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

fastcompany.com

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

#711

Post by Frondo »

_Tev wrote: post #683
Frondo wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I'm not the most careful person in the world, I'm also not the most incautious; I think it's probably not an uncommon experience for people who do regularly ride trains--e.g. those of us living in big cities where you commute by train instead of your car--that you sit and you realize you're sitting on your coat in an odd way that's got your phone in the pocket underneath you where you're sitting. I mean, at som…

That's weird, it took me half a year (commuting daily) to go from "carrying phone in jeans' back pocket is practical" to "I have to take out phone from the pocket _every time_ before I sit". No problems ever since. But I guess I learn fast ... Unless it's setting up some wireless crap.

Hey that's great. You know what? With the wireless earbuds, I never have to think about that again. I can throw my phone in my pocket, any pocket, and leave it there while I get crammed into a metro car.

So, I guess there are tradeoffs -- and fixing pairing means everyone can enjoy freedom from one more wire, while keeping on using a wire means we keep adapting our behaviors around a wire.

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

#712

Post by _Tev »

Frondo wrote: post #711
_Tev wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's weird, it took me half a year (commuting daily) to go from "carrying phone in jeans' back pocket is practical" to "I have to take out phone from the pocket _every time_ before I sit". No problems ever since. But I guess I learn fast ... Unless it's setting up some wireless crap.

Hey that's great. You know what? With the wireless earbuds, I never have to think about that again. I can throw my phone in my pocket, any pocket, and leave it there while I get crammed into a metro car. So, I guess there are tradeoffs -- and fixing pairing means everyone can enjoy freedom from one more wire, while keeping on using a wire means we keep adapting our behaviors around a wire.

I am looking forward to the day when the pairing will be fixed ...

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

#713

Post by rikkus »

tjoff wrote: post #546
yoz-y wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really niche. The GP's problem is solved because pairing effectively becomes "put these two things close together and open the box".

If it only works on one device it is pretty niche and hardly a replacement for the headphone jack...

I use them with my laptop too. I have had only one ‘pairing seems a bit broken’ issue since buying them as soon as they came out - and an iPhone restart was the fix. That’s about 2.5 minutes of hassle in several thousand hours of use.

If they were a pain, I would stop using them, but they are much less hassle than the many pairs of corded headphones I have. This said, other Bluetooth headphones are much more hassle.

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

#714

Post by rikkus »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #629
arsenico wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is exactly why AirPods are an absolutely superior product.

There's still a dance you have to do when you want to change between devices. For example, I want to switch between listening to a podcast on my iPhone to watching a show on my iPad. You'd think that would be quick and easy but it still takes 10-20 seconds.

I switch between iPhone and MacBook sometimes. My flow is usually turning off Bluetooth on the iPhone then selecting the AirPods from the MacBook, or similar. It doesn’t feel like much of a pain but it does seem like there could be an easier way. If the Bluetooth icon/menu on each device could have a ‘move AirPods to iPhone/MacBook/iPad’ option, and maybe a ‘move from’ on other devices.

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

#715

Post by rikkus »

tjoff wrote: post #641
hoorayimhelping wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Removing the headphone-jack is akin to removing a fire-alarm system Am I missing something? There's still a headphone port on phones, it's just not dedicated. People can still plug headphones in to their phones right? I'm asking because the tone of these comments makes it seem like new phones have removed the ability to listen to music without bluetooth.

You are missing the fact that lugging an adapter is not a realistic option. I lived the dongle life for almost two years. By the end the darn thing had started glitching on me and you could not buy replacements. I'm lucky it didn't damage the charging port... Not that it matters, I still didn't have it with me half of the times it turned out I needed it. I actually considered buying like 10 of them. Now we are talkin…

I bought one and put it on the end of a headphone cable and left it there. I’m not sure what the massive inconvenience is here.

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

#716

Post by rikkus »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #481
laurentl wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t forget video. Bluetooth adds latency, and “true wireless” (no cable between the earbuds) adds another layer of latency as the signal has to be sent from one earbud to the other. Noticeable enough that you have to manually add delay between the video and audio tracks, if your player allows it.

Exactly. I bought Bluetooth headphones to listen to music at work & home, and it was all fine... until I decided to watch some TV shows in my free time. It was then that I realized I have 0.5 - 1.5s lag in audio (growing with time), which made movies unwatchable. Very quickly I bought two pairs of wired headphones instead.

Something very wrong in the stack there. There should be a delay in the video in order to compensate for the latency sending the audio to your ears (Bluetooth does not add much here but it all adds up) and you should experience no latency.

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

#717

Post by tjoff »

rikkus wrote: post #715
tjoff wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing the fact that lugging an adapter is not a realistic option. I lived the dongle life for almost two years. By the end the darn thing had started glitching on me and you could not buy replacements. I'm lucky it didn't damage the charging port... Not that it matters, I still didn't have it with me half of the times it turned out I needed it. I actually considered buying like 10 of them. Now we are talkin…

I bought one and put it on the end of a headphone cable and left it there. I’m not sure what the massive inconvenience is here.

That works but that is just one very very narrow use case. There are tons of situations when that won't help you.

And that's even if you only use one pair of headphones.

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

#718

Post by camelNotation »

jamesrcole wrote: post #702
camelNotation wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The options that replaces each of those items were superior to the older design. A wireless headset requires charging, requires pairing, is more expensive, is more likely to break. It's not a superior technology, it's an alternative technology. You don't eliminate options just because alternatives exist.

They're viewed by everyone as superior in hindsight, but anytime anything gets taken away there are vocal voices complaining about how the newer alternatives are inferior in various ways (and technically the newer options are always inferior in certain ways, especially in terms of using them within existing ecosystems and usage patterns).

That is completely untrue. No one got rid of the floppy drive just because new technology existed. They got rid of the floppy drive because it took dozens of floppies to do what one CD could do. It was a genuinely inferior product with regard to its primary function.

In the case of headphones, their primary function is to connect to a device and deliver sound to your ears. Wireless headphones do not do this better than wired headphones. At all. They have a specific use case advantage related to the connection format, but that isn't universally better because it carries drawbacks as well.

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

#719

Post by yellowapple »

tomaskafka wrote: post #599
yellowapple wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the more reason to put your money toward phones that run an operating system that's not locked to one specific device vendor.

Come on. You can pick Apple that sometimes act forceful in the name of (future|profits) and you can pick Google's personal data collector with smartphone functions bolted on, and that's it.

The latter ain't necessarily true. Android without the Google Apps suite is possible (and relatively commonplace; see also: Fire tablets, Fire TV, and the rest of Amazon's Android-based devices). I ran CopperheadOS without GApps for a couple years with few issues. I currently run GApps on my new phone with LineageOS, but I'm strongly considering doing a backup and reflashing with microG's LineageOS build (which ships microG as a drop-in replacement for GApps, thus cutting Google out of the equation even for apps that would normally require it).

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

#720

Post by Wowfunhappy »

SilasX wrote: post #710
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audio and display lag in rhythm video games is a 100% solvable problem provided: 1. The amount of lag is consistent (check, as long as you're not using Bluetooth) 2. The game is not key-sounded (pass for DDR) 3. You know how much lag there is. Since rhythm games are deterministic, you can just offset the visuals and audio output to compensate for the delay. Keysounded games are imperfect, but it's rarely an issue unl…

I don't think adding your own lag solves it. The game is still expecting you to hit the buttons at its own correct time. Even if you lagged the sound to match the screen, the game would think you're wrong. And you can't get the image from before the console outputs it.

You adjust the timing window. If the display adds 20ms of lag, you expect the player to press 20ms later.

This wouldn't work for most games, because in, say, Mario Kart, the world needs to immediately react to the player's input. But in a Rhythm game, no one will notice if the visual feedback comes in a few ms late, as long as inputs are being read at the perceived-correct time. (Delayed audio feedback may be slightly noticeable in particularly bad cases, hence my note about key-sounded games.)

N.B.

1. This doesn't make the timing window more forgiving. Presses made at +0ms are counted as too early, because it is too early on the player's display.

2. I say "display" for simplicity, but IRL it's often a mistake to assume that audio and the display are delayed by equal amounts.

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Edit: To be clear, you can't fix this—the developer has to add user-adjustable latency settings. PS2 games designed for zero-latency CRTs and will never work properly on laggy LCD screens.

New games, however, usually let you adjust for latency. Although, they often make the mistake of not accounting for audio latency, or not allowing visuals and audio to be adjusted separately.

Btw, I've heard that the newer Rockband games in particular can auto calibrate for latency via hardware built into the peripherals.

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