Kevin Boone

They don’t make ’em like that any more: the 3.5mm headphone jack socket

“If it ain’t broke, replace it with something that is.”

About five years ago I was suddenly, unexpectedly taken ill. Not just ‘that’s a bit nasty’ ill, but ‘prepare for the worst’ ill. One thing that kept my spirits up in hospital, in the long watches of the night, was listening to comedy shows and audiobooks. I used my smartphone for this, since I had it with me, and a pair of old, wired headphones that I just had time to grab on my way to the ambulance.

I survived, of course, as evidenced by my continued ramblings on this site. But it was an unpleasant experience, made just a little better by a simple piece of technology: the 3.5mm headphone jack.

Now, of course, I do own wireless headphones and earbuds – I think almost everybody does. I also own several of those irritating USB dongles, that provide a 3.5mm port for devices that don’t have one. But here’s the problem: I can’t use my Bluetooth earbuds while they’re charging. And I can’t easily charge my phone whilst it’s connected to the USB dongle. In a critical-care facility, it’s hard enough to find one free mains socket to connect a charger to, let alone two.

In the debate about the benefits of wired and wireless headphones, I doubt anybody is thinking “What if I get sick?” It certainly wasn’t something I was thinking, either, until I actually did. Still, that experience made me think about all the advantages of having a headphone jack, some of which I’d thought about before, and some I hadn’t.

The headphone jack is a “just works” kind of technology: there’s nothing complicated about it, and its not encumbered by patents, so anybody can make compatible equipment.

So, although “What if I get sick?” probably isn’t at the top of the list of questions that will guide your buying decision, we have to wonder what other things we lose, by replacing a well-established, robust technology with a complicated, flaky one.

On the other hand, the advantages of doing away with the headphone jack are:

What makes the loss of the headphone jack so hard to bear is that it wasn’t done for the consumer’s benefit. To be sure, manufacturers made certain claims about the alleged benefits of losing the jack, but few of them stand up to much logical scrutiny.

The first manufacturer to make a point of dropping the headphone jack (I believe) was not Apple – as is commonly believed – but Oppo, and back in 2014. Their reason for doing so was at least a credible technical one: they said it made their phones about half a millimetre thinner. Maybe that was a selling point, maybe it wasn’t. But Apple couldn’t fall back even on this claim, because people found ways to fit a 3.5mm jack socket into the iPhones that lacked one, and even posted videos on Youtube showing how they did it. It wasn’t easy, but it was clearly possible. If Apple genuinely thought that omitting the jack would leave more room for other features, they didn’t actually provide any.

It’s notable that a number of companies mocked Apple’s decision to drop the headphone jack, before quietly doing the same themselves: Samsung and Google in particular. Samsung even cynically tried to withdraw all the advertising in which they had mocked Apple. Of course, nothing is ever really gone on the Internet, so we can continue to marvel at Samsung’s barefaced duplicity.

Some manufacturers claimed that the presence of the headphone jack made it difficult to keep their phones waterproof; but there’s a whole range of good-quality phones from around 2019-2020 that are waterproof to a reasonable degree, without sacrificing the jack.

No. All of these weak excuses are simply distractions from the real reason Apple, Samsung, and Google dropped the headphone jack: they all have a substantial investment in the manufacture of wireless headphones.

Apple owns Beats – this was a multi-billion dollar investment, in a company that manufactures Bluetooth headphones.

Samsung owns Harmon, which is know for the Harmon-Kardon and JBL audio brands. Again, these were multi-billion dollar acquisitions for Samsung, in companies with a strong interest in wireless audio.

Google owns Synaptics, Dysonics, RevX, and Tempow, all of which are active in the development of wireless audio. Google also hired Peter Liu from Bose, who was one of the original developers of the Bluetooth Low Energy specification.

It is very much in the interest of companies like Apple, Samsung, and Google to encourage their customers to buy into wireless Bluetooth headphones. Or, better yet, to force them to do so, by taking away the means to do anything else. After all, their executives have to justify the billions of dollars they’ve spent, acquiring suppliers and developers of wireless audio equipment.

The 3.5mm headphone jack has almost nothing to recommend it, technically speaking. It was criticized by hi-fi enthusiasts almost from its inception. The only things it has going for it are its simplicity, and the fact that everybody uses it. Well, everybody outside the world of mobile gadgets, anyway. This simplicity and ubiquity is a great benefit to consumers, which is why Apple, et al., don’t want to provide it – they have nothing to gain if consumers spend less money on their products.

The loss of the headphone jack would have hurt even if there were good technical reasons for it. As it turns out, there are none – it’s just another cynical way for big businesses to gouge consumers. A side effect of their strategy is that wired headphones themselves are becoming less available, as cellphone users were until recently major purchasers of these devices. It’s not difficult to get top-quality headphones with a jack – they all have one; but there are fewer and fewer mid-priced wired earbuds on the market.

The way to discourage companies behaving this way is for us all to take our business elsewhere. It’s still possible to get decent cellphones from Motorola, Asus, and Sony that retain the 3.5mm jack. I don’t believe that anything recent from Apple, Samsung, or Google has one, for reasons I explained earlier. Still, there are older cellphone models from these suppliers that do have a jack, and which are still good phones. I own the Samsung S10+, S10e, and Note 9, for example. They’re a few years old, but they still do everything I want and more.

If you’re a fan of the 3.5mm jack, it’s time to vote with your wallet.