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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
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.
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
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 include the dongle with the phone...
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
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.
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.
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.
Two things:
The expensive ass proprietary dongles are free and included with the phone.
The 1/8" stereo plug is over 50 fucking year old. I'm not sure this is the answer, but it's shitty technology
And the wheel is over 5000 years old. Do you have a better idea?
Just because a technology is old, doesn't mean it not still the right solution.
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.