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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.
I need my iPhone to have a headphone jack. I love making DJ mixes on my phone. I use an app called dJay, which allows me to mix using my itunes library. I've gotten quite good, to the point where I will occasionally sit on the bus or at a bar making a mix, and I don't need a monitor, as I can tell where to start the mix using the waveforms of the song.
Anyway, this only works if the sound and screen animation of the song beats are perfectly in sync; if theres ANY delay, I can't mix. I have tried doing this by using a bluetooth speaker instead of headphones, and it never works. It's always off by some delayed amount.
If Apple actually does this, this is the one thing that will make me never want to upgrade. I know they would make dongles, but that adds other issues, such as what if I need to mix while having the phone plugged in because I'm running out of battery power? Anyway, don't do it, apple.
And if anyone wants to hear my mixes made on an iPhone with no monitor and just a pair of headphones, here ya go: https://www.mixcloud.com/xevio...
Bluetooth sucks balls. It's highly prone to electromagnetical interference (of which there is plenty in a smartphone and all the places you take it to), it's laggy as fuck and I don't want to wear a radio transmitter next to my head.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
the thickness of the jack assembly is getting in the way of their desire to make the phone thinner.
Quite possibly. But when you ask people, what they say they want isn't a thinner phone, it's more battery life, which you get by making the phone thicker.
Its not the money. Apple is sticking with their history. Trying to play "what would Steve do?".
Was it the first iMac ? Apple removed the non-standard serial ports, and the non-standard floppy drive. All replaced with standard USB ports.
ADB was good riddance, but floppy sorely missed as USB flash drives were still expensive. Apple did it anyway. They wanted to stand out.
Removing the optical drive from laptops is a no-brainer due to weight. Ethernet was not removed before fast wifi was ubiquitous.
Replacing the 3.5mm socket with a non-standard port is more of a worry. Will mean multiple cables and dongles needed for many years.
Not a huge problem, but not much of a benefit either. Unlike RS232, the 3.5mm audio socket "just works". There is good reason why it has outlived all those other ports.
And Apple, please stop obsessively making devices thinner until the engineers have improved battery life dramatically.
Which, incidentally, will make it completely water proof.
Even IP68 rated phones can only survive brief dips because of the exposed headphone and USB jack.
Pretty much exactly this. Apple is and always has been a HARDWARE company. Removing these things and creating a walled garden on even the equipment that is usable with their devices just feeds right into that model, but goes against the rest of the industry giants (mostly anyway). Problem is this will eventually kill them if they can't keep coming up with revolutionary ideas (and be first to market with them), because everyone can do it cheaper while still making money and being compatible with everything else.
It's also removing weight and volume (the space taken up internally is vast compared to almost everything else but the screen and battery), gets rid of the single largest ingress point for dirt and moisture (another cost issue, since it reduces reliability), and probably disenfranchises some barely-measurable fraction of the market (give me actual figures, not just "I use it so everyone else should have to as well"). Seems like a good move to me.
I think it will be part of making the next iPhone waterproof, which except for "Make it thicker again, but with more battery" is the leading new feature users want. Current iPhones have a special moisture indicator at the bottom of the jack which, if triggered, voids the warranty.
Why use a waterproof jack? Just waterproof that part of the case. Put a solid box sticking in from the back case, rubber on the front case's interior face, and pass a flat ribbon between the case and the rubber gasket. It's not like Apple is ever going to remove the top bezel anyway. As an added bonus, the extra half millimeter it would add to the thickness would give us more usable battery life (which they're going to need anyway if everybody is forced to use Bluetooth).
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It doesn't allow you to eliminate anything from the logic board. Basically the entire set of audio circuitry for the phone is still required for driving the normal speaker and the speakerphone speaker. The only thing that removing the headphone jack does is cut out a jack that is already really, really small.
So now consider the amount of space used by that headphone jack. I think the headphone jack is about a quarter inch by half an inch by the thickness of the interior of the phone (smaller than the 3.5mm plug, in fact, both in length and in thickness, IIRC). The battery in an iPhone 6S is a whopping 120mm x 48mm x 3mm (approx.). Removing the headphone jack, then, would give about a 1–2% boost in battery capacity. If you instead made the iPhone just 1mm thicker, the battery would increase from 3.3mm to 4.3mm in thickness, yielding at least a 30% increase in battery life (and really, more than that, because you aren't making the battery's packaging proportionally thicker). An extra 2mm would almost double the battery life.
The best part about using the thickness approach is that you could even give users a choice (audible gasps). Make several versions of the back case that allow for different thicknesses of batteries (by having various side wall heights), but are otherwise identical in construction. The extra R&D cost is basically zero for doing that, and the tooling costs should be minimal. Then, let the market decide whether users want more battery life or thinner phones. I'd be willing to bet that most users would choose the thicker phone with the longer battery life (unless they made the cost difference so ridiculous that it artificially skewed the market, which knowing Apple, they might just do).
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
"Even IP68 rated phones can only survive brief dips"
Then it's not truly IP68. The first number in the Ingress Protection rating, 6, denotes the system is dust-tight. The second number in that rating, 8, denotes suitable for continuous immersion in water under conditions which shall be specified by the manufacturer. Normally, this will mean that the equipment is hermetically sealed. However, with certain types of equipment, it can mean that water can enter but only in such a manner that it produces no harmful effects. Note, brief dips do not fit the definition of 'continuous immersion' which is typically a time period of MINIMUM 30 minutes (which, incidentally, is all most manufacturers will give you, the cheap fuckers.)
I've got IP68 LED units that are meant to operate directly in saltwater. And they have watertight plug sockets.
I find it hilarious that I can bother to do this with my own retail units while more advanced manufacturers can't even do it properly.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
You're forgetting they'd most likely include a lightening port to 3.5mm dongle, which would cost more than the 3.5mm jack in the phone.
If they simply change the socket shape to something smaller and more waterproof, I'm good with that. I can put a cheap and light adapter onto all of my existing headphones and life will continue unchanged. A thin, waterproof phone is highly desirable - I once killed a high-end phone by falling into a river on my mountain bike, and I hate the faff of having to keep my phone in a waterproof case when I'm hiking or out on my road bike in showery weather (it always rains in Wales!).
But if they require an expensive adapter (active electronics or royalties), that's a big problem. I guess I'm not alone in using multiple headphones with my phone. I have good quality headphones at home and in the office, cheap disposable in-ear phones for cycling, sports headphones for running, a lightweight spare set that I keep in my laptop bag for travelling, etc. I don't mind buying a £2 adapter for each of these, but I don't fancy buying multiple £20 adapters, and I'm certainly not willing to carry an adapter with me just in case I need to use it.