This is something only the nerds complain about. The general public prefer Bluetooth buds. If there was significant demand for phones with AUX, someone would build them.
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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Unpopular Opinion
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On top of all other issues, those fucking dongles wiring breaks really fast
And wears out your USB plug exponentially faster.
Also, the 3.5mm audio port on your phone has another reason to exist.
Your music is digital until something converts into an analog waveform that your headphones or speakers can use. That thing is the digital to analog converter aka a DAC.
The quality of the DAC directly effects the quality of the audio. The cheap dongle you buy on amazon for a few bucks is the cheapest pos that exists. Most phones with a 3.5 output will produce better sound because the manufacturer can elect to put a better DAC in the phone hardware. In fact, a high quality DAC built into the phone would be a nice selling point for audiophiles or a nice upgrade for those who might otherwise choose to buy an external dac--now they dont have to.
When a headphone is connected to the USB-C port via passive adapter, the phone detects this and uses the USB-C port in a pincompatible way; nothing electrical changes.
This came with a cheap phone I bought in 2017 or so, there are no active components in there as far as I know.
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A 3.5mm AUX jack takes up a significant amount of space just to connect a few wires that could be connected through USB-C anyway, that space could be used for a bigger battery.
The USB-C is unavailable because its being used to keep the phone powered. Is your solution to force everyone to carry yet another dongle in the form of a splitter?
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This is a great unpopular opinion and while I hate you for saying this, I do have to agree with you.
I feel this is a very good unpopular opinion, as I think a lot of the annoyance about the fair phone not having a headphone jack is that they bill themselves as a sustainable phone maker who prides themselves as reducing waste and increasing repairability of their devices, something that dongles kinda fly in the face of from an ewaste perspective.
The same target group that they are aiming at generally likes stuff like expandable storage (so that they don't have to upgrade devices just to hold all their photos and stuff) and having a dead simple headphone jack so they can use one of the oldest standard ports in the world to use their headphones.
Since most newer phones have multiple days worth of battery life, I'm more than willing to sacrifice a few hours worth of runtime (maybe even a days worth) just to have a headphone jack. And you could say that I am in the minority of phone users, which is apparently true, however I'd argue I am pretty solidly in the target demographic for a fairphone, which I'm not getting due to the lack of a headphone jack. I instead, got a Sony Xperia 1 V (stupid name for a very nice phone) which offered a 3.5 mm, expandable storage, and decent repairability.
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Bluetooth 5 is 50Mbit/s it's perfectly fine even more so past 5.4 for latency and 6.x. even better. So personally for me it's good enough now. The battery life on my WF Sony earbuds has been enough to not annoy me at all. So, it's better than a tangling cord.
But the space for 3.5 jacks don’t take space away from bigger batteries? In most devices, the two are not directly adjacent to one another. And if anything, the removal of the jack is said to make the device thinner, which would mean a longer battery, if anything. Keeping the device thicker would allow for true bigger batteries since the space is there for the jack.
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Anyone who claims they can hear the difference between an aux jack and USB-C is lying.
I can hear the difference. See, my headphones were bought in the 80s. So they have a 3.5mm jack. If I tried plugging it into a usb-c jack, it would sound AWFUL!
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If the dac on the USB c adapter is cheap you can absolutely tell the difference. However, even apples USB c dac is decent, so that's not really too much of the main problem.
If i were in my mid 20, I probably disagree but not anymore. Wireless earbuds sound quality is good enough for me. Plus, not having wire dangling around me is major convenience. I'd trade a lesser sound quality for no wire in a heartbeat. The first day i went jogging without wired earbud is liberating. Even on treadmill is godsend. I can move around my house easier.
Plus, anyone that is an audiophile probably have a dedicated audio player.
Cool...so I wanna listen to my headphones and charge my phone. Should I just get fucked then?
The ONLY compromise I would find acceptable, if is they had 2x usb-c ports that could handle data/audio, and one of them dedicated for charging...but guess what, that's more expensive for them compared to a 3.5mm
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S-tier
no