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Rejoice: Samsung's Next Flagship Smartphone Looks To Keep the Headphone Jack Alive (theverge.com)
Notorious smartphone leaker Evan Blass has leaked a couple press images of the Galaxy S9, giving us the first indication that it will still have a headphone jack. "The full information spill today is actually focused on a new Samsung DeX Pad, which appears to be an evolution of last year's DeX dock for the Galaxy S8," reports The Verge. From the report: Samsung, LG, and a couple of other companies like OnePlus have remained resolute in their inclusion of a headphone jack, but that was far from a certainty for the next Galaxy S iteration. This is a phone that will compete against the iPhone X, Huawei Mate 10 Pro, and more niche rivals like Google's Pixel 2: all of them surviving sans a headphone jack. So Samsung could have dumped the analog audio output, but it seems to have opted against it, and that's worthy of commendation. USB-C earphones are all still either bad or expensive -- or both -- and phones that retain compatibility with 3.5mm connectors remain profoundly useful to consumers that aren't yet convinced by Bluetooth.
The same engineering reasons that drove their competitors to do it - headphones need a deep hole with lots of mechanical support because of simple leverage. It's harder to waterproof and it takes up more space that could be dedicated to battery or another function. The jack is hard to design such that the point of failure is guaranteed to be the plug and not the socket. It requires a high-quality built-in amp. But yeah, if the market segment for people who want a jack is high enough, it's a good business move.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Apple has a history of dropping old well established standards about 2 to 3 years before people can see they were right. It's actually a bit uncanny how good they have been done guessing correctly.
a few example:
floppy drives
I feel they were way too early with dropping floppy support. The iMac in 1998 was the first one to ship without a floppy. They did not ship with a CD Writer, and USB flash drives had yet to be invented. Apple said they were obsolete because Internet, yet online "cloud storage" wasn't really a thing, and even "emailing files to yourself" was difficult because most email providers at the time had ridiculously small mailbox sizes. Plus although high speed residential internet was growing in popularity, it was by no means widespread.
On the positive side, between USB floppy drives, and replacements for the abomination of the "hockey puck mouse", helped to drive the market for USB peripherals, which helped support on the PC side.