> Wireless headphones are subject to interference while wired ones are not.
That's not true. Have you ever had gunk get into your headphone jack and have that affect the sound? I have.
> Physical connections are much less likely to fail.
I hear the air pods are pretty reliable. I've had plenty of wired headphones either stop working properly or stop working altogether. Wires can get yanked and this an effect the internal connections in the headphones, for example.
> Wired headphones also lack batteries.
The literal text of what I was replying to was "have decent quality and somewhat less reliability", and batteries have nothing to do with that.
> Horses vs. cars is easy: Cars today are cheaper, faster, safer, require less space and require less maintenance than horses. The number of people who'd prefer a horse to a car is insignificant.
We're not talking about horses vs cars today, we're talking about horses vs cars when cars were being introduced! That's the analogous situation.
> I think at best 50% of people would prefer wireless after trying them for a week or two.
On what grounds?
> Wireless and wired aren't mutually exclusive either. There's no reason a phone can't support both wired and wireless headphones and let people choose.
Yes, that's true. But I think that the longer-term picture is different. More features means more cost and complexity. And you can't consider this just in the context of one issue. It's cumulative over time. An analogy here is all the various features that have been lost in desktop and laptop computers over the years (and replaced by different ones). Sure, any one of those isn't necessarily a big deal, but in the longer term it's not about individual ones. If you said that about each individual feature, and kept it on, the devices these days would be really encumbered with all sorts of stuff.
> That's what we've had for years now and unsurprisingly, wireless headphones haven't really taken off.
We're not talking about decades and decades of good, consumer-level priced wireless technology. It's still pretty new, and that also means it's still pretty expensive. I think it's clear that a fair number of people who are against the wireless headphones still haven't actually tried good one, which shows that the exposure levels for the technology is still pretty low.
And removing the jack is the kind of thing that may push the adoption of wireless headphones and lead to the kinds of economies of scales that reduce the price and lead to more takeup.