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Comment by zimpenfish | Hacker News Reader

I use a Bluetooth dongle (Taotronics TT-BA08) with my normal Etymotic headphones for my iPhone 7. Works fine. The TT has ~20hr battery which is a week of usage for me.

(Also doubles as a 3.5mm-to-Bluetooth transmitter but I've not used that yet. I think it also has a microphone for hands-free calling.)

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My $3 headphones are guaranteed to last as long as the phone I'm using, can be toggled between my phone and laptop with one touch, have never had driver issues, are far greener and less power hungry, do not induce noticable EM interference, have perfectly fine range and fidelity, and can be used as a defensive garotte if I'm attacked. I'm sticking with jacks.

It's also a widely adopted zero configuration standard. Go figure, a real problem that needs solving. Glad we're chasing this one down, smart phone manufacturers.

I finally gave Bluetooth headphones a go recently with a pair that cost about £30 and I've found that I really like them - I was always finding that cables got in the way and although audio quality isn't brilliant I mostly listen to audiobooks where I don't mind it.

I'll probably stick with wireless headphones in future.

But are they 10x better, for the price? I listen to music. You mentioned the quality was poor. I won't compromise quality for cables, and cordless is a bit of a non-benefit to me.

You seem to forget you can still have wired headphones connected through the USB c port. It's just the standard jack that's gone. It's not wireless or jack as the only options.

Personally I've loathed wired for almost 8years now. I was happy when they removed the jack, and kept, in my mind, still an alternative if you really want to stay wired sometimes.

> You seem to forget you can still have wired headphones connected through the USB c port.

I already went through the adapter shit with my Sony Ericsson Walkman dumbphones 10 years ago. We have moved on. I refuse to technologically regress to that point because Apple wants to milk people with a new fashion accessory and the other manufacturers want to "look cool" imitating that idiocy.

Well, cordless is a benefit for me and they have a richer set of remote controls (pause/play, forward/reverse, volume up down) than the cabled headphones I've used.

They sound worse than the £300 noise cancelling cabled headphones I've also got - in absolute terms I think they are pretty decent.

I wasn't expecting to be a convert - but now that I've used the wireless headphones for a few months with my iPhone 7 I'm a convert!

I have several wired headphones, and when the wires become intolerable for some use case, I have a bluetooth adapter that offers a 3.5mm jack out. When the wires lose the constraint that one end has to fit into the device generating the sound they lose most of their issues. I mean, yes, obviously now I've got headphones with about 2 feet of wire that don't need it, but it's not doing anything bad with that 2 feet anymore.

So I get headphones that don't need to be charged most of the time and the vast, vast selection of headphones for 3.5mm form factor, and if I do need bluetooth I can get it.

I wouldn't touch $3 headphones with anyone's bargepole. My TaoTronics has no driver issues; I can have two sources connected at once (ie iPhone and Macbook)[1]; I've had no problems with interference or fidelity; and I can still use my headphones as a garotte because they're wired headphones just like your $3 abominations. :)

[1] However, in the interests of transparency, I should point out that the TT firmware has a disgracefully stupid bug whereby if you have two things connected and then move away from one of them, it'll start doing a "lost a device" beep - even if it wasn't active. It's astonishingly braindead as UX.

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