Unpopular Opinion

that space could be used for a bigger battery

This is the truly bizarre part. Removing thr 3.5mm port is about thinness.

It is the antithesis of increasing battery life.

Yeah.. I disagree. One only thing that I got to give to bluetooth headphones is dealing with the cable - sometimes it's just more preferable to have no wires, especially during sport activities.

I'm still on the lookout for the next phone with a headphone jack. I was so hoping for it to be the next fairphone, but sadly that's not it. (Old small ZenFone was perfect but software support of Asus is ass)

No.

I’ve taken apart a phone for the purposes of replacing a battery. While everything is very compact as you can imagine, there is also a surprising amount of unused space. I’ll admit I’m not an engineer, so I don’t know if this space is error margin for manufacturing tolerances or something, but there is certainly enough room for a jack to be installed were this space tightened up just a little.

STRING THEM UP, FELLAS

Dafuq kind of take is this?

notices what sub we're in

oh, I see. Carry on.

I hate how small the USB-C connector is though! They're fragile and wear out pretty quickly. Everybody discounts the round barrel jack size as if it's a bad thing, i think it's the exact opposite. It's large and the internal contacts are similarly large which keeps them working forever lol

Once again, remember folks, this is unpopular opinions. Which means this is a good post, not a bad one.

Not enough room for a 3.5mm audio port, but we absolutely must have a 50MP dual camera plus TOF sensor!

Extremely misinformed post. Upvoted.

I disagree, truly unpopular well done.

Counterpoint:

External DACs on multiple recent generations of Pixel devices frequently experience severe distortion and Google seems to not give a shit about fixing that.

I literally cannot use wired headphones or speakers with my phone even with relatively high end equipment without horrific audio glitches.

I like having a separate connector for audio because it gets a lot of use and this lots of wear from the constant plugging and unplugging, and I'm often moving around with the headphones plugged in. I don't want to have to worry about breaking something from doing this.

Small USB connectors tend to be the first point of failure in most of my devices, and a broken USB port would render a phone completely unusable. I don't want to take that risk.

I suspect this is unpopular in the tech community, but if this were truly an unpopular opinion, then phones without a headphone jack wouldn't sell, and they would be replaced in the next generation. Instead, it seems like I get fewer and fewer options each time I look for a phone at the intersection of qualities that matter to me (unlocked bootloader, sd card, headphone jack).

If the solution to a problem that didn't exist before is "buy an extra thing" it's not a solution. It's bullshit to sell you even more garbage you shouldn't need.

I ended up bying a phone without a jack. I got 2 dongles that split into a jack and a charging port, so i can charge in bed while watching videos. One of the jacks has static noise and whine, the other has i think some kind of digital to analog interface that cuts the sound conpletely when the audio is too low.

So i hear static or when i watch a video or listen to an audiobook, when there is a pause in speech i hear the sound cut out completely, or if a video has soft background music on it, it might not pick up on it at all.

It's very distracting.

And if you go online to buy a dongle, they dont really say what they have in them, or you dont know how your phone handles the conversion etc.

So I don't think "just buy a dongle" is the solution. It works but now i have all these problems i didnt have with my old phone that had a jack...

Yah, I couldn't give a fuck about aux, and up until last year I always had one. I moved on to Bluetooth once it started working properly.

Fuck you, well done.

I disagree. My phone has perfectly acceptable battery life and a 3.5mm jack, I use it all day and get home with over 40% left every day. I need the jack to use my earbuds at work, and to listen to music in my car - and I'm gonna be honest with you something as small as an adapter WILL get lost by me. Everyone's got a different use case, and it might not be important for you, but your use case isn't everyone's.

But why remove it? Having the option is more convenient then having an adapter, reduces e-waste and you never have to play the "Where the hell did I leave the dongle?" game ever again! 2.5mm sounds great in theory but the vast majority of stuff you'd listen to music on uses 3.5mm.

Solid unpopular opinion.

Aux jack is much more reliable than usb-c and can be plugged into any orientation. It is a superior connector. The size difference is negotiable and phones should be made a few mmm larger anyway to fit peoples hand better.

I don't understand how people like Bluetooth earbuds.

You have to constantly clean them because of ear wax for starters, and they're much more uncomfortable if you're sweaty. Not to mention all the years of doctors saying don't use Q-tips because it pushes ear wax into your ears just for everyone to start shoving buds in there anyway. To bad the younger generation didn't get to learn about wired clip-ons or flat cables. Wish they still make them but I suppose bonephonesoike Shokz are safer for when cycling.

Then there's the battery issues. That just feels like a downgrade. Not only is it yet another thing you have to remember to charge, but they can run out of battery. Aux version literally never runs out of battery. Maybe if we had a new gen of battery that lasted months sure, but we don't yet.

And lastly battery on phone isn't an issue. I have an Xperia 1 V and can easily use the phone all day without running out of battery, and it has a headphone jack.

I'm still rocking a 7-year-old Galaxy S9+. A few years ago my headphone jack wore out and the gapped hole no longer retains my earbud cable. Since then, I've been using a USB-C adapter, but the combined earbud and charging use is starting to take it's toll and the port is beginning to feel loose.

Adapter use seems more abusive to the USB port than just charging, as it occurs when the phone may be in a tight place (like a pocket), with torque applied to the adapter body. I'm convinced that if I was limited to USB-only over the full life of this phone, I would have lost wired headphone and wired charging capability a long time ago.

Everybody gangster until they lose an Air Pod.

2.5mm plugs suck ass. My first smart phone had one and I HATED it. It's so tiny, fragile, and I DETEST working with it.

Wouldn‘t a second USB-C outlet make sense? One for charging, one for audio/data/external devices. Or is that still too much space wasted?

On top of all other issues, those fucking dongles wiring breaks really fast