Keep buying phones with headphone jacks and removable batteries then. They exist. If every social media user that whined about these things acted with their wallet maybe they’d be able to change something.
They are — all non-flagships do still have headphone jacks, even the Pixel A lineup kept them for many many years after the mainline Pixel phones dropped them.
And the reason most phones keep these is because wireless headphones are in the end luxury. They're not necessary, they're not even significantly better, but they're in the end a class symbol.
They are significantly more convenient. No wired to tangle or snag on anything. Seamless handoff between all your devices. It’s genuinely a better user experience.
They don’t sound better, but if you care about sound quality over ux then you’re even luckier nowadays than any time prior because you can plug an amp/dac into your phone
I see this every day in our video calls. There's always
1. The user whose jabra headset is intermittently cutting in or out, or whose airpods are empty, who then switches to macbook speakers & microphones
2. The user user whose left airpod is still playing music from the iphone and only the right airpod did the handover correctly
3. The user whose airpods manage to noise cancel his own voice away
And this isn't every now and then, I see at least two out of these three users every single day. No matter which company, which client, every single day, for years. This is not an exaggeration, it's absolutely maddening.
And honestly, I don't care about the cable tangling or snagging if it at least reliably works.
Then there's the other issue of latency. Wireless headphones, even airpods on MacBooks, have horrible and unpredictable latency. The OS tries to hide it from you, but if you're doing live video/audio/broadcast, they're absolutely useless. I do volunteer work in that field, and over the past years it's gotten worse and worse with volunteers bringing wireless headphones, which they can't use for critical audio/video work.
And honestly, I don't care about the audiophile grade quality, we had good enough quality for free in every device, there was no reason to remove the 3.5mm port. Every current-gen midrange phone still has them, and Sony even keeps them on the flagships (which is why I buy Sony, and recommend everyone else to do so as well).
It's great that the best-case scenario is better. But like with FPS, the experience is primarily determined not by the average, but by the 95th percentile.
Also I think the more serious issue is the SD card slot. The missing headphone jack is annoying, but you can work around it with an adapter. Not so for the card slot
You can work around the SD card just as "easily" as you can work around the card slot, as you can just always keep a usb-c sd card reader plugged into the phone.
Obviously, both of them are absolutely silly "solutions" to problems that wouldn't have been necessary in the first place.
> They didn't know the outcome beforehand; had odds fallen the other way, your argument would have stated that they voted no. Were they in a superposition before the results came in, voting both yes and no simultaneously?!
Yes, of course, they didn’t give a shit. They couldn’t be bothered. Outcome was whatever for them.
Or they couldn't vote (besides work and caretaking, Wikipedia mentions that a few thousand's ballots were invalid before the vote even started due to an accounting error), or they thought "don't give our neighbors the finger" was a foregone conclusion. I should also hope that such a vote in my country, where it's economic suicide much more than in the UK, goes to an easy "no", but since Brexit I've learned that I need to always encourage everyone to make time and vote anyway no matter how dumb it seems. They didn't have that example and I'm not so sure if a confirming vote would habe turned out the same way for example
You can say a lot of things about the majority of this group but not that it was necessarily irrelevant to the whole group
People usually point at the scale when this discussion comes up, in my experience. These companies are doing something at a huge scale spending tons of money to do it so the potential harm is greater.
People can easily justify their own piracy because it’s small scale. Even when they organize, create a whole software and tooling ecosystem around pirating media to stick into jellyfin or plex. AI still did it bigger and worse and is bad, what I’m doing is not so bad because I wasn’t going to buy the movie anyway, etc.
On the whole, about 35% of internet users are ad-blocking. In the tech space it's upwards of 70%.
It's in no way, shape, or form "small scale", and has fundamentally changed the the very nature of the internet for the worse (opinions/views of ad blocking people don't matter).
It does, because it allows for quickly sharing a prepared response instead of saying the same thing over and over. It also works because the kind of person this link gets sent to is already used to trusting random websites over their human interactions.
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