💾 Archived View for lesogorov.site › glogs › 2304 › I-was-wrong-about-bluetooth-earbuds.gmi captured on 2023-06-16 at 16:14:52. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I remember the day in freshman year of high school when I saw that the new iPhones were coming out without a headphone jack.
I laughed, typical Apple, making their devices less convenient so you have to buy their new product. It seemed like so many people were in agreement that this was a bad trend that there was no way that it would persist, yet today my phone has no headphone jack and I haven't found myself truly desiring one for some time.
Other companies carried on with this trend, even OnePlus, which I had felt some sense of loyalty to, dropped the headphone jack only a couple years later. This killed pretty much all my brand loyalty since then, good that it was nipped in the bud early on. I really felt betrayed by the promise of the android ecosystem, we were meant to be the open alternative yet all they ever did was copy Apple and further restrict, not open up, the underlying systems. To me the headphone jack removal was the start of this trend, so I put a lot of this inner turmoil about being sold a false promise on the spawn of this trend: the bluetooth earbud.
I was a frequent user of wired earbuds for what feels like all of my life. I had a little iPod nano with all my podcasts and music from a fairly young age, and you were required to use ear buds with it, since the on board speaker only played sound effects. 90% of the time I only ever had one earbud in since I don't like the feeling of being isolated from the sounds of my outside environment, and since I mostly listened to podcasts I wasn't missing anything by using single channel audio. In my younger years I remember being able to keep a pair of earbuds for a while, but when I had a phone and started bringing my them everywhere, pretty soon they became a fairly frequent replacement. The Apple earbuds were pretty sturdy but inevitably would fail on the side with the mic/controls. Once I learned how to solder, I never threw away a pair of earbuds. In fact I made it my mission to collect as many as I could find, whether they be my friends broken pair, ancient ones I found buried in an old drawer, or half-smashed ones lying in the road. I created monstrosities of wire and electrical tape, barely holding together, that would break if you looked at them wrong. They did work as pretty good earbuds though. Very rarely was it the speakers that would go bad, so once I found a pair of speaker I liked, I would just swap out the rest of the connections whenever they went bad. I kept this up for a while, really it wasn't until the past few months where I stopped.
There was a brief stint right before COVID where I did get the chance to use wireless earbuds. They were a stocking stuffer at Christmas and I figured I'd give them a shot for the hell of it. They worked pretty well but the charging case for them broke after a couple months, meaning I couldn't use them after they ran out of charge. However, I was able to use them as a sort of bluetooth adapter by hooking up the wires that would go to the earbud speaker to a 3.5mm jack and attaching it to a deconstructed portable charger I also had. It was difficult to solder it all together since the wires were so small but once I got it working I could now add bluetooth to anything with a 3.5mm jack. I eventually transplanted this monstrosity into an Altoids can and cleaned everything up a bit. I still have it lying around somewhere, I just need to find it.
Now I use bluetooth earbuds practically daily. Roomie got a new pair and decided to give me his old ones, a fairly cheap but good pair of Mpow M30s. I really thought needing to charge my earbuds would be a massive hassle, but in reality I only need to plug them in at most once a week. Since I still mostly only use a single earbud, if I get the low battery warning on one I can just switch to the other. The lack of a cable tethering me to the device I'm listening to is not something I thought I would care much about, but in reality is extremely convenient. I constantly would get my earbuds ripped out of my ear when moving branches, but now there's nothing for them to grab on to. The physical wire was always a weak point on earbuds and the question of it eventually disconnecting was a question of when over if. Wireless makes earbuds last a lot longer, sure I may pay 3x the price for a cheap pair of wireless earbuds over a cheap pair of wired earbuds, but they're likely to last 3x as long. These Mpows are almost 4 years old, but the battery life has held amazingly long, whereas I struggled to have a pair of wired earbuds last more than 3 months. Also when I'm using one earbud, the other one isn't dangling from my neck, begging to get snagged on any passing corner.
I think a lot of my aversion to bluetooth earbuds came from old memories of bluetooth. Nowadays, once you're past the pairing stage, bluetooth pretty much just works, and pairing is all but painless. I have distinct memories of doing bizarre incantations to get both devices into pairing mode and have them properly sync up, before inevitably disconnecting as soon as the device got more than a foot away. I experienced some of this on the Thinkpad T430. Initially I assumed it was too old to support bluetooth, so it was a pleasant surprise 4 years into ownership when I noticed bluetooth pop up in a log somewhere and found out it supported it. Pairing was difficult and required restarting the daemon multiple times, but once it got connected it mostly was fine, with occasional hiccups and disconnects. I just opted to not use it very often since it was hit or miss on needing to do a full reboot to get anything paired.
Bluetooth earbuds are pretty good, not all new things are bad (just most of them).