Notably Fairphone removed the headphone jack on their phones so that they could sell us these wireless earbuds. I appreciate that the battery is replacable on these buds, but not worth it imo! After all, wired earbuds don't even need batteries. :(
The industry seems to have settled on USB-C dongles as the solution for wired headphones. They’re a little clunkier, but they do work pretty well, and you get options for the DAC.
Headphone jacks were a major wear item on older smartphones, and waterproofing them is very annoying as well, requiring a ton of adhesives. I had to take the back glass off my old Xperia Z2C three times over its life to replace the headphone jack, and the waterproofing was totally shot after doing so. At the end of the day, I honestly don’t mind the trade off, although I can see how it can be annoying for others.
My experience has been that it's really easy to damage your USB-C port like this if you keep your phone in your pocket while walking/running. I always end up with the port loose and making poor connections.
I ended up buying a small battery-powered Bluetooth-to-3.5mm receiver that I keep in my left pocket, and then send Bluetooth audio to it from my phone in my right pocket. It's a pretty ridiculous setup.
The sideways force on the connector while in my pocket has always been a real concern to me. It's the main thing keeping me from regularly using a dongle.
Get a USB-C magnetic breakaway adapter and you shouldn't have concerns damaging the port. Mildly annoyingly will probably breakaway while you're jogging occasionally but at least it shouldn't damage the port.
I have been running (sports) 16km each week with my Fairphone 3 in my pocket and wires headphones, for roughly 3 years now on top of that less harsh daily use during commutes — still no issues.
As an electronics guy the jack is rarely the issue, a TRS jack has spring contacts inside, so wear should not be an issue unless they use the shittiest of connectors or you actually damage the bonding between connector and PCB. It is 100 times more likely for the plug to fail and a 1000 times more likely for the cable to fail.
The bonding between connector and PCB seems to fail a LOT in certain devices. I've been seeing a near 100% failure rate on the USB C connectors over a few years in some Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop generations.
I've not seen the same failure in TRS connectors in a long time now, but I think that's mainly because few people actually use them.
I'm an electronics guy too (if you count firmware :P), and I've always found the spring contacts on TRS jacks to be hit or miss. It's a big receptacle with lots of room for lint to get into, the plug rotates, and it can experience some big forces on drops or cable tugs.
Most jacks do just fine, but having the springs eventually wear out on some device or another wasn't uncommon for me 6+ years ago. Not having to worry about whether the jack is going to suck or not on a given product suits me just fine. Having it attached to an adapter means I can easily swap it out if it wears.
That said, some of the sibling comments are reporting wear on USB-C receptacles when used while running... The mechanical design of the Apple Lightning connector seems to me like it'd be more durable, since it's tapered and doesn't have that center alignment thing. But maybe the contact springs of Lightning wear out faster as a result? I haven't seen any data on this, just speculating.
I think it varies a lot from product to product, and much of it is the mechanical design of the phone housing, and the durability of the jack they selected. Plus it’s really easy to accidentally put a lot of mechanical strain on it when the cable gets tugged.
MiniUSB was a busted connector design from the start, which is why the industry moved to Micro USB so quickly. Many MiniUSB receptacles in the wild were failing after thousands or even hundreds(!) of insertions.
I haven't had a single headphone jack fail since my 2nd gen. original iPod (and I'm an avid headphone user). It had this special variant with a remote connection in an outer ring around the headphone jack, resulting in a weak plastic ring which broke a bit too easily from wear if you omitted the wired remote, and plugged your headphones straight into it.
But as others have mentioned, I too have had quite a few Micro-USB and USB-C connectors fail over the years. But almost never the trusty old and dearly missed minijack.
For me the Jack plug from the headphone would always break. Could repair it a couple of times with my own clunky soldering work, but eventually would just wear out too much and I would buy a new headphone. Since wireless I haven't looked back.
Yeah, never had headphone jack issues, it was always the USB port, including with type C now. Sounds like a ridiculous assertion to me, but maybe I use my phone differently.
The material and monetary cost of the number of wired headphones I've destroyed in the 6 years before I got wireless head phones (because there was no realistic way to stow the cabling for the activity I was involved in) probably approaches the cost of the 2 pairs of wireless headphones I've owned in the last 6 years.
I don't think they cut the headphone jack just to sell these headphones. While it is true that you can make a headphone jack as water-resistant as the rest of the phone, every hole you put in the phone adds to the design and assembly cost to maintain the same IP rating. And each hole significantly adds to the complexity of repairing that phone in such a way that it maintains that IP rating after the repair.
I've lost either the earbuds or case of so many wireless earbuds during the past 4 years that I could have afforded 2-3 much higher quality wired earbuds.
Pens: lol yes, it’s why I’ve never tried to get into very-nice pens.
I’d have lost my AirPods several times without find my. I’m certain I’d not have managed to keep both buds more than a couple months if I weren’t very diligent about putting them back in the case when I’m not actively using them.
It's way easier for me to lose something the size and weight of a nickel than a phone. Not to mention ear buds do on occasion come lose and fall. With wired headphones, they dangle, but wireless buds fall into all manner of nooks, drains, and bottomless caverns.
Same. I've been using a tiny pair of wireless headphones for ~5 years. If anything were to break, it is fairly easy to order replacements on Ebay which causes nothing new to be manufactured.
A set of small wireless headphones uses far less material than a large pair of wired headphones. Not saying it is a direct replacement, just that everything has some environmental impact, and fretting over one tiny device misses the forest for the trees.
people seem to forget that having a headphone jack doesn't preclude one from using wireless earbuds. if you grind thru many wired earphones for some reason, great, you do you. for others, they will hang onto it much longer and it will be more sustainable and cheaper.
And I'm not speaking to the fact that you can use wireless headphones with a phone with a 3.5mm jack.
I'm saying that for the objectives Fair set out for themselves, dropping the headphone jack is low-hanging fruit. Its one more piece that fails, it fails as a consequence of normal use (there's no way to baby the headphone jack, or the power jack, in such a way that it doesn't eventually fail from repeated usage. Indeed, they're explicitly rated for number of cycles (typically around 5000 for a headphone jack, which is consistent with daily usage for 3 years, well below their 5 year warranty. By comparison, I'm seeing 20k cycles for a cheap usb-c port, which is a lot more defensible for a 5 year warranty)), and it makes maintaining their IP rating after a repair much harder (doubly so, given that they want users to be able to repair their phones).
All for a feature that, given the price point, won't even be used by the majority of users.
Batteries are just one of the many issues when headphone jacks are removed. (Also you can totally use wireless/usb-c headphones with phones with jacks, but that's something hopefully people realize.)
"an entire USB sound card" is literally a single piece of silicon (plus some passive components like resistors and capacitors) that can cost less than 10 cents to manufacture. Not exactly a huge burden here.
Additionally, unlike a 3.5mm jack, you don't need to deal with a 'sound card' that can handle almost anything you can plug into it. You get to tailor your headphone/headset drivers specifically to your attached devices. The general-purpose device that can handle anything you can throw at it costs much more.
Except for the not-so-minor issue for us Android users: The default gain on Apples adapter is far too low for most proper headphones, and Android doesn't touch the gain and just relies on software-mixer for volume control. This results in a far too low volume. On Apple and Windows devices on the other hand, they are excellent.
Yeah, if only there were some kind of connector which would deliver the current to the earbuds. Then you wouldn't need batteries at all. Perhaps some manner of universal connector which would work with the earbuds everyone already has. But that seems too far fetched, we just don't have the technology for such a thing.
Sounds like you want usb type c! In addition to Audio Adapter Accessory Mode which allows it to drive a couple pins with analog audio exactly like the 3.5mm jacks (and therefore enabling completely passive adapters to support devices with 3.5mm jacks), usb type c also supports charging, high speed data, and video. That's a lot more universal than some silly jack that can only support audio.
Unfortunately it looks like at least the fairphone 4 didn't support Audio Adapter Accessory Mode and I haven't found information on whether the fairphone 5 supports it. Definitely a mark against the company if they don't support Audio Adapter Accessory Mode.
Plugging into a USB-C port in the center of the bottom side feels a lot less sturdy than plugging into the audio port closer to the side. Decreased the lifetime of the wires by a lot as well, it felt like. I've tried for a while before finally giving up and getting bluetooth earbuds.
It's not the end of the world, but it's the end of wired headphones. The dongle is a pain. Phonemakers know this, and that's why each removed the jack, to sell their new wireless earbuds. Even Samsung did this after criticizing Apple for it.
And most people who say "just use the dongle" are not using the dongle.
You got me there, I use wireless headphones. That being said, why is the dongle such a hassle? If your headphone has a detachable plug, you can easily buy a new cable with a USB-c DAC built into it.
Mainly it's an extra thing to carry around, and it probably won't be there when you need it. I tried buying 3 Lightning dongles and leaving them on all my aux cords, problem is they don't work with anything else (Mac, Windows, Android, or even older iPhones like the 6S), so you will disconnect them every time and possibly lose them that way. My wife accidentally banished all of mine into our car's seats. Then they also became incompatible with newer USB-C iPhones.
It's also less reliable than the builtin port, kinda like HDMI dongles but not as bad. My earbuds' inline mic wasn't working with them, idk why but it was fine using the jack. Sometimes my phone didn't realize headphones were plugged into the dongle and it kept using its internal speakers. Irritating when you can't rely on basic functionality like that.
Lastly, leaving the dongle plugged in can wear out the port as others have said, and you also won't be able to charge at the same time. Particularly an issue in cars; I even tried wireless charging and found that my phone overheated if it was also running nav.
With all those caveats added, the dongled jack is far more hassle than Bluetooth, and it's not because BT is particularly good. iPhones had both for several years, and BT headphones never really took off until the built-in jack was removed.
