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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   5649 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 13, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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What I would do myself: I'd go "yeah I knew it, wireless earbuds are a stupid product" and go back to wired forever.

I use wired headphones with a USB dongle on my Pixel 6. There's a loud white noise effect that plays whenever the volume falls below a certain threshold.

I refuse to buy any phone without a headphone jack. If they ever stop making them entirely, then I guess I will stop buying phones or something? I don't know, really. But the point is that I don't get phones that chose to reject a universal standard that worked great in favor of making people use a dongle.

I hear that. The headphone jack was a great standard. You could bring along a cheap male-male cable and interface with nearly any device with a speaker.

The good news is that Bluetooth in the current year is that universal standard. It's supported by as many, if not more devices. I initially thought charging the headphones would be annoying, but I find I rarely need to do it. The charging case keeps them topped up. Plus, you can still use your wired headphones with a lapel clip BT adapter. It's much better than trying to use the awkward phone port ones that always come loose.

That's the thing, though, it's not universal like the headphone jack was (or even close really). My car doesn't even have an aux input jack, let alone bluetooth! I have to use a tape deck adapter (which, naturally, uses a headphone jack). Granted, my car is 21 years old, but there are a ton of legacy devices hanging around which don't support bluetooth. Maybe in 20 years bluetooth will be as universal as headphone jacks are today. But for the moment, it is really unfortunate that short-sighted manufacturers have opted to get rid of one of the very few connections you can reasonably expect damn near everything to have.

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