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Apple Launches the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus; Feature Water-Resistance, Lack Headphone Jack (www.bgr.in)

Posted by msmash on from the new-iphones dept.

Apple on Wednesday unveiled its new flagship smartphones: the iPhone 7, and the iPhone 7 Plus. Both the iPhones look similar to the last year's iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, but offer a range of new features. Chief among those features are water and dust resistance, stereo speakers, improved cameras (the iPhone 7 Plus has a pair of 12MP cameras that are able to take SLR-quality images. It offers bokeh capability). And yes, the new iPhones indeed lack the headphone jack. "it's the best iPhone we have ever created," Apple CEO Tim Cook said. The home button is getting taptic feedback, similar to that of the MacBook.

So why is Apple removing the headphone jack? Apple's SVP Phil Schiller said, "courage."The company also announced AirPods wireless earphones. A pair of these will be priced at $169. The iPhones will go on sales starting September 16 in several regions including the United States In places like India, however, it will be available starting October 7.

11 of 551 comments (clear)

  1. Timeliness by alvinrod · · Score: 1, Interesting

    People tend to criticize this site for being late with stories, but Apple announcements are one instance where Slashdot seems to trot them out before the paint even dries. They're still talking about features in the presentation right now and even the linked article mentions that there's still more to come. Why not wait for the dust to settle a little before rushing this story out?

  2. Terrible headphones by brantondaveperson · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The existing earpods have a habit of falling from my ears - and now they're not even going to be attached to some wires? Great.

  3. Re:Courage, it didn't come, doesn't matter by oh_my_080980980 · · Score: 1, Interesting

    "a company that flat out refuses to actually innovate"

    That is the crux of Apple's problem. Living off of Steve Jobs' legacy. Tim Cook is a suit, nothing more. He's milking the Apple brand for all it's worth but time is running out. Google and Samsung are already eating Apple's lunch. Heck Microsoft could make a come back. Bye bye Timmy...

  4. Re:Where?? What is wrong with MORE CHOICE by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Interesting

    From my point of view, it's a poor implementation. Essentially most people will now have to carry two items around with them - a phone and a dongle - rather than just the one, or else not be able to hook the phone up to a standard audio system.

    I also wish we'd wait for an agreed standard. Lightning is essentially a Apple-only standard. Lightning headsets will only ever work with Apple devices, we need a good common digital standard.

    What I would do, if I had a million dollars, is produce an iPhone 7 case with the 3.5mm adapter built in. I'd also add USB (with charging available) just for completeness. Everyone buys cases for their phones anyway, and that'd resolve the entire problem so nobody has to carry around multiple adapters.

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  5. Re:Courage, it didn't come, doesn't matter by farble1670 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They include the dongle with the phone...

    That's only a short-term compromise to avoid pissing off the world too much. In the long term headphone makers will start producing Apple-only lightning headphones. Those headphones will have to license Apple since this new interface can negotiate the connection. They will consequently cost more. Moreover, it's a DRM ploy since regulating which devices can connect will also regulate how the media played through that interface can be copied.

  6. Re:DRM ahoy :( by Miamicanes · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You can definitely make a tiny sensor array with higher technical resolution than traditional ISO 400 print film grain... maybe even ISO 100. The catch is, you'll have to light up the scene to retina-searing brightness levels like a color movie set from the 1930s, because your effective f-stop will be insanely high and/or your dynamic range will be unacceptably low & have too much random noise.

    Big lenses and/or large-format film/sensors allow you to capture more photons and take pictures with less light.

  7. Dumping the Headphone Jack: My Theory by ewhac · · Score: 1, Interesting
    Some years ago, I was privileged to engage in a discussion on headphone detection with some Apple engineers, who had clearly worked on the issue for some time, and I learned something surprising:

    The 3.5mm headphone jack standard... isn't.

    Even after you set aside the issue of cheap manufacturers releasing shoddy products, you're still left with the fact that there is no actual standard dictating dimensions, number of contacts, location of contacts, size of contacts, separation distance between contacts, etc. Different manufacturers can and do make them slightly differently. More crucially, there's also no validation authority to check that your products meet all the specs.

    Let's just take the most obvious dimension: 3.5mm. For ages, those phone plugs were advertised not as 3.5mm, but as 1/8 inch (3.175mm). So if you wanted to make something compatible with a "1/8 inch" plug, you might get your dimensions wrong. Apply this principle to every other contact's position and size on the plug, and you can see where this is going.

    Moreover, some phone plugs have five contacts (Apple's own, for example). The "meaning" of each contact is not standardized -- that ring in the middle may be microphone input, or the contact switch (answer/hangup) on the cable, depending on who made it and what it was intended to be plugged in to. Further, if the rings in your cheap knock-off aren't lined up with the socket contacts, then bumping the plug could cause the socket contacts to short across the rings, which would get interpreted as a button press, and your call gets dropped.

    The result of all this mish-mash was the Apple engineers found designing a (cost-effective) headphone jack that worked reliably with all headphones and headsets one might encounter in the world was simply impossible. You couldn't position the contacts in such a way that they would never short across two rings (some idiot may have placed their rings very badly). You couldn't know ahead of time which contacts did what, and probing at insertion time was fraught with other perils, especially if your contacts created a short across two rings. Despite their extensive research and massive efforts, they still got tons of support calls about how someone's cheap-ass headset didn't work in what has long been assumed to be a standard phone jack.

    So my theory is: They declared the problem insoluble, yanked the phone plug, and designed a new digital interface.

    An adapter for "3.5mm" stereo headphones will almost certainly be made available. Yes, you still have the compatibility problem with other "3.5mm" devices, but now the problem is in a $30 adapter, and not a $750 phone. It will be interesting to see how liberally Apple licenses their connector so that third parties can also furnish adapters.

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    1. Re:Dumping the Headphone Jack: My Theory by werepants · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The 3.5mm standard may not be established in an ISO document somewhere, but in a practical sense it's as reliable a standard as you're likely to find. I've had lots of problems with Micro-USB, for instance - some cables fit in snugly, some fit loosely, etc. But I've never had a 3.5mm connection fail, and they are so simple and ubiquitous that they have allowed some neat third-party hardware (think Square payment systems). That's not the kind of thing you can roll out without a solid standard in place (either formal or de facto).

      The standard has been just fine for all previous generations of iPhone, and for other Apple hardware as well. This is just a money grab, and it's going to lead to new and needless complexity in one of the very few technology interfaces that had remained pretty foolproof.

    2. Re:Dumping the Headphone Jack: My Theory by Toshito · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The result of all this mish-mash was the Apple engineers found designing a (cost-effective) headphone jack that worked reliably with all headphones and headsets one might encounter in the world was simply impossible.

      Curious, I've been using those headphone jacks for more than 30 years, on cassette walkmans, discmans, mp3 players, computers, dumb phones, features phones, smart phones... with "dumb" headphones and "smarter" headphones with a mic and buttons. And I never had any "compatibility" problem, or reliability problems other than the usual broken solder point. But even that has not happened to me in the last 10 years.

      They ditched the headphone jack because:

      1- they can make a thinner phone (totally useless feature, but it sells)
      2- they can sell their overpriced POS wireless phones
      3- they don't know what else to do to innovate

      And that's it.

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    3. Re:Dumping the Headphone Jack: My Theory by thegarbz · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The result of all this mish-mash was the Apple engineers found designing a (cost-effective) headphone jack that worked reliably with all headphones and headsets one might encounter in the world was simply impossible. You couldn't position the contacts in such a way that they would never short across two rings (some idiot may have placed their rings very badly).

      If they decided the only way around this was to add additional contacts to the jack then I am incredibly disappointed in Apple's "innovation". Not to mention the fact that Sony solved this problem in the early 90s. Heck with one-wire digital signalling you can trivially detect if your own magical approved device is plugged in and change the function of the pins, and currently pretty much every device on the market is compatible with the 4 pin or 5 pin jacks on most mobile phones or media players. Again these have existed since the 90s. Speaking of the 90s do you even recall the 3.5mm Toslink? Yeah standard 3 pins with the ability to send optical digital signals too. I myself used a headphone jack as power output for a small project at university. When the assessor tried to mark me down because some idiot could plug his headphones into it, I plugged mine in to demonstrate a very simple headphone detection routine that was part of the circuit before the power was applied. Bonus marks.

      If Apple did this because they couldn't work around the problem then it's time to let the entire engineering team go. Copying other's hasn't done much for their innovation.

  8. Re:DRM ahoy :( by darkain · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've done under water photography countless times with my Galaxy S5 a couple years back. Yeah, the "water-resistant" feature is the real-deal, and the phone is still working great today.