I am a huge 3.5mm jack defender and I am still upset at how Apple created a post-USB C world. But this is a common misconception.

USB C headphones and 3.5mm headphones (and Bluetooth, USB A, etc) are all equally as "analog" as one another (with the exception of someone with all-analog equipment, of course).

You need a DAC somewhere between the chip you're getting the digital signal from and the speakers that are playing an analog signal. And so the quality of that depends on (among other things) the quality of your DAC.

With USB or Bluetooth headphones, the DAC is somewhere in the headphone. With the 3.5mm jack, the DAC is behind jack. If you have a device with a crummy built-in DAC giving you a noisy signal, you'll be better off using a USB DAC.

I haven't used Apple's USB C earbuds, but Apple does make a $10 USB C to 3.5mm DAC that performs very very well for its price point.

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raw_anon_1111 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The difference is you always can buy USB C headphones with a known good consistent DAC. A 3.5 inch headphone jack serves no purpose in the age of USB C - even my wife’s mixing board has USB C input that she can plug her iPhone into.

Next thing HN folks are going yo want the iPhone to come with a SCSI port.

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lynndotpy an hour ago | parent [-]

I think that is silly, I haven't used an SCSI port since I was a tiny child but I use a 3.5mm almost every day of my life.

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raw_anon_1111 an hour ago | parent [-]

And technology moves on either way. There is not a single high end phone that still comes with a 3.5 inch headphone jack in 2026. The number of people who care in 2026 is probably less than the number of people who want to run Linux on their phone.

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lynndotpy an hour ago | parent [-]

Yes, but that's different than what we're saying. I think many more people want and use 3.5mm jacks than they do SCSI ports. The 3.5mm jack is excellent. We're in a thread about a new device released with this wonderful port.

Also, many people want to run Linux on their phone. About 7 in 10 smart phones run Linux, and smart phones are devices billions of humans use every day.

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raw_anon_1111 24 minutes ago | parent [-]

We are in a thread on HN where you have people who complain about not having root access on youf iPhone, want to run Linux on everything and bemoan the fact that most websites don’t won’t with JavaScript disabled.

This is as far from the mainstream as you can possibly get.

Come September it will have been a decade since Apple dropped the headphone port - the world has moved on

	▲	lynndotpy 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I would very much like root on my phone and most of the websites I use don't require JavaScript. Apple hasn't dropped the headphone port, they even announced a new product today called the Macbook Neo with one. There is even a thread on HN about it :)