I’ve not had any issues with dropouts nor disconnection. To my cloth ears, there are no deleterious compression artifacts, but I’ll admit that they don’t sound quite as good as my HD650 or HD25 II Sennheisers. I put that down mainly to the noise cancellation. But as I really only use them when travelling, that’s a compromise I’m willing to make. I find the bluetooth functionality and battery life to be flawless from my own perspective.
Of course that’s why the frequency was free when they were looking around trying to figure out cordless accessories.
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If I can’t plug my Shure SE425 IEMs in directly, I’m not buying that phone. Screw Apple, I’ll stick with Android phones that have the jack.
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I swear by my Shure SE215s. They have good isolation and sound quality without breaking the bank, but most importantly they have replaceable cables so when they inevitably wear out you don’t have to buy a whole new pair.
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Bah. I just went from 5Ah to 3.1Ah, and it blows.
I’d still be using the old phone, with crap GPS and broken compass, not to mention an external speaker that kept blowing, if 2G was still a thing, but running on only one network was a dealbreaker.
A fat battery fucking rocks. All the features in the world aren’t worth shit without a supply of electrons.
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Cool. I’m just talking about the use of phone chargers, which I haven’t found to be difficult to the level that the above Verge story pretends they are.
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I’m saying that how difficult it is to keep a phone charged is inversely proportional to the battery’s capacity. I was prepared to put up with a lot in order to keep using a phone that could be used heavily all day without going flat, or with normal use, could survive for two days.
It may not be ‘difficult’ to plug in a charger, but it’s often a hassle, or maybe you forget, or maybe it’s not possible for whatever reason. My first powerful phone had a wimpy battery, and it fucken sucked. Never again.
The most important bit of spec is Ah, IMO.
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I gotta love how nobody mentioned sound quality (at $28 MSRP it’s…wow, listen out any HD audio character at all and it’s miracles all the way…someone says no low-latency so it’s lagging 200ms) or that they seem to be about long enough to be a pendant if you’re a size 1 (oops, no it’s the box schematic, regular length IRL.) It’s one of those-how was this authenticated as a Lightning device- things they just put out to see if it sells through 20,000 before they hire any designers.
0 reviews on Amazon.JP if I’m not blinkered.
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Standardised 3.5mm audio ports: a real thing for about 60 years.
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That post text made me think that @doctorow and @frauenfelder got switched up by the Master Boing.
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I just bought the SE425s; my E4s finally had the outer jacket on the left channel crack right through and I figured it was only a matter of time before the phones would die. Ten years out of them is pretty good, I figure!
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Putting batteries in every single thing isn’t sustainable.
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In my experience, bluetooth is useless within a certain radius of any building, or of no buildings whatsoever.
I mean, in a sense it works. Someone who enjoys spending 30 minutes doing some obscure seeking-connecting-handshaking-authorizing-pairing sequence involving repeatedly futzing with unlabeled buttons and unusable apps to get 70’s-era CB-radio-in-a-thunderstorm quality audio for a brief time until you have to recharge (if you’re lucky and remembered to fully charge everything first, otherwise wait a few hours), and carrying the extra chargers and cords everywhere, it might be worth the exorbitant extra cost for that experience.
I prefer to just plug in earphones and have them work instantly at high quality for a much lower cost, with no need for extra cords, chargers, or hassle.
Not entirely… I have spare batteries for my phone, and a wall charger that I can just pop a battery into. So when a battery runs down, I pop a fresh one in the phone and the old one in the charger. I haven’t had to plug in my phone for years.
I ended up with a couple of extra spares when someone else switched phones and gave them to me, but so far I’ve never needed more than one spare. Hypothetically though, I could keep my phone charged at least 4 days to a week without access to electricity, even at normal usage. That’s so liberating, no way I’d buy one where you can’t change the battery.
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I’ve simply not found the lack of headphone jack to be anything worse than occasional annoyance.
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I know it’s a lot easier now than in it’s early days, but my initial experience of it years ago made me hate it so much, I’ve never wanted any Bluetooth device.
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Considering that I live in a very dense area of Tokyo, I’m pretty much constantly near buildings and have never had that problem since the first time I started using bluetooth years ago.
My guess is you are either used to crap or your phone has a really crap interface for bluetooth.
My current Audio Technical ATH-AR5BT headphones pair easily with anything I’ve used, sound great and I get about 20 hours use time between charges. They charge by micro USB so I’ve always got one of those with me anyway.
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Like Nelson!:
This article made me realize that Apple’s design aesthetic is a great conceptual model to introduce the idea of externalized costs.
Consider the MacBook Pro. It’s all sleek and minimal with just its four usb-c ports. But that comes at a cost.
And you see that cost if you ever see a MacBook Pro hooked up to peripherals, or if you’ve ever tried to get it to (e.g.) connect to two monitors at once.
If design anti-aesthetics are an economic liability, Apple hasn’t eliminated that liability. It’s just pushed that liability outside its own boundaries.
To dongles.
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Maybe you don’t remember the days when using any laptop involved carrying a separate bag of adapters. Since lots of those adapters were often specific to manufacturer, or specific to whoever made the PCMCIA card you were connecting the dongles/adapters to, they often had to be replaced entirely when one changed laptops or peripherals.
At my workplace we’ve got several generations of ThinkPads and Dell laptops meaning that to connect anyone to a large screen for meetings means we have to make sure that every meeting room has DVI, VGA and mini display port cables and or adapters.
Blaming Apple alone for dongles is pretty lame and counterfactual.
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Just the other day, I dragged out an old Thinkpad T22 that I hadn’t used in years on end, and discovered my old Zoom PCMCIA V.90 modem card, complete with its own special cable (RJ-11 on one end, bespoke connector on the other). I think I used that thing twice if that many times. Maybe I should see if there are any dialup BBS systems still running in my area.
On the other hand, Thinkpads (at least T- and X-series) haven’t skimped on ports. Gigabit Ethernet? No problem, it’s built-in. While mine are old enough to have VGA, at least they actually have built-in video ports. The whole Jobsian “strip everything down to make it 1 mm thinner” and “no user-serviceable parts inside, let’s fill the case with glue and/or use weird-ass screw heads” (and “let’s use ports that few if anyone else uses”) schtick is what keeps me far away from Apple, and I grew up with an Apple II+.
I wish Apple had been more Woz, less Jobs.
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