They sound better than individual music notes?
Oh, not chords?
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To get stock Android. Samsung phones run Android in name only, they pile so much extra garbage onto their phones, even their flagships, that they’re practically useless to me. The only time I liked a Samsung Android phone was when I had my S6 rooted and I had disabled all of those applications.
They have a backchannel update mechanism that requires no user authorization to run. They remote unrooted the phone, patched the method that had previously been used, and of course all of those applications came back with a vengeance. My battery life went from about a day and a half of normal use down to 4 hours before it needed to go on a charger.
That’s why one buys a Pixel.
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I guess it’s my turn to trot out the probably-apocryphal “if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘a faster horse’” quote.
Also stop calling the 3.5mm jack a “legacy port”. It’s old, but it’s not legacy. VGA is a legacy port. SCSI is a legacy port. The 3.5mm jack still has millions and millions of pieces of equipment produced every year that use it, it’s still a standard inclusion in practically every computer, and either it or the even-larger 1/4" RCA jack continue to be an industry standard for the audio and music production sectors. It’s an enormously useful and versatile port that is still in exceptionally common use today. The only reason anyone is calling it a “legacy” port is because Phil Schiller put it on a Keynote slide.
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To me part of the issue is the quest for the ultimate thin phone. This makes things infinitely more complicated to manufacture phones, guess why removable batteries were phased out? Thinner phones. Personally i’d rather have a beefier phone if it meant it was more durable, had a headphone jack, removable batteries, and was heavier. I honestly don’t care how light and thin my phone is.
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This is a computer port discussion, folks, lets try and keep the tempers moderated appropriately. Won’t stop me telling my grandkids about how I used to moderate epic debates on computer peripheral ports, mind you.
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Its srsbsns
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I’ve already written a lengthy technical treatise on why analog headphone jacks are inherently better than Bluetooth, though it was probably months ago.
The long and short of it is, Bluetooth has fairly pathetic bandwidth limits, and your audio quality is entirely dependent on the audio sink, not the source. If you’re sending audio from an ultra high-end stereo receiver through a Bluetooth speaker, the receiver is just streaming data to a thing that actually does the decoding and DAC. The only thing the stereo can “do” is support one of the proprietary codecs that manages marginally better audio, but that only works if the sink also has it.
I have a bluetooth sink attached to my stereo receiver, and I can tell the difference between a lossless rip played via bluetooth versus the same rip played via an analog cable–and that’s even with a setup that has the sink feeding the audio through a high-end stereo receiver into an array of very good speakers. Bluetooth is obviously not worthless, but it’s definitely inferior to a headphone jack when it comes to audio fidelity.
That, and, I never have to charge my headphones. At no point am I unable to listen to music because my headphones need to be charged or because I lack the right adapter. (Incidentally, those adapters are effectively just USB sound cards, and your audio is going to be limited by the hardware in there too. Much better bandwidth characteristics, but if the hardware in the adapter is junk, the sound will be too.)
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Ah, the good ol’ days…
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Apple has control of nearly every aspect of their supply chain. This argument isn’t invalid if we’re talking about having to fit industry standard things on boards with other industry standard things, but Apple doesn’t really deal with that. They silo as much as they can into single chips, and their logic boards are pretty unencumbered by workarounds needed to make things work. They’re densely packed, not because they’re short on room, but because they can be.
Also, the battery thing isn’t a very good argument. They could make the phone slightly thicker, which would make it more durable, and it would enable them to substantially increase the battery size. Instead of jamming two wafer-thin cells inside of the X, for instance, they could have just put one battery that was a little thicker and they’d have freed up enough room to put an entire second logic board in there if they’d wanted to.
So everybody can rationalize it all they want, but it’s just capitalism ruining things, like capitalism tends to do. It’s not unique to Apple, it’s a byproduct of the point in industrialization we’ve arrived at where it makes “good economic sense” to stagnate rather than innovate. We’re simply told that stagnation and reduction is progress and it makes it all better.
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What is the risk exposure of the headphone jack compared to an active bluetooth stack?
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So much this. Bluetooth can be good in short listening situations. But in the back of my head, I’m always giving a sliver of passive attention listening for the inevitable low battery signal in the middle of a song, or for a song to cut off mid-point from a finished battery. It’s not fatal, but it’s like watching a movie when you know you have to keep an ear out for the doorbell.
I think we’re at a phase comparable to early airline in-flight service. The big players have pivoted from adding significant improvements to stand out from each other and are now seeing how much of the existing buffet can be omitted while keeping the same price point.
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I totally understand that none of those things are meaningful to you. Frankly, since I use a chunky Otterbox case with rubber gaskets over its ports, they aren’t that meaningful to me, either. I’m just pointing out that making phones thinner, giving designers more internal space to work with, better audio capabilities, and better water/dirt resistance are good things for a whole lot of phone manufacturers and consumers.
I meant more in context; a standardized audio interface for 100+ (I think?) years has tons and tons of staying power and isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but it’s become more of a legacy port for phones and tablets as wireless becomes far more popular than wired for mobile headsets and earbuds, and other tech has come along that can do what it does, but better, and in a smaller space.
I do understand that this is what you are pointing out. I still disagree, because none of these things - even all taken together - have tangible benefits that outweigh the removal of a highly functional and utilitarian headphone socket. And most could still largely be achieved even if the socket remained. I know what you are saying and you are not going to persuade me with vague promises of things like better audio capabilities (it’s a phone, people, not a hi-fi source) or unnecessary (and undelivered, it transpires) increased thinness.
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Oh, come now, only blithering incompetents would build consumer electronics so thin that they’d bend…
There is now Android One, which is bloat free and similar to what you’d get on the pixel. Several manufacturers have phone versions running it, but it is not common. The LG G7 One is being sold in Canada, but I doubt it will make it to the US.
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I’m in agreement, headphone jacks are a great thing. In fact I will go as far to say analog is superior to digital, simply because we interface with the world in analog terms. I think it is a fallacy to believe Apple and other manufactures dropped the 3.5 jack and removable battery because of space or dust. It was and is an esthetic design choice. I went from an LG G3 to an LG G7, and really the biggest cons are the sealed battery and glass back. Don’t get me wrong, all glass phones do have that sophisticated highly designed look…but it’s fucking glass. There ain’t gonna be no removable glass back… So like most people my highly designed phone resides in a much less attractive case because who wants to replace/repair it when you drop it after 3 months.
What I want is a moderately spec’d phone built like my old Sanyo mil-spec flip phone.
*800 series snapdragon cpu, 4gb ram, sd card slot, 3.5 jack, BT5, 5.5" screen at +250 ppi, removable battery in a ruggidized body.
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Only if it costs nothing. Which it does not.
Also, the basic sentiment is reasonable in this instance, but not generally correct. When you make a product, especially one as constrained as a smartphone, you generally have to choose the hardware that is the best fit for the target demographic, not throw every possible feature in or make dozens of models with every hardware permutation imaginable.
I also find it hilarious reading through the comments here (and everywhere else people complain about headphone jacks, SD cards, and user replaceable batteries) that go basically like this: “This is so anti-consumer! I am outraged at company X doing this to me. They should be designing phones to meet my needs! I buy used phones and then keep them for 3-5 years, but I am going to show them, I am going to buy a different brand used phone next time”
News flash: if you buy used phones, you only buy clearance model phones, you keep them for several years, or some combination of the above then you aren’t the manufacturers primary customer (or possibly even a customer at all). It’s actually pretty arrogant to suggest that companies should design phones that are less attractive to their biggest customers in order to keep the second hand market happy.
I personally don’t give a rat’s ass about a few mm of bezel around the screen. And I would love if phones were 2-3 mm thicker for 50% more battery life. But the people buying (and reviewing) new phones every year clearly do want tiny bezels and thin phones. If you take a phone like the pixel 3 XL and add a headphone jack, you are going to have to compromise thickness, bezels, or battery life. Waterproof jacks take up even more space, so you either give up IPX rating or compromise those even more. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
The big advantage of glass back over metal is signal reception. Of course, plastic would work as well, but be thicker for the same strength and scratch a lot more. I would still prefer good impact resistance plastic with a raised lip around the screen for protection, but yeah – most people don’t find that premium enough in phones that are pushing $1000. And I think that a glass phone in a plastic holster has a lot going for it: the plastic can be cheaply replaced if gets scratched or chipped. I just replaced the case for my wife’s original pixel because it was starting to crack. Glass is also much more rigid which protects the internals from flexing better than a pure plastic case. A plastic body might not be strong enough for huge screen on current flagship phones.
Might try if such a mythical beast existed in the real world. Unfortunately here in the real world they need electricity, which means that they need wires anyway or else the batteries will fade and die. And since they broadcast over radio frequencies, you get interference, so the quality is crap. And since they’re not directly connected, you have to do the stupid pairing ritual, which is prone to failure. So you end up with an unreliable wired device with poor quality and connection problems.
Standard headphones, on the other hand, just work, with better quality, no pairing nonsense, no extra chargers, no dongles, no random fadeouts. They’re the superior product. Time to evolve, dinosaur.
Better waterproofing isn’t needed if you don’t swim with your phone. Waterproof phones for snorkelers are a specialty niche. Since phones are too thin already, we have to wrap them in an Otterbox or some sort of rubberized case anyway, and that can plug the holes well enough. There’s plenty of internal space. Freed up power capacity comes at the cost of the earphones not working at all because they’re not charged. Thinner devices are more fragile. Basically all drawbacks, or at best neutral, not advances.
Consider some real advances, like thicker, more durable devices (less likely to break or shatter), better external connectivity (more USB ports?), functioning without additional peripheral chargers and dongles, the ability to quickly and easily switch out a drained battery with a full fresh one. Those would be real advances!
Because they’re the superior product.
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