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Wireless Headphone Sales Soared After Apple Dropped Headphone Jack (fortune.com)
Apple's decision to remove the headphone jack from new iPhones last year prompted lots of consumers to switch to wireless headphones, according to a new report on holiday shopping. From a report: Three-quarters of all headphones sold online in December were wireless models, up from 50% a year earlier, according to shopping tracker Slice Intelligence. Apple was the biggest beneficiary of the shift, as both its new AirPods earphones and models from its Beats subsidiary led the sales charts. The $159 AirPods, Apple's first wireless model sold under its own brand, didn't go on sale until Dec. 13, but the product quickly dominated the wireless headphone market, Slice found. In the year prior to the debut, the Beats brand topped online sales of wireless models with a 24% market share, trailed by Bose with an 11% share and Jaybird at 8%. But after AirPods went on sale, they grabbed 26% of online wireless sales, Slice found. Bose was second at 16% and Beats dropped to third with 15% of the market during the period considered.
Why is this a story?
If there is no headphone jack, buying traditional headphones would be pretty dumb. Any outcome other than an increase in wireless headphone sales would have been very unusual.
No thanks. The wire on wired headphones has never been a problem, and adding one more thing to my kit that needs recharging is undesirable. As is a dongle. As are earphones that aren't plug-compatible with airline entertainment and other phone-jack systems.
Bluetooth headsets are hardly "innovation" at this point and adding an incompatible proprietary chip "the W1 - oh, the courage" isn't good for anyone either. BT audio isn't good. It stutters, stumbles, pops, and cracks - even with "good" headsets. If they want to innovate - either fix BT audio or come up with some new standard as part of an open standards body and be the first to ship an implementation of that.
Despite all the whining on Slashdot, this will advance Bluetooth audio, driving lower cost for headphones and encouraging innovation to improve sound quality. Apple got this right, and the increase in sales proves it. Complain if you must, but Apple is still driving innovation while other companies prefer to keep the status quo.
No, this is not an "advancement". Recompressing compressed audio is not a good thing. Real audio is dying and so called innovators like Apple is accelerating it.
I absolutely loathe lossy compressed audio. I can't stand it. High frequencies sound like shit. Cymbals are garbled beyond recognition. It's worse than vinyl records with their RIAA equalization.
Now, if humanity could just solve that pesky problem we have with stagnated battery capacity technologies vs increasing power demands.
I have a smart watch and stopted using it largely due to keeping track of various devices power levels and plugging them in. Keeping track of my phone, laptop, and occasional DSLR are enough with all other responsibiltiies daily life requires. I don't know about most people but I quite enjoy headphones that don't require independent power.
Wireless is nice occasionally but outside of intense cardio/exercise (which I prefer using so cheap they're disposable headphones for anyways), I don't have much use for wireless headphones. The cost of overhead to manage power and additional expense to remove wiring is usually enough to dissuade me.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
From iPhone 7 Tech Specs
They didn't sell many lightning cables before Apple made it a standard either.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Despite all the whining on Slashdot, this will advance Bluetooth audio, driving lower cost for headphones and encouraging innovation to improve sound quality. Apple got this right, and the increase in sales proves it.
The increase in sales only proves that significant portion of the market that was previously content with corded headphones no longer has that option.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
What's with the "incompatible" proprietary chip remark? The W1 helps automatic pairing with iOS and OS X devices, but AirPods are entirely compatible with older iPhones, iPads, Macs, and even Android phones. They work better with Apple devices, but Bluetooth is Bluetooth.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Despite all the whining on Slashdot, this will advance Bluetooth audio
And DRM'ed, "protected media path" audio will also see a huge advance now that we finally got rid of that pesky analog audio transmission.
driving lower cost for headphones and encouraging innovation to improve sound quality.
Ha ha hahahahahahahahahah. Dream on.
Apple got this right, and the increase in sales proves it.
From a business POV, sure. You, as in the Apple customer, are getting assraped, though, and you seem to even appreciate it. Give me a break.
Apple is still driving innovation while other companies prefer to keep the status quo.
The status quo was pretty much fine. Not everything that's being newly introduced (while breaking things left and right, of course), is "innovation" in the good-connotations sense of the word.
Enjoy your fancy innovative products. I won't.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Seriously, what do you get out of lying on the internet?
And most of the people buying AirPods don't have iPhone 7s, I'm using AirPods with my iPhone 6.
In case no one noticed Apple bought Beats audio, who controls pretty much the entire wireless headphone market. Fast forward a year or so and now Apple ONLY sells devices that can use wireless headphones in their most popular product.
Do any of you Apple fanatics NOT see that Apple screwed you by removing a port and FORCING you into the wireless headphone market they own most of? Personally t's this kind of CRAP from Apple that made me completely abandon that entire eco-system years ago.
As others have pointed out, there are 4 ways one could listen to something:
1. Using the sound directly from the phone itself;
2. Using the lightning connector headphones that come w/ the phone;
3. Using an existing headphone or speaker via the aux to lightning dongle that comes w/ the phone;
4. Using a bluetooth speaker
Oh, just fuck yourself!!! As it is, we've had enough of Trump coverage. Slashdot is (or at least was) a tech site, and Apple headphones are certainly more relevant to tech than some stupid Buzzfeed story on the PEOTUS
Tim Cook deserves a "Profiles in Courage" award.
Has anyone figured this out yet?
It seems like it would be kind of obvious, a 3.5mm female jack on the headset itself and a M-M 3.5mm cable to use with devices without bluetooth. The jack would just bypass all the BT electronics and go direct to the speakers.
That way when the battery quit or you had something without a BT option, you could just plug in. Might even be useful for crudely mixing a BT source and an analog source simultaneously.
apple again? Fuck apple/ I have a Samsung with a REAL audio jack
Do any of you Apple fanatics NOT see that Apple screwed you by removing a port and FORCING you into the wireless headphone market they own most of?
Just give up the argument. There are those who have bought into the Apple "mystique" and those who haven't. To the former, it will always be "But Apple is being BOLD, moving on to new tech!" To the latter, like you, there will always be the most cynical interpretation, where everything is about profits. Just like the pro-life/pro-choice debate, the two sides are operating from completely different premises about the world.
No, if we really want to change people's minds, we need to revisit the Apple propaganda of the past couple decades. I'm sure many of us remember those "Mac vs. PC" commercials that ran for many years with the cool hip guy as the Mac and the stodgy guy in a jacket and tie as the PC.
I really don't understand why no one has made a new parody of those considering the loss of standard ports on so many Apple devices recently. Does anyone remember those Mac vs. PC commercials where the Mac was the "cool guy" who could just talk to anyone, whereas the PC wasn't prepared to interface with various gadgets?
Time to turn that around.
Commercial opens with Mac dressed in cool outfit saying to PC, "Hey, look how slim and sleek I am!" Then some other people appear, and the PC just starts going around shaking hands and talking to everyone. But Mac disappears off-screen and comes back wearing all sorts of crap hanging off of him everywhere. He tries to go around and shake people's hands and talk to them, but he can't find the right piece of random mechanical junk hanging off of him to make it work. Finally, the Mac guy asks the PC guy for "tech support" and the PC guy helps rummage through a giant box of dongles to find the right one. The PC guy pulls it out and says, "Here it is -- and only $29.99!"
Unless someone starts producing ads like that, this Apple crap will have no chance of stopping. In a few years, we'll have dongles upon dongles just to use a 5-year-old computer with a new Apple device.
Removing the headphone jack was annoying and regressive; on that we can agree. Samsung is likely to remove it to the S8, in response to Apple, and that makes it all the more frustrating.
Beats are crap. I refuse to buy any of those headphones. I got a pair as a gift for Christmas--wireless, natch--and I haven't taken the shrink wrap off. I intend to sell it.
I bought Jaybirds years before Apple removed the jack. They work great, but they're not perfect. So I'm not sure where you're coming from when you say that Beats controls the wireless headphone market. People have been buying other brands long before the iPhone 7.
Apple has very clearly lost its way, but it's not like their acquisition of Beats and removal of the headphone jack was planned specifically so that they would force adoption of hideous and overpriced wireless pieces of shit. Well, at least I don't think that's the case.
A2DP technically supports streaming AAC and MP3 directly. You don't have to recompress most music formats. If you're allowing for 300+kbps, you aren't going to have any audio quality issues worse than listening through earbuds in the first place.
Good headphones and work just the way you describe with excellent Noice Cancelling also.
Big and ugly but I use mine all the time.
And it's not because of Apple, it's a logical development.
Who buys headphones? Well, people who need new ones because the old ones are dead and/or sound like shit. Headphones are not really an item you buy due to fashion changing. Well, most people don't, I know that there are certainly some that have to have headphones that match the color and style of their handbag, but let's go with the sane majority.
So you have the choice between cordless and corded headphones. What will be the decider here is probably price, availability and quality. Cordless is certainly more convenient than corded (anyone who ever had to weave headphone cords through his jacket so they don't get caught in any doorknob will know). Quality should be on par by now, too. So why not buy cordless if they're halfway decently priced?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And DRM'ed, "protected media path" audio will also see a huge advance now that we finally got rid of that pesky analog audio transmission.
You know even Apple went DRM-free with music sales years ago.
Spotify and Tidal both implement noisy steganography tracking data into their streams. Protected path is probably not as profitable as just suing the people who file share their copies of the streamed audio.
As a wild guess this one: http://www.eastbrooklynlabs.co...
How do you know Apple customers don't like being ass raped? Considering that has been the whole history of the company, I can only guess that their customers must enjoy it. At work I was forced to use a Windows 3.11 machine (Mac) and I don't like it. It is very opionated on how you should do things. Unfortunately Windows 8, 8.1 & 10 are also wanting to tell us how we should work these days as well.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
Unless someone starts producing ads like that, this Apple crap will have no chance of stopping.
PC is a Microsoft Surface with the same problems.
You can plug in your old headphones using the adapter they include in the box (and sell replacements for $9), or you can use the wired Lightning Cable EarPods they also... include in the box. Heck, they sell replacements for those too.
I get that you're mad but your assertion that you can ONLY use wireless headphones is false in more ways than one.
And as for being mad that they bought a wireless headphone company and then did something to encourage usage of wireless headphones? That just says you don't understand how hardware companies work. Especially if you don't think every other phone manufacturer isn't about to do the same.
Schnapple
"Sales of dongles soar after Apple removes MacBook Pro ports"
I can see what's next:
"Sales of external battery packs soar after Apple eliminates batteries from all products to make them 2 mm thinner"
"Sales of wireless keyboards soar after Apple removes keyboard from MacBooks to make them 1 mm thinner"
"Sales of trackpads, displays, and logic boards soar after Apple announces new MacBook Pro is an empty cardboard box; calls it 'our most innovative and courageous product ever'"
TFS said Apple was #1 in sales with the wireless AirPods at 26^% of new sales. Followed by Bose at #2 in wireless headphones. Beats fell to #3 spot after Bose.
And last I checked, Apple gave you a set of wired headphones in the box, and an adapter to use your own headphones. So you don't have to support Apple's conspiracy. They include two options right in the box.
Not quite. Bluetooth audio CAN be quite good. Not reference level headphone good, but fairly close. Getting it any better is likely a fool's errand since the DACs on anything but audiophile gear are 'OK' but not beyond. Expensive audiophile DACs are audibly better than iPhones. And pricier.
I'm impressed by my Sennheiser Momentum 2s. At $300+ they damned well ought to work well. I'm not so impressed by a slew of $80-$150 Bluetooth headphones I've tried. Pops, snaps, drops - the whole gamut.
Perhaps the price points will drop at some time.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
'Beats controls pretty much the entire wireless headphone market'????
Wow. I didn't realize. Amazon must be hiding something.
Sennheiser, Bose, and a host of Chinese manufacturers that you never have heard off might be a tad surprised at that statement. A quick perusal
of a couple of 'best of' compilations (no, not that kind) don't even mention Beats.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Unless someone starts producing ads like that, this Apple crap will have no chance of stopping.
PC is a Microsoft Surface with the same problems.
Nope... Microsoft Surface Pro 4 has standard ports and jacks, including a headphone jack. Maybe not enough USB ports, but it's a tablet.
Surface Pro 4 has a USB port, mini-displayport, headphone jack, Bluetooth, and Secure Digital card slot. The only thing proprietary are the charging and docking ports. You can use the USB port for a USB dock, if you need to. So that just leaves the charging cable that is proprietary.
mini-displayport is the same as Apple's Thunderbolt - typically a dongle required (unless you use an all-in-one cable).
There is no Ethernet port.
With a single USB port, you're probably going to have a hub - not much different than being stuck with a newer USB type-C.
The only thing truly different between Surface Pro and Mac in that regard is the headphone port. I'm not even saying it's a bad thing - just that it's pointless to mock Apple for it exclusively.
Do any of you Apple fanatics NOT see that Apple screwed you by removing a port and FORCING you into the wireless headphone market they own most of?
Just give up the argument. There are those who have bought into the Apple "mystique" and those who haven't. To the former, it will always be "But Apple is being BOLD, moving on to new tech!" To the latter, like you, there will always be the most cynical interpretation, where everything is about profits...
Walled-garden. Sealing the case shut and choosing to solder every component directly to the fucking chassis, destroying the 3rd party market for upgrades. Making damn near every external connection proprietary, requiring the purchase of some form of patented adapter. Removing the headphone jack, leading to a boost in sales of yet another product line (Beats) they now own.
It hardly takes a cynic to understand that every move they make is about profits.
Give up the argument? There's none to be had. Not even the iLemmings can dismiss the blatant motives of a company who has unabashedly made hundreds of billions in profits in a obscenely short amount of time, driven by arrogant Take-It-And-Like-It designs.
Unless someone starts producing ads like that, this Apple crap will have no chance of stopping. In a few years, we'll have dongles upon dongles just to use a 5-year-old computer with a new Apple device.
While it's a cute idea for an ad for the competition, you don't understand that all vendors will soon follow the Apple profit model. Their Boards will practically demand it, so in a few short years, every computing device will look like the Apple product line, each of them complete with their own patented and proprietary designs and interfaces, all driven by the same profit model.
I listen to music when I go to bed at night and I use the alarm to wake up in the morning. Am I supposed to have a special pair of bluetooth headphones that I use at night because then they have to charge during the day after I have used them? If I use the dongle at night and I wake up to my phone at 30% how do I charge it if I am out and about during the day? How do I know if my alarm will even work in the morning?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I'm willing to bet that Samsung will at least include an adapter to listen and charge at the same time.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
So what is included in the box to listen and charge at the same time?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
... they could drop the terrible windows build of itunes and replace it with a linux build? Wouldn't be much work to port from osx and would show the market how dominant they really are.
Why UNIX?
...The only thing truly different between Surface Pro and Mac in that regard is the headphone port. I'm not even saying it's a bad thing - just that it's pointless to mock Apple for it exclusively.
The only thing truly different between Microsoft and Apple is the fact that there are still several other options available from many vendors as a hardware alternative to obtain a "Pro" grade portable device.
Apple offers the Macbook Pro, in all its proprietary glory.
THAT is the issue here, that take-it-or-fuck-off mentality that defines Apples corporate arrogance, which I and many others will gladly mock the shit out of them for. Sadly, I don't see the competition doing anything but following suit, so welcome to the beginning of the end regarding "options".
There is another way to read this news. I don't buy the concept that these people actually *wanted* wireless because then they would have already been using wireless. Maybe people just wanted the iPhone and while they were neck deep in high tech stats like megapixels and megahertz, didn't think they had to confirm that it had a feature that all phones were previously just assumed to have. Really, brilliant planning on Apples part; when I buy a laptop or computer I don't confirm it has an audio port either but who's to say that it won't? Apple knew people would expect it, and that is precisely they wanted to be the first to move on it. The way I read this statistic is that, upon buying the iPhone 7 people discovered that dongles are really, really inconvenient. This isn't a new love for wireless, this is an old hate for dongles. One that Apple played people into perfectly.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Apple removed the headphone jack to prevent users from molesting the phones.
It is odd that other phone brands don't believe their users physically capable of this and thus kept the headphone jack.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Nothing. But that's not what the assertion was.
Schnapple
I'm a fan of Sennheiser, because these have big cups and I have big but sensitive ears. Small over-ear headphones will quickly start to irritate. So I have the Sennheiser HD 558 for home and office. I prefer wireless but they didn't have decent (big cup) wireless ones. Damn shame, but they've apparently seen potential revenue in those iPhone 7 users. Because there are two new models: the HD 4.40 and the HD 4.50 with noise cancellation.
Really looking forward to getting that last one. I'm working regularly in an open office and every now and then, there's someone calling for an hour or so. A good headphone can keep you sane.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Not just that, it even acts as an antennae for some older cellphones if one wants to play FM radio on them. But aside from that, if space was so critical, 2.5mm jacks are also standard, if less common
Apple-brand lube sales have increased by the same amount as Apple fanatics bend over again for Apple.
My girlfriend (Android) and one of my flatemates (iPhone 6) both have bought bluetooth headphones in the last ~2 months. I think the kerfuffle about the iPhone 7 brought modern bluetooth headsets to their attention. They both (independently) bought the same brand, too.
Bluetooth headsets are hardly "innovation" at this point and adding an incompatible proprietary chip "the W1 - oh, the courage" isn't good for anyone either. BT audio isn't good. It stutters, stumbles, pops, and cracks - even with "good" headsets. If they want to innovate - either fix BT audio or come up with some new standard as part of an open standards body and be the first to ship an implementation of that.
The W1 chip DID "fix Bluetooth audio". In fact, that's PRECISELY what it did.
And, BTW, it is NOT "incompatible". The W1 chip in the AirPods and Beats headphones happiliy works with standard BT devices, and the W1 chip in the iPhone 7 happily works with standard BT headphones/headsets.
And from what I have read, even when used "single-ended", the W1 chip SOMEHOW makes BT connections much more stable.
Not quite. Bluetooth audio CAN be quite good. Not reference level headphone good, but fairly close. Getting it any better is likely a fool's errand since the DACs on anything but audiophile gear are 'OK' but not beyond. Expensive audiophile DACs are audibly better than iPhones. And pricier.
I'm impressed by my Sennheiser Momentum 2s. At $300+ they damned well ought to work well. I'm not so impressed by a slew of $80-$150 Bluetooth headphones I've tried. Pops, snaps, drops - the whole gamut.
Perhaps the price points will drop at some time.
Actually, expecting "audiophile" quality in a "mobile" environment is the very definition of a fool's errand.
Outside noise and vibration do a bangup job of obscuring fine audio details that are the only difference between "good" and "audiophile" quality, no matter what.
A2DP technically supports streaming AAC and MP3 directly. You don't have to recompress most music formats. If you're allowing for 300+kbps, you aren't going to have any audio quality issues worse than listening through earbuds in the first place.
Blind A/B/X testing shows that even "golden ears" cannot RELIABLY tell the difference between 128k AAC and "non-compressed analog". Personally, I FEEL like I can tell a LITTLE difference until you get to 160k AAC. But at the "iTunes Plus" standard of 256k AAC, I double-dog dare ANYONE to "pass" an A/B/X test.
Now, if humanity could just solve that pesky problem we have with stagnated battery capacity technologies vs increasing power demands.
Yep.
I have always said: "Why can't I just have the battery they use in a hand-phaser?"
I chose 192kbps AAC (but later switched to VBR that approximates that quality) as my compromise for my rips. Not being able to tell which one is "better" is not the same as not noticing a difference - and I think cymbals are still muddy at the 128kbps (and really bad at 128kbps in MP3), but cymbals are also kind full of dissonant harmonics and accurate doesn't really sound "right."