Though we are seeing the headphone jack becoming slowly extinct on mobile phones, it seems the useful port is safe and sound on laptops and tablets for the time being.
After all, I’ve yet to see a laptop, convertible, detachable or other 2-in-1 ship without a headphone jack up to this point.
From the looks of this commit, it seems Chromebooks are finally getting some inline headphone volume controls.
Sure, with Bluetooth headphones you can play, pause, increase and decrease volume, but the good old pluggable earphones have been left out in the cold on this front with Chromebooks up to this point.
We ran into a similar commit many months ago, but after a few tests around the office, I can confirm inline headphone controls are not a thing on Chromebooks at this point. At least not in a broad fashion, anyway.
While this is nothing ground-breaking, it does hopefully confirm that we aren’t looking at the disappearance of the headphone jack at this point for Chromebooks. Additionally, this is an expected behavior for users accustomed to using Android devices.
For those users who may be picking up their first Chromebooks this fall or holiday season, expected and long-existant features like this need to be just as commonplace on Chromebooks. If Google is to continue this march of Chrome OS being the vehicle for Android on the bigger screen, things like headphone controls will not only be nice to have, but also a fully-expected feature moving forward.
One other thing: this commit is for Kaby Lake devices, but this particular testing looks to be happening for ‘Eve’ (otherwise expected to be Google’s next Pixel device). We fully expect ‘Eve’ to be the torch-bearer for the next generation of Chromebooks, so to see this function coming to it likely means we’ll see it trickle down to most Chromebooks moving forward.