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A year after iPhone 7 omitted headphone jack, do you care? (a friendly wager)

Do you care that the iPhone 7 came without a headphone jack?

  • Yes, I still wish the iPhone 7 would have come with a headphone jack.

  • No, I never did and/or bluetooth/lightning-adapter are fine for my usage.

Results are only viewable after voting.
SquireSCA said:
I don't know what that last post was on about, but I do miss the headphone jack.

Yes, I accept that it's gone from Apple for good, but I don't agree that it was "progress" or "for my benefit"...

Apple wanted to push dongle sales and expensive bluetooth earbuds that don't sound as good as a $25 set of wired ear buds. They didn't "remove the cord", they just moved it from the phone to the wall. Now you have two things to be a "wall hugger" about... charging your phone, and your ear buds, separately.

If the phone came with a dongle, that would be nice, as the included Apple lightning ear buds suck. So I went to Amazon and ordered a set. Got them, not realizing that they weren't the Apple brand dongles, and of course I plug it in and my XR tells me it is not an approved device and disables it, forcing me to go to Amazon again, and order up another set and making sure it was by Apple.

None of this is for my benefit as a consumer. This is about milking their customer base for every dollar possible. Apple doesn't care about any of us. They care about stock price. That's it. We are a means to an end and don't fool yourself into believing otherwise...

That's why they cling to Lightning with USB-C is much better and faster. They want to sell Lightning cables and collect royalties from other companies selling them. It's free money.

The headphone jack isn't outdated, it actually has more bandwidth and better sound quality than BT. It also allows you to connect your phone to more devices. A lot of cars just have an AUX line in, and not all home theater receivers have BT, etc... There are lots of uses for a headphone jack, even today.

I have a set of AKG ear buds that came with my Galaxy S9+ that sound better than any BT earphones I have tried. And they are cushioned and noise isolating, and I can pop them in and slide my motorcycle or dirt bike helmet on and they stay in place, in my ears, and sound great. Try that your your air buds and see how it works out... :)

Getting rid of the floppy drive analogy, is not the same. What came after the floppy was BETTER.

This, isn't. It's a step backwards in function and sound quality, plus it gives you another device to have to keep charging, etc...

Will complaining about it change anything? Of course not. But again this is probably less about changing anything and more of a refutation of the stance of "Apple said XYZ, so it must be good"...

In this case, we got rid of the universal DVD burner and were forced to go back to a ZIP drive...
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Samsung is removing the headphone jack on the upcoming S10/Note10 so you better keep your S9 for the foreseeable future..
 
The-Real-Deal82 said:
I’ve still got too many good pairs of wired headphones and don’t really want yet another gadget I’ve got to remember to charge so still just use the crappy dongle that came with the iPhone.
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Speaking from experience, this just means that you will lose the damn dongle at least once. And it will be somewhere or sometime when you can’t immediately replace it. Tomah Wisconsin at 10:00PM for instance.
 
EdT said:
Speaking from experience, this just means that you will lose the damn dongle at least once. And it will be somewhere or sometime when you can’t immediately replace it. Tomah Wisconsin at 10:00PM for instance.
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I am yet to lose it but no doubt I will at some point lol. Better than losing expensive earphones though I suppose. I just use the standard Apple supplied ones so have some in a drawer at home and some in a drawer at work. My company take the earphones out of the boxes of company issued iPhones so I’ve had a plentiful supply for years now.
 
The-Real-Deal82 said:
I am yet to lose it but no doubt I will at some point lol. Better than losing expensive earphones though I suppose. I just use the standard Apple supplied ones so have some in a drawer at home and some in a drawer at work. My company take the earphones out of the boxes of company issued iPhones so I’ve had a plentiful supply for years now.
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I ended up replacing my iPhone 6 this year because the touchscreen would only work intermittently. I’ve left my Bluetooth headphones at one hotel while on a trip, bought the dongle, then left or lost that at another small town a month later. Cheap headphones I can get almost anywhere, the audio dongle isn’t available in most small towns, at least on the Great Plains. I’ve got a second set of Bluetooth earphones but I’m looking to get over the ear noise canceling ones now, either Sony or Bose. Harder to lose and the battery lasts a lot longer, and for the Bose it’s just a triple A battery available anywhere. I assume that Sony is similar.
 
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The-Real-Deal82 said:
I am yet to lose it but no doubt I will at some point lol. Better than losing expensive earphones though I suppose. I just use the standard Apple supplied ones so have some in a drawer at home and some in a drawer at work. My company take the earphones out of the boxes of company issued iPhones so I’ve had a plentiful supply for years now.
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The ones that come with the phone are complete crap though. They just lay and wobble in your ears, the sound quality is poor, etc...
 
SquireSCA said:
The ones that come with the phone are complete crap though. They just lay and wobble in your ears, the sound quality is poor, etc...
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My wife can’t use them either as they don’t fit her ears but fit mine fine. Sound quality might be poor but I’m usually working while listening to music so don’t worry too much. I’m not ruling out trying Bluetooth for exercise for example, but I’m not at a point where I’m willing to invest significant money as I lose and break headphones usually. I’ve been lucky not losing the ones attached to the dongle though so far.
 
EdT said:
I ended up replacing my iPhone 6 this year because the touchscreen would only work intermittently. I’ve left my Bluetooth headphones at one hotel while on a trip, bought the dongle, then left or lost that at another small town a month later. Cheap headphones I can get almost anywhere, the audio dongle isn’t available in most small towns, at least on the Great Plains. I’ve got a second set of Bluetooth earphones but I’m looking to get over the ear noise canceling ones now, either Sony or Bose. Harder to lose and the battery lasts a lot longer, and for the Bose it’s just a triple A battery available anywhere. I assume that Sony is similar.
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You sound like me in regards to losing headphones lol. I have trodden on a few pairs over the years and shatter the ear pieces, that’s the common breakage. I’d more than likely lose any Bluetooth earphones I own so when I do invest then they’ll have to be cheap.

I found someone’s AirPod while out jogging back in the summer but didn’t pick it up as I didn’t fancy touching it, yuck. I ended up guiding the owner to its location via a Facebook appeal lol. Hopefully they found it as it’s an expensive loss.
 
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I actually use bluetooth earphones now since they're better for exercise, but I use them quite happily with my iPhone SE which also sports a useful headphone jack, which still comes in handy at other times. I still think it was a bum move to take this out of later iPhones; my view on that hasn't changed in the slightest.

The posters in this thread telling people that this was all for our benefit and that we're just being resistant to change - you are just the worst. Go take a look at yourselves. Change in itself is not a benefit or a virtue; a change which simply takes something away and gives nothing back is a loss, not a gain. That loss is still a loss whether it happened yesterday, last year, or (in this case) two years ago.

Meanwhile the inevitable happened this year and Apple removed the jack from the latest iPad Pro's too - and no doubt we're meant to believe this is also for our benefit, and particularly necessary to save space on that 13" model of course. Definitely a benefit and not just utter contempt for their customers.
 
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Yes, this is still a major pain. I’m far more organized than most, have two dongles I keep on my two most-used pair of headphones, and I STILL managed to go on a trip recently forgetting the adapter. Now I have a new iPad with a different usb-c adapter, and I’m constantly switching between them. I went into the headphone store at the airport and refused to pay the $19 they had marked the adapter up to. In the 5 minutes I was in the store no fewer than 3 other people came in looking for the same thing!!

My wife is holding on to her 6s because she refuses to give up the headphone jack, this despite the fact that she has AirPods and multiple pairs of 3.5mm and lightning buds. She just wants to be able to use whatever is conveniently at hand and she is not good at keeping track of any given pair.

Bluetooth is more convenient but it still has a lot of significant disadvantages compared to a wire. Removing the headphone jack remains one of the dumber decisions Apple has ever made.
 
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Pricekart said:
Airpods are the savior. I like my iPhone with no tangled wires appended to it.
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I do, too, but I also like my bank account with $150 in it that I did not hand over to Apple to help remedy a problem that the company created.
 
janeauburn said:
I do, too, but I also like my bank account with $150 in it that I did not hand over to Apple to help remedy a problem that the company created.
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The new Apple Car, they remove the steering wheel, but it's ok, because they have a $1500 accessory that takes the place of the steering wheel! Doesn't work as well as the one they took off, but stop whining, you have a solution available to you, right? :)
 
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SquireSCA said:
The new Apple Car, they remove the steering wheel, but it's ok, because they have a $1500 accessory that takes the place of the steering wheel! Doesn't work as well as the one they took off, but stop whining, you have a solution available to you, right? :)
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Funny. But when it comes to cars, given that over 37,000 die in auto accidents each year in the U.S. alone, I will gladly shell out a great deal of money when autonomous vehicles arrive.
 
Still annoyed by this but since they removed the headphone jack I’ve been using my phone differently. I no longer listen to music or watch anything with sound. I just use it for the basics: email, messaging, browsing. If I need to make a call I’ll use wired headphones with the adapter. Bluetooth headphones would be another device to remember to charge and another different charging port I would have unless I got the AirPods but earbuds hurt my ears so I prefer over the ear.
 
janeauburn said:
Funny. But when it comes to cars, given that over 37,000 die in auto accidents each year in the U.S. alone, I will gladly shell out a great deal of money when autonomous vehicles arrive.
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I don't want that. Imagine the network going down, or getting hacked. Plus, the reality is that some of us drive for the pleasure of it.

How will autonomous cars deal with people out driving their sportscars, or motorcycles? What about off roading? I ask because I do all that stuff... I don't see a self driving motorcycle being any fun. Autonomous works for things like Uber or maybe delivering pizzas, but a lot of people actually enjoy driving and buy vehicles for that purpose, so I don't see all the vehicles on the road ever being autonomous... We still have large parts of the country that don't have decent cellular coverage... I just see all sorts of problems with autonomous cars...
 
SquireSCA said:
I don't want that. Imagine the network going down, or getting hacked. Plus, the reality is that some of us drive for the pleasure of it.

How will autonomous cars deal with people out driving their sportscars, or motorcycles? What about off roading? I ask because I do all that stuff... I don't see a self driving motorcycle being any fun. Autonomous works for things like Uber or maybe delivering pizzas, but a lot of people actually enjoy driving and buy vehicles for that purpose, so I don't see all the vehicles on the road ever being autonomous... We still have large parts of the country that don't have decent cellular coverage... I just see all sorts of problems with autonomous cars...
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Don't worry about it. The roads and infrastructure will need to be redone to accommodate autonomous vehicles.
 
Pnr2020 said:
Who cares wireless is the future
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It's the present for tens of millions of people. If you want reduced audio quality and an extra thing to charge and worry about losing, you can use BT. It's not like it has to be one or the other, you can have both, you know.

I hate having to charge things.

Let's say Apple decided to get rid of the camera? I mean, it's a phone, right, why does it need to take pics? If you want to take pics, go get an Apple DSLR...

It would be the future, so you cool with that?
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tromboneaholic said:
It reminds me of the people who complained when Apple removed the 1.4mb floppy drive from the Mac and gave us Wi-Fi instead.
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Because wifi didn't allow you to take the data and put it in your pocket and take it with you...
 
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