The lack of headphone jack is still a deal breaker for me on phones. My first flip-phone needed a dongle to use and I think I wore out or lost about 4 before getting an iPod. I never want to go back to that...

Currently using a Sony Xperia 1 III running LineageOS. Really hoping the upcoming Motorola/GrapheneOS phones have a jack...

holy moly, I remember 10 or so years ago buying tons of ve monks. So surprised that they are still around.

From what I've been hearing from my friends in college, I think it's a current fad where everyone is buying wired earbuds/headphones. Such a weird thing going on.

Would you kindly share a tl;dr on what Monk GTR is?

ETA: its a pair of earbuds with a usb-c cable or dongle

This thing went on for pages without getting to the point, but as others have said, it's earbuds with a USB-C plug.

I’m lucky enough to call both Russ from Retro Game Corps and Lee (who some of you will probably know better as Wild Lee from Venture Electronics) friends, which made this a particularly fun article for me to put together.

It’s a look at Lee, VE and some of the earbuds he sent me to try, including the Monk GTS and GTR (the latter designed specifically with retro gaming in mind, with Russ helping to bring it to life), but it also gets into the friendship and history between Lee and Russ, how they’ve worked together over the years, and a little of the story behind the people involved rather than a review on the earbuds. I’ve tried to make it as much about Lee and the strange, enthusiastic little world around VE as it is about the hardware itself. Hope some of you enjoy it!

What's the big deal about usb-c headphones (aside from being worse than 3.5mm ones) ? There's a thousand brands doing them

USBC earbuds rather represent a bad direction in phone design.