I 90% agree, I swapped to wireless earbuds about a decade ago when my aux port on whatever phone I had then broke, and I immediately preferred it. I went from buying £10 wired earphones from a supermarket what sounded shit and broke every month to £25 wireless earphones that sounded shit and broke every 6 months, so for me it was am improvement. I was also a chronic "catch headphone cable on every handle" victim, to the point that I immediately preferred the wireless solution. Another thing is when my wireless headphones break, they fucking break; I go with one earbud for about a month then inevitably buy a new pair. When my wired headphones started to degrade, I always fought it, ending up in a losing battle of finding that perfect way to hold them to make them still work. The only downside I have nowadays is when I'm listening to music or a video and realise I've misplaced my phone, which isn't really an issue, just that it was impossible when it was tethered to my ears.

But I'm probably part of a very small minority when it comes to my preference. I carry a compact camera any day I leave the house intending to take photos, so my ideal phone would have one rear camera that prioritises efficiency over quality. I'd have no headphone port, and to be honest, I could live with no ports and wireless charging and data transfer. I've had two smartphones in the last that had their USB-C ports fail as chargers (both galaxy S8s), and I could go years without needing to use the port for anything else. My dream phone would have no ports, one rear camera without a bump, no front camera, minimal tactile side buttons, be pretty slim, have a swappable battery and run a FOSS OS and mostly FOSS apps.

I respect the voices that want a smartphone equivalent to a ThinkPad a lot, but I don't really think it's anywhere near as necessary as a ThinkPad would be, because for most tasks that need something like that, I'd just use that.

That being said, there's two reasons I don't 100% agree. The first is to do with the fairphone specifically. More battery space and better waterproofing don't really apply to a phone where I can swap the battery and it comes apart so much that it's not really competitively waterproof. The second is larger, which is that I can just not use a headphone jack if I prefer wireless, while people who prefer wired are having increasingly few options available on the market.

Once again, remember folks, this is unpopular opinions. Which means this is a good post, not a bad one.

Well, that's definitely an unpopular opinion.

For me, there are two reasons losing the aux port sucks. First, it means I have to pay extra for functionality I want. It's not like the phone is cheaper without the aux port so it's just more money out of pocket for me. Second, it means I have to keep track of a dongle. Something I'd be using nearly everyday.

The funny thing about battery size; they could make the phone 1mm thicker and you'd get way more battery capacity from that than removing an aux port.

Also, wireless sucks dick. May as well give my own unpopular opinion.

If the solution to a problem that didn't exist before is "buy an extra thing" it's not a solution. It's bullshit to sell you even more garbage you shouldn't need.

I disagree, truly unpopular well done.

But why remove it? Having the option is more convenient then having an adapter, reduces e-waste and you never have to play the "Where the hell did I leave the dongle?" game ever again! 2.5mm sounds great in theory but the vast majority of stuff you'd listen to music on uses 3.5mm.

Solid unpopular opinion.

Not enough room for a 3.5mm audio port, but we absolutely must have a 50MP dual camera plus TOF sensor!

Fuck you, well done.

Extremely misinformed post. Upvoted.

Counterpoint:

External DACs on multiple recent generations of Pixel devices frequently experience severe distortion and Google seems to not give a shit about fixing that.

I literally cannot use wired headphones or speakers with my phone even with relatively high end equipment without horrific audio glitches.

2.5mm plugs suck ass. My first smart phone had one and I HATED it. It's so tiny, fragile, and I DETEST working with it.

On top of all other issues, those fucking dongles wiring breaks really fast

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?

I disagree. My phone has perfectly acceptable battery life and a 3.5mm jack, I use it all day and get home with over 40% left every day. I need the jack to use my earbuds at work, and to listen to music in my car - and I'm gonna be honest with you something as small as an adapter WILL get lost by me. Everyone's got a different use case, and it might not be important for you, but your use case isn't everyone's.

I ended up bying a phone without a jack. I got 2 dongles that split into a jack and a charging port, so i can charge in bed while watching videos. One of the jacks has static noise and whine, the other has i think some kind of digital to analog interface that cuts the sound conpletely when the audio is too low.

So i hear static or when i watch a video or listen to an audiobook, when there is a pause in speech i hear the sound cut out completely, or if a video has soft background music on it, it might not pick up on it at all.

It's very distracting.

And if you go online to buy a dongle, they dont really say what they have in them, or you dont know how your phone handles the conversion etc.

So I don't think "just buy a dongle" is the solution. It works but now i have all these problems i didnt have with my old phone that had a jack...

Wouldn‘t a second USB-C outlet make sense? One for charging, one for audio/data/external devices. Or is that still too much space wasted?

I don't understand how people like Bluetooth earbuds.

You have to constantly clean them because of ear wax for starters, and they're much more uncomfortable if you're sweaty. Not to mention all the years of doctors saying don't use Q-tips because it pushes ear wax into your ears just for everyone to start shoving buds in there anyway. To bad the younger generation didn't get to learn about wired clip-ons or flat cables. Wish they still make them but I suppose bonephonesoike Shokz are safer for when cycling.

Then there's the battery issues. That just feels like a downgrade. Not only is it yet another thing you have to remember to charge, but they can run out of battery. Aux version literally never runs out of battery. Maybe if we had a new gen of battery that lasted months sure, but we don't yet.

And lastly battery on phone isn't an issue. I have an Xperia 1 V and can easily use the phone all day without running out of battery, and it has a headphone jack.

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.

Anyone who claims they can hear the difference between an aux jack and USB-C is lying.

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.