Fairphone 6 is switching to a new design that's even more sustainable

Also wired headphones are a very niche market. If you care so much there are wireless DACs that can feed your wired headphones better than any phone in history.

That's a lazy excuse. Every single IP68 rugged phone has a headphone jack. And the ones that are more waterproof even made for diving with them also have one.

With standard Bluetooth codecs you get nowhere close to that and there is a significant noticeable delay for video content. Headphone jack is easy to make IP68. All rugged phones have it and all non-rugged ones have a USB port which is bigger and more irregular than a frigging circle.

So much this. I had an nVidia (Tegra?) based phone with USB, headphone jack, HDMI.

While I don't think a USB port would allow for FM radio using the headphone cord simply having more would be fantastic! But if laptop designers can barely fit two USB-C ports I'm not sure what chance we have against the phone designers...

This is the same thing as with small phones. A vocal minority cried far and wide that they wanted them. Apple made them.. and they did, not, sell.

You know a minority is a _minority_, even if everyone in that minority bought a iPhone Mini, the sales number is still not going to be high.

(Edit: just checked, in 2022, 3% of iPhones sold were 13 Minis. not high but surely someone out there can run a sustainable business out of that 3% of mobile phones)

https://www.fiio.com/utws1

I remember seeing something like this for over ear, you just stream tidal to them so there shouldn't be compression issues. Might be a delay idk.

Don't they all have 50-300ms of latency?

If you have a quality non-bluetooth suggestion, or I'm wrong about the latency of bluetooth, I'd be excited to hear it.

What, when?

I hope you don't mean when the flagship phone has no headphone jack, and a mid tier phone does. It's not the choice between the headphone jack and 3% more battery making the decision in that situation.

Every single person wants smaller phones. What do we get? No small phones.

Apple doesn't count… they are priced at 3x 4x what an android would cost.

People want small phones but don't want to spend their whole salary on a phone.

By and large, the only people who want small phones are those that still do most of their computing and media consumption on a PC or laptop. And that's becoming much, much rarer (and gaming doesn't really count here - lots of gamers have a separate stream or something on their phones while playing).

It's difficult to do that when the available phones are just getting bigger. Ten years ago you could still find sub 6" phones easily. These days, not so much.

Yeah… the budget Moto G3 from 2015 with IPX7 says hi. To the limited surprise of anyone who was familiar with the brand back then, the top model (16GB/2gb) sold out in less than a week.

You can’t tell me it’s harder to waterproof a headphone jack in 2025 than it was in 2015. And could you please tell me how a rubber gasket adds appreciable thickness to a phone? Because I find that a bit hard to believe.

Similarly, I don't know a single person that likes to eat dodo eggs.

And I want it to work with calls were any extra latency is bad. And I want it to work with my desktop where I play games and extra latency ruins things.

Congrats, I guess?

They were also priced like it -- and worse, many of them weren't available through US carriers, which is prohibitive to a market that often won't spend Kaz Hirai money all at once on a phone.

You're otherwise restating my point, though. Many of the niche hardware features don't have to be built into the device if you just offer more baseline extensibility.

Consider how small the overlap is between devices in a product lineup in the first place and an audience that can buy them -- whether that's through carrier availability to put them on plans if in the US, or the resources to spend on them up-front.

That trend also is based on touch as the primary method of interaction -- but given the tethered AR devices we're starting to see trickle out, and Android's desktop mode finally hitting prime time, that assumption might not hold long-term. I'm not saying this will be the timeline we live on, but considering some of the experiments with dedicated, external devices for powering them, it's not hard to envision the pendulum swinging back toward smaller phones that focus more on things like the compute and sensors and less around a screen you look at all day.

Think of the (modern) Moto Razr. You could, hypothetically, have a compute device that more so resembles the folded-down version of this -- aimed more toward external displays, and less toward being regularly looked at.