when a better one already existed
Agree with everything, but it’s not just that it existed, it’s that it was also already widely adopted for literal decades. This was an established solution that is now getting replaced with something worse. This isn’t betamax that just lost the adoption race against a competitor.
You keep arguing that people can just use a dongle. I can keep arguing that a dongle solution sucks ass. I have used a dongle and even the way it’s just used sucks because it’s pulled out of the socket with much less force than headphones, so it keeps getting disconnected. If you like it, fine. I don’t and I still think that removing the jack is a dumb decision. This is getting nowhere.
I can’t have them connected to my headphones all the time because I connect headphones to other devices that all have a fucking headphone jack.
- It’s an additional, and to most people superfluous, point for water ingress. Water damage is the most common type of damage in phones.
I’ve had watertight phones with a headphone jack over a decade ago.
- It takes up space which could be utilised otherwise, like with a slightly larger battery or larger speakers or camera modules.
Yes. Anything you add to a phone is a tradeoff. No shit. These points are what is usually used to justify the lack of a jack. But maybe, just maybe, they don’t save as much money as they make with selling wireless headphones and this is just an excuse? Especially the big companies like Apple or Samsung that sell their own peripherals? And this whole thing is just an excuse to sell overpriced gadgets that need to be replaced every few years because of their batteries? Maybe, just maybe, it’d be valid if consumers still had a choice and could pick phones with or without a jack and would have to pay for the luxury of using decent headphones with a few milliamperehours?
- It’s an additional part which needs to be manufactured, stocked, installed and purchased. Extra cost which only benefits a few. This is especially important to Fairphone in particular because they don’t use off-the-shelf components and promise to supply replacement parts pretty much indefinitely. I.e. Fairphone would have to design a custom module and then have that module in stock and manufactured specifically for them for the lifetime of each of their devices. That’s not a trivial expense.
Manufacturing a phone is not a trivial expense. Removing features is a business decision and a headphone jack costs money but doesn’t earn any whereas they can produce more cheaply without one. I get it. It’s just that doing so requires you to buy and use battery powered headphones that are much less sustainable than traditional magnets tied to a cable. How a company that lives off its promise to safe the world jumps on that wagon is a miracle to me. Companies that remove headphones don’t care about audio quality (which is why Sony still produces phones with audio jacks, I guess) or sustainability. Which is odd for a company like fp.
USB-C to headphone jack dongles suck. You lose them easily, you can’t charge your phone if they’re connected and if you disconnect your headphones the device still behaves as if they’re plugged in. It’s so much less convenient and on the other hand there’s just no downside to having a dedicated headphone jack, so I still don’t get why they’re no longer including them.
You Linux users sure are a contentious people.
I’ve been using threema as my primary messenger for years… Damn.
Won’t happen as it’d require a change in the constitution but the Nazis and the far left have a blocking minority for that.
The thing is, though, that command line instructions work on most flavours of whatever distro you have running. If you have an xfce problem it’s fair game to tell you where to click, but if your issue is not related to your desktop environment, giving a solution that works on most, if not all, systems that may have the same issue, is actually a good idea. No?
I just explained how they are effectively doing that because a dongle is such a terrible solution that it’s essentially not usable. I can repeat my points, from charging over being pulled out, and add that they are either incompatible with some devices that don’t supply the analogue audio signal over USB (so you’re usually just buying one of those to see if they work, are happy if it does and then annoyed when you need to use it on another device where it doesn’t and boom you’re suddenly left without working headphones despite having one of those stupid dongles) or come with probably the cheapest, suckishest piece of shit DAC some underpaid Chinese procurement jerk could find anywhere on the market, so the audio quality will probably be terrible even when using wired speakers on a fucking dongle.
Is there a law that prohibits me from trying to keep using wired headphones? No, so you’re right there that they’re not technically forcing anyone. But in anything but making it technically impossible, they’re making it as unusable and unlikeable as possible, so effectively, there’s no way around using Bluetooth headphones.