I don't believe that is inherently true about wireless headphones.

Re: tradeoffs, you can say that about any set of alternatives, and there can still be one option that in the long term is best for most people. Eg horses vs cars as means for personal transport.

I believe it is. Wireless headphones are subject to interference while wired ones are not. Physical connections are much less likely to fail. Wired headphones also lack batteries.

> Re: tradeoffs, you can say that about any set of alternatives, and there can still be one option that in the long term is best for most people. Eg horses vs cars as means for personal transport.

It's true that whether a product is superior to another is a subjective decision but I think there's a threshold to be met in terms of numbers.

Horses vs. cars is easy: Cars today are cheaper, faster, safer, require less space and require less maintenance than horses. The number of people who'd prefer a horse to a car is insignificant.

Wired vs. wireless is much closer. I think at best 50% of people would prefer wireless after trying them for a week or two.

Wireless and wired aren't mutually exclusive either. There's no reason a phone can't support both wired and wireless headphones and let people choose. That's what we've had for years now and unsurprisingly, wireless headphones haven't really taken off.

The GSM "buzz" would like to have a word with you.

Admittedly it's no longer much of an issue as that standard is not used much anymore, but still...

> I think at best 50% of people would prefer wireless

I'm curious what your sample size on that is, as literally everyone I know who switched to a (good) pair a bluetooth headphones (20+ at this point) is 100% on the wireless bandwagon, myself included.

Admittedly - a large portion of that 20+ samples of anecdata are from pool players who like to wear headphones while playing the game. The fact that there are no wires means that said players no longer have to come up with a way of dealing with the wire to prevent it from interfering in the game (so, sure, my sample is biased).

That's not true. Have you ever had gunk get into your headphone jack and have that affect the sound? I have.

> Physical connections are much less likely to fail.

I hear the air pods are pretty reliable. I've had plenty of wired headphones either stop working properly or stop working altogether. Wires can get yanked and this an effect the internal connections in the headphones, for example.

> Wired headphones also lack batteries.

The literal text of what I was replying to was "have decent quality and somewhat less reliability", and batteries have nothing to do with that.

> Horses vs. cars is easy: Cars today are cheaper, faster, safer, require less space and require less maintenance than horses. The number of people who'd prefer a horse to a car is insignificant.

We're not talking about horses vs cars today, we're talking about horses vs cars when cars were being introduced! That's the analogous situation.

> I think at best 50% of people would prefer wireless after trying them for a week or two.

On what grounds?

> Wireless and wired aren't mutually exclusive either. There's no reason a phone can't support both wired and wireless headphones and let people choose.

Yes, that's true. But I think that the longer-term picture is different. More features means more cost and complexity. And you can't consider this just in the context of one issue. It's cumulative over time. An analogy here is all the various features that have been lost in desktop and laptop computers over the years (and replaced by different ones). Sure, any one of those isn't necessarily a big deal, but in the longer term it's not about individual ones. If you said that about each individual feature, and kept it on, the devices these days would be really encumbered with all sorts of stuff.

> That's what we've had for years now and unsurprisingly, wireless headphones haven't really taken off.

We're not talking about decades and decades of good, consumer-level priced wireless technology. It's still pretty new, and that also means it's still pretty expensive. I think it's clear that a fair number of people who are against the wireless headphones still haven't actually tried good one, which shows that the exposure levels for the technology is still pretty low.

And removing the jack is the kind of thing that may push the adoption of wireless headphones and lead to the kinds of economies of scales that reduce the price and lead to more takeup.