Pursuit of Slenderness May Mean No More Headphone Jack In iPhone 7 (pcmag.com)

An intriguing rumor reported by PC Mag (and initially reported in this Japanese blog) holds that Apple may drop the standard headphone jack from the next revision of the iPhone, in favor of Bluetooth and Lightning connectors. From PC Mag's article: The big question is just how such a move might affect all the other headphones one can buy, as well as the other devices Apple makes. While we can envision some manufacturers making iPhone-exclusive variants of their headphones, we doubt that Apple's potential decision to chop out the headphone jack is going to suddenly make for a market full of Lightning-only headphones and earbuds. There are, after all, plenty of non-iPhone devices that still use the 3.5mm connection. And, of course, you could just pair any ol' pair of Bluetooth headphones or earbuds with the iPhone 7.

Comments

converter

[Anonymous Coward]

As with virtually any apple device, there will be a $75 piece manufactured for 85 cents that will be a lightning to headphone jack connection.

As with the other lightning connectors, if you plug it into your mac it will crash when it wakes on sleep.

Re:converter

[hcs_$reboot]

there will be a $75 piece manufactured for 85 cents that will be a lightning to headphone jack connection.

The only reason Apple keeps doing this is because people keep purchasing their stuff, whatever the price (well, maybe not you I reckon).

Re:converter

[Zontar The Mindless]

I can buy a wired headset that plugs into just about any device that's been manufactured in the last 40 years for about 1/20 the price of a wireless one. SO it seems to me your message is actually more like, "You should spend heaps more money to accomplish the same task, because... um... because I said so, dammit!"

Re:converter

[Zontar The Mindless]

Floppy disks were superseded by other removable storage with clear, tangible advantages over it, as in, "You can pack 50,000 times as much data on something that has no moving parts, requires no power supply, uses a bog-standard connector and thus does not require a cable, is about 50,000 times as rugged, and you can stick in your pocket."

BTW, I have been using various Bluetooth devices for years (speakers and keyboards), and this discussion isn't about going wireless in any case. It's about Apple ditching a standard wired connector in favour of a proprietary wired one.

Re:converter

[lazybeam]

This looks like $75 to me: http://www.apple.com/au/shop/p...

Albeit Australian dollars...

Re:converter

[Zontar The Mindless]

This kind of bizarre nonsense hate just convinces me Apple's brand is still among the most powerful in the world.

I don't make calls with a brand. I do make them with my phone.

The supposedly rabid fans seem almost mythical to me, I can never find any...

You have time to talk about the power of the Apple brand as if it were a good thing, yet you've no time to look in a mirror. Interesting.

Re:converter

[AthanasiusKircher]

Yes, and you could buy a floppy disk drive very cheaply too. Nobody uses those anymore either.

What a ridiculous comparison. Floppies were limited in their design capacity, and Apple's decision to start phasing them out in 1998 (I believe) was ALSO premature. Why? Because there wasn't a good alternative on the market yet for those who needed to transfer files. Zipdisks were fine, but they were pricey, buggy, and annoying. CD-ROMs were write-only. CD-RWs were unreliable and often unsupported in some readers. It was really the USB flash drive which finally replaced the floppy, but that didn't come around until 2000. Once they became cheap and popular, most computer companies finally started dropping floppy drives.

On the other hand, lots of people complained about Apple's decision to drop the optical drive on the MacBook Air, but I thought they were behind the times on that one. I've been using laptops (ultraportables) that didn't come with an optical drive since 2005. The reality is if you wanted the lightest, smallest laptop, why would you carry an optical drive around with you?

And yet they are still useful periodically, so when I built my current desktop, obviously I put an optical drive in. The choice is for a specific use case -- you want the lightest thinnest possible thing, why not get rid of something bulky? You could always buy a USB optical drive, which I've been using with every laptop I've had since 2005. For bigger laptops ("desktop replacements"), an optical drive can still be useful depending on what you do.

So digital audio to the speaker is the future, and then it might as well be wireless. Or you'd have to define a new physical connector which supplies power and a digital signal.

What the heck are you talking about? Why do you think you need to replace the physical connector to get the advantages in digital signal you want? You can ALREADY buy a bluetooth headset and use it with current technology. Your argument doesn't make any sense -- "There are some things that you can't do with the analog audio connector, and if you wanted to do them that way, you'd need other complicated things." NO -- if you want those things, you just buy BLUETOOTH now.

The only difference Apple's decision here makes is that we're all forced to buy more expensive tech to do a rather simple task. The vast majority of people don't care about the audio things you're talking about -- they listen on the crappiest set of earbuds they can buy.

Except now you want to force them to bulk UP those crappy earbuds with a battery and a Bluetooth connection.

Frankly, I don't want to have another device with batteries to deal with. It's already enough to worry about to plug in my phone and tablet to charge. Now I need to be ready to replace the battery in my headphones or charge them too?

Sorry, but even if the cost for wireless was similar, that's just too much of a pain for little benefit. To me, it's the same as wireless mice and keyboards. I bought my first wireless mouse in 2005, I think. It was cool for a couple weeks. Then I had to replace the battery. Then I decided it wasn't necessary. I've never bought another wireless mouse or keyboard since. If I had a specific use case where running a wire was annoying (e.g., controlling a TV across the room or whatever), then sure, I'd use one. But I don't need to have a wireless mouse to "declutter my desk." Dealing with batteries is just annoying unless there's a significant tangible advantage.

Same thing with this headphone thing. I'm not going to deal with batteries to power my headphones unless there's a real advantage. I do actually have Bose noise-cancelling headphones, which are awesome for when I use them, and yes they require batteries. But that's for a use case like airplanes where there's a real advantage. On a daily basis if I'm out for a walk or whatever, I don't want to deal with my battery in my earbuds going dead... just so Apple can shave another fraction of a millimeter off the thickness of its devices. (And of course, that's not the real reason -- they want to see you buy some expensive connector or other peripherals.)

Re:converter

[jeepies]

Apple already has a replacement connector and it's not a lightning dongle. They patented it a couple months ago. Pretty sure that's for the next iPhone.

Re:converter

[LynnwoodRooster]

Lighten up, grandpa - I'm already off your lawn!

Bullshit

[melatonin]

This would mean a DAC, headphone amp, and batteries in every headphone.

Re:Bullshit

[AmiMoJo]

They will probably offer an adapter cable. They seem to love adapters these days, because the device can be smaller and they get to sell you an accessory.

They will go one step further

[Anonymous Coward]

... before long Apple will put in an 'identity tag detector' inside their new iPhone and only their own brand headphones have the tag - and without the tag the headphone won't work

Re:They will go one step further

[kupekhaize]

I hate to say it, but they already have a "Made for iPhone" program where there are special chips the iDevices are looking for, and if they don't find it they will complain the accessory may not work properly:

http://www.iphonehacks.com/201...

Last I heard it never went past fear mongering but was still annoying. I can't remember if there was a way to disable it or not but I'm sure if so it was on by default.

Re:They will go one step further

[LordKronos]

I hate to say it, but they already have a "Made for iPhone" program where there are special chips the iDevices are looking for, and if they don't find it they will complain the accessory may not work properly:

http://www.iphonehacks.com/201...

Last I heard it never went past fear mongering but was still annoying. I can't remember if there was a way to disable it or not but I'm sure if so it was on by default.

That's nothing new. It's been around for a long time. I had a 2nd gen ipod touch. Apple wanted like $50 for their composite A/V cable (with the red/white/yellow connectors) so you could play video back on an old analog TV. Instead I went onto ebay and bought one for $3.50 that worked perfectly. Or at least it did work perfectly, until IOS 4.0 (I think that was the version, but maybe it was 3.0) was released. Then whenever the cable was connected, it would pop up that error message. You could still use the audio out on the cable, but the video portion was useless (I don't remember if it completely stopped working or was just useless because it showed the error message on your TV). The only way to get video out was to buy a new ridiculously priced official cable that had their DRM chip inside.

funny and sad

[matushorvath]

Apple is slowly but surely becoming a parody of itself.

Re:funny and sad

[Dogtanian]

It would be hard to argue that Apple's decision to leave out the floppy drive didn't cause the situation we had 5 years later.

It wouldn't be hard to argue that at all! (#)

As I said, CD writers were already getting cheaper by the late 90s, and Apple can hardly claim credit for hastening their adoption since they didn't even include one.

Yes, the 1.44MB floppy format's capacity was already outdated and starting to look badly out of sync with the sort of file sizes and uses common by the late 90s (cf. the rapidly-growing capacity of hard drives, and the amount of data already-widespread CD-ROMs could hold). The pressure for a replacement was already there in the PC market, the only problem was that no realistic alternative at a practical price had received universal adoption by then. Apple's abolition of the floppy didn't provide a solution at all, it only forced their users to buy external floppy drives.

At best, as the other guy suggested, Apple provide a marginal level of forward pressure to something that would have happened anyway.

If anything, what Apple *do* deserve some credit for is encouraging the adoption of USB, whose time had- or should have- arrived by then. And even that was available in PCs at the time- the one I bought 3 or 4 months before the iMac came out included USB, the problem was that it wasn't that well-supported, and there seemed to be no hurry to do so. So maybe they helped that- and it could be argued, indirectly helped the adoption of USB pen drives several years later- but even that was by forcing the issue (i.e. abolishing legacy ports), and I suspect that USB would have taken off eventually anyway. At least in that case they included a realistic alternative, unlike with the abolition of the floppy.

(#) I think your nickname gives away your slightly partisan nature :-)

Re:3.5mm?

[zAPPzAPP]

Did you even read the link you posted there?
It says right at the top: 'The "mini" connector has a diameter of 3.5 mm [...]'

Looking at my headphone's plug right now, this seems to be correct. The upper part of it (the part without the pinch) is exactly 3.5mm in width.

Real bad news

[cfalcon]

Really excellent headphones use the standard jacks, and will not be converting over. Grado, Audiotechnica, and many others simply do not have a funny little iphone connector, and likely never will. While I'm sure there will be some dumb converter you can buy, who wants to keep that crap in their pocket, or attached to their headphones (which you will have to track carefully when plugged into a normal outlet).

It's true that mostly I listen on little crappy remote earbuds, but that's absolutely not the case that this is ALL I want to listen to.

Moving to this will remove my ability to use real headphones on Apple phones. That's totally shit.

Re:Real bad news

[sd4f]

I think this is the main thing, the inertia on quality headphones using 3.5mm plugs just makes this a silly decision. Additionally, there's just a point where getting a phone thinner is just being silly. Give me better battery life over a thinner device. Problem is the industry appears to be dead set against progressing beyond a 1 day battery.

Re:Real bad news

[AmiMoJo]

Plenty of Android phones have multiple days of battery life. My rather cheap but rather good OnePlus One can go for three or four days on a charge, for example. It's more than thin enough.

I'd rather have a slightly thicker (+1mm) phone with:

- Micro SIM*
- Micro SD card
- Headphone jack
- Strap loop
- Qi wireless charging
- >3000mAh battery
- USB C connector
- Supports all bands (or at least Europe and Japan)
- Factory rooted / unlocked with TWRP installed

Re:Real bad news

[cfalcon]

Apple's move to the larger "plus" option did so very much to help battery life. I also think that there are Androids available with more than a single day, but I'll concede it's rare in general.

I think it's nuts to swap out the headphone jack for any reason at all. I also really think that the "thin" thing is overdone- I already consider any of the larger breed phones too fragile without a case, so you could make it as thin as a card and I'd still need to wrap it in plastic so it doesn't bend and die.

Re:Real bad news

[supremebob]

That sounds like a nice phone, but I think that most people just want a phone that looks cool and "just works". Those are the folks who end up buying or financing a new iPhone.

I'm sure a bunch of Slashdot members want a phone like that, but there probably isn't enough of us to mass producing a phone worthwhile.

Re:Real bad news

[0100010001010011]

I think this is the main thing, the inertia of quality keyboards using PS/2|ADB plugs just makes this a silly decision.

I think this is the main thing, the inertia of quality printers using a Parallel port just makes this a silly decision.

The 3.5mm jack has had a good run. They figured out how to shoehorn in stereo and a microphone. Let it go.

Airplane Mode

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think that the FAA will make an exception for iPhone7 Bluetooth usage on board planes... So no more silly inflight playlists (in the air tonight, jefferson airplane, top gun)... ;)

Stop making super thin phones you idiots!

[laserhead]

We need more battery life!

Re:Stop making super thin phones you idiots!

[Dog-Cow]

An iPhone 6+ is considerably larger than an iPhone 5. Thickness is only one of 3 physical dimensions, ya know?

Re:Slimmer 3.5mm connector patent

[mobby_6kl]

That's ridiculous, especially considering that the 2.5mm stereo jack IS ALREADY A THING. They've been used for ages in phones for headsets too.

Re:3.5mm?

[wonkey_monkey]

Nope. I think there was a 2.5mm variant floating around for a while, but it never caught on.

What else is there left to do on smartphones?

[areusche]

I miss the good 'ol days of 2004-5 when smartphone innovation was huge. Nowadays what's left to innovate? There isn't much room left for Apple to do anything nifty besides up the memory and processor speed. Smartphones are so boring these days. The last phone I was excited for was the Droid 4 and iPhone 4 and the marginal software updates for each applicable platform. What is a mobile hardware geek to do?

I'd love it if some phone manufacturer made a device that was truly secure and could detect when it was being connected to a StingRay device used by law enforcement. Now that's an exciting innovation!

Brb, checking out the Blackberry Priv.

Reminds me of catwalk models

[jez9999]

The original goal of the fashion industry and catwalk models was simply to promote slim women - women who were a healthy weight. This was fair enough, and a decent goal - the happy medium. But the fashion industry didn't stop there. They became psychotic about thinness until the point where they now fetishize anorexic women who are very far from attractive and need to see a fucking doctor.

This seems to be what is happening with smartphones. The first iPhone was somewhat slim and just about right. The boasts about how slim it was were *in relation to* other thicker models at the time; not just about slimness *per se*. It was still a happy medium between slender attractiveness/lack of bulkiness, and utility. But the smartphone industry, led by Apple, is going the way of the fashion industry. It is now led by UX designers with a psychotic obsession with thinness because "that's attractive". Well if some iPhone user comes up to me with a credit card-width phone I'm going to say that my LG G3 is better. Not just because I have a proper headphone jack, replacable SIM card, SD card slot, and replacable battery. But also because the thing actually feels substantial when I hold it. I don't WANT it to be thinner. I don't WANT it to be the anorexic of smartphones.

All I can say is I hope some smartphone manufacturers break rank and start advertising that they are NOT trying to make their phones thinner than 1cm. If Apple want to do that, it's their funeral. I want a decent thickness phone with a good number of features and a decent battery life.

Re:Reminds me of catwalk models

[drinkypoo]

The original goal of the fashion industry and catwalk models was simply to promote slim women - women who were a healthy weight. This was fair enough, and a decent goal - the happy medium. But the fashion industry didn't stop there. They became psychotic about thinness until the point where they now fetishize anorexic women who are very far from attractive and need to see a fucking doctor.

Yeah, I've heard two competing theories and I think they're both right, albeit more the first one than the second one. The first one is that when women are attractive people look at the women and not the clothes, so they wanted women who are more like a clothes hanger. Second, the influence of the homosexual fashion designer, who doesn't want to look at women anyway. (I know queers who like to look at boobs, so it's not all of them, but I also have met queers who seem to have a problem with women. It's a lumpy world.)

Re:Reminds me of catwalk models

[quantaman]

The original goal of the fashion industry and catwalk models was simply to promote slim women - women who were a healthy weight. This was fair enough, and a decent goal - the happy medium. But the fashion industry didn't stop there. They became psychotic about thinness until the point where they now fetishize anorexic women who are very far from attractive and need to see a fucking doctor.

Yeah, I've heard two competing theories and I think they're both right, albeit more the first one than the second one. The first one is that when women are attractive people look at the women and not the clothes, so they wanted women who are more like a clothes hanger. Second, the influence of the homosexual fashion designer, who doesn't want to look at women anyway. (I know queers who like to look at boobs, so it's not all of them, but I also have met queers who seem to have a problem with women. It's a lumpy world.)

Or it's like the peacocks tail, guys don't like thinness because it's healthy, they like it because it's difficult to achieve. In our society there's a huge excess of calories and the standard person tends to be overweight. If you manage to be thin in that environment it suggests you're a higher quality mate because you've achieved a difficult task.

Supposedly a bit of fat tends to be attractive in societies with low food security, that would be completely consistent with this mechanism.

Re:Reminds me of catwalk models

[a whoabot]

Thin women are considered more attractive generally, even in countries with low food security.

https://peerj.com/articles/115...

"Participants from three Caucasian populations (Austria, Lithuania and the UK), three Asian populations (China, Iran and Mauritius) and four African populations (Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria and Senegal) rated attractiveness of a series of female images varying in fatness (BMI) and waist to hip ratio (WHR). There was an inverse linear relationship between physical attractiveness and body fatness or BMI in all populations. Lower body fat was more attractive, down to at least BMI = 19. There was no peak in the relationship over the range we studied in any population"

Also:

"For example, the BMIs of Playboy centerfolds and glamour models over the last 50 years are almost all in the range 17 to 20 (Katzmarzyk & Davis, 2001; Tovee et al., 1999; Voracek & Fisher, 2002). Women and men asked to manipulate female 3D computer models to make them maximally attractive make them have BMIs of 18.9 and 18.8 respectively (Crossley, Cornelissen & Tovee, 2012). The biggest outlier in previous studies of attractiveness at low BMI was the observation that in Poland the highest rated attractiveness was at a BMI of 15 (Koscinski, 2013), and potentially lower as this was the smallest stimulus in the set presented."

Re: 3.5mm?

[Redmancometh]

xbox 360 used it actually...still many devices that do

Re:3.5mm?

[drinkypoo]

I thought the headphone socket on phones was much smaller than that.

It was, in the flip phone era. But then we got phones which are also mp3 players, so then we got a real stereo miniplug so that we could use real headphones without an adapter.

Pursuit of Slenderness? Pursuit for Cash

[hsa]

Yeah, right. This has nothing to do with selling overpriced accessories.

Re:3.5mm?

[PopeRatzo]

I think there was a 2.5mm variant floating around for a while, but it never caught on.

Yeah. I had a Sangean radio that had the smaller variant. I hated it because I couldn't get replacement earbuds for it and had to buy an adapter, which defeats the purpose of the smaller jack.

Dear Apple

[grahamtriggs]

If the 3.5mm jack is restricting you from making the device thinner, then use the "unnecessary" space for high battery capacity.

Hell, just make the device a tiny bit thicker and increase the battery life anyway.

Just because Jony Ive is a twat that craves how things look over how they function, a substantial part of your user base (and potential user base), actually give a shit about having a device that can be used consistently without dying in under 24 hours, and might even last more than a day without charging.

To an extent we will trade battery life for increased functionality, but an even thinner device isn't more functional. We want more battery life.

Re:3.5mm?

[JaredOfEuropa]

Meh. Keep the 3.5mm connector, shrink the rest of the phone down,and fill the remaining space with extra battery. Seriously, how much thinner do phones need to be? I'd prefer some extra battery life, thanks.

Re:3.5mm?

[turbidostato]

"After all, why can't they just redesign the audio socket so it's a couple of millimeters thinner?"

They probably can but then, what would you call an object 1.5mm width and ending on a point? That's a connector no more but a needle. And a needle has two problems: it's fragile and it can hurt. Not such a wise decision for a connector.

Re:Typical crApple loving faggot

[Anonymous Coward]

You crApple loving faggots can't tell the difference between "their" and "there" so it makes all your "points" null and void except for one, you are a cock-sucking crApple fanboi sheep and a fucktard.

Troll posting as AC asshole complains about language usage, and uses idiot language to express displeasure with spelling meanings.
Duh.

"Spelling meanings"?!?!?!

Talk about "idiot language"...

Re:3.5mm?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the 2.5mm head phone jack was the de-facto standard for phones until the iPhone came around.

Re:3.5mm?

[Noah Haders]

They're already having trouble shrinking the camera components. My iPhone 6s has a bump. I'm not going to cry

Re:3.5mm?

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep the 3.5mm connector, shrink the rest of the phone down,and fill the remaining space with extra battery. Seriously, how much thinner do phones need to be? I'd prefer some extra battery life, thanks.

+1 to that. Also note the iPhone 6 has a bulge for the camera. If for whatever reason Apple insists to make the phone even slimmer, please keep the headphone jack and have a reinforced bulge. I'll gladly take that.

I'm fairly mixed feelings over this decision actually.
1) Wireless headphones are an option. IMO they're not ready for prime time, audio quality, or mic quality, or drop out issues etc.
2) Adapter/dongle for normal headphone. Yuck dongles.
3) Looking at more audiophile solutions (head-fi). There's a market for external DAC and/or Amp solutions to drive various headphones. You can buy 3rd party DAC+Amp, connect to the phone via Lightning connector, and get the headphone jack from your 3rd party device (as well as rubber band the extra box onto your phone some how).

Apple doesn't really solve the weight/battery/thinness-while-still-being-sufficiently-good solution. They just export it to 3rd parties to make up the difference. Maybe we're all supposed to go buy Beats and subscribe to Apple Music. Two things I refuse to do.

Also keep in mind there are dedicated music players out there. The downside is you lose your single device convergence but people who are really into trying to have the best portable audio experience probably already carry one or two extra boxes in their pocket already. I want something above average but it doesn't have to be just as good as a desktop experience. I'm willing to sacrifice a little for portability but I think Apple is setting the bar too low. As-is I'm looking at buying one of those external DAC/Amp boxes.

Fuck you Apple for setting the bar too low.

Re:Another explanation - waterproof

[LynnwoodRooster]

Samsung, Sony and many others already use the commodity waterproof 3.5mm jacks. IP67 rated at that...

Re: 3.5mm?

[Fire_Wraith]

This. I've never understood why everyone wants the phones to keep getting lighter and thinner, with things like a glass back, only to then have to put them in a giant bulky plastic case to protect them, entirely defeating the purpose. People (mostly tech journalists) complained about how the Samsung S3/S4 felt with its plastic back, but you could actually get away without putting it in a case, which seems to be true of fewer and fewer phones these days (certainly not the iPhones or the S6).

Re:3.5mm?

[cyn1c77]

Meh. Keep the 3.5mm connector, shrink the rest of the phone down,and fill the remaining space with extra battery. Seriously, how much thinner do phones need to be? I'd prefer some extra battery life, thanks.

Agreed! The phone is already too thin to hold onto without a case right now.

Also, Apple could just make a new 1.5mm female connector jack that was thinner than existing ones. For example, the female conductor could only contact some of the male connector on two sides, not all the way around. But I'm sure it's more profitable for Apple to have us buy their marked up new male connectors...

Re:3.5mm?

[ganjadude]

id rather keep it flat and use the space for battery instead of a bump personally