I don’t listen to music away from my desktop very often these days, as that experience has mostly been replaced by audiobooks and podcasts. So in a purely selfish sense, the disappearance of the 3.5 mm jack doesn’t really affect me. I am content with Bluetooth for the majority of my use cases. However, I am still not convinced that the 3.5 mm jack had to disappear as early as it did or that engineers and designers can’t find a way to include it on a modern, high end smartphone, so in that sense its disappearance annoys me. Until recently I have also been using a variety of 2017-18 era phones, all of which have a 3.5 mm jack, and it is very satisfying to have the occasional music listening session in a cosy setting like my bed with studio headphones plugged in.

The problem I have with Bluetooth vs wired, is the same problem I have with lossy vs lossless music and low vs high bitrate video. What frustrates me is not that I can immediately discern a difference (though depending on the material and comparison, sometimes it’s quite obvious) but rather that if I think I hear an imperfection my immediate thought is “would this sound better through my wired headphones?”. And as soon as that thought pops into my head I find myself actively listening for further imperfections to prove my theory, instead of just relaxing and enjoying the music like I intended to. With wired headphones I know that it’s very unlikely there will be any quality problems and I can just get completely immersed in the experience.