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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.
I'll be switching to you when I next upgrade.
I'm glad Headphone Jack will live longer. He's an old friend.
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.
They're afraid to get rid of a user friendly restore to try to squeeze even more cash out of consumers? Instead they opted to allow us to use our existing headphone, and provide high quality AKGs in the box too, which are excellent with Skype for Business for meetings on the go. Or I could piss around with expensive Bluetooth earbuds, hoping they're charged and I didn't lose one.
Idiot.
Some people forget, that not everyone has a cushy job. This targets the market where bluetooth headphones/ear-buds are expensive to replace.
Ear buds on a jack are 15-20 bones compared to 40-70 for a decent bluetooth headphones. There's also the matter of bluetooth interference for audiophiles where a line-jack will be preferred (pending environment).
I don't read AC
[ sarcasm ] And HDMI? Yeah, that's a useless, antiquated standard. Don't bother with that anymore. [ /sarcasm ]
On a more immediate note, those of us who value high quality audio can now turn to Samsung to support our high quality headphones and earbuds, and not have all the disadvantages of Bluetooth batteries, charging, the higher price, that ambient microwave radiation degrades the signal, etc..
And, I've got a pair of earbuds I really like and they're probably gonna last a good few years more. There's no way I'm gonna buy a phone that doesn't let me plug them in.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
"Apple has a history of dropping old well established standards about 2 to 3 years before people can see they were right."
No. Apple has a history of dropping standards people are actively using, often before the new stuff has matured enough to even be usable.
everyone thought these moves were crazy at the time"
Almost everyone still had devices that that used those ports and had to buy adapters or all new devices. I had $500 serial US Robotics modems, and $300 ADB barcode scanners, for example. That all had to be replaced or adapted. (And adapting them was a PITA because Apple has always been extremely stingy with USB ports too.)
The PC carried these legacy ports for years before getting dropped, the result was that a lot of us had computers with a floppy drive that never got used. This was a much better situation to be in, than not having a floppy drive and needing one - a situation a lot of people found themselves in.
Apple wasn't right. They were irritating. Everyone could have told you USB was better than ADB and parallel ports, or that USB flash drives and networking would kill floppies, and on the PC side everyone was switching to USB as fast as they could. You didn't have have much foresight to see the writing on the wall for the legacy ports.
But it was greatly fucking appreciated by PC users that you didn't have to throw out all your peripherals and buy new ones, because old ones were generally supported until most people were finished using them.
I have a $100,000 lathe at a site, still using ISA controller boards with Windows 98. The computer died last year, and I had no trouble buying a replacement.
Meanwhile Apple frequently won't support interfaces from peripherals from 2 years ago. I recall having the original imac from 1999 and Power Mac 7600 from 1998 in the same office and having no way to get files from one to the other. No floppy on the imac, no writeable CD support on either, and no usb on the powermac. I could network them, but since that office didn't otherwise have or need a LAN and the computers weren't sitting next to eachother... Fuck you very much apple.
by requiring that any device plugged in met some higher level of service expectation they could write software that took advantage of that requirement sooner than their competition who had to have legacy support. I give you the WYSIWYG revolution as exhibit A.
That argument really doesn't have a comparable example for any of the other ports you mentioned.
Because adapters are stupid and clunky in general, and the lighning adapter on my wife's iphone in particular doesn't work properly half the time.
Now I ask you, why the hell would I need to waste my time going to the store and spending money on a replacement, which may or may not actually fix the issue, when I can buy a phone with a headphone jack and not have to worry about that particular nuisance?
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.
My 4 year old phone had:
- HDMI output (MHL)
- IR transmitter
- User replaceable battery
- a wider screen than anything available on a smartphone today.
- a headphone jack
- SD card slot
- a textured back that looked gorgeous, and meant no case was needed because the phone wasn't so slippery it would fly out of your hand every time you tried to hold it.
Now the SD card slot and headphone jack are still available on some phones these days (though only a small handful), but basically all of the others are simply impossible to get now.
So I'm supposed to "upgrade" to what exactly? the only advantage the newer devices have is a small amount of speed. None of the new phones have any features that that one didn't have, there hasn't been a new feature added in at least 4 years. The only thing they do is increase the speed slightly while removing actual features and capabilities.
Well, we're almost at the three year mark now, and the majority of the industry is still saying that it was stupid, which probably is a good indication that you're wrong.
The reason you're wrong is that the way Apple did this is ridiculously un-Apple-like. Normally, when they drop something:
Quite frankly, the way Apple has done this actually encourages people to switch to Android, and that will continue to be true even if all the Android makers follow suit and drop the headphone jack. Why? Because I can use the same USB-C headphones with my Mac and my Android phone. They've actually made the Android-Mac experience better than the iPhone-Mac experience!
No, Apple screwed up badly. Maybe only a small percentage of users care—and obviously that's true, or else they'd be out of business right now—but for the users who do care, Apple needs to drop Lightning for USB-C sooner rather than later. Our iPhone 6s devices are starting to look seriously dated.
That's complete and utter crap. We had WYSIWYG on the Apple IIgs, and it printed to the ImageWriter II just fine, complete with WYSIWYG, and that printer was still supported up through... what, Mac OS 9? (And if you really want to be horrified, there's a third-party macOS driver available for the ImageWriter II that *still* works, AFAIK.)
And there has always been support for a wide range of other non-Postscript printers. Brother uses PCL for some of their laser printers, Canon and HP do their own thing for their inkjets, etc. So at what point did Apple drop support for non-Postscript printers?
ASCII-only printers, sure, but those were only ever really directly supported in any meaningful way on the Apple II series, and nobody was even still building daisy-wheel printers by the time the Apple II line fully went away in 1993. (The last ones were designed in the mid to late 1980s.) Also, I can still print to one from a MacBook Pro today with the right adapters. Nobody would do so, though, because they stopped making those printers for a good reason. Apple didn't ever really drop support; WYSIWYG software never supported them in the first place, and non-WYSIWYG software still does.
Also, the very first Apple products that actually shipped with built-in ports used serial ports. Parallel ports were only available as an add-on card. So talking about Apple dropping that (back in what, the early 1980s?) is kind of a stretch, because it was never a core part of their product line.
And AFAIK, nobody thought that dropping ADB was a bad idea. They grumbled at having to replace their devices, but moving to an industry standard was generally seen as a good thing. Also, you could buy cheap adapters to use your existing ADB devices if you really wanted to.
Finally, with the exception of the floppy drive, none of those other ports/features were used while mobile. And Apple continued to provide the internal hardware needed for third parties (VST) to provide floppy drives inside their laptops until well after USB flash drives were firmly entrenched as a replacement. That makes this the first port designed for mobile use that Apple has ever dropped without a broadly available replacement th
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