Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I still miss my headphone jack, and I want it back

fastcompany.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 741 posts

Re: I still miss my headphone jack, and I want it back

#581

Post by falcrist »

Spooky23 wrote: post #518
williamdclt wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reliability, too. I don't trust bluetooth at all . And price: a jack is dumb tech and cheap (cheap anough that I always had about 10 extra jacks of all kinds with me when I was doing a gig). But to be fair, wireless transmitters/receivers do exist for musicians. They don't use bluetooth ofc, but that means that the latency can be bearable with wireless. It's made for live playing though (freedom of movement), no poin…

Reliability is huge. The bluetooth implementations all suck. My $40k car is about as reliable and predictable from a bluetooth perspective as Chinese knock-off Jawbone copycat from 2007.

WHY is this still the case? I mean, Bluetooth is fundamentally just a communications protocol broadcast with some kind of antenna. Yet I don't have these kinds of issues making wifi or cell service work.

Who decided to use such a flaky protocol for audio and such, and then remove the reliable connection?

Re: I still miss my headphone jack, and I want it back

#582

Post by SilasX »

tjoff wrote: post #423
pookieinc wrote: post #213

We need to take into account _Accessibility_. A large use case that I've found most people seems to miss are individuals who are older and don't have much experience with bluetooth or wireless technology. I'm fine with Apple removing the headphone jack, but they've alienated so many people to find their own path when they don't include the adapter. Anecdotal example: I recently purchased headphones for my 65-year old…

Elderly? I can guarantee that no human being on earth can confidently setup bluetooth on all devices. And that's the issue, these one-off pairings. I had a friend sync with my car bluetooth-stereo, it took a while and from the steering wheel I couldn't be of enough help. But it worked in the end, was quite frustrating though. Then later when I tried to use my phone again it had been lost from the receiver (eventhough…

Also, I tried to use my bluetooth headphones with my Macbook air, even knowing the steps, and it said I had to upgrade the OS to use them (I think the OS was like a year old at the time, and the computer four years old -- El Capitan, I think?)

Seriously? Both OSes knew the version of the bluetooth protocol they needed to use to communicate, and it still doesn't work? Never had that problem with a headphone jack.

Re: I still miss my headphone jack, and I want it back

#583

Post by SilasX »

simonh wrote: post #443
sacado2 wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an eldery, and I prefer a jack socket. I just don't get the benefit of bluetooth in most situations. Jacks are more reliable and definitely plug-and-play. Unless it has a physical failure, your jack socket always just works. As you state it, bluetooth requires you to "Turn on Bluetooth on your phone, then turn on your headphones, then hold down the button to pair, etc", for no benefit. Oh, and now you need ba…

>why is that? Are they too old? Latency. When you're making music and interacting with it directly, you can't afford any noticeable latency. When you're passively listening to it, that doesn't really matter. For phone/tablet users the main place this matters is games, due to their interactive nature.

And speaking of latency, technology has broken in another respect here: rhythm games. If I play Dance Dance Revolution from a PS2 on a flatscreen, they add so much lag that the visuals are unusable, even in video game mode. Others have told me they have the same problem even on games for newer consoles intended to played on such TVs.

So I end up needing to find a CRT to play them.

I also saw this on the Nintendo Wii emulations of SNES games on new flatscreens.

Re: I still miss my headphone jack, and I want it back

#584

Post by borgel »

Jaruzel wrote: post #334
Cogito wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just finished Snow Crash! It's really good; as I was reading it I would stop and check the date it was authored. It holds up very well.

Read 'The Diamond Age'. Personally I think it's the best of his books.

Agreed. Also Anathem is fantastic.

Re: I still miss my headphone jack, and I want it back

#585

Post by SilasX »

anoncake wrote: post #521
SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or an overweight person, for that matter. How about smokers, while we're at it?

Smokers look just like non-smokers, unless currently smoking.

Not if they're a heavy smoker...

Re: I still miss my headphone jack, and I want it back

#586

Post by lloeki »

MaikuMori wrote: post #431
lloeki wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I mourn the practicality of the embedded jack on my iPhone 8, I've had quite a few headphones in a row whose jack ended up failing due to the way my phone is placed inside my pocket, and a repair was impossible, so that was quite an unexpected improvement to have the adapter possibly fail and be replaced at a very small cost instead of a full headset† going bust. † five actually (100-300€ price range), two of w…

You can cut off the jack and solder a new one. You also don't need specific cord, buy a new cord and add the jack. For non replaceable cords you can open up the headphones unsolder the old cord and solder a new one. Or you can cut the cable somewhere high and patch another cable. If you can't do these things your self there is probably some cheap electronic repair shop nearby. Most likely cheaper than shipping new br…

> Repair is possible, just sometimes you need to be a bit creative.

Indeed, and I attempted to do so myself since I know how to handle a soldering iron... yet some of them were in-ear, one was over ear but cracking its case was a one way destructive operation; some had those hair-thin copper wires downright coated with an insulating material that makes soldering a pain, if at all possible. I swear it's made on purpose to thwart attempts at repairs.

I bet I have broken more jacks in a couple of years than during the 20 years before that. Crazy.

Anyway that doesn't change the fact that before that I never thought about having a small, cheap jack-to-jack part in between the headphones and the playing device, as using the adapter was the first time I happened to do something similar, but that's not a property of the adapter itself; or rather, DAC, really, and I find it nice that there are alternative DACs available, at which point if I always have a DAC at hand, well it's less of a problem to not have a jack embedded), but really, I'd rather still have the jack, or having the removal of the jack coincide with the replacement of Lightning with USB-C (together with the USB-C situation not being such a bloody mess) and have some new universal standard emerge across all devices.

Re: I still miss my headphone jack, and I want it back

#587

Post by daveFNbuck »

Natanael_L wrote: post #456
daveFNbuck wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't just need to consider accessibility for the elderly. I need to regularly reconfigure my Bluetooth connections on my phone. They just randomly stop working. With the latest version of Android, I couldn't figure out how to even access the Bluetooth settings. When I connect some devices, they don't show up in the list of paired devices. Somehow it still ended up working, but I don't know how or why. When I walk…

IIRC, Bluetooth LE devices managed by apps doesn't have to be listed in Android, since the app can talk to it without pairing. Devices not meant for pairing with the OS itself (because it doesn't offer interfaces the OS understand) will not always show in scans, because Android can't interact with them without needing additional apps. So instead the corresponding apps has to be used to scan for them, to tell Android…

The devices that aren't showing up aren't managed by apps. They're headphones and speakers. It seems I may have been in the wrong part of the settings app, as I've just now discovered that the area of settings labeled "Bluetooth" shows the device name and an option to pair a new device but doesn't show the currently paired devices. I thought my device name was just hidden.

There's a second separate settings page for "Pair new device" that shows currently connected devices and has the same option to pair a new device as the Bluetooth page. It doesn't let you control the current device's name, but it does have a weird link to a general connection preferences page that includes a link to the first Bluetooth one, as well as links to similar pages for NFC, Android Beam, Cast, Printing, Received files, and Chromebook.

I had a lot of trouble finding both of these pages, and the fact that these are two different settings pages does not help at all. They've really made this a lot more difficult and confusing in Android Pie.

Re: I still miss my headphone jack, and I want it back

#588

Post by tripzilch »

muse900 wrote: post #414
pookieinc wrote: post #213

We need to take into account _Accessibility_. A large use case that I've found most people seems to miss are individuals who are older and don't have much experience with bluetooth or wireless technology. I'm fine with Apple removing the headphone jack, but they've alienated so many people to find their own path when they don't include the adapter. Anecdotal example: I recently purchased headphones for my 65-year old…

Personally I feel like makers saw an opportunity on 1) boost sales on new headphones 2) get rid of the cable hanging around. I can understand and feel your fathers frustration trying to use wireless headphones, on the other side if they never ever get rid of the headphone jack then users are going to end up never getting trained on how to use wireless headphones. Generally with leaps in tech there are leaps in reduce…

So I am in a few years nearing 40, and I remembered when I first used a bluetooth headset, it was like seventeen years ago, so I was in my early 20s

Though it was (a tiny bit) more "magical" back then, pairing devices sucked then and still sucks.

Has anything even changed with how Bluetooth works?

Cause I keep giving Bluetooth new chances, "well it's X years later, and it still exists, surely they must have found a way to make it suck less"--and every time it's a disappointment. People still fiddling with pairing their devices, taking too much time, always at a most inconvenient moment (either in groups with everyone waiting and the device making funny noises, or when you're busy with the task Bluetooth was meant to free your hands for).

Did they fix or improve anything about Bluetooth over the years? Cause it feels to me the attitude has always been what you said: people should just get used to it better. Because what Bluetooth promises sounds like an awesome idea and why shouldn't we have that? But the reality is that it sucks too much and people aren't getting used to it.

To constrast with Bluetooth, I also remember when Wifi started to appear. It also used to suck a bit. It was often difficult to connect to, very unreliable, connections dropping, etc. You wouldn't want to have to rely on it for connectivity, so bring an Ethernet cable for your laptop, just in case. But nowadays, Wifi works brilliantly. You can bring your laptop for a presentation and safely depend on there being Wifi (or your/someone's phone mobile hotspot). Even older people can connect to new Wifi networks (at a restaurant or friends') without too much trouble. And that's including having to select the correct network manually and type in a password.

Ask yourself this: You're at a new place, there's a Wifi network you haven't used before, but you know the name and password. Also there is a Bluetooth device that you have never connected to before. Which of these are you most confident about you can connect to and use without trouble?

Why is this different? Did Wifi improve in significant aspects in the past two decades where Bluetooth didn't? Why is that?

Re: I still miss my headphone jack, and I want it back

#590

Post by dwighttk »

mikewhy wrote: post #543
dwighttk wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m simply countering the absurd blanket statement “...no human’s life is measurably better...” Mine is. The statement is false.

But airpods could have still been developed in a 3.5mm world.

But I wouldn't have bought them, and I would have only experienced two sets of crappy $20 bluetooth headphones and stuck by my assumption that bluetooth sucks, and my life wouldn't be any better.
Post reply on HN