Technology

There are a lot of very good Bluetooth headphones from Bose, Sony, and the like. If you take a look at lab tests, most of lf them got a frequency response pretty close to the ideal curve, and ANC helps a lot to isolate outside noises that would drown out the music on wired headphones.

But I do agree about choice, just not on the blind refusal of using USB-C adapters. That's unfortunate that they removed it, but it has some good reasons. A headphone jack wasn't made to be waterproof, and if some managed to make some of them waterproof-ish, it is often by enclosing it into its own little sub-enclosure, with a good short-circuit protection (because even a tiny water drop in there mean a short), both of which takes place.
Same goes for the DAC, we got so far into miniaturizing it, and inside interferences are so high now with new technologies, it probably wouldn't be viable anymore to have it inside the phone itself. Even larger device, like the Steam Deck, have problems preventing interferences on the headphones jack, so that must be an even bigger problem on something as tinny as a phone 😅

You are right. But for >99% of users Bluetooth is a perfectly sufficient connection format for headphones.

Missed a few things.

• They are cable-less, thus they use a battery and have a shorter lifespan
• The batteries they use are generally not user replaceable do they turn into e-waste rather quickly
• Due to the reduced bluetooth bandwidth, call quality is crap
• Sound quality is worse than a wired headphone that costs the same

I liked the whole not having to charge headphones thing more than anything.

i'm a musician, have a trained ear and even with mild tinnitus have yet to see any BT audio transmission that matches the fidelity of cables.

BT 6.1 introduced Randomized RPA (Resolvable Private Address) which should help with some of the security issues. That said I wouldn’t expect to see headphones implementing 6.1 for quite some time. It just came out in May.

they are cable-less, thus need to be charged separately

Not a major drawback, IMO.

they are cable-less, thus it is easier to lose them

True, but I haven't lost any in the something like 6 years I've been using them.

bluetooth implementation is a potential security vulnerability

What's your threat model? Who's going to be attacking your security via your headphones? What happens if they succeed?

IMO this is a pretty ridiculous drawback, it's like saying "wired headphones are worse because the wire can be used as a garrote", which is true, but not an actual drawback for 99.999% of people.

transmission by radio will always be less energy efficient than transmission by wire

So what?

IMO the drawbacks of wired headphones are:

• The cable often gets tangled, and it's a pain in the ass to untangle it
• The cable can often get snagged on things, and if that happens the best thing that can happen is that the headphones can go flying out of your ears. The worst thing that can happen is that the phone goes flying out of your pocket and smashes on the ground.
• The cables can get dirty and frayed, and if they get too frayed they can break or get worn down so they have an iffy connection.
• Even when the cable isn't tangled, just arranging the wire so it's out of the way, long enough to get to your ears, but not so long it gets tangled can be frustrating.
• Trying to use your phone for anything else while your headphones are attached can be a problem. Say you want to take a picture of something, or pay for something using NFC, you have to be careful of the cable. If you had the cable tucked into your shirt or zipped up in your jacket so it's out of the way, now the cable might not be long enough anymore.
• Because of the wire, you're limited in where you can put your phone, and your head has to always be within a short distance to your phone. With a wireless headset you can choose to put the phone in a knapsack if that's more convenient, and when you put down the knapsack you can take a few steps away from it without losing your connection and interrupting whatever you're listening to.
• If you're doing something like working in the kitchen while listening to music or a podcast, you can't put your phone down on the counter and use it to look at a recipe, because as soon as you have to move to go get another ingredient, or to move from the cutting board to the sink, you have to pick the phone up again. And that can be a real issue if you have goop on your hands and you're moving to the sink to wash them off.
• In cold weather / winter you might want to have your phone in a jacket or something. If you go inside and take the jacket off you either have to pause things while you transfer the phone to another pocket and rearrange the wire, or you have to do this complicated dance where you clear the wire and move the phone without accidentally yanking the wire out of the phone or out of your ears. With a wireless headset you just take the phone and move it to a new pocket whenever that's convenient.
• ~~The headphone wire is a potential personal security vulnerability as a ninja can use it to garrote you.~~

The drawbacks for a wireless headset are:

• They tend to have batteries that can't be replaced, so eventually they lose their ability to hold a charge and need to be replaced. It can get really annoying to use them when the batteries are starting to fail and they hold less than an hour of charge.
• They tend to be much more expensive than wired headphones.
• Wireless buds are easier to lose, and easier to drop. If you drop them they can bounce and roll under things, or into the street or who knows where.
• They do eventually run out of charge, and you do have to charge them, and sometimes they can be low on charge / out of charge when you want to use them.
• There's a fair amount of lag, which can be annoying when you're trying to skip commercials on podcasts and so-on.

I have two devices, one is my phone, and one only plays music. I only ever use my phone as my phone, and my music device as my music device in my car, and both run over Bluetooth.

It is a crapshoot as to which role my car will assign to which device. Sometimes I have to put my phone in airplane mode so that the car won't try to assign it the media player role in Bluetooth settings. I'm not impressed.

Hmmm. Then I would need to figure out how my authenticators would work. I have like 3 different ones for a total of like 18 accounts. It's annoying as all hell

2026 will be the year of the Linux phone!

or 2027. Or some Chinese variant of android on Chinese/Taiwan phone that allows sideloading, perhaps with alternate playstore and maps. I don't yet understand how draconian this actually gets implemented, but death of android/google (to me) is possible. If hardware is good enough, then android emulator will be fine for legacy apps.

I'd love for that to be the case, but without a lot more polish and the ability to run Android apps in some kind of sandbox I don't see it happening.