Samsung had its Unpacked event this past Wednesday in Brooklyn, and if you've been anywhere near a tech news site the last two days you already know the headline stuff: two new Note phones, bigger screens, a stylus that now does little air gestures like some kind of Wii remote for your notifications. Note10 starts at $949.99, the Note10+ is $1,099.99, both ship August 23rd. Fine. Whatever. None of that is what I want to talk about.
What I want to talk about is the headphone jack, because Samsung just quietly killed it and barely anyone in the room seemed to blink.
I've owned every Note since the Note 4, and part of the appeal for me, dumb as it sounds, was always that it was the "normal" flagship. It had the giant screen and the stylus for the nerdy stuff, sure, but it also had a headphone jack and a microSD slot and it didn't ask you to buy a dongle just to plug in wired earbuds. That was basically Samsung's whole pitch against Apple for years - look, we didn't rip out the thing you use every day. And now the base Note10 doesn't even keep the microSD slot. The Plus has it, the regular one doesn't. So the "normal" Samsung phone I liked isn't really the normal one anymore, it's the expensive one.
I get why they did it. Apple ditched the jack on the iPhone 7 back in 2016 and spent three years pretending it was a bold design choice instead of a way to sell more $159 AirPods, and enough people went along with it that everyone else eventually folded too. Google did it with the Pixel. Motorola did it. Now Samsung, the last big holdout that used to run ads mocking Apple for exactly this, has done it too. Note10 ships with USB-C earbuds instead, AKG-tuned apparently, which is a nice enough gesture, but it means every pair of wired headphones I already own is dead weight unless I dig up an adapter and shove it in my bag.
I'm not going to pretend this is some huge tragedy. Bluetooth headphones are fine now, mostly - the lag is basically gone and battery life on something like the Note10 is supposedly good enough that charging one more gadget isn't the end of the world. But there's something annoying about losing a feature that just worked, forever, with zero setup, in exchange for one more thing on my desk that needs power. I've already got a drawer of dongles for my laptop. I wasn't planning on starting one for my phone too.
The S Pen stuff is actually kind of neat, for what it's worth. You can apparently wave it around now to control camera zoom or flip through a slideshow, which sounds a little gimmicky, but I've been wrong about Samsung gimmicks before (remember when everyone made fun of the S Pen itself back in 2011, and now it's basically the entire identity of the line). I'll believe the air gestures are actually useful once I try one in a store, not before.
Small tangent, only loosely related: DEF CON is happening in Vegas right now too, kicked off yesterday, and I've had three browser tabs open all week half-reading talk writeups instead of doing actual work. Every August I tell myself I'm finally going to go, and every August rolls by and I never book the flight. Maybe 2020.
Anyway. I'll probably still end up looking hard at the Note10+ when it lands in stores in a couple weeks, because the screen and the S Pen keep me hooked even while I'm complaining about everything else. But I'm ordering a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter the same day I order the phone. That's just where things are now, I guess. The jack isn't coming back, on any flagship, from anybody. Might as well stop being surprised every time another one disappears.