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Apple Cites 'Courage' As Reason To Remove 3.5mm Headphone Jack (arstechnica.com)
It didn't come as much of a surprise when Apple Senior VP Phil Schiller revealed that the iPhone 7 doesn't feature a headphone jack, since rumors have mentioned this possibility months before the announcement. In fact, what some may find more surprising is Apple's justification. The company cited three reasons why they decided to eighty-six the port, as well as one word: "courage." Ars Technica reports: "[Schiller said] the company can't justify the continued use of an 'ancient' single-use port. He described the amount of technology packed into the iPhone, saying each element in Apple's phones is fighting for space, and it's at a premium. Schiller explained that no company has tried to deliver a wireless experience between your devices and your headphones that fixes the things that are currently difficult to do -- and since there's only one major industry-wide wireless-audio standard, it's easy to assume that he's talking about Bluetooth there (though he didn't say the B-word out loud). To promote Apple's wireless-audio push, Schiller announced the new AirPods, which look mostly identical to the last official Apple earbud model, only with a small piece of plastic replacing the full cord. While Schiller and Apple designer Jonny Ive talked a lot about wireless being 'the future' of audio devices -- and thus being the reason for Apple's 'courage' to move on from the 3.5mm standard -- Apple is curiously not packing those AirPods into new iPhone 7 and 7 Plus boxes. Instead, those devices will ship with the updated Lightning EarPods by default. AirPods will begin shipping in late October and will cost $159."
We can't justify an ancient single use port... Not unlike our proprietary power connectors
"Courage" would be to stop making the phone thinner with less battery life and forcing owners to purchase overpriced items. Of course, Apple gets paid by any company that licenses their "Lightning Port" design. Courage? NO, more like GREED.
Courage is what others can judge you to have shown.
Ego is when you call your own decision "courage".
If they had a good reason they should have said it. Self-claiming courage is a coward move.
E
The dongle comes with the phone.
I still think the idea is stupid, though... but I'm not in the market for a new phone, in any case.
#DeleteChrome
Subject says it all. Pure, unadulterated greed with the chutzpah to convince the fanbois that it's worth it...
Per a Buzzfeed interview, summarized by MacRumors:
The idea for the removal of the headphone jack was raised during the development of the iPhone 7. In a nutshell, the "driver ledge" for the display and backlight, traditionally placed near the camera, was interfering with the new camera systems in the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7 Plus, leading Apple to explore other placement options. It was moved near the audio jack, but it also caused interference with various components, including the audio jack itself, so Apple engineers toyed with the elimination of the jack altogether.
When the headphone jack was removed, Apple realized it was easier to install the new Taptic Engine for the pressure-sensitive Home button, implement a bigger battery, and reach an IP7 water resistance rating, so the elimination of the headphone jack became essential for all of the other features in the iPhone 7.
Apple executives also believe the headphone jack is outdated technology that needed to go to make room for new advancements. According to Dan Riccio, it was holding Apple back "from a number of things" the company wanted to add to the iPhone, taking up space that could be used for camera improvements, battery, and processors.
"The audio connector is more than 100 years old," Joswiak says. "It had its last big innovation about 50 years ago. You know what that was? They made it smaller. It hasn't been touched since then. It's a dinosaur. It's time to move on." [...]
For Dan Riccio, Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering, the iPhone's 3.5-millimeter audio jack has felt something like the last months of an ill-fated if amicable relationship: familiar and comfortable, but ultimately an impediment to a better life ahead. "We've got this 50-year-old connector -- just a hole filled with air -- and it's just sitting there taking up space, really valuable space," he says.
According to Apple's Phil Schiller, there's no ulterior motive behind the move away from the 3.5mm headphone jack. "We are removing the audio jack because we have developed a better way to deliver audio. It has nothing to do with content management or DRM -- that's pure, paranoid conspiracy theory," he said.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Not to mention the various devices designed to encode or decode data over that port.
Square being the first thing to come to mind.
You left out antenna for the FM radio. Oops, the iPhone never had an FM radio, something even cheap flip phones have had pretty much forever. Apple is no longer a leader in innovation, which is why their market share continues to drop. Looks like Tim Cook cooked their goose.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Yeah, Nexus phones don't support FM either.
I guess Californian hipsters designing these things don't have any decent radio stations or have enormous data plans. FM is built into every Qualcomm SoC, iirc.
LG recently released a phone with DAB+ digital radio; maybe that will catch on instead.
Not that I care, as I do not own any apple stuff, but I have not seen a bluetooth headset that was not absolute shit.
I had a phone earpeice thing from plantronics that was worse than simply using the speakerphone in the car. When the thing would actually stay connected the speaker was inaudible. When I could hear the other side, my mic would not pick up.
Bought some LG headphones, failed within 2 months. And in those 2 months it was nearly impossible to get the things to stay connected. Press the connect button, beeps loudly, searches for phone, gives up. Bought earbuds, returned the next day. Worthless.
Bluetooth audio is complete garbage.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
There are no issues of fidelity with an analog connector, no batteries, no sync, no wireless interference, and no extra money involved to have a need for the most ubiquitous interface in electronics worldwide to disappear.
Not to mention the various devices designed to encode or decode data over that port.
Square being the first thing to come to mind.
So either they hook up through the analog adapter or they design a Lightning version. Probably in testing now.
Also they did that with Thunderbolt, and look at the plethora of peripherals available toda.. oh, wait..
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... suggests several sources.
Another problem is that there is only ONE single use port. I usually listen to music while my phone is plugged in, and to my knowledge there is no way to both listen with the headphone dongle and have the device plugged in.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
If this leads to the abandonment of a2dp, I am all for it.
It's actually quite embarrassing that a2dp is still a standard in widespread use. The very fact you can't bidirectionally stream audio at a high bitrate is so 90s.
If this move brings on 6ch, 320kbit bidirectional audio, I'm all for it (even as an Android user).
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
This is different than merely changing a connector or protocol. Now headphones have gone from a passive device to an active device that needs its own power source. How long does the battery last on these earpods? Can it easily be changed?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
yet another device to charge, what will the autonomy be on these $160 suckers ?
As long as they close the analog hole - Riaa will be happy!
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
This is a site specifically for mac compatible stuff, and even they only have 4 categories under 'Thunderbolt'. There is only one hub to choose from, and it is $218.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
>The dongle comes with the phone.
So what?
You will never have it when you need it unexpectedly.
The thing is going to stick out, interfering with carrying the phone, making it bulky and unruly.
It is likely to break or get lost.
It is just plain irritating.
It is a good thing I have no interest in "iphones", I just hope the other phone makers reject this stupid idea.
The concern is that all the other manufacturers will do the same, and everyone's earbuds/headsets will be useless or need adapters.
Geez people - if a 3.5mm analog jack built into the phone is so important, buy any one of the many, many, Android devices on the market
Yeah, that's my plan.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It is spelled GREED not courage. Courage would be releasing their custom bluetooth standard along with open sourcing the head phone design so that it can be easily copied by other manufacturers and become the industry standard. Nice try though Apple...
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Courage!....
Cowardly Lion: You can say that again.
I don't think Apple is using a funny "Courage!", the way the Cowardly Lion would.
I think this case is more of a strange "Courage!", like Dan Rather signing off.
There are some other little niche devices that used the headphone jack as well, for example some company made a diabetes tester that did so, which meant it could be compatible with other smartphones. But now they're making a lightning port version to replace it.
Though based on my own experience on logging health stats from another (non diabetes) chronic condition, I have to say that I've found smartphone based devices to be overall less convenient than using traditional devices combined with my own custom Google Sheets based logging system.
FM is definitely not the feature i've been looking for. The DJ on the radio ad wants it, but then he doesn't show up to work and hands the radio over to the short playlist from his publisher sponsor, so it falls on deaf ears. Literally, since I don't listen to it anymore.
So either they hook up through the analog adapter or they design a Lightning version.
...and pay royalties to Apple.
Ka-ching!
https://www.buzzfeed.com/johnp...
Eh, that's not the real issue. To listen to my existing headphones and charge the phone at the same time, I'd have to buy a Lightning splitter. Neither the earbuds nor the adapter has an extra Lightning port, and they take up the only Lightning port on the device.
So now I'm out more money, and have to keep up with two additional things (the adapter and the splitter).
That doesn't necessarily make the 7 worthless, but I doubt most people would buy it if given the option to have an identical 7 or 7 Plus containing a traditional headphone jack. They do have the option of the 6S with that jack.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
To a lot of people the main point of radio isn't music, it's reliability. I know I can tune in to the radio during natural disasters and get up to date information about what's going on. In many of those situations phone, data, and cable will all be knocked out. Radio's very robust.
Because unlike Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora and other online streaming services... FM is free with adds?
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
The Mac Mini does not have and has never had a magnetic power cord. And if yours is loose, that either means you didn't shove it in hard enough or the cord is defective. Fortunately, I'm pretty sure it is a standard two-prong AC cord, and that they cost about a buck and a half from your nearest Radio Shack, Fry's, Best Buy, etc.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
You do realize how completely unalike those two examples are, right?
Removing the floppy drive wasn't a big deal because USB floppy drives provided a viable alternative, and internal floppy drives were still available for portable devices for three or four years after Apple removed them from the desktop (all the way through the Pismo).
Adapters for portable devices suck. Adapters for ultraportable devices like phones suck absolutely.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
No, they provided a copout. It came down to a choice between slightly better speakers that most people will never use anyway (because it is usually rude) or a headphone jack that lots of people use every day, and they made the wrong call. I've already (since the announcement) heard three people who have used iOS for years say that they're seriously considering switching to Android because of this. That number represents about 50% of the iPhone users in my team at work, and 100% of the iPhone users who were present at the time. I know that anecdotes aren't data, but if Apple's upper management isn't absolutely scared sh**less right now, then they don't deserve to be there.
From where I'm sitting, if the case manufacturers don't save Apple from themselves by building cases with built-in headphone jacks, this will probably mark a turning point where Apple rapidly accelerated their descent into niche-playerdom. There's a very small chance I'm wrong, and that the iOS users that I know are all just the 1% of power users that Apple doesn't care about anymore. For the sake of my Apple stock, I hope so, but I'm not holding my breath.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Not only that, but everyone hated floppy's. They were slow, had poor capacity, and were unreliable. When USB storage came on the scene it was a massive improvement and has only continued to get better.
By comparison I dont know many people who have a problem with wired headphones. I've had a few wireless sets over the year and for portable applications they've mostly sucked due to having two batteries to worry about.
OK, I've converted to a cell phone. No landline any more. So when I'm on a long conference call using my headset so people on the other end can hear me, how do I charge my phone for the long call?
Square couldn't exist in a world of pure USB-2-Go because drivers and device representation varied widely from phone to phone. A simple HID device in the phone world is not so simple.
The audio jack was the ultimate bridge for card readers that didn't require special permissions, drivers and was actually universal (more universal than USB!)
You'll wait quite a while for that adapter. Per the Apple Accessory Interface Specifcation (R25) you cannot make splitter cables. Ever. One connection on each end of the cable, and only certain combinations at that. IF you find such a cable, it's using grey-market chips from some random Chinese vendor - and who knows how well or how long it will work. But as it exists today (and at least for the next 2 months), splitter cables are forbidden. So it's going to be cables and hub, not just a cable.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Because unlike Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora and other online streaming services... FM does not require the use of an internet connection. A lot of cellphone service providers charge for the service based on data transferred (unlike wired internet connections where you usually pay for the connection bandwidth (like 300mbps or whatever), but then can use it 100% and will not need to pay more).
Also, FM radio receiver can use very little power, compared to the cellphone transmitter which needs to be active to use the internet connection.
Even though I do not care about the phone at all, if all of this excitement over one port somehow leads to a new standard for wireless audio, that would be awesome.
Bluetooth sucks for anything above skype calls.
Bluetooth hifi-headphones are a joke. The better the headphone, the more you realize how horribly bluetooth compression mangles the sound quality.
Because of this, every manufacturer is running their own wireless audio format. Your typical audio sources (phone, pc, hi-fi system) do not support any of them. Adapters everywhere...
I guess now we have yet another standard with Apple's... But maybe they can push theirs to more devices than just their phones? Any chance of something Apple to ever become an open standard?
You can give it the spin you want, but what you cannot say is that the earphones plug has fallen into disuse. I think it's the single most used phone accessory nowadays, with no second competitor in sight.
So you remove a widely used feature, and you provide a worse alternative, or rather, you simply point out that an alternative has always existed. The glaring fact that practically nobody used that existing alternative is gloriously lost on you. Or rather, you don't care.
So basically you are doing something to screw your users, thinking that it will improve your company. Again the glaring fact that your company is nothing without your clients, is lost in the glare of your new shiny state-of-the-art office.
Let's see how it plays out. People can be really dumb that way, and certainly that's not a deal breaker. Also, there is always the possibility of backtracking. Never underestimate the marketing department ingenuity of selling an Apple 7 Super Plus "With earphones plug!!!", only for 100$ more. But IMHO, Apple is accumulating small mistakes with a sore lack of the former big hits that could ,in past times, have covered them.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
A smaller version of the headphone jack already exist, I had it in my Nokia phone 6 years ago. And guess what an adapter for that cost 3$ instead of 30$
this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down
Square's mag-stripe card reader is obsolete - it can't read chip & PIN cards, or contactless.
I have a Square card reader that does chip & PIN using the headphone jack: https://squareup.com/au/reader
That way in about 6 months every phone would have that connector and any set of earbuds would work with it.
"Any set of earbuds" working with iPhone was clearly killing Apple. That's precisely the 'problem' they set out to solve - how do we stop people using headphones with our phones that they didn't buy from us?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I sometimes want to hear new music (or rather, old music I haven't heard before), I also like the lack of control with radio and the occasional traffic announcements or news segments.
I listen to radio at work (I use an actual radio and not my phone though). The radio station even announces each hour, so I do not have to keep looking at the clock.
If I play music on my PC (say, I am at home), I always feel the urge to choose the next song, so, I end up spending more time choosing and playing music (and skipping songs) than I was planning to do while listening to music. If I listen to radio or play a tape, I do not get that urge, so I spend more time doing whatever I was planning to do. Listening to radio I do not get the urge to skip a song even if I do not particularly like it (there is some music that would make me tune to another station - thankfully my favorite station does not play it).
And radio has the advantage over tapes in that it sometimes plays a song I haven't heard before, but like.
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Why on earth would Apple want you to listen to free FM radio?
iTunes is a big part of their business and selling bigger data plans makes their carriers happy. FM radio is lose-lose from their point of view.
No sig today...
I would not be too worried. Bluetooth radiates about one thousandth of what a cell phone radio does.
I would be more worried about those who talk on the phone all day without using a headset, text constantly or stream music over the Internet.
Cell phone radios don't usually shut off between each data packet. This means that they will continue to radiate for a while even after you have e.g. received or sent a text, albeit at progressively lower levels. The shut-off delays are in the radio protocols and defined by the cell phone operator - not Apple.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Apple said the batteries in the headphones last about 5 hours -- not a full workday, and often less time than you can expect to spend getting from one state to another (even by airplane, once you factor in time on the ground at both ends of a trip). And replaceable batteries? This is Apple -- if you want to listen longer, just pay another $160 for a second pair.
The phono jack, in it's 3.5mm, 2.5mm and 1/4" incarnations, is the standard for analog audio connectivity for a good reason. It's the oldest electrical connector still in use for a good reason. It works fantastically well! They're cutting themselves out of the audio market, and it's a dumb move. That jack could, with a $5 adapter, connect a phone to virtually any other audio device as input or output. You could plug a guitar into it, you could plug it into a mixing board, a car, a microphone, an instrument amp, a stereo amp, anything. A DJ could entertain a crowd with just a phone and a sound system, any sound system.
Why is it "unbelievably paranoid" to point out that nobody anywhere has ever once (seriously) said "the thing my phone needs is a single-purpose adapter dongle that prevents me from charging it while I listen to headphones"?
All my family's iPhone earbuds are still unopened as well, even going back to the older ones wrapped in a plastic band instead of a case. Never used, not once.
The reason for that is the quality is so crappy they're unusable. You can get some pretty amazing quality wired headphones for under $100 on black friday. Last year I got an amazing deal on some SoundSports at $50 each. Compared to cheap headphones, you can actually hear so much more detail in the music it's like a whole different song.
Besides using my phone with multiple different sets of headphones, there's 2 cars I regularly listen in. I am not carrying an adapter every where with me and I am not buying 6 more adapters to leave them on every 3.5" pin I use often.
On the bright side, this got me to try a Note 7. Wow is Apple ever living in the stone age. Just have the "courage" to spend a few days seriously giving it a go. I will never go back to Apple. The edge panels alone are worth the courage to switch. And the display on the Note is simply amazing.
They aren't wrong. They're going to get a lot of crap for this, and if they brought it on themselves knowingly but did it anyway, that does indeed take courage.
However, I'd also imagine it takes courage to publicly be a White Supremacist these days. Those public-area preachers who call random passing women "whores" while their husbands/fathers/sons are with them are being pretty courageous too. Just because you are showing "courage" doesn't mean you doing the right thing, or that you aren't also being a total asshole.
My Nexus 5 supports FM just fine by using the headphone as part of the antenna and using the NextRadio app - http://nextradioapp.com/
FM radio is old fashioned grandpa technology.
So is microwaving food. So is TV. So is pasteurized milk. So are condoms, birth control pills, toothpaste, pens and pencils, gasoline, diesel, atomic energy, wind and water power, farming, chemical warfare (WW1 mustard gas), antibiotics, soap, clothing, ovens, baking and cookbooks, baking powder as a leavening agent, sliced bread, sliced bacon (mmm ... bacon!), saran wrap, mylar, communications satellites (anyone remember the echo communications satellites made from mylar?), transatlantic cables, electricity, toasters, movies, paper and cardboard, plywood, nails made from rods (instead of the hand cut nails shaved from a chunk of iron), screws, nuts, needles and thread, false teeth, glasses, etc.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.