I see a lot of people complaining that the Fairphone 6 doesn’t have an Aux jack.
Just use an adapter cable.
A 3.5mm Aux jack takes up a significant amount of space just to connect a few wires that could be connected through USB-C anyway, that space could be used for a bigger battery.
Even if there was a good enough reason to keep Aux it should be 2.5mm Aux and not the usual 3.5 as it does exactly the same thing but uses less space
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Once again, remember folks, this is unpopular opinions. Which means this is a good post, not a bad one.
But…but…but…
I just wanna strangle him. Can I strangle him a little? Just a little choke…
So long as you promise it’ll be under 10 seconds
Longer!! I want to see the light
Funny saying this to the moth guy
This. This is my legacy now 😭
You’re going need an AUX cord for that.
Good thing it isn’t plugged into anything
Yes, if you can untangle the aux cord currently strangling you, you can turn its power against him
strangle with upvotes
Well, that’s definitely an unpopular opinion.
For me, there are two reasons losing the aux port sucks. First, it means I have to pay extra for functionality I want. It’s not like the phone is cheaper without the aux port so it’s just more money out of pocket for me. Second, it means I have to keep track of a dongle. Something I’d be using nearly everyday.
The funny thing about battery size; they could make the phone 1mm thicker and you’d get way more battery capacity from that than removing an aux port.
Also, wireless sucks dick. May as well give my own unpopular opinion.
I used to be a big fan of rhythm games on android, but the loss of the headphone jack has completely killed it for me. Bluetooth latency is still like 200ms, it’s insane. I can’t stand to even watch video with it
You can have wired USB C headphones with no latency.
Also any good headphones should compensate by delaying the video a bit. At least on iOS with Airpods the audio and video are almost perfectly synced. Same with any other bluetooth headphones I’ve used. I did have a REALLY old BT speaker with like a 500ms delay and that was very noticeable. But that speaker is over 10 years old and cost $20.
The funny thing about battery size; they could make the phone 1mm thicker and you’d get way more battery capacity from that than removing an aux port.
Z space is not at a premium, X and Y space are. A 3.5mm jack takes up a TON of space in all dimensions. The PCBs of modern phones are TINY compared to the phones of old.
“a TON of space” Give me a break, older phones that were quite literally a small fraction of the size of modern smartphones were able to house them just fine. The space is minimal and everyone knows it. The reason that Apple got rid of it was mostly so that they could push their first party wireless headphones and make a killing. And it worked out very well for them. Everyone else followed suit because… Apple did it!
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.
At some point technology moves on.
At some point we had to give up VHS for DVD It’s time to let go of Aux just like we let go of VHS
Ok, so what should replace the aux port? Becuase right now it seems to be just an adapter … for an aux port. That’s not moving forward, that’s just adding extra steps.
USB-C can replace Aux
IMO, everything that can be USB-C should be, that way we can have one cable for everything.
So how do I charge my phone while also having it connected to my wired headphones?
Should I get a docking station for my phone now? Add multiple USB-C ports to phones?
Realistically you don’t NEED to do that, unless your battery is cooked. You can just charge your phone when not listening to music
If you really must then a simple splitter does the trick.
If this isn’t acceptable, then I’d argue that phones should have two USB-C ports, instead of one Aux and one USB-C
So what you’re me offering is limited use cases and additional equipment to achieve something that I can currently do with an AUX port.
This is not an upgrade or improvment … that’s just enshitification.
If this isn’t acceptable, then I’d argue that phones should have two USB-C ports, instead of one Aux and one USB-C
That is slighlty better, but a lot of headphones don’t actually support sound via USB-C and I’m also not aware of cheap, wired earbuts that use USB-C.
Sometime in the not so distant past I could have said: “but a lot of radio’s don’t actually support CD’s and I’m also not aware of cheap, radio’s that use CD’s, or a place to buy Cheap CD’s”
At some point we had to ditch tapes for CD’s or Digital media.
We can’t just stay stuck in the past because it’s convenient in the short term.
Classic management response for problems they created: “You don’t use your device that way, and if you do you are wrong”
Something funny about those: sometimes they just don’t work. Seriously. Depending on the phone, the brand, those splitters just will not function because the phone decided it cannot do both power and media from the same port at the same time, if it’s split up. I tried 4 different ones before finding out my phone is too dumb for it, and same with most friend’s phones.
Bluetooth has replaced the aux port
i held out for quite a while, but i got a shokz bone conducing headset about five years ago and i had to admit, the sound quality is pretty good, so i got a fairbud xl more recently and they both work great with my phone. i still use a wired headset and mic with my pc thoughBluetooth has replaced the aux port
No. It’s an alternative that trades sound quality and delay for being wireless. Not a replacement.
it has though, at least according to most phone makers
the average person (me included) isn’t bothered by the minimal loss of quality and latency, at least on the moveThere really is no perceivable difference in audio quality between wire and bluetooth. Especially considering most people use Spotify. Also most consumer headphones aren’t great; you’d have to use audiophile level gear to maybe hear a difference.
I don’t think I’m an audiophile, but I stream my own flacs with 800-3000 kbps and there is a very noticeable difference in quality between the bluetooth- and the wired connection on my Bose QC Ultras.
Out of curiosity I did a quick test with Sennheiser Momentum 4 using 1000 kbps flac and I personally couldn’t hear a difference that I wouldn’t call placebo. If I wanted to I could convince myself that BT sounds better. But there really was no difference in quality. Only the tuning might be slightly different.
One cause of a difference could be whether the headphones use their built-in DAC or the phone’s.
To the phone? Really, really doubt it.
Right?
I just want to hitch my working Clydesdales to my Toyota because I want to avoid the emissions, but it comes with a fucking engine instead and no place to mount the yokes! They don’t need ANY gas and can even drive me home at the end of the night. Who has the money to go full electric when the wagon was working PERFECTLY fine.
It’s bullshit to sell me all this garbage I don’t need.
I disagree, truly unpopular well done.
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.
reduces e-waste
This is technically becoming less and less true as time goes on. Keeping the 3.5mm port only reduces e-waste for buyers who already own 3.5mm accessories. Fewer and fewer of today’s younger generations own any 3.5mm devices at all, as more and more devices are unifying toward USB-C. In fact, fewer and fewer people today own any type of wired headphones.
The e-waste is now coming from the older, holdout consumers who are sticking to their 3.5mm accessories, as they’re the ones requiring extra dongles to keep their obsolesced technology functional.
And the non-3.5mm audio equipment is, itself, also e-waste with non replaceable batteries. It’s also generally lower quality than analog.
Not in my experience. I still use BT headphones I bought in 2019, but all the wired headphones I had before that were dying every year with the same cable problems. The only long-lived wired headphones I had were expensive Sennheisers with thick coiled cable, but those were always destroying jack port on my phone with their fat lever of a connector.
Cables just shit for mobile application, they’re always in the way, and always getting yanked around.And here I am still using my headphones that are older than the first smart phone.
My wife’s wired headphones are also last forever. She never listens to them while moving, only when she sits at the table and her phone lays firmly on it. If she needs to move, even in a different room she takes her headphones off, and only put them back when she is sitting firmly and the phone is stationary.
Which, let’s be honest, is exactly the use case we are all talking about here I think. I also mounted my headphones to my “listening post” and casually slip my head between the always open ear cuffs to reduce wear and tear from putting them on and taking them off.
This is why I NEED the aux jack on a phone: minimizes the waste of swapping my listening post when I changed from walkman, to MP3 player, to iPod, to 1st gen iPhone.
At this point, why even have a phone? Even cheap stationary player will give much better sound quality
I admittedly have a bunch of headphones because I won’t make my family listen to my music that they hate, but I have different pairs for stationary listening and moving. When I am on the move, usually doing chores in house, I’ll have my phone (or now portable music player since my Pixel 4a got nerfed into oblivion) in my pocket and use my wired IEMs. I greatly prefer over ear headphones, but they aren’t so great when you’re on the move. The only headphones I have ever had break in my decades of using them were a pair that I let someone else use. Some (many?) people are just really rough on their things, I don’t get it.
Type c supports analog audio, you can have a wired earphones with type c connector, with exactly the same parts as a classic earphone, just not 3.5mm but type c connector.
Type c also supports digital connection for interesting applications where the dac is in the earphone.
Lmfao. The audiophile community would burn you at the stake.
I’m used to catching flac from those guys. ;)
That’s a good pun right there
The audiophile community is too busy masturbating to their golden powercables
Not enough room for a 3.5mm audio port, but we absolutely must have a 50MP dual camera plus TOF sensor!
It’s more that it’s redundant and takes up a lot of space, you can just use USB-C
Yeah just remove the camera and connect an external camera to the USB-C port.
Just give me a featureless brick and I’ll pay for the dongles I want. Like the screen dongle and the sound dongle. All through USBC ofc
Framework actually kind of did this with their laptops ports 🤣
Fuck you, well done.
Extremely misinformed post. Upvoted.
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 have issues even with the simplest Apple USB-C to 3.5 mm dongle on my phone. The USB side rocks back and forth, disconnecting from the phone and exploding my ears with popping noises.
It’s also flimsy as hell.
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.
I actually much prefer working with the 6.5mm Aux jack, but when every mm counts, you need to weigh up the pros and cons and see if 2.5mm, 3.5mm, 6.5mm or No Aux is best.
On top of all other issues, those fucking dongles wiring breaks really fast
Also, the 3.5mm audio port on your phone has another reason to exist.
Your music is digital until something converts into an analog waveform that your headphones or speakers can use. That thing is the digital to analog converter aka a DAC.
The quality of the DAC directly effects the quality of the audio. The cheap dongle you buy on amazon for a few bucks is the cheapest pos that exists. Most phones with a 3.5 output will produce better sound because the manufacturer can elect to put a better DAC in the phone hardware. In fact, a high quality DAC built into the phone would be a nice selling point for audiophiles or a nice upgrade for those who might otherwise choose to buy an external dac–now they dont have to.
When a headphone is connected to the USB-C port via passive adapter, the phone detects this and uses the USB-C port in a pincompatible way; nothing electrical changes.
This came with a cheap phone I bought in 2017 or so, there are no active components in there as far as I know.
Apples dongle is $10 and very high quality. It uses the same chip that was previously internally in the iphone. Good adapters aren’t that expensive.
Dedicated DACs for phones started taking off right as the 3.5mm jack was getitng killed anyways. All the hardcore audiophiles I know that listen to music on their phone use one of those because they can actually drive good headphones. It was kinda perfect timing.
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.
Yes, optimizing thinness is the antithesis of increased battery life.
Dafuq kind of take is this?
notices what sub we’re in
oh, I see. Carry on.
A 3.5mm AUX jack takes up a significant amount of space just to connect a few wires that could be connected through USB-C anyway, that space could be used for a bigger battery.
The USB-C is unavailable because its being used to keep the phone powered. Is your solution to force everyone to carry yet another dongle in the form of a splitter?
How often are you really charging your phone while also using headphones, and do you really think that usecase is widespread enough to warrent an extra connection?
Literally daily
In this case you can invest 7 bucks in a good splitter.
I have two and they have had endless connection issues. Also, the DAC in splitters is terrible, so this requires a USB-C splitter followed by an external DAC. It’s pretty unwieldy.
Also, on my previous phone without a jack the USB-C port started having charging issues after a couple of years due to wear. I’d be less annoyed about it if they had multiple USB-C ports, but a single port device is a bad idea in general.
It’s >0, which is all that matters IMO.
If you’re using an older battery (which we should be as much as possible) then plugging in is needed more frequently. Upgrading every two years is not good for the environment, and certainly not good for the child slaves mining the parts for our batteries.
Wireless charger.
This seems to be the common reason which really baffles me. I just replaced my 5yr phone with a refurbished phone. My battery was at 75% health and I would just charge in the morning or night. I feel like charging devices when not being used is pretty easy, though I guess if someone is chained to their phone 24/7 it may be a bit harder to accomplish.
Now that’s what’s up. Was thinking the exact same thing. Non-issue.
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…
My dongle that supports charging and analog audio for my car has a whine that changes pitch with the motor speed (guessing it’s very sensitive to the voltage or frequency of the alternator or something). Though at least it’s low enough that it’s almost unnoticeable when actual audio is playing.
It also requires the phone be unlocked to start sending audio through the USB interface. And maybe about 10% of the time whe I get it all set up and music/podcast playing, the motion of hitting the lock button on my phone to turn the screen off also bumps the usb port enough for it to briefly disconnect, which stops my audio and forces me to unlock my phone again to get it playing through the cable.
The phone needs to have a DAC anyways if it wants to drive its speakers. I could live with a smaller analog jack, but hate having to use a separate device with its own DAC that is probably way cheaper than the one already in my phone plus they probably don’t even isolate the audio signal from the charging signal because the main selling point is just the ability to play audio and charge at the same time.
Clip a ferrite core filter around the audio cable, that should get rid of the whine. You can find them pretty cheap on Amazon or your favorite electronics store.
I did some research about it and it sounds like what I need is a dongle that isolates the charger and audio grounds from each other. Though a ferrite bead might help with the charge whine I get on one of my indoor chargers.
I also did some searching again and came across the usb-c alternate modes. There is an alternate mode for “Audio Adapter Accessory Mode” and this needs certain architecture of the adapter you are connecting to be automatically detected.
From the spec: "The analog audio adapter shall identify itself by presenting a resistance to GND of ≤ Ra on both A5 (CC) and B5 (VCONN) of the USB Type-C plug. If pins A5 and B5 are shorted together, the effective resistance to GND shall be less than Ra/2.
A DFP that supports analog audio adapters shall detect the presence of an analog audio adapter by detecting a resistance to GND of less than Ra on both A5 (CC) and B5 (VCONN)."
So the host has to support it, and the adapter needs to be manufactured so that it turns this feature on.
But i find it difficult to find firstly if my phone supports it, and if the jack is designed with it in mind.
And after that we apply the complexity of also charging in this mode, and chespest possible manufacturing of these things, or they just throw their own DAC in the adapter and call it a day so from phones dac -> usb-c alternate audio mode -> adapters dac -> headphones.
And nowhere have i ever seen the manufacturer of these dongles say how its constructed.
But i will stop here and forget about this because it is way outta my league.
I also have absolutely no idea about if anything i say is correct so readers beware feel free to correct me on all thing usbc!
