A Eulogy for the Headphone Jack

https://medium.com/@flimshaw/a-eulogy-for-the-headphone-jack-aabda6c66cd8

by mparramon • 8 years ago

68 97 8 years ago

rvense• 8 years ago

I honestly believe that the headphone jack is done.

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.

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.

AndrewDucker• 8 years ago

Yup. Unless you can replace it with something which requires no power and costs £10 then I'm not interested in moving to a new technology.

pls2halp• 8 years ago

The Apple dongle is just an external DAC(someone put the circuit in a phone) and costs $10US.

sheraz• 8 years ago

well said. That stupid apple dongle on iPhone. Amazing that I can't charge AND use my urban ears. Wtf.

Or apple abandoning that cool magnetic charger! My mbp 2010 had that skinny one, and I never came off.

Now we have usbc or whatever it is called, but waaaaay longer battery life, so that might be the answer there.

Come to think of it, is there wireless charging for laptops yet?

zimpenfish2• 8 years ago

Come to think of it, is there wireless charging for laptops yet?

Amazon has a few Qi receivers with USB-C plugs outputting 1A - that's probably enough to (slowly) charge the 12" Macbook.

KozmoNau76• 8 years ago

Come to think of it, is there wireless charging for laptops yet?

A docking station serves that purpose already, and it allows much faster charging than a Qi pad.

zeveb3• 8 years ago

Amazing that I can't charge AND use my urban ears.

I think Apple must have fired all of their UX engineers. That's the only thing that can explain the inability to charge & use headphones and the inability to charge & use a mouse[0].

[0] https://www.geek.com/apple/design-before-function-apple-magi...

dx0342• 8 years ago

Not to forget that wireless connections are less reliable, esp with a lot of devices or other sources nearby. Switching headphones off with cable is much faster than with bluetooth (just unplug it) and quality is about as good as it gets.

solarkraft9• 8 years ago

Except when you break all of your headphones while cycling ... And then your phone.

skate222• 8 years ago

Im a fan of wired headphones with the exception of excercise.

If youve ever skateboarded, popped a trick, had the wire get caught on your knee, violently tug the headphones out of your ears, and get caught up in your wheels, then you know this pain.

arethuza• 8 years ago

I managed to cut the cord on two pairs of headphones gardening before I decided to get a wireless pair - don't think I'd ever go back to wired headphones.

tomcooks• 8 years ago

Keep phone in front pocket, with wire under clothes

KozmoNau76• 8 years ago

The minijack is essentially perfect, which I know is a word that shouldn't be used lightly. It's intuitive, durable, reliable, inexpensive and compact.

In the 4-pole incarnation, it handles the addition of a microphone with backwards compatibility. A headphone-only plug works without issues in a 4-pole socket, and a 4-pole plug works equally without issues in a headphone-only 3-pole socket. Obviously you won't be able to use the microphone, but it will not mess up anything, only give you sound in one ear or something similarly weird and unexpected.

There was a small issue with TRRS standards, OMTP on one side and CTIA on the other, where the mic and ground pins were switched in relation to each other. Everyone seems to have agreed on using the CTIA standard now, though. And a lot of headsets are able to accomodate both automatically.

The minijack has stood the test of time.

wilsonnb7• 8 years ago

While I do love the 3.5mm jack (along with the 1/4", XLR, and pretty much any other analog audio connector known to man) it seems like it's redundant on modern smartphones and in the near future possibly laptops.

If everything is already going to have a USB C port, and USB C can handle audio transmission, then I see no reason to keep the 3.5mm around. Sure, there's an argument to be made about keeping the DAC inside the smartphone, but once we are out of the transition period, any pair of headphones you want will either be wireless, come with a dongle, or forgo the 3.5mm entirely and just have a USB C cable.

It would be nice if Apple would join the rest of the world (and their own Macbooks) by replacing lightning with USB C, but I think that will happen eventually.

agumonkey3• 8 years ago

I get the simplicity, but 1) I hate tangled wires 2) wire break, I take care of them but very often a minute crack will happen and your cable is now a random silence generator.

Maybe there's a middle ground solution.

larkeith• 8 years ago

There is - it's called providing both Bluetooth and minijack.

johnchristopher• 8 years ago

Except minijacks on every devices (smartphones and portable media player) I have ever owned have become useless after some time because the plug starts working randomly.

I am so much happier with a bluetooth headphones: free movement \o/. Software problems but you know what they say: software eats the world.

solarkraft9• 8 years ago

Too bad good Bluetooth earphones are still ridiculously expensive and the cheap ones (Taotronics ) keep breaking. I'll consider them again when the extra cost for the Bluetooth hardware (it shouldn't be more than 5€) gets to a manageable level.

devit• 8 years ago

An analog connector doesn't necessarily seem perfect since sound can degrade undetectably.

I think what would be perfect would be something carrying both power and a lossless digital signal.

executesorder662• 8 years ago

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.

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.

empath75• 8 years ago

If it actually affected them, they’ll absolutely complain. Most people just don’t care about the headphone jack. My car has usb, and I rarely use headphones and I like the airpods just fine.

jmmcd• 8 years ago

People don't care about the headphone jack enough to demand it. There may be a few people like the author here, but saying this --

Tell them you see what they’re up to, and you don’t like it. You can say this part slightly deeper, through gritted teeth, if you get to say it aloud. Or, just italicize it so they know you are serious.

-- is implicitly admitting defeat. Saying these loudly and italicizing in rants on social media won't change profit-driven decisions!

gambiting3• 8 years ago

I was just looking for a replacement phone, and was told by multiple techy people that I should give up looking for a phone with a headphone jack, customers clearly voted with their wallets and it's a done deal now. I'm like....when did this happen? Two years-and-a-half ago, when I bought my last phone, there were no phones with no headphone jack - now, barely any time later, it's a "done deal"?? Are you kidding me? When was I supposed to "vote with my wallet", even if I wanted to? I guess I did in the end, because I bought the OnePlus 5T almost specifically because of the headphone jack, but this whole thing is beyond stupid.

I'm normally not a fan of conspiracy theories, but I wouldn't be surprised if the removal of the headphone jack on the iphone was actually an attempt to make sure more people have bluetooth on so they can be tracked in shops using the bluetooth beacon tracking.

KozmoNau76• 8 years ago

Those people were idiots, then. Samsung S8 (and S8+) has a headphone jack (and comes with a very nice AKG headset).

Really, it's only Apple and Google who are really doubling down on having no headphone jack, and probably because they want to push their own assistant-enabled/burdened headphones.

corobo• 8 years ago

I went with an iPhone SE because a) headphone jack b) it isn't a huge surfboard of a thing

I hope there's another small but beefy phone when I next come to switch. Honestly I'd even sacrifice the 3.5mm jack for a smaller (but still useful) smartphone

ginko• 8 years ago

It's like with the switch from 4:3 aspect ratio to wide screen (first 16:10, then 16:9) in computer displays. I'm still mad about that one.

ClassyJacket• 8 years ago

Wow, I finally found the one other person that thinks screens are too wide!

If you look it up, the human field of view is actually approximately 4:3... you know, like old monitors.

KozmoNau76• 8 years ago

It was a bit annoying until displays with reasonable vertical resolution became widely available. There were way too many displays with shitty low resolution, but you only get those in the shittiest bargain-basement monitors now.

I'm using a 27" 1440p monitor at home (bought it ~4 years ago), and it has plenty of space to comfortably show two full-size pages side by side, with plenty of space left over for toolbars and such. Or two 1280x1440 windows, which is a very handy size, giving me the equivalent of two portrait-mode monitors. Most modern WMs (and even Windows!) have window snapping/tiling that makes this very easy (win+arrows).

Aspect ratio isn't really an issue anymore, as long as you have enough vertical resolution, and the additional horizontal space is nice for tool windows and such.

DomreiRoam• 8 years ago

It's expensive but I like it: http://www.eizoglobal.com/products/flexscan/ev2730q/index.ht... . It s crazy how nice it is to have so much vertical space.

rimliu• 8 years ago

For me the experience is way better when wires are gone.

rsynnott• 8 years ago

You're surprised that people aren't getting outraged by very minor inconveniences caused by design changes in consumer electronics?

executesorder662• 8 years ago

It's more the fact that I'm surprised that this is only a minor inconvenience to a lot of people.

Theodores• 8 years ago

This is a eulogy for the 'headphone jack' and not 'analogue audio out'.

How many Sony Walkman tape players and their clones did I break and where did they break? The headphone jack.

How many headphones have I broken and where did they break? The headphone jack.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

dx0342• 8 years ago

Maybe if we switch from headphone jacks to a comparable digital method. But headphone jack to Bluetooth tends to create more problems than it solves, in my opinion. The only situation where wireless has clear advantages is when cable creates additional noise (e.g. running).

lawlessone• 8 years ago

Maybe there was some lightbulb style conspiracy to ensure that headphone jacks only lasted '1000 hours' before failing

Jogging damages them.

hoopladler4• 8 years ago

Cables and switches always break first. It's the same in power tools - any component that you have a 200-pound gorrilla mucking around with every day will eventually break. You can mitigate this, but you can't eliminate it. It doesn't mean they're bad design.

That said, I think a good, working bluetooth solution would be something I'd prefer. I like analog jacks, but honestly, cables are a bad solution for wearable devices.

tawayway• 8 years ago

a 200-pound gorrilla mucking around

There's the AvE influence.

gambiting3• 8 years ago

Guess what's going to break first in all bluetooth headphones, potentially much much much sooner than headphone jack ever breaks for people?

The microscopic lithium battery crammed into the case - non replacable, usually in difficult environment and if it fails you have to buy new headphones. This is far far worse choice for consumers than normal cable-based headphones.

imiric• 8 years ago

I recently acquired a pair of high-end earphones, and while the audio quality itself is excellent, there's noticeable background noise on low volumes or during track skips, not to mention the microphonics effect. It's likely coming from the cable itself, which thankfully I can exchange, but the fact that a high-end product exhibits this behavior is concerning.

I'm very much in favor of keeping the headphone jack, but we'll look back at these analog issues the same way we currently think about needle static from record players.

klez• 8 years ago

the same way we currently think about needle static from record players.

At the moment there seems to be a group of people thinking about it with nostalgia.

tjoff5• 8 years ago

I'm very curious as to why you think the cable is the issue.

mmjaa• 8 years ago

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?

delinka• 8 years ago

In the system of Apple devices, iPhones aren't "supposed" to be content creation devices. iPads still come with headphone jacks. They've got bigger screens with space to use implements like styluses. Apple sees iPhone as a consumption device and iPad as a creation device.

styfle• 8 years ago

I seem to recall one of the iPhone keynotes saying that the iPhone is most popular camera (as in most photos taken in a year) presumably by looking at EXIF. That sounds like Apple is aware of content creators using the iPhone.

JorgeGT• 8 years ago

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.

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.

gugagore• 8 years ago

Except you can't really get a signal in below 20Hz.

solarkraft9• 8 years ago

Would having to use an external DAC be a real problem here? The Google pixel one costs 9€.

aestetix• 8 years ago

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.

tempodox• 8 years ago

You're under a false impression. The culture you're talking about is rooted in maximizing profits and cornering a market. Logic and reason are only ever established in that framework.

Jedd2• 8 years ago

Speaking of 100+ year old standards <sic> ... ask a photography friend who advocates Full Frame DSLRs why they think Full Frame is the holy grail of photography. Hilarity shall ensue.

amdavidson• 8 years ago

Do you know people that think that 35mm is some sort of magical dimension or are you arguing that sensor size doesn't play into photography?

jacknews• 8 years ago

As per the article, they'll have to pry the jack from my cold dead hands...

tezza• 8 years ago

while i cling on to my audio jack personally, the article use cases would be trivially replaced by dongles and adapters

there is the lightning dac for apple and equivalent for other brands

there are oodles of audio <-> bluetooth adapters

then i am sure there will be a raspberry pi / beaglebone / arduino with open source oscilloscope clients available.

dbrgn• 8 years ago

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.

I'm not happy at all about headphone jacks disappearing, but I doubt the development can be stopped.

mhd• 8 years ago

I bet there will be someone selling $2000 gold plated 1/4 inch jack cables in 2118 (adjust for inflation/non-existence of USD).

iamben• 8 years ago

This, so much.

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.

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.

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.

solarkraft9• 8 years ago

Hey, you could charge while you listen (my Bluetooth earphones didn't allow that).

oelmekki• 8 years ago

I see the point from both side, here. I guess both tech could live together as alternatives.

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.

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.

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.

Could bluetooth multiplexing be a thing? (or are there reasons it couldn't happen?).

I would also love to know if I'm an edge case, or if other people here are doing something similar as well.

zimpenfish2• 8 years ago

My TaoTronics TT-BA08 can have two devices connected at the same time in receive mode (obviously only one can send data at a time).

HOWEVER - and this is a giant caveat - the firmware[1] is really dumb about this because if A and B are connected, A is sending audio, and you move out of range of B, it'll start a plaintive beeping.

[1] Might actually be a function of the chipset since it's happened identically on two different dongles that allowed two connections.

tjoff5• 8 years ago

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.

It is beyond insane to remove the headphone jack when we have no even half-decent alternatives. This is before the detail that today you can be absolutely certain that all your bluetooth devices are remotely hackable.

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.

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.

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.

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.

wilsonnb7• 8 years ago

The only issue I see is that iPhones aren't using USB C, at least not yet.

If you go out and buy a new android smartphone and a new laptop right now, there's a pretty high chance that they will both have USB C. You can then use a reasonably priced USB C -> 3.5mm adapater with a DAC (the Google one is only 9 dollars, and your phone will probably come with one of these) and use your headphones with either device.

In the past, laptops/desktops and smartphones/mp3 players didn't share any ports aside from the 3.5mm analog port. Now, they're going to share a USB C port so there's no longer as much of a need for the 3.5mm port.

In the near future, I expect many more headphones to come with their own USB C adapter or to forgo the 3.5mm jack entirely. In the medium to far future, I expect Apple will replace the lightning port with USB C and from that point on, including a 3.5mm port on something will make about as much sense as any other legacy port that most people no longer care about.

The exception will probably be professional audio equipment, which I expect will keep analog ports around forever because it actually makes sense in that field.

tjoff5• 8 years ago

Why?

Oh, and why shouldn't I be able to charge and listen to music at the same time? I need another adapter for that?

Adapters are an insane solution to a non-problem.

solarkraft9• 8 years ago

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. The removal of the built in audio jack won't hurt us much.

5555624• 8 years ago

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?

zeveb3• 8 years ago

Without a headphone jack, how do you use the built-in radio?

I don't think Apple & Google want you to use the radio. They don't make money from it, so they don't see a reason to permit you to use it.

A Eulogy for the Headphone Jack

Related Stories