rule

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"

Happy Motorola G 84 user here. The only ding is the camera isn't the best but for the price this couldn't be beat.
- Frankly I think it's a bit weird that phones have subsumed actual cameras existing, gettin' old...
Not being allowed to uninstall facebook should be a crime.
- I just bought an A34 for my mom. I was able to remove all the bloat directly from the launcher, except for some Galaxy apps. For the rest, I used ADB.
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.
- And no sdcard, which is a real pain in the ass for a lot of people, I think, it's more of a problem, than just the headphone plug.
- 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.

I'm cruising down the freeway in my horse and buggy cursing all the young punks passing me way too fast.

See, this might be ok if there were two of them. But now when the battery gets low you are required to stop listening.

Old man yells at radio waves.

I swear I can hear them yelling back.

And what do you know, Ego enjoyed a simple meal that finally broke his personal vendetta against the restaurant.

Enjoy your music.

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

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.
- Pretty much exactly that lol
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.
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.
It also implies that him not liking wireless could potentially ruin a small company's livelihood and drive the owner into his grave, as he has done in the past.

Don't even get me started on the fact you can't just replace a fucking battery anymore.

Gotta keep that IP68 rating!
- 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.

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.
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 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 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.

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.
Which one did you get? :)
- An open box A12 for I think $40. Working fine for almost two years now.
Last time I went to look at phones I told them I want something without any AI. He said you won't find anything, so I left and bought a pixel online to wipe and run a privacy OS on.

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.

Then he wears the airpods for the first time and it's exactly like when maman served that disgusting peasant dish.

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.
- Well, I break the cables a lot, so the wireless last longer for me, but for most people, they last longer.

let me use a goddamn headphone, Jack

Bluetooth is amazing, don't get me wrong. But it doesn't always work and it's hard to figure out why something won't connect. Plugging something works every time.

Plus most Bluetooth modes have horrendous latency, which is jarring when playing a mobile game.
- The latency is even more noticeable when using a phone to make music, like using it as a virtual guitar amp.
- BT LE audio should help in that regard. It also has some cool features like directly sending audio to individual ear buds rather than having to have one bud relay the audio to the other and "auracast" which allows multiple devices to listen to a single source.
not sure why you have that experience, the only issue i've had with bluetooth is not figuring out how to enable pairing mode on some device, which.. that's the device having a shit implementation, it's like putting a headphone jack under what looks like a screw cover.
Until the jack takes a hit and you can't repair it.
- oh yeah cause its way easier to repair something that uses bluetooth after it takes a hit

I, unfortunately, switched to a phone without a headphone jack. I hope to be able to switch back in a few years when I need a new one.

My experience with smartphone headphone jacks is that they break really fast. Not quite sure what I'm doing wrong, but bluetooth did solve that particular issue for me.

I've never had that happen all my life. I've never even heard from a friend where such a thing would happen.

Did you drop your phone on the jack with a cable inside?
- I've had it happen too, I assume it's because I'd fall asleep listening to stuff with headphones and jerk on it weirdly while sleeping
- No. If there was such an obvious reason I'd know what I'm doing wrong.

let me guess, you're also an Arch user? 😏

I wish I had the gall to switch off windows 😞
- Get some gall then!
  
  Yesterday was the best day to switch but today is fine too!
- I'm in the middle of switching to Linux. I'm dual booting so I can still use Windows when I need to or run into issues. If you install something like Mint you'd be surprised how easy it is. Not only that, in a lot of circumstances it runs better than Windows because of all of the bloatware that comes with Windows. If you're afraid to switch but have enough hard drive space I highly recommend dual booting to test the waters. These days I end up using Linux more than Windows.

It's a real tragedy how basically nothing new these days comes with a headphone jack anymore.

It feels like phone reviewers only know 3 phone brands and half of them are Apple. Some great phones still have headphones jacks and expandable storage. I use a Sony Xperia 6.
- There are definitely some out there, but it feels like you have to go hunting for them. My current phone is some lower end thing I found which had everything I wanted. Ulefone Power Armor 13. Absolutely massive battery, microsd slot, and of course a headphone jack. I was sick of all the thin phones that barely make it through a day before being at low battery, so I got the thickest smartphone I ever seen lol.
- You couldn't pay me to use Sony (in fact thought they stopped making phones over a decade ago). Might be worse than Samsung
- And the other brands that have features like headphones jacks and sd card slots are increasingly not bringing those products to the US, like the new Xperia and Zenfone.

Used some wired earphones and then remembered why I use Bluetooth ones

could you elaborate
Your complete lack of discernment?
- No my need to move away from my tablet when cooking

Thankfully now there’s MagSafe charging so that frees up the lightning/usb-c for wired headphones

Thankfully now there’s MagSafe charging so that frees up the lightning/usb-c for wired headphones

Shhh, you have to call it “qi2 charging” or you’ll be sent to the Apple User gulag. We need to pretend that qi2 isn’t directly based on MagSafe.

Does any flagship phone have a headphone jack nowadays? It's getting were even with budget phones. I'm holding on to my current old phone partially for that reason.

When I replaced my phone I just attached a USB-C Adapter to my wired headphones. It works exactly as before.
- Yeah but you can't charge at the same time. Useful for road trips.
- do you not have other devices you use your headphones with?
Not really, no
The only ones left in the US are gaming phones, it seems. Or last generation Xperia or Zenfone.
- Last gen xperia was last year. Idk if youre trying to say its outdated but Its assumed this years xperia will have a jack too.

Samsung Galaxy XCover 6 pro has a headphone jack and replaceable battery. I think they are coming out with a new one soon too (or it might be out already). Its what I have and it works great. Kinda shitty camera but I don't really care

do custom roms work well on the galaxy xcover 6 pro?
- I do not know because I have never tried and also don't know where I would start to even try unfortunately

I don't untangle cord

I. Don't. Say. Please. I. Don't. Say. Thank you. I. just. Do. What. I. Want. And. If. You. Want. to. Get. With. Me. You. Better. Give. Me. What. I. Want.

Same cadence in this song that this meme has.

I also find it annoying that there's no headphone jack by default on most phones, but I just connected a usb-c to 3.5 mm to my headphones and use it them this way if I need to. Yes, it's a dongle, but it's small enough that it can just stay connected to my headphones jack and carried with them.

I cannot for the life of me get any of those dongles to work for more than 6 months. It always turns into a glitchy disconnecting mess.
- i had a friend that got a new phone and half of the conversations we had was about how much the usbc to jack adaptors break
  
  like he would have to buy then every week and they looked pretty expensive
  
  also he couldnt go back to his old phone cause the screen was so screwed up part of it was black and the rest would be brighter than a lightbulb
Even the expensive dongles buzz constantly.
- That shouldn’t be happening.

I just realized my android phone doesn't have a headphones jack

how long have you had it and how have you been listening to stuff
- Bluetooth earbuds. Once I was an adult and started actually taking care of my things, they were straight-up better for me across the board.
Haha. Oh, fuck. So do i. 🫥

I got a free phone but it didn't have a headphone jack, after trying them I really like the bluetooth earbuds.

I always yoinked out my headphones when working out with the wired ones.

There's a bunch of brands that make airpod quality earbuds for like $25