Samsung had its Unpacked event today at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, and I stayed up refreshing the liveblogs like an idiot even though I knew basically everything that was coming. The big reveal was the Galaxy Note10 and Note10+ ($949.99 and $1,099.99, if you're keeping score), and the phones themselves are fine, sure, bigger screen, faster chip, S Pen now does "air gestures" so you can wave it around like a tiny magic wand to skip songs or take a selfie. Nobody is going to use that more than twice. But the detail that actually got me typing tonight isn't a feature they added. It's the one they took out.
No headphone jack. On the Note. The Note line was the last Samsung phone that still had one, and now it doesn't.
I need to sit with that for a second because the memory is still pretty vivid for me. Back in 2016 when Apple killed the jack on the iPhone 7, Samsung ran that whole "Growing Up" ad campaign making fun of people standing in line clutching their dongles, practically laughing at Apple for the decision. It was smug and a little mean and, at the time, kind of satisfying if you were annoyed at Apple too. And now, three years later, Samsung's own flagship ships with a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter rattling around in the box instead of a real jack, exactly like the thing they mocked. I dont think anyone at Samsung is losing sleep over the hypocrisy of it, corporations dont have shame, but its still funny to watch happen in real time.
The base Note10 also lost its microSD card slot, which is a smaller story but honestly bugs me more. The Note10+ keeps expandable storage, but if you buy the regular Note10 youre stuck with whatever internal storage you picked at checkout, forever. That used to be one of the actual, real reasons to buy Samsung over an iPhone: you could just shove a $20 card in there and stop worrying about space. Now that's a "plus" tier feature. Feels like death by a thousand cuts, one spec at a time, until eventually every phone is just an identical slab and the only difference is the logo.
I still have a drawer, an actual physical drawer in my desk, full of dongles at this point. USB-C to headphone jack, USB-C to HDMI, USB-C to regular USB because half my cables are still the old kind, a lightning one from an old iPad I dont even own anymore. I grabbed the wrong one on my way out the door last week and spent a train ride in total silence because my headphones just wouldnt connect to anything. Wired headphones still sound better to my ears than most of the true wireless stuff Ive tried, and I'm not particularly interested in charging my earbuds AND my phone every night, but apparently that ship has sailed for good now that even Samsung's given up.
None of this is going to stop the Note10 from selling well. Preorders were already open before the event even finished, and people who wanted this phone wanted it regardless of the jack. Im just old enough now to feel a specific kind of tired about industry-wide decisions like this, where every manufacturer converges on the same call within a couple years of each other and acts like it was some bold innovative leap instead of, you know, cutting a part out to save two millimeters of thickness and a few cents in manufacturing. Somewhere there is a Samsung ad exec who wrote that "Growing Up" script in 2016 and I hope they get a good laugh out of today too.
Also, unrelated but worth a mention since I had a tab open for it all day: the Dow had its worst single day of the entire year on Monday, mostly over the trade war stuff with China and the yuan dropping past that 7-to-1 threshold everyone kept talking about. Tech stocks got dragged down with everything else. Rough week to be reading business news and gadget news at the same time, honestly, feels like the whole industry is a little on edge right now and this phone launch was almost a relief, something normal to write about for a change.
Anyway. If you're a Note diehard, enjoy the bigger screen and the fancier S Pen. Just budget for the dongle, or better yet, budget for a second dongle, because youre going to lose the first one within a month. Ask me how I know.