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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • No, just because you say “it is obsolete” doesn’t make it so.

    It’s not obsolete because I say so, it’s obsolete because it has no function that cannot be replaced with USB, an interface that is already present on every modern smartphone…

    The headphone jack is an industry standard, has been for decades and will be for much more time

    The fact that we have done something in the past or had a certain standard is not a good argument for keeping it indefinitely…

    It’s not really a standard

    Of course it is… Apart from the Iphone, every smartphone has an USB C interface… Yes, it is kinda a mess with differences in quality etc, but as far as the interface goes, USB C is the standard nowadays…

    Why should i have a more fragile connector that has to rely on electronics when i can use a cable that i can fix myself if it breaks?

    It’s already there… Even if you have a modern smartphone that still has a 3.5mm jack, you still have to have a USB port to charge your phone, etc… So the actual question is:

    Why should a modern smartphone have an additional 3.5mm audio jack that servers no function other than audio when that function is already taken care of with USB (or wireless)? I can see an argument if we were talking about audiophile tech, but we are talking about smartphones

    Also, please point me in the directon of some high end headphones with a usb connector. And i mean high end, reference quality, not some brandless crap from amazon.

    What do you mean with “high end”? “Audiophile stuff”? The focus is obviously on wireless stuff nowadays because most people don’t care that much about audio quality, especially not when listening on their phones, but there are USB headphones:

    https://www.androidcentral.com/best-usb-c-headphones

    Because Fairphone are arguing in bad faith. If they were really concerned about repairabilty, they would have kept a reliable and easy to fix jack instead of selling overpriced bluetooth earbuds.

    Why? It’s just another additional port that can break… I’m sure selling wireless earbuds played a role in their decision, they are a business after all, but that doesn’t mean that it was the only factor in their decisions or that there aren’t viable reasons to move away from the headphone jack…

    If anything, this whole ordeal is a constant reminder that corporations are not our friends, and that some people will somehow just blindly defend them.

    Of course corporations aren’t our friends, they are businesses… And you can imply that I’m “blindly defending them” if you want, just as I can claim that you are blindly clinging to an outdated standard that has by today virtually completely disappeared in the smartphone world and that there would be no benefit in bringing it back…


  • The headphone jack is an inexpensive small connector

    It’s still an unnecessary addition to modern smartphones that has an impact on design, etc…

    offers far better quality than bluetooth does

    And once again, you ignore what I wrote in my comment and try to turn this discussion into a discussion about “wires vs wireless/bluetooth” when it’s obviously not…

    As for the usb adapters, those are an extra point of failure and easy to misplace.

    If using an adapter is too much of a hassle for you, get a wired USB headphone… It’s funny, you pretend that the only viable options are either bluetooth or an obsolete standard. We already have a new standard… We had it for decades now… And it’s already built into and used with virtually any modern smartphone. But no, because you are used to your old standard, you demand that the old standard is still used in addition to the new standard…

    If Sony can keep the jack on all their devices

    This isn’t about what we could and couldn’t do… We could go back to using cassettes if we wanted to, there just isn’t a good enough reason to do it as far as most people are concerned…

    Look at your comment, you can’t give me a good reason for your argument. Your only argument is “but it’s not that much of a hassle” and “everyone used it in the past so we should continue using it”…

    You don’t like the jack? You can just keep using bluetooth.

    I can just use bluetooth, or I can just use USB. So can you.

    But can you give me one argument why we should, in addition to having both bluetooth and USB interfaces on our smartphones, have an additional plug using a standard from the 1950s that we can ONLY use for audio when we already have to have a USB plug that can also be used for audio?


  • So I thought to myself…why?

    Why? There are various arguments as to why the old audio jack standard is obsolete, but this discussion was essentially settled with the Fairphone 4, which was the first one that did not have a headphone jack. And they released a detailed article describing their reasoning…

    https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/9836188988049-Audio-jack-3-5mm

    The community has been requesting this for a couple years

    The community? It’s not as if Fairphone just willy nilly decided to get rid of the headphone jack, this was done with feedback from the community in mind… Just because you are loud and passionate doesn’t mean that your opinion is the only one that represents the community’s… As a fairphone user and “member of the community”, I say fuck the 3.5 mm jack… It’s an ancient standard that was obsolete years ago,

    And just to be clear, this isn’t a discussion about wireless vs wired earbuds. You can have wired USB earbuds, you can even use your old 3.5 mm jack headphones with an adaptor. This is a discussion whether we should switch back to an ancient and inferior standard just because you are used to it…

    Just add the headphone jack, shouldn’t be too hard.

    And this entitled and wilfully ignorant attitude will make people take you even less seriously… You can’t “just add the headphone jack”, decisions like that have an impact on all of the design of the device and have to be carefully evaluated… You simply going “come on just do it, how hard can it be” will not convince anyone…