If I want to watch porn and masturbate at a kiosk, who are you to take away my American freedoms? George Washington fought for my right to masturbate at kiosks.
90% of the U.S. will likely have > 1000Mbps by 2025, so most of us will be 10x ahead.
And 10% will still be barely faster than dialup, so by 2025, 10% of us—probably the poorest people who can least afford to pay for the infrastructure improvements to bring their speeds up to snuff—will be 1000x behind.
I wonder what the tradeoff of 802.11 WiFi vs LTE is.
The size of the congestion block. In either case, the speed plummets if too many people are using it, but with Wi-Fi, you fix it by running a new fiber up to two hundred feet (twice the maximum radius, give or take) and adding a $100 access point; with LTE, you fix it by running a new fiber up to 28 km (or 200 km, depending on preamble format) and adding a new tower for orders of magnitude more than that.
It would be an interesting thought experiment to calculate the efficiency of running fiber-to-the-hotspot for Wi-Fi versus fiber-to-the-tower for LTE at various population densities.
Forget that. You should be asking, "Who needs an alternate way to wake the phone when the power button fails?" (...as it did epidemically on the iPhone 5...)
This is like comparing a Pinto to a Corvair....:-)
My favorite HP experience involved a set of... IIRC three different HP printers (multiple models in the same series) at my former employer with duplexers. If you loaded them up with 11x17 paper and told them to print double-sided, you had to send them exactly two pages (one physical sheet) at a time. Otherwise, the stupid printers would start feeding the next page before it finished printing the previous one, resulting in a paper jam every single time. I wasted a good couple of hours before I figured out what was causing the constant paper jams, because I never in a million years would have thought that a shipping printer could possibly have such a serious firmware bug in its final firmware revision (which was many years old at the time).
Eventually, they scrapped those printers because they couldn't get toner cartridges for them, and replaced them with smaller HP printers that jammed when I looked at them funny. Don't get me started on HP.
Odd. My FedEx distribution center is open until 8 P.M., and my UPS distribution center only hold-for-pickup handling once a day, at IIRC 11 P.M. (yes, P.M.), so neither should involve missing work unless you work a very strange shift.
Also, after the first notice, you can request redelivery within the same geographic region, so you can have them deliver it to your workplace instead of your home.
The thing is, the Samsung laser printer wasn't *that* much cheaper than the bottom tier of Brother or Konica Minolta laser printers, both of which were miles better.
Terrible printers, last I checked. I went around at a trade show a few years ago to look at laser printers, and the Samsung impressed me by being the only one whose output was actually worse than not having output at all. The printed photograph that they used for a demo was a dark, blotchy mess, with nonexistent gradients.... It was so bad that I almost wondered if it was somebody's idea of abstract art.
Then again, I can pretty reliably recognize HP-printed photos from several feet away by the banding, so maybe it kind of does make sense....
Science Fiction (to me) has always boiled down to deal with the question "what does it mean to be human?".
That pretty much describes all good drama, too. To me, science fiction is any story that uses an alternative setting that is different from our own so that it can deal with the question above in a way that makes people think rather than causing them to have a knee-jerk reaction that makes them stop thinking, as it would if the same story were set in the present universe and at the present time.
Additionally, if anything happens that can't currently happen, it has to result from a plausible evolution of technology (i.e. not magic), and it generally should not be set in the past (i.e. not historical fiction) unless it involves some sort of alternate timeline or something.
As for good sci-fi, I've always been a fan of the Hitchhiker's series. It pokes fun at the world we live in, and is set in the context of an alternate future where Earth has been bulldozed to make room for an intergalactic superhighway. Of course, it is also pretty snarky.:-)
Talking to another human being for 5 minutes is such an onerous task that you'd rather wait two days for something to show up in the mail?
You left out a bit there. Compare:
Drive ten or fifteen minutes to the store.
Find the product you want.
Check Amazon reviews to make sure it isn't crap using your cell phone clumsily while standing in the relative discomfort of a busy store.
Notice that it is cheaper on Amazon.
Spend 5 minutes talking to a salesperson.
Spend ten or fifteen minutes driving back.
Versus:
Find the product you want from the comfort of your home.
Check the Amazon reviews using your laptop in the comfort of your home.
Verify that it is cheaper at Amazon than local stores using Google.
Decide whether to bother driving for half an hour, spend five minutes haggling, and still lose 2-4% in credit card rewards just to get it two days sooner.
NAS systems should generally be behind a NAT firewall unless attached to a hardened server, and hardened servers in the DMZ should be kept up to date religiously. If you want to use a NAS remotely, you should VPN into your network.
If they had waited just a couple more years for USB sticks to become readily available
Except it would have been twice as long until that happened because people would have just stuck with floppy drives.
You have the timeline wrong there. NOR flash had been around for decades at the time Apple removed the floppy drive, and the company that released the first flash drive was already well into their development cycle by the time Apple made their announcement.
Apple taking floppies out of their machines had had approximately zero effect on the market other than creating a market for third-party floppy drives from small niche product manufacturers. Apple's paltry 4% of the computer market in 1998 wasn't enough to make the rest of the industry even blink. Industry leaders were advising Apple to sell off its assets and return the money to the shareholders at the time, as it was reportedly about 90 days away from bankruptcy at about that time.
So no, it would not have taken twice as long without Apple's decision. It probably would not have taken a week longer.
Externalizing hardware is orders of magnitude more annoying on a phone
It's an adaptor about an inch long that you just leave on your plug. How is that seriously "orders of magnitude more annoying".
First, because you statistically will never have it with you when you need it, for one, unless you buy a $10 adapter for every pair of headphones you own. Second, because they're bulky enough to be annoying in your pocket. Third, because it means you can't use the same headphones with your laptop and your cell phone from the same manufacturer without carrying an extra cord solely for the purpose of making your phone compatible with your headphones. It is completely ridiculous.
Because they know in the long run it is better for everyone, just like the ditched floppy drives while people like you raised a stick about that because they could not see past next month, to what the future held - or more importantly, what it could hold.
We grumbled about floppies because it was a pain in the backside, and because they dropped them in a product that was otherwise highly desirable in the education market, where the floppy was still critical for several more years. The result was that nearly every iMac bought by an educational institution had an external floppy drive along with it, at least initially. Apple created a whole industry around that one design mistake. If they had waited just a couple more years for USB sticks to become readily available, nobody would have complained, but they were slightly premature, and it was annoying.
However, the fact that the iMac wasn't portable, meant that it was just mildly annoyed grumbling. Externalizing hardware is orders of magnitude more annoying on a phone, because you don't tether a phone to your desk; you carry it in your pocket. And now, you carry it in your pocket with an adapter so that you can use your headphones, or else you charge a pair of headphones every day just in case you decide you want to use them.
In every previous instance, something better was available, with the sole exception of Ethernet, and because that is used exclusively while you're sitting at a desk somewhere, an adapter is just a minor nuisance. Neither is true for headphones. There is no wired standard for headphones other than 3.5mm, and by removing that jack, Apple has done absolutely nothing to drive people to a newer, better standard other than taking away a standard that worked reasonably well. This is not how innovation works.
And wireless headphones suck. Even the AptX codec's 40 ms latency is easily noticeable (and Apple doesn't support that codec). The 150 ms standard Bluetooth latency might as well be a minute. It is horrible to the point of being almost unusable in my experience. That's not even factoring in the headache of having to charge your headphones versus being able to carry them around for days or weeks at a time in a bag or glove compartment and not have to think about them except when you need them.
Their engineers made the same mistake a year ago with the Macbook, turning a previously good computer into a toy that you can't charge while using it to charge your phone (making it a terrible choice for the college market, which was their primary target market). The new crop of hardware designers are, IMO, utterly ruining Apple's product lines.
Now is the time to buy whatever usable Mac and iOS hardware you can buy. Winter is coming.
And it will be a long, cold winter if history is any indication.
Perhaps because if you compare the first two stretch goals, you come up with $150,000 for 440 rolls of toilet paper, or $340 a roll. That's a price that would make even defense contractors blush. The only way the numbers would add up is if they were in Yen or the rolls were gold plated.
People like Feinstein win because the Republicans run ultra-right wing-nuts against them. You can't run somebody like Emken on an anti-gay-rights platform in California. You'd be more likely to win by running a Boxer (the dog, not the Senator).
All the Republicans have to do to win California is run a socially liberal candidate—someone with a strong position on equal rights, but fiscally conservative. I know that would technically border on a libertarian candidate in a lot of ways, which is why they don't want to do it, but if they ran that sort of moderate Republican against Boxer or Feinstein, they would have at least a decent chance of winning—particularly if they did it in an off-season election (non-presidential) when fewer Democrats vote.
The fact that the Republicans keep trying and failing to push a radical right-wing social agenda in California tells me unequivocally that either Republican leadership in California is grossly incompetent or they don't actually want to win in California.
For example, months ago Cornyn proposed a bill that would ban persons on the no-fly list from purchasing firearms. His incredibly naieve and idiotic characterisation of his bill was that it would stop terrorists from buying guns. As if all we needed to do was tell them to quit buying! And there was no consideration of the fact that the no-fly list is riddled with innocents who have no way to investigate or change their status on the no-fly list. Cornyn seemed blithely unaware of the constitutional questionability of the bill. Luckily it was discarded by more intelligent men and women.
No, not "luckily". Technically, one possibility would have been than the bill would be declared unconstitutional, but a more likely result would have been:
Forcing the government to make your no-fly status accessible to the general public (particularly if they also closed the gun show loophole).
Pitting the entire gun lobby and the second amendment against the no-fly list, which would have very quickly forced the government to create a formal appeals system (either by SCOTUS decree or mass threats to elect libertarians instead of Republicans next round).
IMO, the best thing you can do to change a bad law is to make it suddenly affect NRA members. That's the surest way to scare your congresscritters into fixing it.
Thanks for that. I was about to say the same. The reality is that folks routinely run speaker signals hundreds of feet, and headphone cables tens of feet, without any appreciable loss. Yes, in theory, matching the amplifier to the speaker is advantageous, but that has nothing to do with the length of the wire in between, and the only reason iOS still does fairly poorly in this regard is that Apple still hasn't bothered to put in a simple graphic EQ in iOS, instead forcing folks to use hard-coded profiles that rarely match real-world hardware.
If Apple actually cared in the slightest about audio quality, they would have built a headphone analyzer app into the OS a decade ago. Place your earbuds up to the built-in microphone, choose between several modes (open can, closed can, open earbud, closed earbud), and play a frequency sweep, measure the output, compute an EQ curve, and make that available as an EQ preset in the OS.
So the fact that Apple hasn't done that—indeed, the fact that they haven't even bothered with a simple graphic EQ—tells us definitively that this has nothing to do with improving audio quality. There are just too many less painful ways to improve audio quality that Apple hasn't bothered with, despite lots of prodding.
I certainly hope they aren't. The last Belkin product I bought dead-shorted my USB port and caused my computer to shut off the second I plugged it in. And the last Belkin product I dealt with at a relative's house would function for about ten minutes at a time between crashes. In fact, with the sole exception of a power strip, I have never encountered a Belkin product that was even marginally reliable.
Anyways, Apple's built-in DACs are widely known for being better than almost anyone else's.
Actually, they're widely known for being less crappy than other devices in their price class; there's a difference. From what I remember, Apple stopped being known for good built-in audio quality when they stopped building their own audio chipsets at or around the time of the Intel transition. Everything since then has been a significant compromise to keep costs down.
The thing is, Apple dropping the headphone jack won't do anything to drive wireless headphones. There are plenty of products out there in that space already, and there's no real room for improvement until Apple A. starts supporting more cross-platform codecs and B. improves their handling of audio latency so that apps behave better instead of having half a second of video playback before the audio starts....
Same with the first x86 Minis. They only changed to the internal power supply when they went to the unibody design in 2010. Note however that although the G4 Mini and early Intel Mini power supplies look alike, they have different wattage (85W vs. 110W), so the early Intel Minis will not function correctly with a G4 Mini power supply.
That is completely untrue. If you were more than a troll, a quick google search would show you that tires have had extreme upgrades, just even within the past 15 years!
You fundamentally misunderstood the analogy. Sure, they've made lots of incremental improvements in traction. However, electronics engineers have also made huge improvements in headphone design over the past 40 years. The drivers today are light years ahead of the drivers that they built in the 1970s. If you don't believe me, get yourself a set of state-of-the-art Hi-Fi cans from the early 1970s and see how they sound today. Your $2 earbuds sound better.
But the fundamental design of the interface has not changed at all since the last time that the standard sidewall height changed back in 1972, and arguably it didn't change in any meaningful way for decades before that. You can still go down to Goodyear and buy off-the-shelf tires for pretty much any automobile built since 1972 (and back to the dawn of the automobile if you don't mind having a slight odometer/speedometer error, and in some cases, changing the rims), because fundamentally, tires haven't changed in any way that actually changes whether it looks and acts like a tire.
The headphone port IS inferior. It is analog! It is subject to interference! Especially when enclosed so tightly next to so many radios, screens, and power sources, etc.
Uh... no. You obviously don't know how electrical interference works if you're saying that. At some point, the audio must be converted from digital to analog to make the speaker cone move. In extremely low-power situations like microphones, the distance between the analog signal source and where it is converter matters a great deal because the voltages are so low. However, in speakers, that is not the case. Folks routinely run speaker cables many hundreds of feet without worrying about any sort of interference, because the levels of RF out there in the world are so many orders of magnitude lower than the speaker signal levels that no detectable interference is realistically possible. Headphones aren't quite that extreme power-wise, but even still, you'll never hear external interference in headphones (at least passive headphones), because you'd have to have an electrical field so powerful that merely carrying a pair of headphones through that field would cause them to make noise on their own. That's a powerful enough field to cause actual physiological damage.
So from an interference perspective, it makes essentially zero difference whether the DAC and amplifier is inside the headphones or is inside the phone.
Now there are some slight exceptions when you start dealing with external amplifiers. For example, if your car's sound system isn't designed properly, it can pick up interference from your phone via the headphone cable in interesting waysparticularly if your phone is plugged into a cheap charger with a noisy ground. However, that problem is equally likely if the DAC is inside the car (or powered headphones or whatever). Either the power to the phone is filtered well enough and the device on the other end rejects noise properly or it doesn't. And if it doesn't, it is going to fail in exactly the same way no matter where the DAC is physically located.
But there's also one other critical difference. When you're passing audio through an analog path, you can actually solve ground loop interference problems fairly easily when they crop up. With an all-digital path, you're pretty much screwed, because the flaw is baked into the DAC and amplifier circuitry on the other end.
So no, digital paths to headphones are not superior. The longer the signal remains in the digital domain, the more of a pain in the backside it is when (not if) things go wrong. Simpler is almost invariably better when you're dealing with audio, and analog signal paths are far simpler.
Slashdot Mirror
Only if the scientologist flat-earther is having twins. And even still, they're not parents yet.
Right to bare your gun?
And 10% will still be barely faster than dialup, so by 2025, 10% of us—probably the poorest people who can least afford to pay for the infrastructure improvements to bring their speeds up to snuff—will be 1000x behind.
The size of the congestion block. In either case, the speed plummets if too many people are using it, but with Wi-Fi, you fix it by running a new fiber up to two hundred feet (twice the maximum radius, give or take) and adding a $100 access point; with LTE, you fix it by running a new fiber up to 28 km (or 200 km, depending on preamble format) and adding a new tower for orders of magnitude more than that.
It would be an interesting thought experiment to calculate the efficiency of running fiber-to-the-hotspot for Wi-Fi versus fiber-to-the-tower for LTE at various population densities.
Forget that. You should be asking, "Who needs an alternate way to wake the phone when the power button fails?" (...as it did epidemically on the iPhone 5...)
This is like comparing a Pinto to a Corvair.... :-)
My favorite HP experience involved a set of... IIRC three different HP printers (multiple models in the same series) at my former employer with duplexers. If you loaded them up with 11x17 paper and told them to print double-sided, you had to send them exactly two pages (one physical sheet) at a time. Otherwise, the stupid printers would start feeding the next page before it finished printing the previous one, resulting in a paper jam every single time. I wasted a good couple of hours before I figured out what was causing the constant paper jams, because I never in a million years would have thought that a shipping printer could possibly have such a serious firmware bug in its final firmware revision (which was many years old at the time).
Eventually, they scrapped those printers because they couldn't get toner cartridges for them, and replaced them with smaller HP printers that jammed when I looked at them funny. Don't get me started on HP.
Odd. My FedEx distribution center is open until 8 P.M., and my UPS distribution center only hold-for-pickup handling once a day, at IIRC 11 P.M. (yes, P.M.), so neither should involve missing work unless you work a very strange shift.
Also, after the first notice, you can request redelivery within the same geographic region, so you can have them deliver it to your workplace instead of your home.
So yes, that's pretty badly exaggerated. :-)
The thing is, the Samsung laser printer wasn't *that* much cheaper than the bottom tier of Brother or Konica Minolta laser printers, both of which were miles better.
Terrible printers, last I checked. I went around at a trade show a few years ago to look at laser printers, and the Samsung impressed me by being the only one whose output was actually worse than not having output at all. The printed photograph that they used for a demo was a dark, blotchy mess, with nonexistent gradients.... It was so bad that I almost wondered if it was somebody's idea of abstract art.
Then again, I can pretty reliably recognize HP-printed photos from several feet away by the banding, so maybe it kind of does make sense....
That pretty much describes all good drama, too. To me, science fiction is any story that uses an alternative setting that is different from our own so that it can deal with the question above in a way that makes people think rather than causing them to have a knee-jerk reaction that makes them stop thinking, as it would if the same story were set in the present universe and at the present time.
Additionally, if anything happens that can't currently happen, it has to result from a plausible evolution of technology (i.e. not magic), and it generally should not be set in the past (i.e. not historical fiction) unless it involves some sort of alternate timeline or something.
As for good sci-fi, I've always been a fan of the Hitchhiker's series. It pokes fun at the world we live in, and is set in the context of an alternate future where Earth has been bulldozed to make room for an intergalactic superhighway. Of course, it is also pretty snarky. :-)
You left out a bit there. Compare:
Versus:
SynoLocker.
NAS systems should generally be behind a NAT firewall unless attached to a hardened server, and hardened servers in the DMZ should be kept up to date religiously. If you want to use a NAS remotely, you should VPN into your network.
If they had waited just a couple more years for USB sticks to become readily available
Except it would have been twice as long until that happened because people would have just stuck with floppy drives.
You have the timeline wrong there. NOR flash had been around for decades at the time Apple removed the floppy drive, and the company that released the first flash drive was already well into their development cycle by the time Apple made their announcement.
Apple taking floppies out of their machines had had approximately zero effect on the market other than creating a market for third-party floppy drives from small niche product manufacturers. Apple's paltry 4% of the computer market in 1998 wasn't enough to make the rest of the industry even blink. Industry leaders were advising Apple to sell off its assets and return the money to the shareholders at the time, as it was reportedly about 90 days away from bankruptcy at about that time.
So no, it would not have taken twice as long without Apple's decision. It probably would not have taken a week longer.
Externalizing hardware is orders of magnitude more annoying on a phone
It's an adaptor about an inch long that you just leave on your plug. How is that seriously "orders of magnitude more annoying".
First, because you statistically will never have it with you when you need it, for one, unless you buy a $10 adapter for every pair of headphones you own. Second, because they're bulky enough to be annoying in your pocket. Third, because it means you can't use the same headphones with your laptop and your cell phone from the same manufacturer without carrying an extra cord solely for the purpose of making your phone compatible with your headphones. It is completely ridiculous.
We grumbled about floppies because it was a pain in the backside, and because they dropped them in a product that was otherwise highly desirable in the education market, where the floppy was still critical for several more years. The result was that nearly every iMac bought by an educational institution had an external floppy drive along with it, at least initially. Apple created a whole industry around that one design mistake. If they had waited just a couple more years for USB sticks to become readily available, nobody would have complained, but they were slightly premature, and it was annoying.
However, the fact that the iMac wasn't portable, meant that it was just mildly annoyed grumbling. Externalizing hardware is orders of magnitude more annoying on a phone, because you don't tether a phone to your desk; you carry it in your pocket. And now, you carry it in your pocket with an adapter so that you can use your headphones, or else you charge a pair of headphones every day just in case you decide you want to use them.
In every previous instance, something better was available, with the sole exception of Ethernet, and because that is used exclusively while you're sitting at a desk somewhere, an adapter is just a minor nuisance. Neither is true for headphones. There is no wired standard for headphones other than 3.5mm, and by removing that jack, Apple has done absolutely nothing to drive people to a newer, better standard other than taking away a standard that worked reasonably well. This is not how innovation works.
And wireless headphones suck. Even the AptX codec's 40 ms latency is easily noticeable (and Apple doesn't support that codec). The 150 ms standard Bluetooth latency might as well be a minute. It is horrible to the point of being almost unusable in my experience. That's not even factoring in the headache of having to charge your headphones versus being able to carry them around for days or weeks at a time in a bag or glove compartment and not have to think about them except when you need them.
Their engineers made the same mistake a year ago with the Macbook, turning a previously good computer into a toy that you can't charge while using it to charge your phone (making it a terrible choice for the college market, which was their primary target market). The new crop of hardware designers are, IMO, utterly ruining Apple's product lines.
Now is the time to buy whatever usable Mac and iOS hardware you can buy. Winter is coming.
And it will be a long, cold winter if history is any indication.
Perhaps because if you compare the first two stretch goals, you come up with $150,000 for 440 rolls of toilet paper, or $340 a roll. That's a price that would make even defense contractors blush. The only way the numbers would add up is if they were in Yen or the rolls were gold plated.
People like Feinstein win because the Republicans run ultra-right wing-nuts against them. You can't run somebody like Emken on an anti-gay-rights platform in California. You'd be more likely to win by running a Boxer (the dog, not the Senator).
All the Republicans have to do to win California is run a socially liberal candidate—someone with a strong position on equal rights, but fiscally conservative. I know that would technically border on a libertarian candidate in a lot of ways, which is why they don't want to do it, but if they ran that sort of moderate Republican against Boxer or Feinstein, they would have at least a decent chance of winning—particularly if they did it in an off-season election (non-presidential) when fewer Democrats vote.
The fact that the Republicans keep trying and failing to push a radical right-wing social agenda in California tells me unequivocally that either Republican leadership in California is grossly incompetent or they don't actually want to win in California.
No, not "luckily". Technically, one possibility would have been than the bill would be declared unconstitutional, but a more likely result would have been:
IMO, the best thing you can do to change a bad law is to make it suddenly affect NRA members. That's the surest way to scare your congresscritters into fixing it.
Thanks for that. I was about to say the same. The reality is that folks routinely run speaker signals hundreds of feet, and headphone cables tens of feet, without any appreciable loss. Yes, in theory, matching the amplifier to the speaker is advantageous, but that has nothing to do with the length of the wire in between, and the only reason iOS still does fairly poorly in this regard is that Apple still hasn't bothered to put in a simple graphic EQ in iOS, instead forcing folks to use hard-coded profiles that rarely match real-world hardware.
If Apple actually cared in the slightest about audio quality, they would have built a headphone analyzer app into the OS a decade ago. Place your earbuds up to the built-in microphone, choose between several modes (open can, closed can, open earbud, closed earbud), and play a frequency sweep, measure the output, compute an EQ curve, and make that available as an EQ preset in the OS.
So the fact that Apple hasn't done that—indeed, the fact that they haven't even bothered with a simple graphic EQ—tells us definitively that this has nothing to do with improving audio quality. There are just too many less painful ways to improve audio quality that Apple hasn't bothered with, despite lots of prodding.
I certainly hope they aren't. The last Belkin product I bought dead-shorted my USB port and caused my computer to shut off the second I plugged it in. And the last Belkin product I dealt with at a relative's house would function for about ten minutes at a time between crashes. In fact, with the sole exception of a power strip, I have never encountered a Belkin product that was even marginally reliable.
Actually, they're widely known for being less crappy than other devices in their price class; there's a difference. From what I remember, Apple stopped being known for good built-in audio quality when they stopped building their own audio chipsets at or around the time of the Intel transition. Everything since then has been a significant compromise to keep costs down.
The thing is, Apple dropping the headphone jack won't do anything to drive wireless headphones. There are plenty of products out there in that space already, and there's no real room for improvement until Apple A. starts supporting more cross-platform codecs and B. improves their handling of audio latency so that apps behave better instead of having half a second of video playback before the audio starts....
Same with the first x86 Minis. They only changed to the internal power supply when they went to the unibody design in 2010. Note however that although the G4 Mini and early Intel Mini power supplies look alike, they have different wattage (85W vs. 110W), so the early Intel Minis will not function correctly with a G4 Mini power supply.
You fundamentally misunderstood the analogy. Sure, they've made lots of incremental improvements in traction. However, electronics engineers have also made huge improvements in headphone design over the past 40 years. The drivers today are light years ahead of the drivers that they built in the 1970s. If you don't believe me, get yourself a set of state-of-the-art Hi-Fi cans from the early 1970s and see how they sound today. Your $2 earbuds sound better.
But the fundamental design of the interface has not changed at all since the last time that the standard sidewall height changed back in 1972, and arguably it didn't change in any meaningful way for decades before that. You can still go down to Goodyear and buy off-the-shelf tires for pretty much any automobile built since 1972 (and back to the dawn of the automobile if you don't mind having a slight odometer/speedometer error, and in some cases, changing the rims), because fundamentally, tires haven't changed in any way that actually changes whether it looks and acts like a tire.
Uh... no. You obviously don't know how electrical interference works if you're saying that. At some point, the audio must be converted from digital to analog to make the speaker cone move. In extremely low-power situations like microphones, the distance between the analog signal source and where it is converter matters a great deal because the voltages are so low. However, in speakers, that is not the case. Folks routinely run speaker cables many hundreds of feet without worrying about any sort of interference, because the levels of RF out there in the world are so many orders of magnitude lower than the speaker signal levels that no detectable interference is realistically possible. Headphones aren't quite that extreme power-wise, but even still, you'll never hear external interference in headphones (at least passive headphones), because you'd have to have an electrical field so powerful that merely carrying a pair of headphones through that field would cause them to make noise on their own. That's a powerful enough field to cause actual physiological damage.
So from an interference perspective, it makes essentially zero difference whether the DAC and amplifier is inside the headphones or is inside the phone.
Now there are some slight exceptions when you start dealing with external amplifiers. For example, if your car's sound system isn't designed properly, it can pick up interference from your phone via the headphone cable in interesting waysparticularly if your phone is plugged into a cheap charger with a noisy ground. However, that problem is equally likely if the DAC is inside the car (or powered headphones or whatever). Either the power to the phone is filtered well enough and the device on the other end rejects noise properly or it doesn't. And if it doesn't, it is going to fail in exactly the same way no matter where the DAC is physically located.
But there's also one other critical difference. When you're passing audio through an analog path, you can actually solve ground loop interference problems fairly easily when they crop up. With an all-digital path, you're pretty much screwed, because the flaw is baked into the DAC and amplifier circuitry on the other end.
So no, digital paths to headphones are not superior. The longer the signal remains in the digital domain, the more of a pain in the backside it is when (not if) things go wrong. Simpler is almost invariably better when you're dealing with audio, and analog signal paths are far simpler.