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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.
"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?