I miss you Jack.
My work recently gave me an iPhone - first one I’ve ever owned - and the lack of a 3.5mm jack just fucking sucks. It makes everything so much less convenient. Bluetooth is so much slower to get going than a simple plug-in pair of cans (or even buds), and then that’s another thing with a battery that I have to rely on.
Such a garbage decision. Now I understand what fashion truly is, I guess.
You wouldn’t if you’d just let me onto that bloody door, Rose you dumb bitch.
How many ways is that?
I’m going with “infinite” ways, assuming the 3.5mm jack is a perfect circle.
I use jack cables every day on my audio interface, headphones, electric guitar, effect pedals and synthesizer in stereo, which means twice the cables.
Hmmm, how long would your jack need to be to be used as USB?
4 pins. So standard length because four pin aux exists
https://www.amazon.com/Auxiliary-Braided-Compatible-Stereos-Headphones/dp/B07PJW6RQ7Unless you wanted high transfer speeds for something like an iPhone if you’re transferring videos, then you’d need something like 12 or 13 poles. Now imagine accidentally yanking on the port of a modern smartphone tripping over the cable.
I could only generate about 9 poles in my testing.
Just make the usb-c connector a circule and not an oval. I am guessing that the only reasons it isn’t circular is thinness (devices are thin and need thin connectors) and manufacturing costs (probably harder to get it circular with all of the inner pins)
Thanks to the eu, it’s unlikely we’ll ever have another usb variant. Certainly nothing in the next decade.
Good.
<.< I can’t tell if this is a joke or not.
Seems serious to me. Is there an obvious reason it’d be a joke / is not to be taken seriously?
I expect theres some technical limitation that wouldn’t be obvious to a layman, but I’d love to learn if you can point to resources.
I can’t think of the proper words so I apologize for how untechnical this is: If you look inside the connector you’ll see a thin line jutting out. That’s the actual thing that USB-C connects with. You can’t make that round. The reason the outer part of the plug is an “oval” is just to make plugging it in easier. It could be a rectangle and still work.
Assuming by “jutting pieces” you mean the pins, yeah, I could see that being difficult ultimately to manufacture into the 3.5mm jack configuration.
But translating each pin to a “band” (sorry I’m not very technical myself) on a jack with the form factor of a 3.5mm pin should be doable. You’d probably need 5 or 10 bands since (as I understand it) USBs use a 5 pin connection (again, as I understand it, most devices mirror the 5 pins on each side, but some more advanced/specialized USBs utilized the USB-C connector as 10 pins, hence the possible desire for a 10 band jack).
Again, I could see that being difficult to manufacture, but not impossible, and especially if it became a standard package. Might need a bigger jack than 3.5mm though.
Can you explain why the jack for my guitar to my amp has to be like 3 times bigger than the jack for a phone or computer to some speakers? It’s literally doing the same thing, right?
Considering the 1/4” jack has been around for literal eons (1877, no joke), there’s sort of just tradition when you compare it to the 3.5mm from the 1950s. The primary reason being durability. Your guitar is probably going to be yanked on pretty rough a few times compared to something as little as a phone that will just rip out of your hand. On the guitar, it’d probably damage the port pretty quickly.
That’s interesting. So there’s no major signal degradation or limit between the two cable sizes? I always assumed it was something like that that would make the larger jack preferable.
Not really. Until you get down to really small sizes, the human ear can’t perceive the signal noise. If you’re recording at a full studio level, the lower the noise floor, the better, and thicker cables/ports are better, but for most indie stuff, 3.5mm would suffice just fine for audio quality. Also, if you amping the signal like crazy, that could theoretically help with noise.
That’s cool, so you could just wire USB through these.
i used to have an mp3-player with only an audio jack, and a USB-to-TRRS cable for charging and data transfer.
i think it had 64MB of storage?
point is, it’s been a thing
Edit:
also my keyboard! the two halves are connected together via audio jack.
Wasn’t that how the later iPod shuffle’s did it?
Yup
I saw that prison laptops in the US can’t have USB but can have an aux port and I’ve wondered since then if that couldn’t be cheesed.
TIL. I mean, the headers on most boards are easy to find, so a few paperclips and some tape could be your USB port. And most built-in peripherals use the interface so it probably isn’t disabled. The rest depends on how thoroughly their IT vendor locked things down.
This is one of the most absurd ideas I’ve ever heard. I LOVE IT
There was a time we used it for data.
Pine64 devices like the PinePhone still use it for serial: https://pine64.com/product/pinebook-pinephone-pinetab-serial-console/
A 56.6 kbps modem just needs an analog audio channel to work, right? A stereo jack has two channels for full duplex communication at that point.
But it was broke…
