Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, Apple, the Headphone Jack Isn't Going Anywhere (yahoo.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Rob Pegoraro via Yahoo Finance: Two things unite almost every phone on display here at Mobile World Congress 2017: Android and a headphone jack. Apple doesn't exhibit its wares at this trade show, so the domination of Google's operating system is predictable. But the headphone jack's persistence did not look so inevitable when Apple cut it from the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus last September. Lenovo's Motorola subsidiary had already shipped a phone without a headphone hack, the Moto Z, and Apple's influence over the rest of the smartphone industry remains formidable -- indeed, within months, the Chinese firm LeEco had debuted a lineup of Android phones devoid of headphone jacks. As my colleague David Pogue predicted in a post approving Apple's move: "Other brands worldwide will be following suit." The hardware on display here at the world's largest mobile tech conference, though, suggests otherwise. Two days of walking around the show floor showed companies expressing a consistent unwillingness to abandon the humble headphone jack, even on models as thin as, or thinner than, the iPhone 7. The MWC floor revealed only one company willing to do away with the headphone jack: HTC. The Taiwan-based firm, which has struggled financially for years despite shipping such well-reviewed models as the HTC 10, used its exhibit to showcase the U Ultra and the U Play, which rely on their USB-C ports for audio output. Unlike, Apple, though, the company didn't make the move to save space, but rather to incorporate its "USonic" feature, which lets the phones' headphones calibrate themselves to your ears and provide noise cancellation.
Bingo.
The headline is stupid.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Its not about the jack going away for everyone, but the how apple claimed to be progressive and having much courage to remove it. Which means apple as usual is being a dick about things. What about this is hard to understand?
Two days of walking around the show floor showed companies expressing a consistent unwillingness to abandon the humble headphone jack, even on models as thin as, or thinner than, the iPhone 7.
PCs held on to Dsub parallel and serial ports and PS/2 ports and floppy drives for many years after Apple kicked them to the curb. Blackberry kept making physical keyboards long after the market proved that most buyers don't care about them. Just because everyone else didn't follow Apple one year later doesn't really tell us much. It's going to take a few years for this to really play out. The other handset makers are going to be watching. If Apple sales remain strong you can bet that more of them will follow Apple's lead over time. No one should be surprised that there wasn't a stampede of removing the headphone jack in just one year.
It's true that you need power for active noise cancellation, however it's pretty trivial to supply that power via a DC bias voltage over the regular audio signal on a headphone jack, and use any one of many trivial methods to detect supported headphone to switch that bias voltage on or off.
Oh no... it's the future.
Hell, this feature was available on my Cyangen-Modded Galaxy S3 years ago. The Oneplus-1 was also able to do this with typical headphones.
It was actually pretty neat, you listened to a series of pitches at different volumes with each ear and it was able to tell if you had some amount of loss in one ear and calibrate sound for it.
"Two days of walking around the show floor showed companies expressing a consistent unwillingness to abandon the humble headphone jack, even on models as thin as, or thinner than, the iPhone 7."
Very good, and I'm glad to hear it. There is NO reason to let Apple set the standard, especially when the standard they set sucks or changes with every new model or just doesn't make any fucking sense. And don't give me that "courage" bullshit- I wasn't buying that line of crap then and I'm not buying it now.
Long live the humble headphone jack- a simple, time-tested bit of tech that still has a lot of life left in it.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Where is the added profit in using an industry standard 2.5mm headphone jack? Apple wants you to buy their more expensive and proprietary Lightning port earbuds or wireless Airpods instead.
Rumor has it that the next iPhone will be USB-C, but I wouldn't be suprised if they added some proprietary protocols that require Apple/Beats branded headphones or earbuds for that as well.
There is no way to secure a USB port. Your USB keyboard or mouse can lie and claim it's also a HDD and auto-play a virus or it could type whatever it wanted into the computer. And as a previous poster said, you can actually press more keys on PS/2 than you can on USB. I'll assume PS/2 takes far fewer CPU cycles to process as well.
Just a wild ass guess, but I'll bet ALL ports and sockets will be gone soon.
It's far easier to make a phone waterproof, if you don't have any ports and sockets to seal up.
I suspect the rumors we've been hearing about Lighting being replaced by USB-C aren't accurate. I do think that we will see lightning converted to a mag-safe style flush mount connector.
So my prediction for the next iPhone is no buttons, switches or socket style connectors.