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Comment by modzu | Hacker News Reader

you guys should try switching to a camera for your photography instead of a cellphone, then we can remove the camera from the phone too

the idea that because bluetooth headphones exist means the jack shouldnt exist is not fair -- there are plenty of reasons the jack is plenty useful to plenty enough people

the only excuse I can see to remove the jack is that when you sell a billion devices and the little jack costs a buck a device you just made yourself a billion dollars for nothing. oh and now you can sell dongles that cost $1 a pop to make for $10 a pop and you make yourself 10 billion

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Exactly. I routinely switch my headset from my laptop to my phone and vice versa. Doing this with a jack is trivial. Doing this with a BlueTooth headset is very annoying and requires additional steps on both devices.

Anecdotally, my experience with Bluetooth headphones is that they’re easier. I don’t have to do anything more complicated than you do — if I turn on my Bluetooth headphones in range of my computer, they connect. If I turn them on in range of my iPhone or iPad, they connect.

If any of them start playing sound, it comes out the headphones. No cable twiddling required.

> No cable twiddling required.

But charging is.

And if they're currently connected to your phone and you want to connect to your computer?

Bose BT headphones have two inputs. I usually have my phone and laptop connected. It has some priority sorting order which seems to work well.

Yes, Bose QC BT headphones are good. So now you need $300 headphones to solve a problem that didn't exist in the first place.

And 2 inputs are good but it's clearly a pain once you want to connect more devices, say a laptop, phone, ipad, TV...

That's a bad analogy or whatever it is. If you remove the camera from the phone you cannot take photos. If you remove the 3.5mm jack you can still listen to audio and even still plug in wired headphones with an adapter.

you said it yourself -- i can still listen to audio "with an adapter". so this is like saying you can still take photos "with a camera".

the point being that to some, the wired output was useful and significant without the requirement of having additional adapters.

actually wasn't the idea of a "smart" phone that it could replace so many separate things we used to also have to carry around...?

> when you sell a billion devices and the little jack costs a buck a device you just made yourself a billion dollars for nothing

You're looking at it the wrong way. It's not the money you save; it's the money you make by selling adapters.

Also, there might be legitimate engineering reasons for getting rid of the 3.5mm jack. It is rather large by modern standards, maybe there are also water-proofing concerns. It's a trade-off I wouldn't make, but I'm neither Apple nor Google.

If space utilization is the issue then use a 2.5mm jack. Like Palm (before HP) did over 10 years ago. Waterproofing a jack is not any harder than doing it for USB.

Eliminating the jack entirely just means I'll be looking elsewhere for my next phone and I've bought a lot of Google phones.

Bluetooth dropouts and interference are a regular occurrence. And dongles are not necessary unless the phone makers is just trying to make more money by removing existing functionality from the base device.

Not even dongles, you drive X% increase in Bluetooth headphone sales of your Beats line and $150 AirPods.

I think there's value in having a camera there, even if it's shitty. It means you are always carrying around a device capable of image/video recording, which is tremendously useful.

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