[Johan-bjareholt]

Wow, that was a long article for something very obvious. Its not because they have guaranteed sales, its because they are one of the biggest smartphone brands in the world! Its that simple! There are Chinese brands already who have removed the aux jack and include a type-c to 3.5mm adapter, their sales are doing fine. The difference is that these Chinese brands are not big enough to be a trend setter and this won't catch on until some bigger brand starts with it.

[Grishnakh]

So how are you supposed to charge one of these phones and use headphones at the same time, with only one USB-c jack? Do they use some big, clunky Y-adapter (USB-c to USB-c and 3.5mm, plus included circuitry)? That basically defeats the whole point of removing the 3.5mm jack in the first place, which is to save space; now you have to carry around a clunky adapter just to use your headphones. This is at least as stupid as eliminating easily-swapped batteries and SD cards.

[Terretta]

Why do headphones need wires? Why should your phone power them, or send them analog signal decoded from digital? Why not let music fans listen to their decoder and amp of choice?

Wires suck.

The jack, dongle, charging are only problems if you assume wires persist. If only Apple were positioned to persuade a popular headphones company to ditch them...

[Grishnakh]

Without wires, the headphones will need a power source. That means a battery. That means you now have to worry about keeping two devices charged all the time, instead of one. And the battery in some headphones is going to be necessarily small, because who wants a big heavy battery hanging off their head or ears? Why do I want to worry about my headphone battery dying while I'm using them? I don't have to worry about that stuff with regular earbuds.

If you want to haul around extra boxes full of electronics and batteries (decoder and amp of your choice), feel free. The rest of us are happy with cheap earbuds, and don't want all this extra complication.

[Terretta]

I have a cell headset that stores in a charging case. Such a brilliant balance in convenience and battery life. I have never once thought about whether the headset is charged. Same play Amazon did with the Kindle Oasis cover, and now Apple with these. You're going to want to keep the two parts in something, why not a charger case?

Your heavy battery hanging off ears comment is like people hearing about a Walkman asking how you'll fit LPs in your pockets anyway:

https://prudentgroove.com/2013/03/29/the-triple-p/

// PS. I highly recommend carrying an amp matched to drivers on your head. In particular, this set: http://blue-headphones.com/powered.php ... an ideal candidate to add a nice DAC to in a future model.

[Johan-bjareholt]

Not defending that it's a good thing, only saying that the arguments in this article for that "Apple is the only company that can get away with this" is simply false.

[Grishnakh]

I'm not so sure. Just because a few Chinese phones have adopted it doesn't mean anyone can do it. Just look at what happened when Samsung abandoned waterproof cases, removable batteries, and SD cards with the Galaxy S6 in their effort to ape Apple: their sales plunged, and the used-market prices of S5s were very high. Then they brought back two out of those 3 features and the S7 seems to be doing well. So Apple was able to get away with not having any of those features, while still enjoying a huge sales volume and profit margin. Samsung found out the hard way that their flagship customers simply are not the same as Apple's.

So maybe it's possible to dump the headphone jack on some cheap-o phone model in a different market and not see a difference in sales. That doesn't mean everyone could do it for all phone models. One of the strengths of the Android market is that there's many different phone models, by different makers, with different prices and features and strengths. Maybe Chinese buyers don't care much about 3.5mm jacks, maybe those particular phones are typically sold to a certain demographic that doesn't use headphones or listen to music, maybe those are barebones phones popular with economy buyers who just want the cheapest phone they can find, etc.

So you're right that it's false that Apple is the only company that could get away with dropping the headphone jack in any phone in any market. But that doesn't mean the opposite is true, that any phone maker could drop the jack in any phone in any market and not see a difference in sales.