Glad this submission is finally receiving upvotes.
This was just shown at the 39C3 in Hamburg, few days back.
Common (unpached) Bluetooth headsets using Airoha's SoCs can be completely taken over by any unauthenticated bystander with a Linux laptop. (CVE-2025-20700, CVE-2025-20701, CVE-2025-20702)
This includes firmware dumps, user preferences, Bluetooth Classic session keys, current playing track, ...
> Examples of affected vendors and devices are Sony (e.g., WH1000-XM5, WH1000-XM6, WF-1000XM5), Marshall (e.g. Major V, Minor IV), Beyerdynamic (e.g. AMIRON 300), or Jabra (e.g. Elite 8 Active).
Most vendors gave the security researchers either silent treatment or were slow, even after Airoha published fixes. Jabra was one of the positive outlier, Sony unfortunately negatively.
What is exciting, even though the flaws are awful, that it is unlikely for current generation of those Airoha bluetooth headsets to change away from Aiorha's Bluetooth LE "RACE" protocol. This means there is great opportunity for Linux users to control their Bluetooth headsets, which for example is quite nice in an office setting to toggle "hearthrough" when toggling volume "mute" on your machine.
I feel like this should receive state-level attention, the remote audio surveillance of any headset can be a major threat. I wonder what the policies in countries official buildings are when it comes to Bluetooth audio devices, considering that Jabra is a major brand for conference speakers, I'd assume some actual espionage threats.
> Most vendors gave the security researchers either silent treatment or were slow, even after Airoha published fixes. Jabra was one of the positive outlier, Sony unfortunately negatively.
While I don't recall Sony issuing an advisory, I believe the users of their app would have started getting update notifications since they (quietly) released firmware updates.
> This means there is great opportunity for Linux users to control their Bluetooth headsets, which for example is quite nice in an office setting to toggle "hearthrough" when toggling volume "mute" on your machine.
I think most vendors are using custom services with their own UUIDs for settings such as this.
Regardless, I believe there are open client implementations for some of the more popular devices. Gadgetbridge comes to mind in regards to Android, not sure about any Linux equivalent.
They also demonstrated how this could be used to silently find out someone’s phone number and then hijack a TFA validation call from an app like WhatsApp to take over their account with no user interaction.
the session (or pairing key) means you can both connect to the headphone or impersonate it.
It can toggle the hands-free mode and listen to whatever is being talked, you'd notice that it has switched to the mode though - but if you're headphones are powered on and you're not listening to in they can be used for eavesdropping.
During the talk they both demonstrate listening to the microphone and also receiving a WhatsApp 2FA call.
Is this an unintentional vulnerability or is it one of those "we left it open because it's easier and we hoped nobody would notice" kind of things. I mean can you just send a "update to this firmware" command completely unauthenticated and it's like "yep sure"? No signing or anything?
Remote audio surveillance probably be accomplished on wired headphones with TEMPEST [0]/Van Eck phreaking [1]. Not sure about which has a better range and which would be stealthier - TEMPEST or the Bluetooth attack. The Bluetooth attack just requires a laptop. Not sure if the TEMPEST attack would require a big antenna.
And everyone got mad at OpenBSD for refusing to develop bluetooth.
It’s a messy standard and we shouldn’t be surprised that the race to the bottom has left some major gaps.. though Sony WH1000’s are premium tier hardware and they have no real excuses..
I always wondered how people could justify the growth of the bluetooth headphone market in such a way.. Everyone seems to use bluetooth headphones exclusively (in Sweden at least), I’m guilty of buying into it too (I own both Airpods Pro’s and the affected Sony WH1000-XM5) but part of me has always known that bluetooth is just hacks on hacks… I allowed myself to be persuaded due to popularity. Scary.
I was also trying to debug bluetooth “glitching audio” issues and tried to figure out signal strength as the first troubleshooting step: I discovered that people don’t even expose signal strength anymore… the introspection into what’s happening extends literally nowhere, including not showing signal strength… truly, the whole thing is cursed and I’m shocked it works for the masses the way it does.. can you imagine not displaying wifi signal strength?
This is not a Bluetooth issue. The chip manufacturer Airoha just felt it acceptable to ship a wireless debug interface that allows reading the SoC memory with no authentication whatsoever, enabled in retail customer builds. They are just not a serious company (which is why their security email didn't work, either).
Sometimes plugging a cord is a minor inconvenience.
But sometimes it's a large inconvenience
Example: if I'm using my laptop for work but at a slightly longer distance (think, using external monitor/keyboard) then it gets annoying (cord has to hang from the connection, or it gets between you and the keyboard, etc)
You can't read English like if it was a declarative logical language. It is obviously an hyperbole to say "everyone". It means "a lot of people". So why they didn't say "a lot of people"? Language uses hyperboles to make a point stronger.
I don't have time right now to watch the video and will be coming back to do so later, but here's a couple of snippets from the text on that page that made me want to bother watching (either they're overhyping it, or it sounds interesting and significant)
> The identified vulnerabilities may allow a complete device compromise. We demonstrate the immediate impact using a pair of current-generation headphones. We also demonstrate how a compromised Bluetooth peripheral can be abused to attack paired devices, like smartphones, due to their trust relationship with the peripheral.
> This presentation will give an overview over the vulnerabilities and a demonstration and discussion of their impact. We also generalize these findings and discuss the impact of compromised Bluetooth peripherals in general. At the end, we briefly discuss the difficulties in the disclosure and patching process. Along with the talk, we will release tooling for users to check whether their devices are affected and for other researchers to continue looking into Airoha-based devices.
[...]
> It is important that headphone users are aware of the issues. In our opinion, some of the device manufacturers have done a bad job of informing their users about the potential threats and the available security updates. We also want to provide the technical details to understand the issues and enable other researchers to continue working with the platform. With the protocol it is possible to read and write firmware. This opens up the possibility to patch and potentially customize the firmware.
The most frustrating part is when Apple dropped the jack we laughed at the "courage" bit, Apple's given reasons where already seen as bullshit, Samsung had their finger pointing moment.
And it just went on, Apple weathered the critics, the other makers also dropped it, and at some point there was just nowhere to go for anyone still wanted a 3.5 jack with a decent phone.
I agree the loss of the 3.5mm jack is a short-sighted and poor decision. There is at least one mitigation, which is the ability to recover the jack through a USB-C DAC. Apple sells them for USD10. I have several, in the car and in my backpack.
It's not a good solution though. In particular I find the USB-C port gets worn out pretty quickly. Its also easy to lose the dongle and of course it's more complicated to setup. (I'm not sure how to articulate the "it's more complicated" part. Adding the dongle elevates the action of "plug in headphones" from something you can do without attention to something that requires attention, and I don't like that.)
I see the point for ultra slim phones. Except the only phones that are slim enough to have their thickest point thinner than that have only started to come up recently.
Imagine the same argument for USB-C: at some point phones will be too slim to allow for that port, should every maker start dropping it right now ? That would be nonsense.
On adapters, it's no panacea: you still want the USB port available. Split adapters exist, but most of them only allow for charging, and the charging rate is also usually miserable.
You could say people who appreciated that should just eat it and feel in their bones how much the world doesn't care about them, that would be fair. Now staying sour about it is also one's prerogative.
PS: The biggest part for me is every other devices I own still having a pretty good jack. Laptops still have it, game consoles, VR headsets, TVs, high fidelity portable players, cars etc. So keeping around a very good headphone pair is still an enjoyable thing, except for the damn phones. Even in XL sizes. They're the only one needing a dongle, and regardless of the price that sucks.
On slimness: wouldn't an alternative implementation be to "do the Magic Mouse" and put the USB C port on the back of the phone instead of the edge? Alternatively I could imagine MagSafe alignment / charging magnets plus an NFC like inductive communication (or contact pads) to allow for a range of "snap on" peripherals for phone backs that could be implemented on devices thinner than a USB C port.
They’re just responding to the market. The vast majority of people don’t care about this. Personally, I’d rather have two minutes more battery life than a headphone jack.
It’s annoying to have non-mainstream preferences in an area where economies of scale mean every product needs to have mass market appeal. But you might as well complain about the tide coming in.
The official reason was, famously and ridiculously, "courage". Apple further explained that space is at a premium, listed the many things competing for that space, and noted that a large, single-purpose legacy connector no longer made sense.
A lot of Apple's strategic choices are driven by products that take 5, 10, or sometimes 20 years to realize. For example, the forthcoming foldable iPhone (and the proving ground for many related decisions, the iPhone Air) was on roadmaps literally a decade before a decision like this reverberates through released products.
Putting a high-quality DAC in a dongle wasn't a terrible solution (many phones with analog jacks have poor ones), and today hundreds of headphones¹ courageously have native USB-C support.
Regardless, the point of mentioning it is that Apple commonly makes decisions that can seem bizarre to people who don't consider systemic and longer-term reasons why they might've been made. Another micro-example of this that comes to mind is Tahoe's mostly-reviled chonky window borders, which along with many other gradual UX changes over years, absolutely foreshadow touchscreen Macbooks.
They've also been late sometimes and had to change by force their assumptions, the first app store in iOS was cydia and a lot of what we consider modern iOS design was copied over from the jailbreaking community.
I just don’t know a single real person that still wants to use wired earphones with their phone. To me it’s the same as complaining that an artist only has CDs, not records.
I want to use the extremely simple and reliable direct interface and inexpensive cheap earphones and patch cables that I can buy in any reasonable electronics store for low markup. They are all passive components.
Adding an external sound card introduces variables outside of manufacture control, the quality, latency, and drive power all at the mercy of some random integrator.
My phone is easily thick enough to accommodate a 3.5mm port, and it can't be that difficult to waterproof such a jack, which should also make reasonable cleaning easy if it's ever required.
> We also demonstrate how a compromised Bluetooth peripheral can be abused to attack paired devices, like smartphones, due to their trust relationship with the peripheral.
Can't watch the video now. But I wonder to what extent they can take over a smartphone? Can they make a headphone look like a keyboard/mouse, for example?
Second question: can the whole problem be remedied by installing a firmware update?
Haven't watched the video yet, but I think this capability was leaked by VP Kamala Harris during her recent interview with the Late Night Show [0]. She stated she doesn't use wireless headphones because she's been in security meetings and knows they're not safe.
You also don't need to be in classified meetings to understand that Bluetooth/ BLE (and specifically the way most vendors implement the spec) is not as secure as other more battle-tested technologies
What she says isn't necessary untrue, now is it? She just skips a lot of steps most people have no clue about.
I had files in a cabinet, now they are digital. And most often also on a cloud drive, which is metaphysical in some sense. For most it is indistinguishable from magic.
I think many people would be justified in making the argument that bluetooth has existed for at least 20 years and thus is the established battle tested protocol.
Yeah, but Bluetooth spec changed a lot over the years (3000+ pages) and the certification price is rather expensive.
There's an interesting article from Wired [1] about this, although some interesting comments from the engineers working on BT stacks are far more interesting. It seems like most of the manufacturers do not create spec-compliant devices, and that the tests from the certification are just poor.
I'd love to hear more from an expert on the topic, but this looks to be the consensus.
I'm by no means an expert, but I've recently implemented a small BLE based IoT device, and had a look at the security/privacy of a medical BLE device.
Some points:
* there's a real lack of quality, up-to-date documentation. I would have thought that at least on Linux you'd find some documentation, but most of it seems to be "RTFS".
* BLE is in general very unfamiliar to most developers. There's no client and server, there's central and peripheral. GATT profiles are a mix between TCP connections and binary REST-ish interface.
* Encryption/authentication is possible, but depending on the manufacturer's API/quality of documentation it's not really apparent a. how to select a secure connection method b. how to even check if and which authentication/encryption was chosen
* Coming from the previous point, many BLE devices have the same generic GATT profiles, sometimes with the same sample data. This looks like a lot of BLE devices just copy&pasted sample code from the manufacturer and added the minimal changes "to make it work"
* It's probably really easy to do passive/active fingerprinting to find out the manufacturer and/or chip version used in a device. Default services, ordering of advertising options etc
* Many BLE devices are not conformant. Uninitialised name fields with garbage in them ("Device Name: WHOOP\020��=u5״\023n"), manufacturers using random identifiers that clearly don't belong to them
* when doing passive BLE sniffing: the biggest obstacle isn't getting data. It's how to filter it. One of the most useful filters of the nRF Connect app for android is to filter out all advertisement packages for apple and ms devices, to cut down the overwhelming amount of such devices
I think people are generally aware of how low quality the Bluetooth protocol suite is though so maybe they'd guess that extends to security too.
I definitely remember lots of folk security advice to keep bluetooth off on your phone back when smartphones were new (nobody does that now though, and Android auto-enables it these days).
There hasn't been a POTUS or VPOTUS with a technical background in the last 45 years (Jimmy Carter was a nuclear engineer). So obviously none of them would be authoritative on such topics.
However the individual in question is not delusional or conspiratorial, and we know for sure that they are receiving advice or restrictions from extremely well-informed sources, so there's every reason to believe they are (lo-fi) repeating that.
I think the policy Harris is referring to is based on the _risk_ of something like this - it is easy to imagine wireless devices being vulnerable and enabling this capability - rather than being based on definitive existence of this capability.
This is just a chip with debug mode left on and does not allow anyone to hijack audio stream or anything interesting. (Just in case anyone’s checking the comments because they don’t want to watch a long ass video and they notice all the comments are essentially off topic)
checking my understanding: this vuln is in the firmware for specific airoha chipsets; e.g. if a bluetooth device is listed as using a qualcomm chipset then it's unaffected by this specific vuln?
... though I wouldn't be surprised if we see a burst of similar disclosures for other manufacturers in the next year or so
Ah yes, the removal of headphone jacks, the gift that keeps on giving
Funny that there were always some people here pushing bt audio as "the future", whom I can only assume were the technically shallow but very opinionated people that would die on the smallest technical hills
I'd assume that most people wouldn't want to get back to wired headphones.
Transition period was definitely rough, but nowadays bluetooth headphones are substantially better than they were in the past, and it's quite freeing to not have to deal with wires.
There are definitely benefits to wired headphones, such as better audio quality and no battery life to worry about, but for those cases there are USB-C DACs.
Brand new devices' batteries are awesome but wear off and need to be changed at some point, if A) the device is designed to let you do that and B) the battery is still in production.
You don't really own a wireless headphone. You can see it as a rent, or an ownership that loose its capability when in use.
It's not like wired earbuds/headphones are invincible either. I've had a few wired ones lost due to cable damage, which constitutes more casualties than my wireless inventory, including noticeable charge loss. Of course, there are a lot more cheap wired options with replaceable cables now, thanks to Moondrop and gang.
I really wish the debate was more than jack vs Bluetooth, and more wired fans would consider supporting devices with multiple USB-C ports. Yeah, Sony still puts a jack on Xperias, but most audiophiles note that it's driven by Snapdragon's mediocre integrated DAC, possibly because Sony doesn't want it to compete with Walkmans. Yeah, Valve puts a jack on the Steam Deck, but SD OLED's jack has interference issues that users need to fix with electrical tape or loosening screws. If these devices had two USB ports, then it would be easy to use a better DAC with no interference issues (while also charging with a cable attached to the other port). Having a second USB port would increase device life, and tie wired earbuds/headphones to a more durable standard that's actively developed and backed by legislation. We know this is possible for phones because ASUS ROG Phone has 2 USB ports.
A couple days ago there was a bit of a conversation about this, you might find it interesting. It seems this feeling (to the point of calling it an "epidemic"!) might be caused by the known bias of thinking that earlier times were better:
LOL.
People not using headphones in public are narcissistic a-holes, but they’ve been doing it since *long* before headphone jacks went missing from smartphones.
Most audiophiles ignore bluetooth headphones due to sound quality + latency, so we (audiophiles) stick to wired at home and we also have dedicated headphone amps since the pissy sound card D/A convertors are incredibly bad. Bluetooth only when I’m doing yard work. Sadly, modern music is tuned to crappy headphones, crappy car systems, crappy speakers … I miss the 80’s audiophile obsession, the equipment had heart, and mixing and mastering was generations ahead of current (mainstream) music production.
- Apple has a lossless codec for wireless, ALAC that can do up to 24bit/192khz
- aptX can do 44/16 in other devices, Sony has LDAC at 24/96 too
- latency under <100ms is meaningless for pure audio listening, video players have latency compensation
We have amazing technology available today, at prices and quality unimaginable in the 80s. A $50 in-ear from a chinese hi-fi brand can give you an audio experience you couldn’t buy for thousands of dollars a decade ago. And there’s more and more analog hardware being designed and built as technology costs have fallen. You’re really missing out if you think things were better back then.
A friend worked in an audiophile shop during his physics master and he'd swear the customer base was the most gullible bunch he ever saw... And mostly unswayable by rational arguments.
I suspect some of that disconnect is because hearing itself isn’t standardized. Differences in frequency perception, hearing loss, and training can make two people genuinely hear different things.
I'm really enjoying my Focal Bathys Bluetooth headphones! Sure, wired options will always be better, but when I want convenience, I've been really impressed with these!
Glad this submission is finally receiving upvotes.
This was just shown at the 39C3 in Hamburg, few days back.
Common (unpached) Bluetooth headsets using Airoha's SoCs can be completely taken over by any unauthenticated bystander with a Linux laptop. (CVE-2025-20700, CVE-2025-20701, CVE-2025-20702)
This includes firmware dumps, user preferences, Bluetooth Classic session keys, current playing track, ...
> Examples of affected vendors and devices are Sony (e.g., WH1000-XM5, WH1000-XM6, WF-1000XM5), Marshall (e.g. Major V, Minor IV), Beyerdynamic (e.g. AMIRON 300), or Jabra (e.g. Elite 8 Active).
Most vendors gave the security researchers either silent treatment or were slow, even after Airoha published fixes. Jabra was one of the positive outlier, Sony unfortunately negatively.
What is exciting, even though the flaws are awful, that it is unlikely for current generation of those Airoha bluetooth headsets to change away from Aiorha's Bluetooth LE "RACE" protocol. This means there is great opportunity for Linux users to control their Bluetooth headsets, which for example is quite nice in an office setting to toggle "hearthrough" when toggling volume "mute" on your machine.
RACE Reverse Engineered - CLI Tool: https://github.com/auracast-research/race-toolkit
I feel like this should receive state-level attention, the remote audio surveillance of any headset can be a major threat. I wonder what the policies in countries official buildings are when it comes to Bluetooth audio devices, considering that Jabra is a major brand for conference speakers, I'd assume some actual espionage threats.
> Most vendors gave the security researchers either silent treatment or were slow, even after Airoha published fixes. Jabra was one of the positive outlier, Sony unfortunately negatively.
While I don't recall Sony issuing an advisory, I believe the users of their app would have started getting update notifications since they (quietly) released firmware updates.
> This means there is great opportunity for Linux users to control their Bluetooth headsets, which for example is quite nice in an office setting to toggle "hearthrough" when toggling volume "mute" on your machine.
I think most vendors are using custom services with their own UUIDs for settings such as this.
Regardless, I believe there are open client implementations for some of the more popular devices. Gadgetbridge comes to mind in regards to Android, not sure about any Linux equivalent.
Uh totally, I can't believe how much support Gadgetbridge has - wow thanks for the reminder. I'd love to use that on Linux eventually.
> Glad this submission is finally receiving upvotes.
Speaking for myself, I have very little patience for technical videos, so I don't believe I've ever upvoted a YouTube submission.
I would read it if it was an article of identical length!
One second thought I think this is called a transcript...
---
Edit: Auto-Transcript! (No timestamps, sorry)
https://jsbin.com/jiqihuveci/edit?html,output
This is a good article: https://insinuator.net/2025/12/bluetooth-headphone-jacking-f...
> This includes firmware dumps, user preferences, Bluetooth Classic session keys, current playing track, ..
That doesn't sound very serious if they're exposed, is it? Can it be used to eavesdrop my conversation if I'm speaking through the headphone
They also demonstrated how this could be used to silently find out someone’s phone number and then hijack a TFA validation call from an app like WhatsApp to take over their account with no user interaction.
This attack was not silent, it was noisy. They specifically pointed that out in their talk.
the session (or pairing key) means you can both connect to the headphone or impersonate it.
It can toggle the hands-free mode and listen to whatever is being talked, you'd notice that it has switched to the mode though - but if you're headphones are powered on and you're not listening to in they can be used for eavesdropping.
During the talk they both demonstrate listening to the microphone and also receiving a WhatsApp 2FA call.
presumably, even in hands-free mode the attacker needs to be very close to the speaker to hear it
Finally, a coherent explanation of AirPods glitches ;)
Is this an unintentional vulnerability or is it one of those "we left it open because it's easier and we hoped nobody would notice" kind of things. I mean can you just send a "update to this firmware" command completely unauthenticated and it's like "yep sure"? No signing or anything?
Remote audio surveillance probably be accomplished on wired headphones with TEMPEST [0]/Van Eck phreaking [1]. Not sure about which has a better range and which would be stealthier - TEMPEST or the Bluetooth attack. The Bluetooth attack just requires a laptop. Not sure if the TEMPEST attack would require a big antenna.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking
And everyone got mad at OpenBSD for refusing to develop bluetooth.
It’s a messy standard and we shouldn’t be surprised that the race to the bottom has left some major gaps.. though Sony WH1000’s are premium tier hardware and they have no real excuses..
I always wondered how people could justify the growth of the bluetooth headphone market in such a way.. Everyone seems to use bluetooth headphones exclusively (in Sweden at least), I’m guilty of buying into it too (I own both Airpods Pro’s and the affected Sony WH1000-XM5) but part of me has always known that bluetooth is just hacks on hacks… I allowed myself to be persuaded due to popularity. Scary.
I was also trying to debug bluetooth “glitching audio” issues and tried to figure out signal strength as the first troubleshooting step: I discovered that people don’t even expose signal strength anymore… the introspection into what’s happening extends literally nowhere, including not showing signal strength… truly, the whole thing is cursed and I’m shocked it works for the masses the way it does.. can you imagine not displaying wifi signal strength?
This is not a Bluetooth issue. The chip manufacturer Airoha just felt it acceptable to ship a wireless debug interface that allows reading the SoC memory with no authentication whatsoever, enabled in retail customer builds. They are just not a serious company (which is why their security email didn't work, either).
I mean, most companies have security last on their budget list.
It tells more about human nature than about a company.
This can only be fixed systemically by huge fines and/or imprisonment. Otherwise the temptation of taking the risk to neglect security is too strong.
Wireless 'JTAG'! The Dream :)
Honestly, can't we just ditch BT and send audio over WiFi?
One thing less to worry about.
Sometimes plugging a cord is a minor inconvenience.
But sometimes it's a large inconvenience
Example: if I'm using my laptop for work but at a slightly longer distance (think, using external monitor/keyboard) then it gets annoying (cord has to hang from the connection, or it gets between you and the keyboard, etc)
Some of us kept using OpenBSD (longer than they should’ve?) because of that and a few other related decisions.
So who is everyone, in your meaning?
You can't read English like if it was a declarative logical language. It is obviously an hyperbole to say "everyone". It means "a lot of people". So why they didn't say "a lot of people"? Language uses hyperboles to make a point stronger.
Some people use hyperbole to make a point, and some people see this as a red flag, and causes them to lose trust.
It comes up enough that I am comfortable saying that it feels like “everyone” to the OpenBSD devs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25950845
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45798439
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34667522
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43144607
> And everyone got mad at OpenBSD for refusing to develop bluetooth.
Alright, so when is OpenBSD patching out USB support? Such a giant exploit vector.
I don't have time right now to watch the video and will be coming back to do so later, but here's a couple of snippets from the text on that page that made me want to bother watching (either they're overhyping it, or it sounds interesting and significant)
> The identified vulnerabilities may allow a complete device compromise. We demonstrate the immediate impact using a pair of current-generation headphones. We also demonstrate how a compromised Bluetooth peripheral can be abused to attack paired devices, like smartphones, due to their trust relationship with the peripheral.
> This presentation will give an overview over the vulnerabilities and a demonstration and discussion of their impact. We also generalize these findings and discuss the impact of compromised Bluetooth peripherals in general. At the end, we briefly discuss the difficulties in the disclosure and patching process. Along with the talk, we will release tooling for users to check whether their devices are affected and for other researchers to continue looking into Airoha-based devices.
[...]
> It is important that headphone users are aware of the issues. In our opinion, some of the device manufacturers have done a bad job of informing their users about the potential threats and the available security updates. We also want to provide the technical details to understand the issues and enable other researchers to continue working with the platform. With the protocol it is possible to read and write firmware. This opens up the possibility to patch and potentially customize the firmware.
Meanwhile all the phones dropping jack because Apple started it. Official reason is to "waterproof phones"
The most frustrating part is when Apple dropped the jack we laughed at the "courage" bit, Apple's given reasons where already seen as bullshit, Samsung had their finger pointing moment.
And it just went on, Apple weathered the critics, the other makers also dropped it, and at some point there was just nowhere to go for anyone still wanted a 3.5 jack with a decent phone.
I agree the loss of the 3.5mm jack is a short-sighted and poor decision. There is at least one mitigation, which is the ability to recover the jack through a USB-C DAC. Apple sells them for USD10. I have several, in the car and in my backpack.
It's not a good solution though. In particular I find the USB-C port gets worn out pretty quickly. Its also easy to lose the dongle and of course it's more complicated to setup. (I'm not sure how to articulate the "it's more complicated" part. Adding the dongle elevates the action of "plug in headphones" from something you can do without attention to something that requires attention, and I don't like that.)
The jacks are a physical impediment for slim phones. An adapter costs $3 if you still want it. It’s not a bad trade.
I see the point for ultra slim phones. Except the only phones that are slim enough to have their thickest point thinner than that have only started to come up recently.
Imagine the same argument for USB-C: at some point phones will be too slim to allow for that port, should every maker start dropping it right now ? That would be nonsense.
On adapters, it's no panacea: you still want the USB port available. Split adapters exist, but most of them only allow for charging, and the charging rate is also usually miserable.
You could say people who appreciated that should just eat it and feel in their bones how much the world doesn't care about them, that would be fair. Now staying sour about it is also one's prerogative.
PS: The biggest part for me is every other devices I own still having a pretty good jack. Laptops still have it, game consoles, VR headsets, TVs, high fidelity portable players, cars etc. So keeping around a very good headphone pair is still an enjoyable thing, except for the damn phones. Even in XL sizes. They're the only one needing a dongle, and regardless of the price that sucks.
On slimness: wouldn't an alternative implementation be to "do the Magic Mouse" and put the USB C port on the back of the phone instead of the edge? Alternatively I could imagine MagSafe alignment / charging magnets plus an NFC like inductive communication (or contact pads) to allow for a range of "snap on" peripherals for phone backs that could be implemented on devices thinner than a USB C port.
Maybe, but Apple doesn’t make them thinner anyway so the argument is invalid. iPhone 6S with headphone jack: 7.1mm thick. iPhone 17 is 7.95mm thick.
3$ adapter will have low quality DAC
They’re just responding to the market. The vast majority of people don’t care about this. Personally, I’d rather have two minutes more battery life than a headphone jack.
It’s annoying to have non-mainstream preferences in an area where economies of scale mean every product needs to have mass market appeal. But you might as well complain about the tide coming in.
Do you have a source that supports your claim, that the market asked for 3.5 mm jacks to go away?
The official reason was, famously and ridiculously, "courage". Apple further explained that space is at a premium, listed the many things competing for that space, and noted that a large, single-purpose legacy connector no longer made sense.
A lot of Apple's strategic choices are driven by products that take 5, 10, or sometimes 20 years to realize. For example, the forthcoming foldable iPhone (and the proving ground for many related decisions, the iPhone Air) was on roadmaps literally a decade before a decision like this reverberates through released products.
Putting a high-quality DAC in a dongle wasn't a terrible solution (many phones with analog jacks have poor ones), and today hundreds of headphones¹ courageously have native USB-C support.
¹ https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/products/usb-c-headphones/ci/...
Apple is very late to the foldable phones now, not sure that's the best example
> Apple is very late to the foldable phones now, not sure that's the best example
“PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” — Palm CEO Ed Colligan, 2006, https://www.engadget.com/2006-11-21-palms-ed-colligan-laughs...
“A wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to.” — Gandalf the Gray
:)
By "late", I mean they are starting to lose market share because of that in some regions, that kind of late.
Regardless, the point of mentioning it is that Apple commonly makes decisions that can seem bizarre to people who don't consider systemic and longer-term reasons why they might've been made. Another micro-example of this that comes to mind is Tahoe's mostly-reviled chonky window borders, which along with many other gradual UX changes over years, absolutely foreshadow touchscreen Macbooks.
They've also been late sometimes and had to change by force their assumptions, the first app store in iOS was cydia and a lot of what we consider modern iOS design was copied over from the jailbreaking community.
I just don’t know a single real person that still wants to use wired earphones with their phone. To me it’s the same as complaining that an artist only has CDs, not records.
I want to use the extremely simple and reliable direct interface and inexpensive cheap earphones and patch cables that I can buy in any reasonable electronics store for low markup. They are all passive components.
Adding an external sound card introduces variables outside of manufacture control, the quality, latency, and drive power all at the mercy of some random integrator.
My phone is easily thick enough to accommodate a 3.5mm port, and it can't be that difficult to waterproof such a jack, which should also make reasonable cleaning easy if it's ever required.
For other mobile users:
https://www.cvefind.com/en/cve/CVE-2025-20700.html
https://www.cvefind.com/en/cve/CVE-2025-20701.html
https://www.cvefind.com/en/cve/CVE-2025-20702.html
> We also demonstrate how a compromised Bluetooth peripheral can be abused to attack paired devices, like smartphones, due to their trust relationship with the peripheral.
Can't watch the video now. But I wonder to what extent they can take over a smartphone? Can they make a headphone look like a keyboard/mouse, for example?
Second question: can the whole problem be remedied by installing a firmware update?
Haven't watched the video yet, but I think this capability was leaked by VP Kamala Harris during her recent interview with the Late Night Show [0]. She stated she doesn't use wireless headphones because she's been in security meetings and knows they're not safe.
[0] https://youtu.be/BD8Nf09z_38 (Timestamp 18:40)
Disclaimer: This comment is not intended to be political - I don't care about the specific party she's part of.
Out of all the people I would trust on the matter, Kamala Harris doesn't certainly end up at the top of my list, for reasons such as this one: https://youtu.be/O2SLyBL2kdM?si=Zq-EN8zxj4Y_UCwI
You also don't need to be in classified meetings to understand that Bluetooth/ BLE (and specifically the way most vendors implement the spec) is not as secure as other more battle-tested technologies
What she says isn't necessary untrue, now is it? She just skips a lot of steps most people have no clue about.
I had files in a cabinet, now they are digital. And most often also on a cloud drive, which is metaphysical in some sense. For most it is indistinguishable from magic.
I think many people would be justified in making the argument that bluetooth has existed for at least 20 years and thus is the established battle tested protocol.
Yeah, but Bluetooth spec changed a lot over the years (3000+ pages) and the certification price is rather expensive.
There's an interesting article from Wired [1] about this, although some interesting comments from the engineers working on BT stacks are far more interesting. It seems like most of the manufacturers do not create spec-compliant devices, and that the tests from the certification are just poor.
I'd love to hear more from an expert on the topic, but this looks to be the consensus.
[1]: https://archive.ph/6201V
I'm by no means an expert, but I've recently implemented a small BLE based IoT device, and had a look at the security/privacy of a medical BLE device.
Some points:
* there's a real lack of quality, up-to-date documentation. I would have thought that at least on Linux you'd find some documentation, but most of it seems to be "RTFS".
* BLE is in general very unfamiliar to most developers. There's no client and server, there's central and peripheral. GATT profiles are a mix between TCP connections and binary REST-ish interface.
* Encryption/authentication is possible, but depending on the manufacturer's API/quality of documentation it's not really apparent a. how to select a secure connection method b. how to even check if and which authentication/encryption was chosen
* Coming from the previous point, many BLE devices have the same generic GATT profiles, sometimes with the same sample data. This looks like a lot of BLE devices just copy&pasted sample code from the manufacturer and added the minimal changes "to make it work"
* It's probably really easy to do passive/active fingerprinting to find out the manufacturer and/or chip version used in a device. Default services, ordering of advertising options etc
* Many BLE devices are not conformant. Uninitialised name fields with garbage in them ("Device Name: WHOOP\020��=u5״\023n"), manufacturers using random identifiers that clearly don't belong to them
* when doing passive BLE sniffing: the biggest obstacle isn't getting data. It's how to filter it. One of the most useful filters of the nRF Connect app for android is to filter out all advertisement packages for apple and ms devices, to cut down the overwhelming amount of such devices
I think people are generally aware of how low quality the Bluetooth protocol suite is though so maybe they'd guess that extends to security too.
I definitely remember lots of folk security advice to keep bluetooth off on your phone back when smartphones were new (nobody does that now though, and Android auto-enables it these days).
> doesn't certainly end up at the top of my list
There hasn't been a POTUS or VPOTUS with a technical background in the last 45 years (Jimmy Carter was a nuclear engineer). So obviously none of them would be authoritative on such topics.
However the individual in question is not delusional or conspiratorial, and we know for sure that they are receiving advice or restrictions from extremely well-informed sources, so there's every reason to believe they are (lo-fi) repeating that.
It's essentially a statement about the view of gov security, not about the view of an individual.
you have a tracking "si=..." parameter in the youtube link
Too late to edit. I missed that, sorry!
> this capability was leaked
I think the policy Harris is referring to is based on the _risk_ of something like this - it is easy to imagine wireless devices being vulnerable and enabling this capability - rather than being based on definitive existence of this capability.
It seems this vuln was already publicized in june, or is that interview from earlier?
This is probably going to make some state actors unhappy.
Probably a combination of happy and unhappy, depending on which state actor, and who knew about the exploit.
I previously posted the repo here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46406310
Why not just link to the repo directly? That post only has one comment.
Here’s the repo (to save everyone a click):
https://github.com/auracast-research/race-toolkit
A bit irritating to see people ruining the demo by calling the phone number
You'd think Sony would have learned from the PSN debacle, but alas...
Now I need to setup to check if my headphones are still vulnerable...
What about B bluetooth keyboards and touchid
This is just a chip with debug mode left on and does not allow anyone to hijack audio stream or anything interesting. (Just in case anyone’s checking the comments because they don’t want to watch a long ass video and they notice all the comments are essentially off topic)
checking my understanding: this vuln is in the firmware for specific airoha chipsets; e.g. if a bluetooth device is listed as using a qualcomm chipset then it's unaffected by this specific vuln?
... though I wouldn't be surprised if we see a burst of similar disclosures for other manufacturers in the next year or so
Ah yes, the removal of headphone jacks, the gift that keeps on giving
Funny that there were always some people here pushing bt audio as "the future", whom I can only assume were the technically shallow but very opinionated people that would die on the smallest technical hills
I'd assume that most people wouldn't want to get back to wired headphones.
Transition period was definitely rough, but nowadays bluetooth headphones are substantially better than they were in the past, and it's quite freeing to not have to deal with wires.
There are definitely benefits to wired headphones, such as better audio quality and no battery life to worry about, but for those cases there are USB-C DACs.
Brand new devices' batteries are awesome but wear off and need to be changed at some point, if A) the device is designed to let you do that and B) the battery is still in production.
You don't really own a wireless headphone. You can see it as a rent, or an ownership that loose its capability when in use.
It's not like wired earbuds/headphones are invincible either. I've had a few wired ones lost due to cable damage, which constitutes more casualties than my wireless inventory, including noticeable charge loss. Of course, there are a lot more cheap wired options with replaceable cables now, thanks to Moondrop and gang.
I really wish the debate was more than jack vs Bluetooth, and more wired fans would consider supporting devices with multiple USB-C ports. Yeah, Sony still puts a jack on Xperias, but most audiophiles note that it's driven by Snapdragon's mediocre integrated DAC, possibly because Sony doesn't want it to compete with Walkmans. Yeah, Valve puts a jack on the Steam Deck, but SD OLED's jack has interference issues that users need to fix with electrical tape or loosening screws. If these devices had two USB ports, then it would be easy to use a better DAC with no interference issues (while also charging with a cable attached to the other port). Having a second USB port would increase device life, and tie wired earbuds/headphones to a more durable standard that's actively developed and backed by legislation. We know this is possible for phones because ASUS ROG Phone has 2 USB ports.
Thanks god the headphone jacks died in smartphones.
I switched to USB-C soundcard cables which are dirt cheap and survive much much more plug-unplug-cycles. They easily can be replaced.
The epidemic of people not wearing headphones has been directly caused by the lack of headphone jacks
A couple days ago there was a bit of a conversation about this, you might find it interesting. It seems this feeling (to the point of calling it an "epidemic"!) might be caused by the known bias of thinking that earlier times were better:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46424228
LOL. People not using headphones in public are narcissistic a-holes, but they’ve been doing it since *long* before headphone jacks went missing from smartphones.
It’s even noted as a problem in the beloved, acclaimed piece of cinema - Star Trek IV : The Voyage Home.
Shame on Airoha. Terrible security pracices.
Most audiophiles ignore bluetooth headphones due to sound quality + latency, so we (audiophiles) stick to wired at home and we also have dedicated headphone amps since the pissy sound card D/A convertors are incredibly bad. Bluetooth only when I’m doing yard work. Sadly, modern music is tuned to crappy headphones, crappy car systems, crappy speakers … I miss the 80’s audiophile obsession, the equipment had heart, and mixing and mastering was generations ahead of current (mainstream) music production.
- Apple has a lossless codec for wireless, ALAC that can do up to 24bit/192khz
- aptX can do 44/16 in other devices, Sony has LDAC at 24/96 too
- latency under <100ms is meaningless for pure audio listening, video players have latency compensation
We have amazing technology available today, at prices and quality unimaginable in the 80s. A $50 in-ear from a chinese hi-fi brand can give you an audio experience you couldn’t buy for thousands of dollars a decade ago. And there’s more and more analog hardware being designed and built as technology costs have fallen. You’re really missing out if you think things were better back then.
What does audio have to do with this post?
GP seems to mean that if people cared about audio quality, they would not use bluetooth in the first place?
Audiophiles tend to have firm stances on what is acceptable or not, I find.
There are also some amazing cables available in the space. Especially the digital cables, they are really amazing.
A friend worked in an audiophile shop during his physics master and he'd swear the customer base was the most gullible bunch he ever saw... And mostly unswayable by rational arguments.
In any case someone ought to shear the sheep....
I suspect some of that disconnect is because hearing itself isn’t standardized. Differences in frequency perception, hearing loss, and training can make two people genuinely hear different things.
I'm really enjoying my Focal Bathys Bluetooth headphones! Sure, wired options will always be better, but when I want convenience, I've been really impressed with these!