I worked for U.S. Robotics and 3Com back in the day when they manufactured dongles for ethernet, modems etc. Remember the Palm Pilot? Ahhhh! The good ol’ days. Dongles were a pain in the ass back then and they still are today.
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Lossless bluetooth is tough though. You can never guarantee a packet will get there in a frequency hopping device like bluetooth or wifi. Too many external factors to consider. You of course can add buffering in at the headphone side to give enough time for the packet to be retransmitted. That would result in phase delay in the audio stream. Fine for music. For phone calls and video not so fine. I’m not sure what the worst case for not being able to get a packet through though. I would think milliseconds. But I don’t know how bad “bad” is in a saturated RF environment.
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True but lets be honest if their focus was a solid reliable device with good performance and features the users really wanted they wouldn’t include planned obsolescence. Let’s see, bigger battery, headphone jack, truly standard io/power port, upgradeable memory. What am I missing?
I have similar problem with the moto z droid force recon (whatever it’s called.) No headphone jack so I end up with two sets of Bluetooth headphones Just to get through the whole day. (Plus I carry the adapter and wired headphones.)
Bluetooth does suck bigtime. Walk near a microwave oven and the sound starts cutting out. On my Bluetooth speaker it has this annoying bug where it cuts off the first half second of a track. I will be listening to an audio book and it occurs going from one track to the next. Also noticeable with notification sounds. Not really an issue just annoying.
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I’ve said it before but why they cannot introduce an element of practicality to their phones is a joke. Everyone uses a case so it doesn’t matter how beautiful you make the ‘naked’ phone because we won’t ever see it. Everyone has a pair of headphones with a headphone jack. Most people want to listen to music while the phone is on charge.
I’m a minimalist and love streamlined design but it’s only good when it’s both minimalist AND practical. Once you start stripping away the practical in pursuit of the minimal you’re sacrificing good design.
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No i refuse to carry another chargable device. It’s yet another thing I have to think about charging before i leave the house.
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I never used a case on my nice old iphone 4 either, and could never work out why people bothered with them.
When I upgraded to an iphone 6 (not a 7, btw, because I wanted a proper headphone jack) I found the phone was so sleek and slippery and droppable - in a way the 4 never was - that I really had to buy a case for it, just to keep from dropping it.
So the start of this post rang pretty true for me.
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Just what i needed … a digital appendix.
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Yeah… whoever designed water to efficiently absorb 2.5GHz RF wasn’t thinking about the impacts to wifi and bluetooth… 
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Wait, people pay for low quality corded headphones? I mean, I did pay for my sennheisers (earpads wore out after only 15+ years! Dangit!) but I’ve never paid for cheesy corded headphones, around here people give 'em away for free.
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Yeah, the aluminum back of my recently purchased SE is kinda slippery. I’ve been considering putting a big sticker on the back of it to make it more grippy. I’m pretty sure you can get precut grippy sheets of vinyl that will stick to the back of your 6 without adding the annoying bulk of an actual case.
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That’s a great description of the female condom, btw.
You can still get those?
They are useful in places where birth control is seen as only a woman’s issue.
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All the complaints about the lack of headphone jack are valid, but not everyone uses a case. I don’t. Not everyone has headphones with a headphone jack. I just use the lightning jack set that came with the phone. Maybe most people want to listen to music while the phone is charging, but I can’t think of a case where I’ve wanted to and not had an alternative immediately available.
Yeah, people say “everyone” when they don’t literally mean everyone, but I’ve seen several cases where people thought you HAD to use a dongle or bluetooth speakers with a new iPhone, not realizing they come with a lightning set, or that other lightning sets are available and I think it’s been due to the hyperbole of the problem.
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I exclusively buy cheap earbuds. But i’m very particular about which ones, i buy these:
They work great, they’re durable, will survive going through the washer/dryer whenever i forget them in my pockets, and i’m don’t get upset whenever i misplace/lose/break them because they’re affordable.
Now if i had to worry about pricier wireless headphones i’d be way more particular about what i do with them and frankly worrying that much over headphones is stupid and sounds exhausting.
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Goody for you. I work in between a federal facility and a county jail, and Bluetooth is useless near either of them. I don’t know why–might be signal jamming, might be Stingray cell spoof towers, I dgaf why --but Bluetooth is useless within a certain radius of either of those buildings.
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Spoken like someone who’s never been to a proper all-night party.
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Heh, I was at a pretty good Imbolg bash recently, and everybody turned their phones off at 7pm!
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The good news is you only have to worry about eight individual stress points.
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