On smartphones, at least.

There is this nonsense driven by fear of change. Yeah, there are billions of 3.5mm jacks headphones, but who cares about the quality because all billions of those are the $0.02 variety pooped out in China that might as well go straight to a landfill? Wouldn’t an equally lame $0.02 variety adapter work just fine?

I speak out of personal experience, and I know I am just one person with one set of experiences, but a wireless headphone/earbud experience significantly trumps a wired one, when the smartphone is the basis of your sound. Let’s skip the at-home use cases for now (in which you probably want to stream to a receiver or a google cast client of some sort anyway), and focus on the on-the-go and traveling-stationary cases.

In the former I’ve spent enough money replacing wired headphones to know that if this is my use case for a lot of the time, wireless will be the cost-sensitive solution because you will be spending $$ replacing cables all the time. I think my rate was like $20 a year at least. Now I suck it up with an average bluetooth headphone that has no cables, over the ear, because cables always will break if used on a mobile use cases, for prolong (12+ months) periods. To be specific, all I use my headphones for are my ~2hr commutes daily, and sometimes trips and excursions.

There are some times when I’m using my phone for audio and I plug it into an external DAC. I have to use a USB to Go cable, then plug the DAC into that. No headphone jack is involved. And why any self-respecting audiophile doesn’t use a portable DAC for phone audio is beyond me. In this case you have no use for a 3.5mm jack anyway. OK, maybe your favorite amp doesn’t have a DAC, and it’s annoying to have a DAC and an amp, as portable devices, I hear you. But I think in this case you can excuse a wimpy adapter, right? Or even buy a better one than the one out of the box? No bigs.

All this whining and focusing on the losing of the jack is standard, textbook, resistance to change without looking at what you gain out of it. For most people, nobody uses the headphone jack. My folks don’t use it, and my mom uses a headphone all the time on her iPad to watch dramas anyway. So yeah, keep that on a tablet, where size is not a problem. On phones where device component size is a lot more important, the jack takes up a good 5% on the total footprint of the device. Does anyone uses the jack 5% of their phone’s overall lifetime?

Yeah, the only ones that would use it are the people selling stuff using a card reader (Square, etc), and I think those guys will be okay to live with an adaptor so the rest of the society can enjoy the benefit of that extra real estate on their smartphones.

There are other “hardware” ecosystems attached to the smartphone headphone jack, but none of them has to do with your audio experience, nor should it. Get some bluetooth cans and move on to a better future.