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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."
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
Subject says it all. Pure, unadulterated greed with the chutzpah to convince the fanbois that it's worth it...
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.
Courage is a strange way to spell profit. I'll assume that these $159 wireless earplugs don't have replaceable batteries, and it seems they're proprietary, so it's just another recurring profit stream. Since users aren't as willing to upgrade their phones every 2 years (although thinner phones might make them break more easilly, which helps), Apple is searching for a way to get them to upgrade the accessories on a regular basis. There's no benefit to the user, unless they'd like a lighter wallet.
To quote Jobs: that's brain-dead.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
> It has nothing to do with content management or DRM -- that's pure, paranoid conspiracy theory," he said.
Yeah, that's just a nice, completely unexpected side benefit.
> "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." [...]
Also, it still works. With any pair of headphones or any gear, purchased from any store. That's why we like it.
This is just Apple ensuring that everyone (at least, all Apple fans) must pay the Apple tax on every bit of hardware.
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
"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."
You know, fine. I don't disagree with this idea. It's an old port that takes up a lot of space, and it's time to move on by replacing it with something better. What's the replacement here?
You can use Bluetooth, which I haven't found to be a very good solution. Someone's going to say that I'm crazy, but I've had problems with various devices where the connection drops or is unreliable. I've had experiences where I've had problems with pairing, and the process of unpairing and repairing every time you want to connect to a different device is unwieldy. Plus, I just don't like having another battery that I need to keep charged. I want a simple and reliable wired solution. Bluetooth is out.
Apple's other offering seems to be the lightning connector. You know, I wouldn't mind, but then they need to make it an open standard and get others to adopt it. Make it USB type-D micro, or something. Convince everyone to make it a standard connector for peripherals where you want a smaller connector than USB type-C. Make it the new universal standard for headphone ports, and get it installed everywhere. But they haven't done that. They don't even have lightning ports on their computers. Lightning isn't a standard, and no one else is using it. So Lightning is out.
So come up with something else that replaces the existing port, but is better, more convenient, easier to use, and able to provide even better audio quality. Then convince every manufacturer of audio equipment to use this new standard. *Then* get rid of the old port.
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.
As long as they close the analog hole - Riaa will be happy!
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Their proprietary power connectors that break easily and frequently.
If Apple had true courage, they'd announce that they were dumping Lightning for USB C. That would have been courage.
If Apple had true courage, they'd have announced a new open Bluetooth protocol for dealing with higher bitrate audio. That would have been courage.
Replacing a set of $30 earbuds (or $3 if you avoid the Apple Tax) with a $160 one? That's not courage. That's a cash-grab.
Drank the Kool-aid, eh? Sure, Apple pushed the keyboard back on laptops. Inline headset control wasn't new with Apple. HP created the 3.5" floppy. Ethernet, which is preponderant, pre-dated LocalTalk, which is long gone. Bonjour isn't significantly different than SSDP. People were ripping CDs long before iTunes (which itself originated outside of Apple).
There was once a time when Apple sucked less. Now they just suck.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I don't doubt that those are the actual reasons, but that's not really the point. All it means is that they're pushing off their (engineering) problems on their users. Apple has a long history of deprecating stuff that (at the time) people thought was premature - but in essentially all the other cases it turns out that the new thing really is better. Serial ports, the floppy drive, non-USB connectors, CD drives in laptops, even replaceable batteries - there are tangible benefits to switching to the new thing, and they usually relate to speed, capacity, or physical size.
The headphone jack is slightly thicker than a Lightning connector (the only remaining jack) - but they didn't make the phone thinner to take advantage of the extra depth. And other than the connector itself a Lightning headphone is worse in every way, because headphones are driven by your ear technology, not the phone's. The newest fanciest Lightning headphones in 5 years (assuming this decision sticks) will never be more than today's headphones plus a built-in Lightning dongle.
What does this decision get me as a user? Let's go through. Headphones are headphones; there's two channels of audio that are the result of a varying electrical signal. I don't really care what the cord to the device looks like and considerations like "do these phones work with other things? do other phones work with this?" easily dominate that area. I guess this lets them use a little extra power but there was already more than enough output to damage your ears. If there were wild battery life improvements... maybe? But someone on the other thread did the math and a headphone jack's volume of battery is good for ~12 minutes. Meh. What about water resistance? Other phones have no problems with the IP67 rating and a headphone jack - I have no doubt that it was easier for Apple's engineers, but Apple used to not push their problems on their users.
So what does that leave? They wouldn't be able to have a force-sensitive home button? Honestly I'd rather have the headphone jack. Or just get rid of the home button - it works just fine for Android - or at least make it oblate or rectangular rather than round.
I have had every non-S model iPhone since the 3G, so I'm "due" to buy this one. In addition I have apps that I rely on that only work on iOS. It should be a slam dunk. But... honestly? I knew someday I'd lose the reason to buy an iPhone, and this might be that day. Not just the headphone jack, but the whole package. It doesn't look like a bad phone as such, but the only thing I'm really interested in is the waterproofing. And I'm not careless enough with my phone that getting it ruined is a big risk. The headphone jack thing isn't a dealbreaker, mostly because I don't listen to music much on my phone, but it's damn close.
Honestly Apple is just out of ideas. I bought a new MBP last year and it was the first hardware purchase I made in my entire life that I wasn't excited about. Roughly as functional as the 5-year-old one it replaced, more in some ways and less in others, but the same price. I needed a new one because the older one wasn't really working but boy did they manage to turn something I used to enjoy into something kind of boring and depressing. I'm still annoyed about the large size of the smallest iPhone still available - I was in London a few months ago and had to use my (out of contract and unlocked) iPhone 5, and it was sooooo nice. I assumed I'd gotten used to the wider width, but nope - and I didn't miss the extra screen at all.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
LOL. You give 4 examples to support a claim for lack of "vendor lock-in", but 3 of them are proprietary, and none have the quality of a simple analog jack. What flavor Kool-aid did you get?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
"The tire is almost 200 years old. It had its last big innovation about 70 years ago (radial tires). It's time to move on," Joswiak said, when asked why the new Apple car uses spider legs.
I mean seriously, what does the age of a technology have to do with whether it is the best choice for its particular purpose? I've never read a more mind-blowingly ignorant comment from a major corporate exec in my entire life.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
"that no longer counts as "proprietary""
You have no fucking clue what proprietary means. Proprietary means that if I wanted to sell a Lightning adapter of any sorts, I need to pay a licensing fee. Courage would be using an open standard that is unencumbered by PATENTS and thus motivated only for PROFIT.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Yes, because one came before the other.
USB-C has 4 lanes, lightning has 2. USB-C devices started coming out in 2014, but USB3.1 wasn't standardized until 2013, yet motherboards didn't start coming out with them until this year because INTEL. Motherboards have to add chips to support USB 3.1, which takes lanes away from PCIe until Intel integrates a controller for it.
Lightning (and Thunderbolt) are basically extensions of the PCIe bus. Lightning came out in 2012. So, basically it was Apple's move to Lightning that lit a fire under USB-IF's ass to come out with a better engineered connector and the "alternate mode" system that Lightning/Thunderbolt have.
To add insult to injury, the micro USB-B connector was selected as the European charging standard. WHOOPS. To which nearly every device still uses their own proprietary cable and power supply for quick charging. So much for that idea.
What I expect, is by 2020 we will have two USB standards. USB-C for "compact" devices that provide all the services that a "docking port" would have in 1996. So you plug your laptop or iPhone into a USB-C monitor or television and it will switch to the Super MHL 8K profile, while providing 10G-ethernet and 24bit/192khz 22.2 surround sound. None of this is going over wireless, and anyone who thinks so needs their head examined. The second standard which I'll just call "USB-D" for Desktop will be a larger connector that extends 20 PCIe bus lanes. So a laptop or desktop connected to this will shut down it's internal GPU/Audio and connect to the external PCIe bus where an external GPU, Audio processor and USB input hub will be present. The desktop/laptop will still use it's own CPU, RAM and hard drive. This allows the maximum flexibility. If a laptop doesn't have a USB-D port, then it doesn't have 20 PCIe lanes, and may only have 4 (over USB-C, thunderbolt 3 profile)
As for what such ports would look like, a USB-D port would be a USB-C port (which connects the first 4 lanes) with a small cutout and adds 16 lanes by extending the connector.