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PC World has an article on why USB-C has not been a viable alternative for the 3.5mm audio jack. Problems with USB-C include variable handling of digital to audio conversion, incompatible SOCs inside the cable, and non-standard analog-passthrough. In short, the cables which contain computers themselves are not standardized in behavior and the author's conclusion is that mobile devices must have 3.5mm jacks until the USB-C cable technology gets sorted out enough that they become usable.
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Bring Back the Headphone Jack: Why USB-C Audio Still Doesn't Work
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Your reasoning is excellent -- it's only your basic assumptions that are wrong.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @01:56PM
Bluetooth audio is like USB-C audio -- some devices work fine, others are absolutely ATROCIOUS. The only difference is they've had goddamn DECADES to figure that shit out with Bluetooth yet it's still fucking awful...which doesn't give me high hopes for USB-C...
I do use Bluetooth at home, to pipe my phone through the house speakers, only because the company running my old credit card shut down and the bluetooth receiver was the most useful thing I could get with my remaining points (it was under $20.) That thing works great, as long as you keep the phone within three feet of the receiver. But I only use that rarely anyway -- I've got a whole PC hooked up to that system with my full music library loaded on that (my phone has only a large subset of that library)
But I still use the headphone jack every single day in my car. Doesn't have bluetooth for music. However when my car was in the shop a while back they gave me a loaner which did have bluetooth audio, and I was cursing that thing out wishing for an aux in jack every single time I got in that car. Took a good five minutes or more to get the bluetooth connected -- first you go navigate through the car's menu to switch on the bluetooth, then you've gotta enable it on the phone, then you've gotta deny access to your filesystem and your contact list and calling and texting and everything else because if you ask it to play music it's going to demand full permission to every single goddamn piece of data or hardware on that phone. And then it sits there for a good sixty seconds "connecting". Gimme a cable and I can have my music playing in ten seconds flat. Faster, easier, more secure...why would you want to give all of that up just so you don't have to spend two seconds plugging something in?
Plus there's just the convenience factor. I can take the output of my phone and connect it to headphones...or my PC...or my guitar amp, oscilloscope, home stereo, some random circuit I just hacked together, absolutely anything. Worst case you need a $2 adapter, and even then I've managed to use a glass of tap water as an audio cable adapter with shockingly good results so you don't REALLY need the adapter even. Plus it's a hell of a lot cheaper -- I can buy three or four pairs of headphones for the cost of one bluetooth receiver that still requires a pair of headphones to connect to it!
And what do you do if you want to use those big fancy bluetooth headphones with a device that doesn't have bluetooth? Buy another pair of headphones?