Phone makers ditched 3.5mm for USB-C, but which one offers better audio quality?
Entertainment Phone makers ditched 3.5mm for USB-C, but which one offers better audio quality? 14, 2026 11:00 am EST Dedi rinaldi08/Shutterstock Add Engadget on Google: Preferred Source Google Discover For years, the 3.5mm headphone jack was an expected, default feature on every iPhone or Android device. This tiny, round descendant of the 6.35mm "phone plug" carries a converted analog audio signal from the phone to the preferred listening device.
- ▪Entertainment Phone makers ditched 3.5mm for USB-C, but which one offers better audio quality?
- ▪14, 2026 11:00 am EST Dedi rinaldi08/Shutterstock Add Engadget on Google: Preferred Source Google Discover For years, the 3.5mm headphone jack was an expected, default feature on every iPhone or Android device.
- ▪This tiny, round descendant of the 6.35mm "phone plug" carries a converted analog audio signal from the phone to the preferred listening device.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Engadget |
| Canonical URL | https://www.engadget.com/2253607/usb-c-vs-3-5-mm-aux-cable-audio-quality/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-14T15:36:51.374Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-14T15:36:51.374Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | OJr6E3IIGxnJ · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Entertainment Phone makers ditched 3.5mm for USB-C, but which one offers better audio quality? There's a lot more to it than just the port. By Thomas Godwin Sept. 14, 2026 11:00 am EST Dedi rinaldi08/Shutterstock Add Engadget on Google: Preferred Source Google Discover For years, the 3.5mm headphone jack was an expected, default feature on every iPhone or Android device. This tiny, round descendant of the 6.35mm "phone plug" carries a converted analog audio signal from the phone to the preferred listening device. Its simplicity is rivaled only by its universal acceptance, and it remains a staple feature in many devices. Apple removed the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 in 2016 and pushed users toward Lightning connections.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Engadget.
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