Why do people care about headphone jacks so much?
EMILY, WARWICK
AIt’s not about wired headphones, reader. It really isn’t. An eagle-eared listener may be able to tell the difference between Bluetooth and hard-line, but they must then contend with the constant rubbing of cable on clothes, the everpresent fear of snagging and having one’s buds inelegantly yanked from one’s lugs, the glaring fact that dangling wires are, in 2021, dorky as all hell. Besides, a USB-C DAC is going to output a finer signal than any headphone jack, if that’s what you’re really interested in. It’s not about wired headphones: it’s about choice.
Whenever a feature gets taken away, particularly if it relates to a not-quite-dead-yet technology, people get cross. It happened with physical phone keyboards, with the tactile home button, and so on. Your typical puce-faced mouth-foamer might never actually want to plug a 3.5mm jack in, but the fact that they can’t – or that, to do so, they need to spend £9 on an ungainly adapter – grinds those guys to the point of apoplexy.
Guru isn’t one of those people. He tends to roll along the tech ride, and is happy to embrace whatever’s next while lovingly side-eyeing his cherished ZX Spectrum collection. Guru knows that the reason headphone jacks are being removed is a good one: they’re a horrible point of water ingress, and they take up room in phone cases which could be used for more battery or a thinner shell. Features that (realistically) don’t matter sacrificed for those that (arguably) do. That’s the march of technology.
Whenever a feature gets taken away, particularly if it relates to a not-quite-dead-yet technology, people get cross