I understand it. I was annoyed by the removal of the headphone jack at first. I have a pair of Sennheiser headphones with 3.5mm and I previously used the adapter with them. I didn’t notice any lower fidelity audio with them and leaving the tiny adapter on the 3.5mm jack didn’t really feel like I was carrying anything more around. I’ve replaced the headphone cable on my senns twice and it was never through use of the adapter(usually because I’d get up and pull my computer to the floor and it fell on the jack), plus the Sennheiser cables are like $30 vs $9 so I’d rather have the adapter fail. I did a sound test with my wife’s Bose QCs and they sounded the same or better than my wired Senns. Now I have my own pair and I don’t miss fucking around with wires at all.
> Audio quality of Apple Lightning to 3.5mm adapter (A1749) is almost as good as in-built mobile audio solutions by Apple, though it has slightly worse df-measurements. Mostly due to the higher jitter. But if you listen music you will not hear the difference; it is too subtle to be perceived.
But in those cases you wouldn't want to use a 3.5 mm headphone jack even if your phone or computer had one. You'd want to use a digital interface such as Lightning or USB.
Music on a phone or computer is digital. To get analog output for the headphone jack the device includes a DAC to convert that digital audio to analog and probably analog amplifiers to get the analog signal to the right level. The quality of the DAC and the analog amplifiers chosen by the device maker place an upper limit on the quality of the audio.
To get the highest quality you want to be able to choose the DAC and amplifiers yourself.
And I'd argue the number of people who actually do have a "need" are stretching the definition of "need" to it's breaking point. Yes, if you need near-zero latency then AirPods might not be for you but that's a tiny segment of the population.
You know the vast majority of users don't care? No one is saying you should use AirPods as your monitors while you record but for listening to music/calls/podcasts/etc they work just fine.
Now argue to the risk of stepping outside your house.
Come on, the truth is almost none of us need to worry about this. To each their own and you get to pick what your balance of security and convenience but disabling bluetooth is a little too tin-foil-y for my tastes.
I'd bet that many (most?) people would plug their headphones into the adapter and leave it until the headphones or adapter failed.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not for Apple or the adapter, but I'm not convinced by the adapter hate either. I do wish I could find Bluetooth devices that didn't suck, though.
Haha, I might be unreasonably amused by your rephrasing of the question.
The adapters (cheap, tiny copper cables) seem as sturdy or sturdier than many of the cables attached to headphones and ear buds (also cheap, tiny copper cables).
So maybe the question should have been "do they fail more frequently than the cables would themselves?"
I've seen more people with wireless than wired headphones for many years now, there's been a couple of instances since I got my fairphone when I miss the headset jack, mostly in cars with old stereo systems. If I had a car like that I'd buy a Bluetooth DAC probably.
Now they should have lower fidelity audio, and/or more shit to carry around and fiddle with, and/or fail unexpectedly when least needed?
You actually can't understand the consumer side of this? Or just like Apple?