Slashdot Mirror
Taking the Headphone Jack Off Phones Is User-Hostile and Stupid (theverge.com)
A WSJ report on Tuesday claimed that the next iPhone won't have the 3.5mm headphone port. A handful of smartphones such as LeEco's Le 2, Le 2 Pro, and Le Max 2 that have launched this year already don't have a headphone jack. The Verge's Nilay Patel has an opinion piece in which he argues that smartphone companies shouldn't ditch headphone ports as it helps no consumer. He lists six reasons:
1. Digital audio means DRM audio :Restricting audio output to a purely digital connection means that music publishers and streaming companies can start to insist on digital copyright enforcement mechanisms. We moved our video systems to HDMI and got HDCP, remember? Copyright enforcement technology never stops piracy and always hurts the people who most rely on legal fair use, but you can bet the music industry is going to start cracking down on "unauthorized" playback and recording devices anyway.2. Wireless headphones and speakers are fine, not great.
3. Dongles are stupid, especially when they require other dongles.
4. Ditching a deeply established standard will disproportionately impact accessibility.:The headphone jack might be less good on some metrics than Lightning or USB-C audio, but it is spectacularly better than anything else in the world at being accessible, enabling, open, and democratizing. A change that will cost every iPhone user at least $29 extra for a dongle (or more for new headphones) is not a change designed to benefit everyone.5. Making Android and iPhone headphones incompatible is incredibly arrogant and stupid.
6. No one is asking for this.
1. Digital audio means DRM audio :Restricting audio output to a purely digital connection means that music publishers and streaming companies can start to insist on digital copyright enforcement mechanisms. We moved our video systems to HDMI and got HDCP, remember? Copyright enforcement technology never stops piracy and always hurts the people who most rely on legal fair use, but you can bet the music industry is going to start cracking down on "unauthorized" playback and recording devices anyway.2. Wireless headphones and speakers are fine, not great.
3. Dongles are stupid, especially when they require other dongles.
4. Ditching a deeply established standard will disproportionately impact accessibility.:The headphone jack might be less good on some metrics than Lightning or USB-C audio, but it is spectacularly better than anything else in the world at being accessible, enabling, open, and democratizing. A change that will cost every iPhone user at least $29 extra for a dongle (or more for new headphones) is not a change designed to benefit everyone.5. Making Android and iPhone headphones incompatible is incredibly arrogant and stupid.
6. No one is asking for this.
and they save a whole whopping nickel off each unit. move a few million units and it's easily 100k+.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Fuck Apple.
Never stopped Apple before.
The reason they're ditching the headphone jack is because the thickness of the jack assembly is getting in the way of their desire to make the phone thinner. I think they're ultimately shooting for having future phones as thin as credit cards.
So, just don't buy a phone without a headphone jack...how's that for democratizing?
This is what passes for innovation when you run out of actual innovation.
Sure, the engineering is perhaps more elegant and you get rid of a few creaky parts like an amplifier and a jack, but what's the payback for that? If we're lucky a few extra mm^3 of battery? A device even thinner or smaller in some way, features most people don't want?
But this is what passes for innovation when you don't have ideas, and somebody made the fucking spreadsheet work, indicating it would be some tiny percentage cheaper to build and there would be a short-term bonus in terms of selling dongles and new headphones.
So really the only actual innovation is *financial* innovation -- squeezing a few more bucks out of end users and creating some licensing deals for "made for iPhone headphones" but not any innovation that anyone seriously thinks improves anything.
And you can bet that the dongles will be ass-ugly lumps sticking out the bottom of the phone, just asking to break the jack. Maybe somebody 2 years from now will finally get the green light to produce an Apple-approved adapter that makes the phone slightly longer but has a separate lightning and headphone jacks. But you can bet it will be a long delay before they approve it so they can capture every damn dollar of dongle spending.
No one will care in a year.
So, the headphone jack is apparently the argument that finally brought forth the "No one is asking for this" argument?
Hey consumers, where the fuck were you 172 pointless "upgrades" and $500 MSRP dollars ago?
Don't even bother bitching about design changes now. The monopolies aren't listening anymore. Consumers lost the ability to provide feedback that would result in action long ago.
...and they save a whole whopping nickel off each unit.
That's not the reason they are doing this. The 3.5mm jack is an open standard which anyone can easily use for free and just about any earphones will work with any phone. If each manufacturer can get away with replacing this with their own proprietary connector then now users will have to either purchase a dongle or a specially designed earphone where the phone manufacturer gets a cut because it uses their connector.
So this is not about saving a 3p/5c per phone this is about making ten times as much, or more, per dongle or earphone purchased. Better yet if these are like Apple's lightning connector the lifespan of the connector is a lot less than that of the phone so they can sell multiple connectors per phone and make even more money. Call me cynical but I have yet to see any real benefit mentioned to the customer from ditching the standard 3.5mm jack, and certainly nothing like enough to offset the pain involved in carrying around multiple dongles so your earphones can work with your tablet, phone an laptop.
That's an admirable goal... but being as thin as a credit card means that it is equally likely to get broken. If your credit card cracks they will send you a replacement for free if you ask for one. Will Apple do likewise?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The same thing happened in 1998. Geeks everywhere told Apple to screw themselves for coming out with a 'proprietary' connector USB that no one else used. Forcing everyone to buy new mice and keyboards and ... oh the humanity.
Not buying an Apple product? Why the hell do you care?
Since everyone's hating on replacing 3.5mm jacks, I'm going to play devil's advocate.
6 reasons that 3.5mm jacks will go the way of the 3.5" floppy drive:
1) Analog audio cables need shielding from outside interference. Cheaper cabling is inadequately shielded. Digital signals are more resistant to minor interference.
2) 3.5mm jacks are finicky. I've owned many extension cables with 3.5mm plugs that need fiddling with. If I don't rotate it just so, and plug it in at just the right depth, I get abnormally low volume, one of the channels won't work, or certain frequency ranges won't play.
3) 3.5mm plugs aren't universal. There are ones with 1, 2, or even 3 rings, and the above problems are more prevalent if a plug is connected to a receptacle/adapter engineered to expect a different number of rings.
4) Data sent through the 3.5mm jack is an unencrypted analog signal. This means it's vulnerable to side-channel attacks and surveillance. Someone could surveil/inject data going through the microphone channel (assuming the phone uses an analog microphone), or the headphone channel. A simple 'not' inserted into or removed from a sentence could cause substantial disruption to a target. Of course phone networks and smartphones are often surveillable in multiple ways, but not by everyone; also, phones are sometimes used as personal audio recorders, which may not be surveillable. An encrypted digital signal, with a handshake protocol but no master key (i.e. backdoor), could prevent these attacks.
5) Phones tend to come with noisy/cheap amplifiers/DACs. This means that even if you plug in your $500 headphones you're going to get noise, and there's nothing you can do about it. Moving these components into the headphones means that phones can accommodate top-end audio. For some reason, smartphones have their cameras heavily scrutinized, yet their audio components are glossed over by reviewers and consumers. Go figure.
6) 3.5mm jacks add cost and thickness to smartphones. This is the real reason (of course) why they're being ditched. Just like laptop makers are aiming for the thinnest laptops, phone makers want to make the thinnest smartphones. USB type C (which Thunderbolt 3 uses) has a height of ~2.6mm, meaning a full millimeter can be shaved off the device thickness. They could add a bump around the 3.5mm jack like they do for rear cameras, but I suspect that's considered ugly. there are 2mm audio jacks, but all the above problems remain, and people would still need an adapter or new headphones.
The DRM issue is orthogonal to the encrypted digital signal issue. If an unencrypted MP3 file is sent over an encrypted interface, then who cares? The 'protected content being stolen via the analog hole' is the potential bogeyman, but it's not going to be an issue. Music is sold DRM-free today, and people are unlikely to start buying DRM-ed music in the future; it won't matter unless CDs go away, anyways. In the unlikely event the encryption protocol isn't cracked, it will only matter for content that is only available via streaming, which will probably be a minority of audio that people would care to preserve. Furthermore, just as you can buy (outside America) HDCP-compliant devices that decode the signal and then happily pass it on unencrypted, you'll be able to get the same for audio, if there's demand for it.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I think they're ultimately shooting for having future phones as thin as credit cards.
And that's a very dumb goal. No one complains, "I wish my phone was thinner." People do complain, "I wish my phone had better battery life" and "I wish my phone's screen wouldn't break so easily."
Circumcision is child abuse.
No one asked for systemd either, but look what happened.
Speaking more broadly, I honestly can't tell if this is because most of the major problems have been solved, people are too ignorant of the thought processes that went into the original tech, people don't know their history, people have too much faith in overly-complex technology that couldn't possible fail, people honestly, think they're just that much smarter than the installed base of users and want to increase "Quality of Life" (as one notable Borg put it), people want to make their own mark, or people are disingenuously trying to achieve lock-in on their newfangled contraption. No doubt, it's a mixture of all of the above.
Speaking as someone who's only been around in the industry for 15 years or so, I've already seen this pattern repeat way too frequently. I can only imagine what people who've been writing COBOL for the past 40 years think of it all...
Please, for the love of God, stop breaking sh*t that works fine.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
ALL audio on smart phones is digital. They could DRM the headphone jack fairly trivially if they wanted to.
No, they couldn't. It's an analog signal at the jack, and a DRMed digital or scrambled analog signal would sound like noise through any traditional set of headphones.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
there are very specific reasons they want an iPhone. For one, they're a Veblen good. E.g. something you buy because you can. There are very real social advantages to Veblen goods. iMessage is practically a social network, which is another advantage. iTunes is highly desirable and iMusic is $5/mo if you're in college and mostly just works. Apple has an entire ecosystem that powers a social network. I resent buying my kid an iPhone every 2 1/2 years (they last about that long before they're falling apart). But I'm smart enough to recognize that, like it or not, it is a very real social advantage. That's fucked up. But with the amount of fucked up shit in this world it's one of the more minor instances...
Yea, sure...
Teach your kids to be vain and pretentious assholes, and look down on the lower classes because they can't afford to buy things that are no good and offer no real value, other than marking you as a pretentious asshole. Then they can grow up to be neurotic assholes like yourself, that are constantly worried about what other people think of them and where they fit into the vicious culture of bullying that you have created.
Nobody in those circles are happy. They are all neurotically paranoid and on edge about what everybody thinks about them and how they are judged. And they make other people miserable by applying the same warped morality you demonstrate in your post.
What there is very real value to, is being able to afford the things you actually need because you didn't blow all your money purchasing vacuous status symbols.
They make cases that thicken your iPhone dramatically and give it a little bit more battery life. The problem with using external cases is that a battery requires a hard wall around it to protect it. This adds considerable volume. And an external battery, because it cannot share the phone's charge circuit, has to include all of that redundant circuitry as well. So you could double an iPhone's battery life internally by adding about 2mm of thickness, but a case that doubles the battery life adds about 8mm of thickness. That's fine if you were planning to use a case anyway, but if you weren't, then that's a lot of wasted space.
To make matters worse, because of Apple's Lightning port licensing rules, unless you buy Apple's hunchback of Notre Dame case, AAFAIK, all of those external battery cases make your phone incompatible with lightning accessories. So if Apple ditches the headphone jack, those third-party battery case users won't have any way to connect their phones to any kind of wired audio output without removing the phones from their cases (thus eliminating the extra power boost, along with any protection that the cases might provide). That's a terrible user experience if ever I heard of one.
Incidentally, that's yet another reason why removing the headphone jack is such a very bad idea.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.