Solid article.
It ends up being the price of engineering smaller devices with increasingly demanding battery requirements, connectivity and functionality.
I'll be getting the phone and I'll still lament the loss of the 3.5mm audio port.
This would be an easier pill to swallow if the lightning port was a usb c port. A lightning specific headset can't be used on anything right now. Not even my macbook pro.
this is where I am. I might buy some BT headphones for the gym, but when I really want to listen to music, say on a cross-country flight? The adapter will be close by. There is nothing they can do to get me to stop using my wired headphones.
Perhaps when BT headphones get to the point where high-end headphones ($400+) can be charged in 10 minutes from empty and last 2 weeks. Then maybe. But probably not because who wants to have to worry about being able to buy a replacement battery for a pair of $1,000 BT headphones a decade from now? What if nobody makes one because the brand was niche? What if a small high-end company like Audeze (
https://www.audeze.com/) makes a fleet of sweet cans but went out of business? Sooner or later, that technology is going to require repairs or replacements, you know?
I can always buy a new audio cable for any of my existing headphones and keep on trucking. 50 years from now, I'm sure I'd be able to do the same. BT headphones? What happens if the BT chip fails? What happens if some other special circuitry or processors fail? What happens if the battery fails? All of this added complexity and loss of longevity for...what benefit? Outside of exercise and being out and about, nobody cares about there being a cord or not. This isn't like telephones or old corded cables for TV remotes that would just get tangled up and messy. This continues to feel like a solution looking for a problem.
Is this not making any sense? Am I really tired? I feel like I'm babbling; I just don't get it.