I think I'm in the minority, but I haven't really missed the headphone jack in my iPhone 11. I have the Echo earbuds, and those have been good to great for my use cases.
This continues to feel a bit like the 3.5 floppy and CD-ROM removals from the Mac: a lot of people hated it, until it was a nonissue.
You don't miss it until you do. When you are trying to join a meeting and your bluetooth headset absolutely refuses to work (and yes, even the fancy Airpods Pro do that occasionally), you wish you had the ability to just plug in an old-fashioned, analog headset. Which you can pull easily, with no fuss, from many devices, including computers and gaming consoles. Quick, no pairing required. No battery issues.
Analog headphones are also very cheap(good if you are not in a rich country), and will always be cheaper than bluetooth headphones, as there is minimal hardware required. You can quickly pick one up even from a shady street seller and you know it will work(longevity might suffer, but again, cheap).
The only problem with the headphone jack is that it is a very old standard. It's big connector, and takes significant real state inside a phone.
The 2020 iPhone SE is much bigger than the 2016 iPhone SE and almost 50 % heavier. This argument seems invalid to me.
While I got the Airpods Pro when they launched and loved them at first, the battery degradation and seemingly worse ANC performance has really irked me given their price. I've also tried using cheaper wireless earbuds, but their connectivity can be spotty. I know it's not the worst issue, but I do miss being able to take a pair of wired earbuds and use them freely between my laptop and phone and not have to worry about their battery lives.
I think bluetooth receivers are the way to go. you get the wireless aspect for the most part and can change track/volume without having to take out your phone.
you can use it any headphones or earbuds you have
with the fiio one I own, you can charge it while using it so you are never caught if you are near a power source or have an external battery chargers. and if not then at least you can quickly switch to being directly plugged in
there's also a much better chance that I will be able to replace the battery at some point in the future. with bt headphones, they are so small that it would be almost impossible to take it apart successfully
It was basically a forced upgrade to bluetooth headphones. I bought some bluetooth over-ear ANC headphones like two weeks later and it really hasn't annoyed me at all since.
The larger problem with modern phones is the form factor.
These days, I charge my wireless headphones once a week. When I turn them on, they are connected before I have opened the music app. The connection is stable. When I stop playing sound on my phone and start sound on my laptop, they automatically switch to that. Their microphone is perfectly fine for calling people.
But I have hundreds of dollars invested in good-quality wired headphones, plus wired earbuds, and I want to be able to use those with my phone without needing to re-spend that money. Plus, regardless of quality of the product, I'm occasionally a forgetful human. I've actually run out of juice mid-workout with my wireless set. Instead of not having music for the rest of my workout (I like music!), I simply walked over to my bag, pulled out my wired earbuds, and finished up.
Not having the ability to do that is a deal-breaker for me on a phone, and it's not something that can be fixed by improving the Bluetooth tech. While this is obviously anecdotal, I don't imagine I'm the only person who feels this way.
The dongle is small enough to leave attached to your headphones and costs $9. It would be wasteful to include one with the phone, as most would be unused. Clearly you'd prefer a built-in jack, but you have a cheapish option to add this ability.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMX62AM/A/lightning-to-35...
Why not just swap in a wireless cable?
Some issues I've noticed:
- My tv (flagship LG OLED) always has trouble connecting to the headphones. I usually have to turn them off and then back on again at least once. Macbook and iPhone rarely have trouble connecting. Connecting on Windows has always worked so far.
- When I'm connected to both my Windows laptop and my phone, in a skype conference on the laptop and get a call on my phone, the skype conference is automatically terminated. FOR ALL PARTICIPANTS. That's insane.
- To make the previous point even worse: except for the ringtone, the audio from incoming calls never even goes to the bluetooth headphones. The audio from outgoing calls does, however. This is all on an iPhone SE.
- Sometimes when I listen to music, or watch a video on a Windows machine, my bluetooth headphones will just pause the playback every couple of seconds. This only happens on Windows.
- If your headphones are connected to multiple devices, you have absolutely zero control over what is happening. You might be listening to music on your phone, but some notification from your computer will interrupt your playback even though the computer is set to silent.
I could go on and on and I've only been using bluetooth headphones for a month. There is a LOT of polish missing here. That being said, this could be a great technology and it's not too far off at the moment. There certainly are some advantages over wired headphones as well.
It’s gone, it’s never coming back. To that end, once iPhone goes USB-C it’ll accelerate this majority non-issue.
I'll give you it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but having lived through all there events professionally, I can tell you that's not how it was perceived at the time. At least, not around my offices :-)
The phone MUST create analog audio signals, to drive its own speaker. Denying customers a connector to access it is petty and offensive. Compounding that offense is requiring every listening device to now incorporate redundant D/A converters. Contrary to apologists saying that this enables better quality, it in fact results in wholly unpredictable quality.
Not to mention that your ears will ALWAYS require analog audio. So do billions of amplification devices around the world.
There's no excuse.
