+1. It seems like there is just a vocal minority who complain about the missing HW buttons etc.
I’m sure Amazon has enough actual customer data to make their product decisions based on what moves the most volume.
back
1 comments
Just like the 3.5mm headphone jack, which a very vocal bunch of people are still complaining about, 10 years after iPhone got rid of it.
I traded occasionally making my life more difficult, and in return I got what? My old phone was equally waterproof
Keep buying phones with headphone jacks and removable batteries then. They exist. If every social media user that whined about these things acted with their wallet maybe they’d be able to change something.
They are — all non-flagships do still have headphone jacks, even the Pixel A lineup kept them for many many years after the mainline Pixel phones dropped them.
And the reason most phones keep these is because wireless headphones are in the end luxury. They're not necessary, they're not even significantly better, but they're in the end a class symbol.
They are significantly more convenient. No wired to tangle or snag on anything. Seamless handoff between all your devices. It’s genuinely a better user experience.
They don’t sound better, but if you care about sound quality over ux then you’re even luckier nowadays than any time prior because you can plug an amp/dac into your phone
I see this every day in our video calls. There's always
1. The user whose jabra headset is intermittently cutting in or out, or whose airpods are empty, who then switches to macbook speakers & microphones
2. The user user whose left airpod is still playing music from the iphone and only the right airpod did the handover correctly
3. The user whose airpods manage to noise cancel his own voice away
And this isn't every now and then, I see at least two out of these three users every single day. No matter which company, which client, every single day, for years. This is not an exaggeration, it's absolutely maddening.
And honestly, I don't care about the cable tangling or snagging if it at least reliably works.
Then there's the other issue of latency. Wireless headphones, even airpods on MacBooks, have horrible and unpredictable latency. The OS tries to hide it from you, but if you're doing live video/audio/broadcast, they're absolutely useless. I do volunteer work in that field, and over the past years it's gotten worse and worse with volunteers bringing wireless headphones, which they can't use for critical audio/video work.
And honestly, I don't care about the audiophile grade quality, we had good enough quality for free in every device, there was no reason to remove the 3.5mm port. Every current-gen midrange phone still has them, and Sony even keeps them on the flagships (which is why I buy Sony, and recommend everyone else to do so as well).
It's great that the best-case scenario is better. But like with FPS, the experience is primarily determined not by the average, but by the 95th percentile.
This very much depends on region
Also I think the more serious issue is the SD card slot. The missing headphone jack is annoying, but you can work around it with an adapter. Not so for the card slot
You can work around the SD card just as "easily" as you can work around the card slot, as you can just always keep a usb-c sd card reader plugged into the phone.
Obviously, both of them are absolutely silly "solutions" to problems that wouldn't have been necessary in the first place.
You can keep the adapter attached to the headphones and it's not an insurmountable hassle
You certainly can't realistically keep an SD card dongle permanently sticking out of your phone to store your photos/etc.
Earlier this year, the Guardian had a piece about the way in which wired headphones were now the status signifier among a certain cohort ...
You can buy a Bluetooth headset at Action for 20 euro. I'm sure wireless was a status symbol once but it hasn't been for a very long time...
I recently had to do a flight without my headphones, because they had discharged because the switch had got jostled and activated in my luggage. 10 years on, we're still running into the disadvantages of losing 3.5mm headphones, so of course there's complaints.