I mean, you don’t have to buy the new one. I guess as long as they’re not forcing you to upgrade while your current phone is still fine, it shouldn’t have too much impact on e-waste and stuff for them to refresh the parts list and specs for new buyers.
…No. It seems like a bad time to be a plant. Too many wildfires, weird things are kinda happening to atmospheric composition, plus invasive species everywhere— Ugh, pine beetles crawling all up in my skin, hogweed taking my nutrients? No thank you. Maybe later— Definitely want the autotrophy eventually, but taking like a 95% hit to metabolic rate and being unable to go indoors obviously wouldn’t be acceptable either…
Seriously though, the comment you replied to also mentioned a few products by name, so I thought I’d reflect that hey, Bluetooth hasn’t been quite as bad as I’d expected it would be, even if most headsets are either overpriced or garbage.
Other than the 3.5mm still being universal basically everywhere except for phones, it’s also universal in a purist physical sense.
Any old piece of scrap copper wire connected to a 3.5mm jack, wrapped vaguely into a coil, and placed next to something magnetic, should form a working speaker compatible with the 3.5mm jack. It won’t sound hi-fi, but it will work, because unlike Bluetooth or USB-C where you have to read hundreds of pages of standards and do a bunch of engineering just to figure out how to understand the signal, the signal in the 3.5mm jack basically is the sound.
This has direct practical implications as well: The transparent simplicity vs opaque complexity is why wired headphones can be so cheap and yet so reliable, or as hi-fi as your DAC and the speaker cone will allow, whereas Bluetooth devices are comparatively expensive, a mess to connect, fragile, bandwidth-limited, and environmentally and ethically dubious.
Bluetooth, and even USB-C, is basically black magic— Which wouldn’t be so bad, except that it’s also glitchy black magic. And this remains true regardless of device availability, because it’s determined by the physics of the technology itself is implemented.
I’ve been using the same (comparatively) cheap Sony WIC100 in-ear Bluetooth headset every day for several (over four?) years now. It’s lasted longer than basically any of the cheap wired earbuds I kept replacing before ever did, and still has all-day battery life too. I haven’t been particularly careful with it; Generally, I’ve just crumpled it up and stuffed it in my pocket with my keys, and probably semi-regularly snagged and yanked it on stuff pretty hard. Losing it is not really a concern; It’s all one flexible piece, and it’s basically the same profile or even slightly bulkier and heavier than wired earbuds when coiled up (but still more convenient when worn, because it doesn’t run the length of the torso). Plus they can just dangle safely from my neck when I need to hear stuff around me, which neither wired headphones nor “true wireless” headphones can do.
I agree with all your points in principle, and I still pay attention to the headphone jack when evaluating phones. But the corporations that make our consumer electronics have decided this is the trend they’re going with. Ultimately, you can either adapt, stop using the technology, or make your own with Raspi and SLA or whatever.
Let us not forget that S7 and S7 Edge had headphone jack and were waterproof.
Not user-disassemblable, much less Lego-style modular, though. Easy to make something “waterproof” when you can just seal it shut with “gooey black adhesive”.
I personally think the headphone jack is a wonderful truly universal and effectively completely open standard that’s very good at what it does, and which furthermore is doubly useful as a generic power and analog signal delivery mechanism, while mandating its supposed successors like Bluetooth and USB-C needlessly and massively inflates the technical and material cost of just playing a dang sound file. You could get serviceable wired headphones that last forever for like $5 if you were lucky; Nowadays, you pay at least ten times that for fragile lithium batteries and circuitry that will break in a couple years, and I really don’t like this trend of taking away capabilities for less robust alternatives while portraying it as innovating.
But I also actually use my Bluetooth headphones way more than my wired ones, and I appreciate the potential engineering and market challenges in what Fairphone is trying to do here.
Usually rated “Gold” or “Platinum” on AppDB:
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=12274
Platinum: “Applications which install and run flawlessly on an out-of-the-box Wine installation”
Gold: “Applications that work flawlessly with some special configuration”
Click on a version. Apparently it works perfectly, but you need to winetricks corefont, vcrun6, speechsdk, and sapi for the initial install.
Yes. And I’m saying that’s not really a valid comparison, because those phones are generally just monolithic slabs that have been glued shut, whereas Fairphone has to implement a user-serviceable modular design with actual seals and stuff.
Would giving it both water-sealing and a headphone jack be worth increasing the price by another €20, because it adds a new potential ingress point that the rest of the phone might have to be redesigned around? What if the jack is one of the biggest parts that isn’t replacable? Fairphone 5’s apparently only rated IP55, while Fairphone 4’s only IP54. That’s barely even really “waterproof”, but more like “splash-proof”. Would adding another hole in the frame be worth possibly reducing that rating to IP53 or IP52 (“drip-proof”)? Would it be worth reducing the warranty by 4 years, because some amount of dust and moisture still works its way in over time no matter how robust the rest of the phone is?
Personally I think I would probably rather have the jack even if it meant no waterproofing at all. But that might not be the direction the market is leaning in, and we don’t know what tradeoffs exactly they’ve considered to arrive at their final design with decent-ish waterproofing and good reparability but no headphone jack.
They have written about this directly in some detail, it seems. If nothing else, it shows that they have put some thought into the issue, and they’re aware that removing the headphone jack will be disappointing for some users, but overall they see making the phone thinner and adding IP rating as being the higher priority:
https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/9836188988049-Audio-Jack-3-5mm