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Apple Launches the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus; Feature Water-Resistance, Lack Headphone Jack (www.bgr.in)
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.
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.
Here's hoping the rest of the market doesn't make like apple-obsessed sheep for once and make the 3.5mm headphone jack obsolete.
the most shocking announcement this afternoon. i really thought it would be $29.99
My 12 years old DSLR will still take better pictures than those new iphones, it just might not be that evident anymore.
So they take away the 3.5 jack, give us an easy-to-lose adapter, and want to sell us their proprietary wireless one-size-fits-none earphones. And they call it courage? Really?
Oh, but they have licensed out the wireless tech for a whopping 3 alternative headsets. I suppose that is supposed to appease us.
Yay, you can no longer listen to headphones at your desk and have your phone charging. Listen all day at the office, phone is dead for the walk home. GREAT Idea.
It's wireless. Less space than Azure. Lame.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
"it's the best iPhone we have ever created," Apple CEO Tim Cook said.
Amazing, I think I will now purchase an Apple iPhone 7 device due to this declaration by none other than the CEO of Apple. I was content with my Nexus 6P, but that has all changed now. Thanks slashdot for letting me know about this statement in particular, time for the trip behind the woodshed 6P.
Please. My social media feeds have been filled with out of focus, blurry photos for just as long as social media has been around.
Nothing says performance like that!
Bokeh is a function of the lens diameter relative to the subject distance (and distance of other objects from the focal plane). For a given scene, cannot be created any other way other than a physically bigger lens. You know the penumbra during an eclipse (the area experiencing a partial eclipse during a solar eclipse)? That corresponds to bokeh. There is nothing you can do on the ground to enlarge this area. It is purely a function of geometry. (Mathematically, it's the point distribution function of the lens.)
You can fake it in software. I've been saying for over a decade that two small lenses with some lateral separation should allow an algorithm to estimate distance and blur the parts of the picture outside the focal plane appropriately to simulate bokeh. But it's not real bokeh, it's a digital manipulation.
the iPhone 7 Plus has a pair of 12MP cameras that are able to take SLR-quality images
Don't lie to me.
It has a tiny little sensor that assuming has perfect glass is just providing false magnification as the lens is a f/1.8 with a pixel edge size of about 1.2um (assuming the same size sensor as in the Apple iPhone 5S) but the diameter of the airy disk would be 3.7um. So the smallest item resolvable would fill about a 3x3 grid. Granted software can get rid of some of that but it isn't going to magically make it deliver results like a full frame SLR with good lenses.
While it is probably a better camera than most other cellphones (seriously these cameras are shit) don't say it holds a candle to an older full frame DSLR or even my 40+ year old film SLR that has some really nice lenses with good film.
Time to offend someone
Courage my fat fucking ass. They removed the headphone jack to SCREW every customer into needing to either replace ALL of their sound equipment, or purchase expensive ass proprietary dongles. That is the 1 and only reason, no, the headphone jack is NOT the reason your phone isn't a millimeter thick, it's because fucking technology has not got there yet, forcing all of my stereo equipment into obsolesce is not courageous. It's clearly a desperate move from a company that's losing marketshare everytime they check the numbers, a company that flat out refuses to actually innovate while promoting their stolen features from competitors who beat them to the market by years "innovation" is pretty fucking funny. But this is indeed innovation, it's an innovative method to fuck each and every customer into having to replace a bunch of shit that doesn't need replacing.
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.
They are getting very old and can at least use some price cuts / ram / cpu / disk bumps.
The phone ships with an adaptor that gives you back the audio jack you could copy from if you wished... no more DRM than before.
It just ALSO gives you an improved audio path that provides power to headphones.
What is wrong with having an improved set of choices? More importantly what the FUCK is wrong with people like you who should be embracing technology, being steadfastly against any change?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The EarPods that ship with the phone are wired, just using the lightning port instead.
The new wireless EarPods you would have to buy, so if you don't think they will work, don't buy them. Personally I was worried about that also (while running the default pods will slip out of one ear) but the wireless pods may be batter, with the long stems against your cheek it seems like they would stay in better.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So how the fuck am I supposed to use my existing earbuds (which I just purchased) with the dongle while charging at the same time?
This is an absolute requirement so that I can watch Netflix without it draining the fuck out of my battery.
"Water resistance? Who cares."
My boss dropped his machine in the water this past weekend.
My wife left hers in a puddle when it fell out of the car unbeknownst to her.
I have know several people who have accidentally knocked theirs in the toilet.
Some people care even if you hope to never care.
So don't buy their headphones if they don't meet your needs? It's not like they're removing Bluetooth or something.
What is it about Apple making accessories for their products that enrages people? Just don't buy the fucking thing.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Nope, they needed the cubic mm inside the case for.... well.... a 3rd camera? Really? I smell a rat. This was to make the headphone connector proprietary and allow them yet another shot at licensing dongles.
And yet, no one else seems to have problems creating a 3.5mm jack, including Apple before today.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
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.
Try it! Library of Babel
What if you don't have Bluetooth headphones? The audio jack worked perfectly and was not broken or dysfunctional. It worked across most models of phone and other devices trivially. There is no new advantage to the consumer to the new Apple method.
So if they removed all USB adapters from a mac book, would you say that's ok because everyone can just buy thunderbolt adapters instead or store the data in the cloud?
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.
Apple is claiming they did it to make the phone waterproof. Apparently, they didn't bother to spend about 12 seconds with Google searching for "ip67 headphone jack", because if they DID, they'd have found countless IP67-rated headphone jacks like this one:
http://koumay.en.alibaba.com/p...
For those who don't know, the "7" in "IP67" means "waterproof to a depth of 1 meter for 30 minutes". I didn't have time to search further, but I'd be shocked if there wasn't at least one company that makes IP68 ("waterproof to a depth guaranteed by manufacturer, generally 1-3 meters, for some period of time also guaranteed by the manufacturer"). Note that IP ratings for things like headphone jacks don't guarantee that the jack itself won't end up with gunk in it if you drop it into mud, only that the jack ITSELF won't allow water to pass through to the interior of the phone case.
For $169 using the exact same shape as the normal ear buds but now wireless with a recharging case, means you are going to lose an AirPod in record time. Those suckers fall out of my ears all the damn time to the point I replaced the ear buds with something much better. Not even working out, just walking around or just sitting still and they fall out.
I'd rather pay a bit more for German headphones than any Beats or Apple EarBud/AirPod... I don't get the popularity of Beats, they make you look like a friggin' moron. Early iPhone adopters were mugged due to the white headphones clearly indicating you had an iPhone...
Here's hoping my 5S lasts three more years. I refuse to buy any phone without a 3.5mm jack.
Are these bluetooth airPods abomination going survive a 4 hour call? The phone does, but I doubt tiny little powered buds will.
Good thing they still make the SE (the four-inch phone). Everything else in their catalog is just bleh to me.
Way to fuck it up, Apple!
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Sure there's an advantage. The iPhone 6 if inadvertantly spilled on with liquid would die. This one, won't. One of the reasons for that is no mini-jack socket
Oh bullshit. My samsung s7 comes with a 3.5 jack and some how samsung made it spill and puddle diving resistance.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
No phone jack makes it a non-starter.
Hopefully Android phones have the sanity to keep theirs.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
They must have a different meaning of SLR quality from me.
The entry level Canon is an 18mp camera with interchangeable lenses. It has a significantly larger sensor that would enable a significantly different depth of field, and rang of depths. Further, you can completely manipulate the aperture, shutter and ISO. And you can export RAW for MUCH greater flexibility in editing. And you can mount it easily on tripods, dollys, etc. And by using different lengths you can manipulate the bokeh.
Hype much?