Something I read recently which I think is interesting food for thought:

Did ditching the headphone jack increase the number of people in public who just play their music / talk on speakerphone, because now the alternative is much more complex and expensive compared to simple 3.5mm wired headset?

Before proclaiming that Bluetooth is in fact simple and cheap, consider how your situation may differ from that of the perpetrators

My 2c.

The risk of losing one (or both) earbud is a real one. My ears don't tend to keep snug grip on the earbuds so they tend to get loose after I walk a little. With earbuds, this might just be my own singular piece but, there is also the chance that only one of the two would connect to your phone.

On the other hand, the cables get tangled together. I can't walk around with them because the cable gets stuck in the swing of my arms. Connecting them to the phone after a call had already started was a piece of cake though. With bluetooth, I never have my earbuds on when I actually need them and it's too much of a pain to take them out of my bag and connect them.

Whenever it is time to replace my current earbuds, I am gonna go for a neckband instead. It has basically the best of both, imo (I am not that sensitive to audio quality mostly) and the downsides aren't large enough (I'll think of the weight as a neck workout).

LE Audio should fix the quality and latency problems. The latency is significantly lower and the bandwidth is twice Classic Bluetooth. There are new default codecs that are better, and there should be enough bandwidth for lossless. The other nice thing is enough bandwidth for bidirectional streams instead of low quality audio when use microphone.

The current problem is that LE Audio implementations are new with lots of headphones having them as beta.

Shouldn't it be the same thing? You either have the DAC on your phone convert the digital music file to an analog signal and send it over the aux cord to the speakers in the headphones, or have the digital file sent over Bluetooth and converted by a DAC in the headphones, right? It's not like you're plugging your headphones into a record player.

Adapter causes unnecessary wear on the charging port.

Recently had a phone go bad when the thunderbolt port stopped working due to the same port being used repeatedly for charging and for audio adapter.

So when I updated the phone I grudgingly decided to get a BT earbud.

> what's wrong with a usb-c to 3.5mm adapter

I think it just adds friction (for measure, I feel audio jacks are pretty good)

So the real response is, "what's wrong with most companies to not provide the 3.5mm itself?"

It's good that xperia's doing this though. I think I still have phones which have 3.5mm itself so there isn't much to worry about. I think there are a lot of new phones which do offer it, I think both of my parents phones have support for 3.5mm by itself.

I pair my AirPods Pro and Beat Flex to my iPhone and they automatically pair with my iPad, watch, AppleTV and my Mac and switch between them perfectly

> "what's wrong with a usb-c to 3.5mm adapter"

I want to charge and listen to music at the same time.

> what's wrong with a usb-c to 3.5mm adapter

In my experience the connection is much easier to accidentally break through movement (e.g., walking) with a USB-C adapter than straight-through 3.5mm.

I really miss having a 3.5mm output on my phone...

> but the real response is "what's wrong with a usb-c to 3.5mm adapter"

Easy. You can't charge and listen to your headphones at the same time.

> "what's wrong with a usb-c to 3.5mm adapter"

Hidden inside of a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter is an entire DAC with a power amplifier for driving headphones. They're complex little things.

And like any other bit of active, plug-in electronics: They're not all the same.

Some of them are wonderful (Apple's adapter sounds great and don't cost much), but and some of them are terrible.

And there's compatibility issues. The combination of an Apple headphone adapter on an Android produces a volume control bug that prevents a person from turning it up even to normal line level output voltages that normal audio equipment expects.

And there's functional issues: Want to play some lossless audio in the car or low-latency audio on headphones, and charge your phone at the same time? Good luck with that! (Yeah, there's adapters that have USB C inputs for power, too. They're a mess. And I once popped one as soon as my phone negotiated a 12VDC USB PD mode instead of the 5VDC that the adapter must have been made for. (And no, wireless charging isn't a solution. It's a bandaid for the deliberately-inflicted footgun incident that brought us here to begin with.))

And it's complicated: For a "simple" audio output, we've got USB 2 with a signalling rate of 480Mbps and a power supply, when all we really want is 20Hz-20KHz analog audio with left, right, ground, and (optionally) microphone.

And then: It often doesn't work. When I plug the USB C headphone adapter I have into my car and go for a drive, it disconnects sometimes: I observe no physical change, but the device resets, the music stops, and the phone rudely presents a prompt asking me which voice assistant I'd like to use (the answer is, of course, "None" -- it's always "None", but it asks anyway). And then I get to figure out how to make it play music again, which presents either a safety issue or a time-suck issue while I stop somewhere to futz with it. (Oh, right. Did I mention that the electronics in these adapters also include support for control buttons? I guess I glossed over that.)

Forcing the use of USB C headphone adapters and their complexities represents a very Rube Goldberg-esque solution to the simple problem of audio interconnection that had already been completely solved for as long as any of us reading this here have been alive.

Except: While Rube Goldberg contraptions are usually at least entertaining, this is just inelegant and disdainful.

If you’re in the low percent running cabled headphones, you probably are also running a headphone amp if necessary or not which uses more cell phone power.

Now you need a usb->usb + 3.5mm to keep it charged up or an add on battery.