I need a new phone and I want to cry because it is seeming that the Pixel Pro with Graphene is the best I can do. New phones fucking suck, It’ not about “I need the MAXIMUM PRIVACY 90000” it’s “I want some control, I’m not buying a Samsung ever again due to the mountain of irremovable bloatware”
Not being allowed to uninstall facebook should be a crime.
For real. Samsung’s sheer quantity of bloatware on every phone is ridiculous. It’s the primary reason I’m never buying from them again, aside from just plain old privacy concerns.
I have a Galaxy Note 9 from the days of yore and it’s beginning to show its age, I need to replace it before it completely shits the bed, but like, what am I supposed to replace it with?
I need a headphone jack, I need it to be powerful enough to run modest phone games to the tune of Arknights and similar, and I want to feel like I have a half decent amount of control over it (no apps I can’t remove within reason)
I too was disgruntled with samsung and chose a pixel and grapheneOS. It does not have a headphone jack but I can reluctantly live with that. It has been the best OS i have ever used and I didn’t even have to root it.
Same same
So sick of Nintendo doing stuff like this. Releasing the GBA SP and requiring a dongle to use headphones? What if I need to charge during a session of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance? This will never catch on.
Sadly it’s more profitable to force users to buy more shit
That wasn’t even the reason for that change. There just plain wasn’t much room on the GBA SP for a headphone jack. People have modded them in aftermarket but every single one of the possible positions looks like crap and the GBA was never the pinnacle of audio hardware. In fact, the headphone jack made a triumphant return on every handheld Nintendo has released since the GBASP, including the GBA Micro.
(I am not saying there weren’t good bops on the GBA, most Pokemon tunes are incredible. Just that audio quality was never a priority for design on the GBA.)
im so tired of crappy usb-c dongles that stop working if my phone moves at all and bluetooth earbuds with shit battery i might just get an sd card with massive storage and use my old nintendo ds as a music player
I just bought a €10 mp3 player off aliexpress.
See, this might be ok if there were two of them. But now when the battery gets low you are required to stop listening.
I see your point but, isn’t this more cumbersome than wired earbuds/headphones?
Sure, but what’s the use case at this point anyway?
“My bluetooth headset ran out of battery and my phone ran out of battery and I want to listen to music.” How often does that really happen?
Bluetooth is less cumbersome than all of these choices, but for under a tenner you can solve all these drawbacks. Whack it in a pocket of your travel bag with your earbuds and away you go. I genuinely couldn’t even tell you the last time I saw somebody in real life with wired headphones. My bluetooth AKGs actually have a headphone socket, that I’ve used exactly twice. Once to watch an in flight movie on a 480p screen on the back of a headrest, and again to use them with my Switch since for some bonkers reason it didn’t support bluetooth headphones for ages, despite having a BT receiver on board. No idea where the cable is for them now. I doubt I’ll need it again.
I travel 8+ hours by train several times a week, and regularly go a day or two without access to power where I sleep. By all means, I’m not the average consumer, but the situation of “need to change while also wanting to use my headset” comes up often enough.
Now that’s just perverse. 😳
Personally I’m not a huge fan of unplugging and replugging and jostling around a cord inside my phone’s main vein though. When that port goes that’s it, I can either pay too much to have someone fix it or pay too much for the “upgrade” with a higher number and the same problems. If it had two at least when the headphone jack dies it isn’t “oh well now your shit won’t turn back on once it dies have fun,” it’s “oh well at least I can fall back on these shitty airpods.” It either needs a usbc and a 3.5mm or two usbc, and this is my manifesto…
Yeah, I feel similar. That’s why I use wireless.
And what do you know, Ego enjoyed a simple meal that finally broke his personal vendetta against the restaurant.
Enjoy your music.
Old man yells at radio waves.
I swear I can hear them yelling back.
Old man yells at sky
I’ve found that bluetooth headphones are about just as cheap as wired ones and being free of the cable makes a big difference.
Washing dishes? Don’t have to worry about your phone being to far away from you.
Laying in bed? Don’t have to worry about headphones getting pulled out of your ears because you rolled over.
For the same price wired headphones have much better sound quality than wireless ones. They are built with less expensive parts and software.
The tiny batteries in small wireless earbuds makes them disposable, after a few years.
I own have owned lots of different wired and wireless headphones. My two over ear wired headphones need a new ear cushion every couple of years or a new cable per decade, but they last and last. My wireless headphones have either become unusable because of dead batteries or one part of an overengineered device breaking.
My two wired overhear headphones have cost less together than my one nice Bluetooth overhear headphones and have outlasted it by a decade.
For the same price wired headphones have much better sound quality than wireless ones. They are built with less expensive parts and software.
The tiny batteries in small wireless earbuds makes them disposable, after a few years.
I own have owned lots of different wired and wireless headphones. My two over ear wired headphones need a new ear cushion every couple of years or a new cable per decade, but they last and last. My wireless headphones have either become unusable because of dead batteries or one part of an overengineered device breaking.
My two wired overhear headphones have cost less together than my one nice Bluetooth overhear headphones and have outlasted it by a decade.
Yea it’s a good thing the batteries in them are made of fairy dust that just appears and disappears with no problems whatsoever.
I only ever had that problem with AirPods, but the $15 knock-off has been great. I’ve had them for a while now and there is no battery problem yet.
I usually manage to destroy my headphones well before the battery starts turning into a problem.
Maybe I shouldn’t wear them for 10 hours a day.
For those who are looking, the Sony Xperia line has a number of phones with both an sd card slot and a headphone jack.
And 2 years of security updates.
They type of person who owns a set of wired headphones or earphones for over a decade doesn’t replace their phone every 2 years.
And these days you really shouldn’t try and keep a device on the internet without updates.
It’s why the fair phone got rightly trashed when they ditched the headphone jack. Battery powered ear buds were completely against their demographics
HMD make decent repairable phones with a headphone jack. They took the Nokia brand for a while but they’re now just HMD and they’re doing some cool modular stuff with cases too.
They discontinued the 5 while I was waiting for it -.- And “We continue to produce the old version” was missing the “and prolong the software support window”. I think I have to usb or bluetooth dongle with my next phone.
The irony of the meme being that the food critic ends up loving Remy’s ratatouille. Meaning Bluetooth would bring him to a simpler time like the ratatouille did in the movie
i feel like there was a time where wireless audio devices were just too expensive and too low battery to be worth it, but now we’re well past that point and i can buy a pair of true wireless earplugs with ANC for 40 bucks, and that’s pretty good!
really the only real complaint i have is that i do not see the point of “true wireless” when you could just have a wire between them and be able to add more battery capacity while also reducing the risk of them being lost.
Back when he grew up just listening to music rather than being a bitter adult worrying about bitrates.
When I was a kid, I used to drop my CD rips down to a 32,000kHz sample rate to make the WAV files smaller, because I couldn’t figure out MP3s yet. Adult me is horrified by the notion. But back then, sounding good enough was acceptable.
I used to download AMVs using YT to MP4 sites, then play back the audio on my phone instead of just downloading the music.
Pretty much exactly that lol
this was my exact experience tbh. I hated the idea of Bluetooth headphones, I had tried some 5ish years ago and they were horrendous, even though they were a relatively high end pair. last year I said fuck it and got another high end pair, and I love them. ldac capable, so it’s 990kbs so I don’t have any complaints at all about the sound, and the probability is great and I don’t have to worry about charging them nearly as much as I assumed I would.
Don’t even get me started on the fact you can’t just replace a fucking battery anymore.
Gotta keep that IP68 rating!
There are ip68 seals for phone fames so you can open it to replace the battery
Pretty sure that has almost nothing to do with it.
There are other non-smartphone consumer electronics with IP68 and user replaceable batteries.
Samsung Galaxy XCover series have replacable batteries
Fairphones have them too.
With headphone jacks and SD card slots! I don’t need a streaming service to enjoy my 1TB of onboard media.
What do you mean you can’t? Sure, it takes an unnecessary amount of work, which is fucking stupid, but it is still absolutely doable at home (in most cases)
you need to heat the phone up and mess about with the internals, even as a tech person i don’t want to risk fucking up my phone like that.
We want to hot swap our batteries on the go, you goof.
Most people literally do not have the technical knowledge for that.
Just because I own the tools and can do it myself misses the larger issue of this being anti-consumer in general.
Consumers shouldn’t need to have those kind of skills to change a battery.
My last phone purchase went something like this:
“What phones do you have with a headphone jack?”
“Uh, I don’t think any. Maybe one? I’d have to look.”
“I’ll take that one.”
“But we–”
“Only spec that matters is a headphone jack.”
“There’s bluetoo–”
“Headphone jack.”
Gotta look for either a budget or non-major brand phone. I went with an Asus phone for my last upgrade (previous was an LG V60). Sony Xperia and some of the Chinese ‘gaming’ phones also have them.
Yep a bottom of the barrel phone from a no-name brand will still have an audio jack…
But the fucking Pixel line doesn’t. Pixels are the only real non-dogshit phone if you want a secure OS.
Sometimes you have to choose between two important things.
Sometimes you have to choose between two important things.
i love losing my little tiny dongle with a fragile little cable that I need to take off my phone to charge and need to take off my headphones to use them on other devices ♥️
Yeah it sucks. Though the usb-c converters will actually work on anything with USB-C
I have the slightly bigger green adapter that does charge and 3.5 jack and it’s 32 bit/384khz. And the two tips are magnetic so you can split it. It sounds great with my IEMs
Right? This — and literally nothing but this — is what all the outrage is about. Still, none of my business; everyone can buy whatever phones they want.
Which one did you get? :)
An open box A12 for I think $40. Working fine for almost two years now.
Same goes for SD card readers! I don’t want to pay extra for storage I already have!
There’s barely even an excuse for it, as most of these phones have a dual SIM tray and one of those can be a dual SIM/SD slot. It’s just enshittification so they can upsell $25 of storage for a $200 model upgrade.
This. I have an s20FE which is one of the last samsungs to keep the microsd slot. I’m considering very carefully what I should get for my next phone and this is one of my most wanted features, besides 3.5mm aux.
Depending on carrier compatibility and where you live, the Sony Xperia 1 V/VI may be your best bet. I ended up going for an Asus phone, dropping the SD card slot.
Looks good, thanks!
I’m fascinated by this apparently critical sliver of venn diagram between “I value audio latency/marginal improvement in quality highly enough to be inconvenienced by messing with a headphone cable while on the go” vs “a dongle is too inconvenient”.
*Apparently this is a really hot take. My point being the convenience gap between cable vs no cable is so much larger than the gap between dongle vs no dongle that I don’t understand how it’s a dealbreaker.
Using a dongle is in no way a replacement for a real headphone jack. A dongle on a phone is a one way ticket to a broken usb c port. It’s not meant to be pocketed with a dongle attached. Headphone ports are supported and able to better handle the stress (if made properly).
Just give us a phone with the single most common port in use by our species that is standardized across all nations on our planet: 3.5mm audio port. I don’t care if it makes the decice .0000001mm thicker. I don’t care if it adds $.01 to the BOM cost of the phone. Go fuck yourself, manufacturers, I WANT MY GODDAMN HEADPHONE JACK BACK YOU BASTARDS!!!
I just want a pair of headphones that I don’t need to recharge and that won’t inevitably die when the batteries fail.
let me use a goddamn headphone, Jack
