They technically already did this. There's an apple watch that you can put a sim card in that works like a phone. Maybe that's what you were referring to?

It’s not that nobody wants them it’s that no company wants to make a phone that can’t run all the services they are trying to get you to subscribe to

That doesn't really make that much sense. A toaster can run most apps people use nowadays. Apple would sell you a brick if it had their App Store on it. There is an argument that they want to upsell you to bigger phones so that you pay more for the device itself, but if it was really worth it for them to offer smaller versions, I'm sure they would. Their biggest profits by far are from the App Store. And if they really were ignoring that market in the hopes of upselling people, then other companies would offer mini phones and people that want them would switch. But they're basically nonexistent.

Case and point, mini version accounted for barely 5% of sales in 2021: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apples-iphone-13-mini-is-over-ending-this-small-screen-fan-favorite/

Do you really think that Fairphone, a company with sales in the thousands, should cater to five percent of the market? And comparing this to the SteamDeck is also not really fair, because Valve owns Steam and they subsidize SteamDecks via purchases from Steam. Fairphone doesn't earn anything from purchases made on the Play Store. And in addition the SteamDeck is considered a success because it captured like 50% of the market when it released. The market is in general really small for these devices, but the SteamDeck was a notable success because it managed to become the go-to device. Were the market for handheld consoles as big as the phone market, the SteamDeck very much would not be considered a success.

A little rant about that, sorry in advance:

The Graphene team seems very busy trash talking /e/OS and Fairphone on social media (at least Mastodon) for not being secure enough.

Their criticism boils down to how nothing except GrapheneOS on a Pixel phone can ever be "secure enough", but they are weirdly aggressive and insistant about it targetting /e/ specifically.

I used to care when I saw their posts as of course I want my phone to be reasonably safe, but the more I looked at it the more it boled down to bullshit.

Furthermore:

• They insist one should buy a Pixel phone produced by Google - avoiding Google is my #1 priority from the start. Clearly my values don't overlap with theirs
• They pretend like /e/ is super dangerous because non-0-day exploits can get patched later. Yet /e/ provides software updates for much longer, while in the past all my phones that didn't break right away have immediately stopped receiving updates. Longer software support = more security.
• Contained apps is not so important if you don't install random bullshit on your phone. I get as much as possible from f-droid, which is very well screened.
• The communication of the GrapheneOS team around this has been pathetic to the point where I have frankly lost trust in the project. I struggle to trust a team I don't respect. /e/OS was started by the founder of Mandrake Linux, and as far as I've seen he seems to have values that align with mine.
• I like /e/OS. It lets me avoid companies like Google, block trackers, and just use my phone free of things I hate and cannot control or understand. For me, that is security.

DivestOS used to be the bomb. Super secure. Monthly updates. Super private. Ran on tons of hardware. But it was run by 1 guy and he recently dropped the project. Which is fair, it was a lot of free labor and donations weren't paying the bills, but so sad :(

On god if you wear large beats over your head in any capital city you'll get ur head kicked in for them, but nobody will mug you for for ten dollar buds

I don't know any who offer weeks or continuous usage. I do know there's a few with battery life of 30-100 hours (that's a wide range yes) but that's just a few days to a week and half in terms of endurance.

If you aren't a heavy user, 3-4 hours a day, it can definitely last you for more than a couple of weeks

tunai firefly ldac

Ah, cool, I figured there must be a device out there. Sadly it doesn't help me directly, as I'm already using a cassette adapter just to get up to a 3.5mm jack. Still bookmarking this though, never know when I'll need it. Thanks!

When your phone is old yes blutooth can drain the battey faster then headphones.

I would actually spend money in this. :)

That wouldn't be bad, for extra couple of bucks headphone manufacturers could give us C jacks and a pass-through as well.

Wonder if this problem will be "solved" with Qi2 (magnetic charging) in the future. Pixel 10 is supposed to have it if we're talking Android. Otherwise with 2 USB-C ports you have Lenovo Legion 2 Pro and Lenovo Legion Y90 but that's not mainstream

How about a bigger battery, so you just don't need the battery bank, and the form factor is sufficiently large enough to handle without needing a large case?

I've had this issue for years across at least 3 different phones, and probably 4 different sets of headphones. Mix of buds and over ears. Different brands.

I don't experience it much anymore, so I suspect its been fixed in more recent versions of Bluetooth.

No pace maker, no prosthetics, and I'm average weight. The Bluetooth tech was just half baked when it came out. Better now but I can still replicate the issue with older headphones.

I also experienced it a lot when walking around busy areas. Might be exacerbated by other nearby devices. No idea, but the point I'm trying to make is that removing the headphone jack from devices meant many people had to deal with this shit with no good alternative for years while the tech caught up

Okay, "never would have happened" is an exaggerated statement. But you're talking about the headphone wires breaking. I'm talking about the USBC port on the phone itself breaking. I've never had a headphone jack PORT break. But Ive had 2 phones USBC ports fail from pressure on the plug.

I would much rather have the wire on headphones fail instead of the port on the device itself.

The user experience is objectively way better with wireless earbuds

Not objectively. There are plenty of problems with Bluetooth headphones. If you don't do anything "serious" with audio it's not a problem.

But:

• Audio quality is worse (mathematical fact)
• Latency is high
  • So high it's impossible to make music / play beats via Bluetooth
• Packets drop due to external interference

All of this can be solved with USBC audio but that's not wireless of course.

You don't really know the meaning of objective do you?

Look at the thread for "objective" reasons people want the jack.