets lost, I don't really care.
Just like Bluetooth just works and makes my life easier. My little Anker earbuds charge in their case, they can live in my gym bag without getting lost, sound quality is fine, no connection issues at all, even across the gym (like 20 meters) with dozens of other BT earbud users around. Oh, and the case also has three LEDs to show me how full the battery in the case is. Charge it an hour with a USB-C cable and I'm good to go for weeks.
Converters only make the problem worse, because now you have a fragile USB-C dongle sticking out and a 3.5mm jack so it's extra bulky and prone to damage.
The wireless ones bug me to no end. Two more batteries to manage, two more single points of failure. Maybe I should dust off that old walkman.
But perfect it isn't.
> If you’re a fan of the 3.5mm jack, it’s time to vote with your wallet.
Not sure why the author thinks this hasn't been happening already, and the 3.5mm jack is simply losing the popular vote. I really just don't think that many people care about it, in the scheme of things. If removing it helps make the phone even marginally thinner, cheaper or more waterproof, I suspect most consumers will happily make that trade-off. Bluetooth headphones can also be more convenient in that you don't have to remain wired to your phone or deal with tangled cords, etc. Like the author, I also have a Samsung Galaxy S10 that still has the headphone jack but a few months ago I finally caved and bought a pair of bluetooth earphones.
Totally true!
I'm also baffled by the number of people who seem to lose anything that is not connected to something else with a wire.
Just the commenters in this thread that are just a tiny 3.5 mm jack away from losing their fifteenth pair of headsets... Amazing!
And… stop buying garbage products from gas stations? You are buying the most cheaply-built item possible from a manufacturer and merchant who have zero concern with repeat business. Pay a few bucks more once for something made by a manufacturer with a reputation and stop throwing more money down the drain.
Don’t know what those gas station dongles cost, but seems you might save money in the long run just adding Bluetooth to your car…
When you are buying smartphone, you can not selectively select the features. If you used iPhone and bought apps, you will buy iPhone even if it is missing jack or whatever.
I know that I disliked quite a lot about how phones were/are changing ... and when my phone life ends, I have to buy another one. I have no real choice when it comes to this.
On the plus side it has a 120 hz display that doesn't help me either.
I think it's still the case that Bluetooth headphones cost more for the same quality, though.
What I do wish is if somebody at least made is a USB C phone dock similar to what Apple made for 30 pin and lightning iPhones with audio out jacks. There are dongles that let you charge and do audio out but not in nice dock form.
And yet, we are approaching the day very soon where there's no point in getting the next year's flagship phone. It's not faster. It's not better. It doesn't have a better battery. The camera's not going to get any better. It's going to be the same form factor.
At some point phones will stop charging ridiculous amounts of money for 128 GB of RAM, when a terabyte of storage is approaching $50 in retail cost.
More ports SD card. I can see all of it coming back on the table. Cuz you're going to want features if you get a nice phone.
It will certainly be interesting to see how the manufacturers continue to find ways to differentiate themselves. Right now, unsurprisingly, all the hype seems to be focused around AI. So possibly future phones will be ruthlessly optimised for running LLM models. But if, instead, the phone manufacturers just decide to use cloud-hosted AI (or if the hype around AI dies down), then they'll need something else. The foldable form factor is the only other one that occurs to me right now.
> Some manufacturers claimed that the presence of the headphone jack made it difficult to keep their phones waterproof; but there’s a whole range of good-quality phones from around 2019-2020 that are waterproof to a reasonable degree, without sacrificing the jack.
Sure, on an airplane I'll drag along some noise cancelling ones, and I keep a wired set of Sennheisers in my bag for a backup, but I never use them otherwise.
The audio chips in phones were woeful. Not every headphones could be driven by them. There was a whole cottage industry of DAC that you had to plug between your phone and your headset.
As a very deep hole, the jack was also a dust/lint catcher, almost impossible to clean. And because of its length, it had a lot of leverage on the board, requiring fairly heavy-duty soldering to avoid damaging the board.
And the first reason the jack went out is not thinness but water resistance.
I think it was wonderful when headphones always worked, usually sounded fine (sometimes magnificent), and were available for $10.
> There was a whole cottage industry of DAC that you had to plug between your phone and your headset.
If there was, it was minuscule. I've never heard of people doing that in the wild.
> As a very deep hole, the jack was also a dust/lint catcher, almost impossible to clean.
Back then, the products were expected to be used long enough for this to become a problem. After a decade, I bet some of those holes were pretty dirty, although who would know. Modern portable tech does not have the disadvantage of durability.
> because of its length, it had a lot of leverage on the board, requiring fairly heavy-duty soldering to avoid damaging the board.
True. Can't deny this.
Strawman?
I doubt many people even thought about it. For them, bluetooth was available. Now it is almost the only option.
Off the top of my head, there are savings in: Pick and place Stack Assembly Testing Improved phones/hour and therefore shorter/cheaper factory runs Packaging, especially if you eliminate the shitty wired earpieces in the box Less weight/volume and cheaper shipping Reduced warranty / chargeback because things that don’t exist can’t fail
All of these savings are small. But remember that the goal is to make/sell 500K+ units. And, this is an industry where the bean counters will kill their mothers to shave a penny off of the BOM.
So, yeah, for the OEM eliminating headphone jacks is a complete no brainer.
Flagship phones on the other hand are sold to another population who seems happy to spend more money for a small inconvenience.
I do wonder how hard/expensive it would be to offer this as a configuration option though. Like if your favorite set is 300 ohms you could just configure your phone with an amp powerful enough to drive them. Or, maybe whatever they do in the MBPs to detect high impedance headphones would also work. I'm obviously out of my depth here.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S8
Water resistance + 3.5mm jack + sdcard tray
I had multiple phones with IPx7/8 water resistance and a headphone jack (e.g. LG G6 and Samsung S10) that is a bullshit excuse.
"environmentalists" being you know:
- https://www.apple.com/environment/
- https://www.samsung.com/us/aboutsamsung/sustainability/envir...
- https://sustainability.google/
It's all greenwashed bullshit.