This is more of an argument for have an ipod for music, and a separate flip-phone for an actual phone. Free wifi is almost everywhere in the US, and even the cheapest flip-phones can provide a wifi hotspot if you ever find yourself in need of some internet.
Or, better still, make headphones that have a lightning connector charging connector, and use bluetooth too. That way, when they're plugged in to your phone, they use wired audio, and charge their battery at the same time. When you unplug them, they revert to bluetooth. Problem solved. I wonder if anyone will actually bother to make such a thing. I expect not, but it would be cool.
1/4" TRS plugs which are far more a remnant of the ancient past
Not really. On any professional audio product you'll find 1/4" plugs because they are many times more robust and reliable. A 3.5mm jack is fragile, and often crackly, and it looks like they'll be on their way out.
Actually, that's not true at all. Most of the time, if I go round to someone's house, they don't have a 3.5mm jack that can be used to plug an iphone or whatever into their stereo. I certainly do, and my more tech-savvy friends do too, of course. But if you visit someone a little more, er, normal - for want of a better term - they won't. They will have either nothing at all - no audio leads of any sort - or they'll have a bluetooth something-or-other. Normally it'll be one of those bluetooth speaker gadgets, which can sound pretty good if you get a decent one, or they'll have a bluetooth-enabled amplifier.
In actual fact, I recently stopped dicking around with 3.5mm leads dangling out the front of my amplifier, and invested in a $60 Logitech bluetooth receiver instead. I find this option far more convenient for listening to music on my ipod than a lead - and if anything the sound quality seems to be somewhat better than the DAC built into the device itself. Possibly because the headphone output is designed to be a headphone output, not a line-level audio driver, and thus some design compromises have had to be made.
Having said all that, I do rather agree that, when you need one, a 3.5mm jack is a real nice simple way of getting audio out of the device. I'm personally never going to buy an iphone anyway, because the things are just too damn expensive, and a flip-phone is fine thanks, but I do worry what decisions like this will mean for the future utility of apple devices. I really don't want them to cock it up, because I've got lots of money invested in apple devices in my house. OSX is the only OS that doesn't make me furious every time I use it, and I don't want to stop buying apple laptops, but I don't like their new macbook pro line, so I'm starting to think I might be a bit screwed. I really don't want to go back to windows, and life is just too short to dick around with Linux.
The amps in all phones have been class-D for a long time, and at the currents that they have to deal with, generate negligible heat.
Of course it's possible for the BT - and certainly lightning - headphones to sound better, if they happen to contain a better DAC that would have been in the phone, or contain DSP processing that can compensate for the imperfect frequency response of the drivers / enclosure. I'm not saying that they're doing this, but it is at least, possible.
Putting the DAC + headphone amp in the phone, means that design compromises have to be made, because you don't know anything about the load that's going to be connected to them. You also need to add circuitry to deal with dead shorts, which happen as the jack is plugged in, and to perform all the analog fiddling-around that's necessary to make those remote switches work over the same line that also deals with the microphone.
I don't know. It seems a bit unlikely that Apple would have built a completely proprietary wireless protocol. They're very far from trivial things to design, and you have to get them licensed by whoever it is that thinks they own the electromagnetic spectrum these days, so it seems more likely that it's actually close to a yet-unreleased BT 5.0 or something.
I'm pretty sure you won't find a high quality line-level USB DAC that doesn't also have a headphone amp. They pretty much all do. Even this one here, which is about the cheapest decent one you can get, has a headphone amp. However, what it doesn't have is a volume control that messes with the levels coming out of the RCA sockets - which I presume is what you wanted since you were asking for line-level outputs.
Whatever you do, don't buy one of those tiny USB DACs with just a couple of 3.5mm jacks on them. They are universally terrible.
The Dalvik interpreter is still present in the system, and it's probably quite small compared to the size of the java runtime anyway. In either case, the reason for Java's high memory usage is not that it's interpreted or otherwise - it's due to the use of garbage collection (amongst other things). Garbage collection means that at any given time, the program is using more memory than it strictly needs to. It further means that additional CPU cycles have to be dedicated to searching the heap, following references, in order to find things like circular references and so-on.
No, I do follow. Whether or not Java is compiled to bytecode, and executed by an interpreter, or compiled further down into machine code, has no effect on the memory usage of the running java application. Java uses more memory than objective C, because one is garbage collected, and the other is not (or rather, it isn't on iOS - it can be on a mac).
Garbage collection is not an appropriate memory handling strategy on mobile devices, because it trades off memory and CPU cycles against ease of programming. Java was not a good choice.
That has no impact on memory usage though - and it's memory usage that was under discussion. It's a fact that Java exerts more memory pressure on a system than the native code that runs on iOS does. That's why those Android phones have to have so much memory, and still don't match the performance of iOS.
That depends on the station you listen to. In the US, you're probably right. In the UK, they still have proper radio, with shows that are curated by the DJ, and no-one tells them what to play. Similarly in New Zealand, where local radio stations have complete autonomy over what they broadcast. Rotten Radio, that broadcasts out of Lyttleton, for instance, plays whatever the hell they feel like.
Because you don't rely on the security of the transport - you build another layer of security on top of that. The same way that you build https (secure) on top of TCP (not secure at all). I assume that's what they do anyway. I'd certainly hope so.
The lead coming out of the jack can pivot and swivel 360 degrees and encounter no resistance.
The lightning port is more robust than a 3.5mm jack - those things fail pretty easily, and things like the remote control stop working. Also, the 3.5mm jack can rotate, but it's not going to unless you twist the lead enough to damage it. That said, the strain relief on all the lightning connectors I've ever used has been terrible, so the adaptor is fairly likely to break at the plug.
I have a rental car at this very moment, and when I start it up the bluetooth on my ipod touch hooks up to the car automatically and starts playing. When I stop the car and get out, the device pauses automatically. I don't even have to take it out of my bag. This is far, far better than plugging in a 3.5mm jack to the device, unlocking it, opening the music app, and pushing play. Even pairing the device when I picked the car up was really straightforwards.
Now, granted, every other time I've tried this out, it's been a real pain. But when it works, it works really well, and it's miles better than fiddling around with leads.
I've found quite the opposite. Lightning leads, on the other hand, are uniformly terrible, and break at interface between the lightning plug and the lead all the time. But the physical connection between the lightning plug and socket has always been rock-solid for me. Quite a bit more so than the headphone jack, which is often a bit crackly, and even more often fails to work with the remote button functions (play/pause etc).
It's nit-picky, I know, but single purpose doesn't mean the same thing as single-use. Whatever you feel about the removal of the headphone jack, the fact remains that all of the non-audio-out uses of the jack were horrible hacks.
Apple didn't remove the headphone jack because it allowed them to make the device waterproof. I mean, I don't understand why they removed it, but I don't think it was for that reason.
I do still think that it's a step backwards in some sense though. I realise that packing all that extra functionality into a 3.5mm jack has been quite a hack, but I can plug today's earpods into my macbook pro (and it's not even an especially new one), and the volume controls, play/pause, and the microphone all work. I used to provide this as an example of how integrated the apple product lines are.
However, it won't be possible to plug lightning earpods into anything else. This isn't a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
If Apple did this, there would be a slashdot outcry. So it goes.
This is more of an argument for have an ipod for music, and a separate flip-phone for an actual phone. Free wifi is almost everywhere in the US, and even the cheapest flip-phones can provide a wifi hotspot if you ever find yourself in need of some internet.
Or, better still, make headphones that have a lightning connector charging connector, and use bluetooth too. That way, when they're plugged in to your phone, they use wired audio, and charge their battery at the same time. When you unplug them, they revert to bluetooth. Problem solved. I wonder if anyone will actually bother to make such a thing. I expect not, but it would be cool.
1/4" TRS plugs which are far more a remnant of the ancient past
Not really. On any professional audio product you'll find 1/4" plugs because they are many times more robust and reliable. A 3.5mm jack is fragile, and often crackly, and it looks like they'll be on their way out.
Actually, that's not true at all. Most of the time, if I go round to someone's house, they don't have a 3.5mm jack that can be used to plug an iphone or whatever into their stereo. I certainly do, and my more tech-savvy friends do too, of course. But if you visit someone a little more, er, normal - for want of a better term - they won't. They will have either nothing at all - no audio leads of any sort - or they'll have a bluetooth something-or-other. Normally it'll be one of those bluetooth speaker gadgets, which can sound pretty good if you get a decent one, or they'll have a bluetooth-enabled amplifier.
In actual fact, I recently stopped dicking around with 3.5mm leads dangling out the front of my amplifier, and invested in a $60 Logitech bluetooth receiver instead. I find this option far more convenient for listening to music on my ipod than a lead - and if anything the sound quality seems to be somewhat better than the DAC built into the device itself. Possibly because the headphone output is designed to be a headphone output, not a line-level audio driver, and thus some design compromises have had to be made.
Having said all that, I do rather agree that, when you need one, a 3.5mm jack is a real nice simple way of getting audio out of the device. I'm personally never going to buy an iphone anyway, because the things are just too damn expensive, and a flip-phone is fine thanks, but I do worry what decisions like this will mean for the future utility of apple devices. I really don't want them to cock it up, because I've got lots of money invested in apple devices in my house. OSX is the only OS that doesn't make me furious every time I use it, and I don't want to stop buying apple laptops, but I don't like their new macbook pro line, so I'm starting to think I might be a bit screwed. I really don't want to go back to windows, and life is just too short to dick around with Linux.
To nitpick a bit:
The amps in all phones have been class-D for a long time, and at the currents that they have to deal with, generate negligible heat.
Of course it's possible for the BT - and certainly lightning - headphones to sound better, if they happen to contain a better DAC that would have been in the phone, or contain DSP processing that can compensate for the imperfect frequency response of the drivers / enclosure. I'm not saying that they're doing this, but it is at least, possible.
Putting the DAC + headphone amp in the phone, means that design compromises have to be made, because you don't know anything about the load that's going to be connected to them. You also need to add circuitry to deal with dead shorts, which happen as the jack is plugged in, and to perform all the analog fiddling-around that's necessary to make those remote switches work over the same line that also deals with the microphone.
I don't know. It seems a bit unlikely that Apple would have built a completely proprietary wireless protocol. They're very far from trivial things to design, and you have to get them licensed by whoever it is that thinks they own the electromagnetic spectrum these days, so it seems more likely that it's actually close to a yet-unreleased BT 5.0 or something.
Anything with an S/PDIF fibre optic or coax connector will do
If you use the digital out, you're not using the DAC, now are you?
I'm pretty sure you won't find a high quality line-level USB DAC that doesn't also have a headphone amp. They pretty much all do. Even this one here, which is about the cheapest decent one you can get, has a headphone amp. However, what it doesn't have is a volume control that messes with the levels coming out of the RCA sockets - which I presume is what you wanted since you were asking for line-level outputs.
Whatever you do, don't buy one of those tiny USB DACs with just a couple of 3.5mm jacks on them. They are universally terrible.
The Dalvik interpreter is still present in the system, and it's probably quite small compared to the size of the java runtime anyway. In either case, the reason for Java's high memory usage is not that it's interpreted or otherwise - it's due to the use of garbage collection (amongst other things). Garbage collection means that at any given time, the program is using more memory than it strictly needs to. It further means that additional CPU cycles have to be dedicated to searching the heap, following references, in order to find things like circular references and so-on.
No, I do follow. Whether or not Java is compiled to bytecode, and executed by an interpreter, or compiled further down into machine code, has no effect on the memory usage of the running java application. Java uses more memory than objective C, because one is garbage collected, and the other is not (or rather, it isn't on iOS - it can be on a mac).
Garbage collection is not an appropriate memory handling strategy on mobile devices, because it trades off memory and CPU cycles against ease of programming. Java was not a good choice.
That has no impact on memory usage though - and it's memory usage that was under discussion. It's a fact that Java exerts more memory pressure on a system than the native code that runs on iOS does. That's why those Android phones have to have so much memory, and still don't match the performance of iOS.
Never. He's just wrong.
That depends on the station you listen to. In the US, you're probably right. In the UK, they still have proper radio, with shows that are curated by the DJ, and no-one tells them what to play. Similarly in New Zealand, where local radio stations have complete autonomy over what they broadcast. Rotten Radio, that broadcasts out of Lyttleton, for instance, plays whatever the hell they feel like.
Because you don't rely on the security of the transport - you build another layer of security on top of that. The same way that you build https (secure) on top of TCP (not secure at all). I assume that's what they do anyway. I'd certainly hope so.
The lead coming out of the jack can pivot and swivel 360 degrees and encounter no resistance.
The lightning port is more robust than a 3.5mm jack - those things fail pretty easily, and things like the remote control stop working. Also, the 3.5mm jack can rotate, but it's not going to unless you twist the lead enough to damage it. That said, the strain relief on all the lightning connectors I've ever used has been terrible, so the adaptor is fairly likely to break at the plug.
I don't have to worry about distance.
The wires are of infinite length?
I have a rental car at this very moment, and when I start it up the bluetooth on my ipod touch hooks up to the car automatically and starts playing. When I stop the car and get out, the device pauses automatically. I don't even have to take it out of my bag. This is far, far better than plugging in a 3.5mm jack to the device, unlocking it, opening the music app, and pushing play. Even pairing the device when I picked the car up was really straightforwards.
Now, granted, every other time I've tried this out, it's been a real pain. But when it works, it works really well, and it's miles better than fiddling around with leads.
Lightning is essentially a Apple-only standard. Lightning headsets will only ever work with Apple devices, we need a good common digital standard.
Exactly. That's the worst part about this whole thing.
I've found quite the opposite. Lightning leads, on the other hand, are uniformly terrible, and break at interface between the lightning plug and the lead all the time. But the physical connection between the lightning plug and socket has always been rock-solid for me. Quite a bit more so than the headphone jack, which is often a bit crackly, and even more often fails to work with the remote button functions (play/pause etc).
It's nit-picky, I know, but single purpose doesn't mean the same thing as single-use. Whatever you feel about the removal of the headphone jack, the fact remains that all of the non-audio-out uses of the jack were horrible hacks.
Apple didn't remove the headphone jack because it allowed them to make the device waterproof. I mean, I don't understand why they removed it, but I don't think it was for that reason.
Well, probably not. But no-one is claiming that the iPhone 6 is water resistant, so I'm not sure what your point is.
I do still think that it's a step backwards in some sense though. I realise that packing all that extra functionality into a 3.5mm jack has been quite a hack, but I can plug today's earpods into my macbook pro (and it's not even an especially new one), and the volume controls, play/pause, and the microphone all work. I used to provide this as an example of how integrated the apple product lines are.
However, it won't be possible to plug lightning earpods into anything else. This isn't a good thing.
The existing earpods have a habit of falling from my ears - and now they're not even going to be attached to some wires? Great.
If true its effectively a lowscale energy-to-matter convertor which uses the resulting matter as 'fuel'.
But I think the claim is that it works inside a sealed container - so even that explanation wouldn't work.