Whatever we think we gained from losing the 3.5mm headphone jack on modern smartphones is not worth it.
The main reason (or excuse) we were given for why we lost the useful jack was “it creates space inside the phone that could be used for all sorts of cool stuff.” It’s possible, we’ll give them that, and the promise of bigger batteries sounded like it could be a good trade.
It’s been years now and smartphone battery sizes and battery lives have hardly changed, despite the space created by removing the headphone jack. So, what did we actually gain from losing it? We are still waiting for the “cool stuff” we were promised.
We gained expensive Bluetooth earbuds though. Are they as good as their wired counterparts? – no, but they are serviceable. These expensive Bluetooth earbuds are why we lost the headphone jack.
The 3 camps
I know there are 3 main camps when it comes to the use of Bluetooth earbuds.
The first says “Ya’ll connect earphones to your phones?” These people couldn’t care less about audio output options if the earpiece works and they can make calls in loudspeaker mode. What’s there to say about this camp? Do you, I guess.
The second camp says, “Bluetooth is convenient, man. I don’t have to deal with tangled cables anymore, life couldn’t be sweeter.” To which I say, we didn’t need to lose the headphone jack for that. Bluetooth coexisted with the headphone jack for decades before Apple’s “courage”.
The third camp will tell you about HD audio, lossless audio etc. and how wired is the way to go. To this camp’s argument, I’ll add the following:
What you’re looking at in the screenshot above are the ‘Sound quality and effects settings’ on an LG V50. LG, rest their sweet souls, tried to carve out a niche for themselves in catering to the audiophiles and the DACs like the one in the V50 were really great.
As you can see though, you need to be wired to enjoy the Hi-Fi Quad DAC. Trust me, you don’t need to be an audiophile to appreciate the better sound quality. It kind of is like walking around thinking you see well enough and then getting glasses and realising you saw in 360p.
If that’s not a big deal for you. If you don’t mind missing out on stereo separation that sounds like it were angels surrounding you singing their hearts out, then at least bear with me as I lay out one other niche use case that has people like me in fits.
Lag
If you play around in Digital Audio Workstations like FL Studio (previously Frooty Loops) you will be hit with lag. You cannot use Bluetooth headsets to create music because it takes a few milliseconds for you to get feedback on your key presses.
That delay is enough to throw you off. The same applies when you want to sing to a backtrack. You will hear your own voice coming through milliseconds after you sing, as you’re trying to sing the next line. It can’t be done.
Gamers will tell you about this lag too. If you’re deep in a battle royale and on the lookout for footsteps behind you or any rustling, you don’t want to get that information milliseconds late because that ends with a bullet in your head every single time in highly competitive games.
Courage
I know it took “courage” for phone manufacturers to ditch the headphone jack. It’s just a happy coincidence that that courage led to fatter purses for them.
How can we not applaud the courage that led to new flagships coming with USB-C and Lightning earbuds at first and then dropping wired earbuds completely?
Maybe I’m salty over nothing. Maybe ya’ll are happy with how things turned out. We could always turn to the trusty dongle to alleviate the above, after all. For our sanity, we better accept the dongle life.
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