Bring back the headphone jack. Dumping the 3.5mm jack is what brought this on.
It is simple as that. I do not want to worry about the headphones being charged and losing another charging case and making more room for another thing to charge where i charge everything else.
I do not want that at all.
It was the dumbest thing to make me need batteries for headphones. And I don't do any of this stuff that is in the article. But BRING BACK THE JACK.
People have been loud and obnoxious since long before Audio jacks were a thing, and they’re going to continue being loud and obnoxious long after your grandkids ask “what’s an audio jack?”
Your glasses are nostalgia-tinted. The jack or its absence didn’t prevent or cause this.
Hot take, but people that want 3.5 jacks back are just a (very) vocal minority. I've never met a single person IRL that prefers wired over wireless, I sure don't miss getting my cable snagged on things or just having it dangling around. I have a nice set of wired Sennheisers for my PC and then decent wireless buds I use when I'm out.
The headphone jack is not gonna come back. Buy an adapter if you care that much or just use wireless buds like 99% of people these days. Mine last a full 10 hour shift with battery to spare, a normal 8 hour shift isn't gonna kill the batteries on your buds unless you buy 10$ garbage.
Edit: also the 3.5 jack or cable generally stopped working or got fuzzy/bad connections long before the buds themselves started to go. Had to replace headphones so many times cause the jack got shitty or the cable wore out due to use. Sure the batteries in wireless buds will lose capacity over time but my current pair is over 2 years old and I only charge the case once a week with 40 hours of use per week.
This is just stupid. The point is having options. It's not like having a 3.5mm jack stopped you from having wireless buds. What do you mean “prefer wired over wireless” when everyone had the choice of both since fucking forever
It's almost like that 99% is because they don't have an alternate option.
I've had phones from the '90s that still work, so not sure what $5 headphones you were using or what you were doing with them. I'm fairly confident that no matter what price point none of your pod things will function 20-30 years from now. Is that mean you haven't lost them by then.
You can also get a bluetooth amp/dac and plug your wired headphones into there. I use a Qudelix 5k for my IEMs at home and I can just put it in my pocket if I want to take them out.
Hifiman one, little square. He's a nice little piece of kit. I put Rockbox on it. You lose Bluetooth but it dual boots into the stock firmware and hates my 2014 Civic anyway.
When I worked for a phone manufacturer I learned that their market research found that features like a headphone jack and SD card slot were pretty exclusively needed at the budget end of the market while the higher end generally didn't care about the lack of these features. I don't know that I fully agree with this, but to some degree it kinda makes sense
I am still salty about this. I was generally neutral about Apple until the headphone thing, and now I just loathe the iPhone for forcing the bullshit of Bluetooth headphones in the world.
Most recent Androids don't have an audio jack either. Samsung dropped it from their flagship products back in 2020, and that change made it slowly throughout their line. The Google Pixels don't have headphone jacks, the Moto Edge I use doesn't have a headphone jack, etc.
Honestly, if you have a a phone made in the last few years that does have a headphone jack, I'm curious to know what kind.
FWIW, my last phone (until 3 weeks ago) was a OnePlus Nord N20. Absolutely stellar budget phone with a solid mid-range experience and features. It had a headphone jack AND an SD card slot, as well as dual SIM tray if that's useful. I think it's actually higher spec than the N30. You can still find those. OnePlus is pretty good about including a lot of that stuff, except on their flagship phones. Hope that's helpful.
Yeah I seriously was considering one plus back in the day when they still had a jack (flagships). Was not impressed when they dropped that... And my memory, while bad - seems to recall that they said they weren't going to remove it at one point.
The A71 came out in 2020, which was about when Samsung was phasing the jacks out. And they took them out of the S line first, which I always thought was weird - for a while, you had this feature that was present in their mid range phones, but completely absent in the more expensive flagships. They're not the only ones that did that, of course, but it does seem kinda backwards.
My Moto also does per-app volume, and I agree, it's pretty rad.
Samsung Galaxy XCover 6 Pro. On top of the headphone jack, it has a removable battery and micro SD slot. I have my entire music collection and dozens of movies on a 1 TB card and I'll never have to be online or pay for a damn subscription to enjoy them.