I honestly believe that the headphone jack is done.<p>Done as in, we can just keep using it. It perfectly solves the problem of moving audio and similar from a device on or near my person to my ears. There's no need for any such device to be smaller in any dimension than the minijack allows. Wires are fine, they're so easy to understand. There is absolutely no need to keep working on this, it's fine as it is.<p>They should still be making headphones with minijacks in a 1000 years - because maybe in time we would learn to make devices that lasted that long. In general I really wish our culture would become used to the idea of solved problems.
Those are good points, but I'm more outraged that I can't just hand someone an AUX-cable and let them play music. Nowadays you have to fiddle with bluetooth (which for some reason tries borrow your contacts) and it just isn't worth it.<p>It is beyond insane to remove the headphone jack when we have no even half-decent alternatives. This is <i>before</i> the detail that today you can be absolutely certain that all your bluetooth devices are remotely hackable.<p>Most people that don't seem to mind the disappearing of the headphone jack only seems to view it from their own very narrow perspective. Yes, you've just bought some decent bluetooth headphones and love the cordless freedom, I get that - it is awesome. But that is a very narrow use case that isn't going to hold long. I've alternating between cordless and wired headphones for many years and there is no reason even on the horizon to stick with cordless headphones.<p>Also, you have to pay $100 extra for that bluetooth connectivity. So, a wired headphone for $100 will cost you $200 if you want it cordless, and that goes with the assumption that you have aptx. And I don't even have a clue of whether I have aptx.<p>And a decent wired headphone will just last (spoiler, good headphones have better cables and connectors than that $25 headphones that break all the time), the cordless version will not be that cool when the irreplaceable battery dies.<p>Also, I have to spend tons of money on adapters I have to carry with my all the fricking time just so my phone manufacturer can save a few cents, it's ludicrous.
> You can also tell companies that are getting rid of headphone jacks that you don’t like it. That your mother did not raise a fool. That aside from maybe water-resistance, there’s not a single good reason you can think of to give up your headphone jack.<p>I don't understand how people can just accept this change. Why would you pay for a shittier experience? I feel like people get outraged by the stupidest things these days. But when it comes to issues that will actually affect them in their everyday life, most people don't seem to give a shit.
For a culture that claims to be rooted in logic and reason, the momentum to abandon a 100+ year old standard because "Apple did it" is rather illogical.
Here in my uni we give future engineers their first taste of data acquisition and generation using the sound card as general purpose I/O.<p>It's perfect because it's a very capable DAQ system (16 bit samples @ 48 kHz!) and almost every students owns one already so they can play at home.
This, so much.<p>I have bluetooth headphone for the gym, because exercising with a cable is a faff. But I hate then. I hate that they run out. I hate that I have to, and often forget to, charge them.<p>From a purely practical standpoint, my year old phone barely holds a day of charge with a little usage. But at least now I'm still able to charge my phone and listen to music at the same time. I listen to music (on fantastic, wired headphones) for about 7 hours a day in the office. I can't imagine a world where I'd have to stop after 5 hours for 3 hours of charging before I could wire in again.<p>Until you can give me phones and headphones that charge by themselves - nay - until you can replicate my current experience, just without the cables, I'm not interested.
I find it fascinating that the music-making market is constantly ignored in the rush to make better consumer devices out of the iPhones/iPads and whatnot of the day .. as a musician with tons of iDevices, and lots of cables, I rue the day I won't be able to get a low-latency, high-power, perfectly usable audio signal from one of my devices. It really seems stupid that this market is being under-represented by the manufacturers .. perhaps they just want to sell more external-audio interfaces?
I see the point from both side, here. I guess both tech could live together as alternatives.<p>There's one thing I would ask from manufacturers who go the bluetooth-only way, though: please first make sure a bluetooth receiver can handle multiple connections.<p>I have bluetooth speakers at home that I've put on top of my sofa, so I can watch movies comfortably without annoying neighbors with loud sound. During the day, my phone is my media center, playing music. But I also want sometimes to play sound from my computer, like when I watch a youtube video.<p>In order to do that, I plug the speakers' jack to the phone, and connect the laptop through bluetooth. This is awesome and is better than jack only speakers: I can easily plug two devices on it. But if everything was bluetooth only, then it would be a regression, as I could only connect one device.<p>Could bluetooth multiplexing be a thing? (or are there reasons it couldn't happen?).<p>I would also love to know if I'm an edge case, or if other people here are doing something similar as well.
Yeah, it's cool. And it's cool that the author thinks about it. You could repurpose what was meant to carry audio and do cool things with it. The problem is: You still can. You'll need an external DAC in the worst case, you needed extra parts before anyway. Except now, by communicating digitally, you get a more reliable signal and potentially higher throughout.
It's a bit more effort to build a nice product, but DIY projects can still just use audio dongles.
<i>The removal of the built in audio jack won't hurt us much. </i>
This is a eulogy for the 'headphone jack' and not 'analogue audio out'.<p>How many Sony Walkman tape players and their clones did I break and where did they break? The headphone jack.<p>How many headphones have I broken and where did they break? The headphone jack.<p>As a student playing around 'on the decks' I found that anything with a headphone jack was liable to be responsible for that mains hum.<p>I have fond memories of using the headphone jack of the 32x CD ROM that was in the front of that 'Compaq' PC that cost many thousands. But when was the last time I touched a CD? So that is another headphone jack we thought we needed but didn't.<p>Had we moved to a magnetic latch as per the Apple power arrangement then I think that I would have got burned a lot less with the soldering iron and the purchase of hi fi kit and caboodle. Maybe with some optional VGA style screws if you really want the connection locked down hard. This could have been a much more 'jogging friendly' solution, waterproof too.<p>I mourn the loss of analog audio but not the headphone jack. Maybe the latter is responsible for the demise of the former and maybe there was vested interest in the Walkman era in having the universal but breakable headphone jack.<p>Incidentally the headphone jack seems much better engineered in computers and phones than in 1980's era Walkman style tape players. Maybe there was some lightbulb style conspiracy to ensure that headphone jacks only lasted '1000 hours' before failing, therefore maintaining sales of new tape players.
Well, the same thing counts for the serial (UART) port. It's incredibly simple, it's a license-free universal I/O port. And in spite of that, it has disappeared from computers and we now have the complex beast called USB instead.<p>I'm not happy at all about headphone jacks disappearing, but I doubt the development can be stopped.
Without a headphone jack, how do you use the built-in radio? All of my phones that had a working, built-in radio (NEC, Sony) used the headphone cable as the radio antenna. With a movement to get manufacturers/carriers to activate the built-in FM capabilities of the chips, what will they use as an antenna?
while i cling on to my audio jack personally, the article use cases would be trivially replaced by dongles and adapters<p>there is the lightning dac for apple and equivalent for other brands<p>there are oodles of audio <-> bluetooth adapters<p>then i am sure there will be a raspberry pi / beaglebone / arduino with open source oscilloscope clients available.