According to Wikipedia, Michelin made some of the first commercially available radial tires available to consumers in 1948 as standard equipment on the Citroën 2CV. But it was designed two years earlier, in 1946, which is... wait for it... 70 years ago this year. So educate yourself before you pull crap out of yours.
There have been minor incremental improvements to tires over the past several decades, but the emphasis is on the word incremental. I can take pretty much any car that takes radial tires, and I can usually buy off-the-shelf tires for them today, because tire sizes haven't changed significantly since before I was born. In much the same way, I can take a Walkman built in the 1970s and buy a pair of headphones for it today, and they will work together, and vice versa.
For that matter, I can still buy tires for much older cars, though I might need new rims, much as I can take a 70-year-old radio and with a 1/4" to 3.5mm adapter, plug in a set of headphones made in China last week, and they will work together.
So as you can see, that example was very carefully chosen as a prime example of why we have standards, and why if you're going to break something that has been standardized since before 95% of Apple employees were born, you'd darn well have a much better reason than "we wanted to put in a better speaker that nobody uses anyway."
What part of "when used iPhone 7s start to make their way to emerging markets" didn't you understand?
Just because something is expensive when new doesn't mean it is expensive five years later. The one thing Apple has going for it growth-wise is that the hardware tends to keep working. But between the iPhone 6's digitizer failures and the iPhone 7 requiring a $10 adapter to work with headphones that cost pennies apiece, their recent history does not spell long-term growth in those markets.
Not to mention the addition of the short ground to add an extra pin for a microphone, the addition of short detection on the mic line to detect plug/unplug and clicking of the button, the addition of sideband data on the microphone to provide more complex controls, The advent of low-removal-force jacks that minimize damage, the advent of jacks that use the case as part of the jack to make the jack thinner....
Incidentally, run-flat tires have existed in one form or another since the 1930s; technically, the concept predates radial tires, if not the specific modern implementation.
On at least two occasions, I ended up saving people's work by copying and pasting data from a floppy disk to a new file using a raw block editor. The floppy disk absolutely sucked immeasurably if used for anything more permanent than carrying a file from your hard disk at work to home or vice versa, and the emergence of the Internet largely relegated it to the dustbin of history.
USB sticks, unfortunately, are misused in the same way that floppies were, often with similarly unhappy endings. Worse, they are largely unserviceable when they do fail. Honestly, I almost think we'd be better off if those had never been invented at all, but maybe that's just me being cynical.
It wasn't the same as the laptops, but I know the one you're talking about—on the pre-unibody Minis. It looked like a FireWire connector that was round on both ends. And yes, I do remember knocking them loose on occasion. The unibody design, for all its serviceability headaches, did at least manage to rid us of external power bricks and flimsy connectors. (Then again, the pre-unibody Minis were also a pain in the backside to service, so I guess I shouldn't complain....)
Experimentally, Apple's 30-pin cords survive a vacuum cleaner encounter. Apple's lightning cables do not. Ask me how I know.:-D
IMO, the 4s was a disaster of design, with twice as much glass as was reasonably necessary, leading to fragility purely for show. And the result was that all the beautiful design inevitably ended up inside a plastic and rubber case.
At some point, Apple's hardware people forgot that although elegant form is important, if the function isn't there, it doesn't matter how shiny the turd is. Frankly, I think it started when they put a recessed headphone jack in the original iPhone, and it has been downhill since then. Each consecutive generation has fixed some things, but made others considerably worse:
Original: recessed audio jack, no front-facing camera, slow CPU, woefully insufficient RAM, only marginally adequate flash capacity.
3G series: rounded backs made cases problematic, still woefully insufficient RAM until the 3GS, still no front-facing camera.
4 series: made of unnecessary glass and stopped receiving signals if you held it wrong.
5 series: power button failures (at least on the original), expando-batteries that bent the screen, headphone jack on the wrong end (making it hard to design holsters that expose both the audio jack and the charge connector).
6 series: digitizer failures, plus the misplaced headphone jack, plus power button on the side, making it hard to press without also pressing the volume controls and negating the power button press.
7 series: can't even plug it into your friend's stereo system without driving home to get the adapter that of course your Android-using friends don't have.
Every iPhone model has had at least one thing that I consider to be a significant design flaw. Most had more than one. Maybe I'm more critical than most consumers, but where some see genius, I see half-assery. Things that should have been immediately obvious—not putting buttons directly across from one another on opposite sides of a device, for example—seem to constantly escape Apple's notice. It is as though they have forgotten many of the most basic lessons of human-computer interaction, and they're having to learn them all over again.
At least that's just proprietary software. Grab yourself a Windows PC, download a USB bus dumper app, install the Windows drivers, send a few MIDI commands to it, figure out how the commands correspond with the original MIDI commands, and write an OS X driver that initializes the device and sends and receives messages. It is probably not much more than a week's work. Then sell the driver for $25 a copy.
In the keynote, they showed a pair of JBL wired noise-cancelling headphones that used lightning. so, there are some third parties chipping in now. Not saying I love this decision, but you have to admit Apple's track record on these changes is decent enough to give it a chance.
By "every audio manufacturer", the GP didn't mean every headphone manufacturer, or even many headphone manufacturers. When I buy a pair of headphones that costs $200, I expect to be able to easily use it with my laptop, with my phone, with my tablet, with my home stereo system, etc. All of those devices have a 3.5,, mini plug. That means that any headphones that I will buy within the next 20-30 years will have a 3.5mm mini plug. In theory, it might also have a Lightning cord.
But the thing is, carrying around an adapter in your pocket all day sucks. Having to remember to bring a different cable if you plan to hook your headphones up to your phone sucks. So having a different connector on that one device inherently makes the cell phone a poorer user experience for anyone who owns more than one device. Unfortunately, for Apple, approximately 100% of all the users who spend more than $10 on headphones own more than one device.
This can't end well unless the case manufacturers save Apple yet again by building a case with a built-in headphone jack. Of course, if they do that, then it will be the best of both worlds, in which case this probably won't hurt Apple much at all. We'll find out soon whether Apple was foresighted enough to think of that solution or not.
> "The audio connector is more than 100 years old," Joswiak says. "It had its last big innovation about 50 years ago. You know what that was? They made it smaller. It hasn't been touched since then. It's a dinosaur. It's time to move on." [...]
"The tire is almost 200 years old. It had its last big innovation about 70 years ago (radial tires). It's time to move on," Joswiak said, when asked why the new Apple car uses spider legs.
I mean seriously, what does the age of a technology have to do with whether it is the best choice for its particular purpose? I've never read a more mind-blowingly ignorant comment from a major corporate exec in my entire life.
No, they provided a copout. It came down to a choice between slightly better speakers that most people will never use anyway (because it is usually rude) or a headphone jack that lots of people use every day, and they made the wrong call. I've already (since the announcement) heard three people who have used iOS for years say that they're seriously considering switching to Android because of this. That number represents about 50% of the iPhone users in my team at work, and 100% of the iPhone users who were present at the time. I know that anecdotes aren't data, but if Apple's upper management isn't absolutely scared sh**less right now, then they don't deserve to be there.
From where I'm sitting, if the case manufacturers don't save Apple from themselves by building cases with built-in headphone jacks, this will probably mark a turning point where Apple rapidly accelerated their descent into niche-playerdom. There's a very small chance I'm wrong, and that the iOS users that I know are all just the 1% of power users that Apple doesn't care about anymore. For the sake of my Apple stock, I hope so, but I'm not holding my breath.
You do realize how completely unalike those two examples are, right?
Removing the floppy drive wasn't a big deal because USB floppy drives provided a viable alternative, and internal floppy drives were still available for portable devices for three or four years after Apple removed them from the desktop (all the way through the Pismo).
Adapters for portable devices suck. Adapters for ultraportable devices like phones suck absolutely.
Try using a Mac Mini. The magnetic power connector gets knocked out easily when you bump the cord or unplug the ethernet cable, and there is no battery backup!
The Mac Mini does not have and has never had a magnetic power cord. And if yours is loose, that either means you didn't shove it in hard enough or the cord is defective. Fortunately, I'm pretty sure it is a standard two-prong AC cord, and that they cost about a buck and a half from your nearest Radio Shack, Fry's, Best Buy, etc.
Just to clarify, I'm not talking about the cables breaking. I'm talking about the cables momentarily disconnecting. The only Lightning cable I've had break was an Apple cable that was so thin that the vacuum cleaner ate it. Now, I use third-party cables because they are thick enough and inflexible enough to not get sucked up. (Thin is almost never a virtue when it comes to cables.)
You must be using aftermarket cables; where the lightning connector is not one solid piece but rather two that snap together.
No, the dozen or so devices I've used are moderately flaky with Apple's cables, too. I mean, they're not horrible—they never fail when they're just sitting there—but when you tug on them at an angle (like headphone cables frequently do), they do lose contact pretty reliably.
Except it isn't like that, because A. they replaced it with something that is objectively better in every respect, and B. nobody carried around a printer with them in their back pocket.
This is fundamentally different than any previous Apple "transition", because it removes functionality that connects a device that you carry around in your pocket to another device that you carry around in your pocket. Adapters are not even sligthly annoying on fixed assets like printers. They are mildly annoying on semi-mobile assets like laptops that you carry around in a laptop bag. They are intolerable on a cell phone.
Cell phone manufacturers have tried insisting on nonstandard connectors and adapters before. In every single case, they eventually gave up and moved back to commonly available standards. This isn't courageous. It is arrogant and brazen. There's a difference.
No, it's objectively worse in every way. There's exactly one situation where it could theoretically be slightly better, and that would be if manufacturers precisely tune the output of their powered amplifier circuitry to match the headphones, but even that won't be a substantial improvement, and comes at a high cost (which means almost no headphone makers will do so). And even in that situation, the only reason it would be slightly better is because Apple still hasn't bothered to give people any meaningful degree of control over the EQ curve of their headphones in iOS, which is fundamentally a software defect, not a hardware defect.
The most technical people don't do it via the jack but via some wonderful streaming system. The non-technical people are the ones who like the idea of driving down the road and thinking oooh lets listen to some music and plugging their various devices into the audio input jack of the car head unit, or sharing some music with friends who have their earphones with them, or go to their colleagues at work and say here have a listen to this, and just grab the first headset they see on people's desk.
Even the technical people get stuck when they're not at home, because chances are their friend's house doesn't have an Apple TV or whatever.
Technical people work around stupid shit like this. This affects the least technical people the most.
That and developing countries. The difference between a $2 set of earbuds and a $2 set of earbuds with a $10 adapter is non-negligible, and will only further slow iPhone's growth outside of the first world when used iPhone 7s start to make their way to emerging markets.
That that is an absolute lie, total BS. A bulky 3.5mm jack [digikey.com] is 0.5cc. Assuming the previous life of their 1715mA/3.7V battery was 14 hours, they are now adding another 245mA/3.7V worth of battery to it, to get those 2 additional hours. That translates to an energy density of around 6.4 MJ/L, about three times what the best LiPo batteries can give. Not a chance.
I did the math based on a more accurate estimation of Apple's amazingly tiny 3.5mm jack, and IIRC, I came up with 12 minutes. Most of the battery life improvements likely come from a more efficient CPU with lower-power idle states (which also likely makes it a bit of a myth if you're actually using the device in a non-negligible way).
The GP is right. The lightning connector is amazingly flaky and unreliable in my experience even when using it exclusively for charging, much less for audio. I can't imagine the amount of continuous frustration that Lightning-attached headphones would cause. The contact points are an order of magnitude too small to be robust against even the smallest amount of physical motion. I mean, it is more reliable than micro-USB, but that's like saying that a go-kart is safer in a rear-end collision than a Pinto; if the bar is low enough, you're sure to exceed it....
The f-stop is low, but the *effective* f-stop for depth-of-field purposes (computed by multiplying the f-stop times the crop factor) is huge. This is why focusing almost doesn't matter, because essentially the whole universe beyond a sphere that starts three or four inches out from the lens is always roughly in focus.
These devices with multiple cameras try to fake depth of field by using multiple angles to create a depth map and then applying some sort of blur, hence the marketing jargon "DSLR-quality". All it really means is that there's at least a small amount of subject isolation under certain circumstances.
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According to Wikipedia, Michelin made some of the first commercially available radial tires available to consumers in 1948 as standard equipment on the Citroën 2CV. But it was designed two years earlier, in 1946, which is... wait for it... 70 years ago this year. So educate yourself before you pull crap out of yours.
There have been minor incremental improvements to tires over the past several decades, but the emphasis is on the word incremental. I can take pretty much any car that takes radial tires, and I can usually buy off-the-shelf tires for them today, because tire sizes haven't changed significantly since before I was born. In much the same way, I can take a Walkman built in the 1970s and buy a pair of headphones for it today, and they will work together, and vice versa.
For that matter, I can still buy tires for much older cars, though I might need new rims, much as I can take a 70-year-old radio and with a 1/4" to 3.5mm adapter, plug in a set of headphones made in China last week, and they will work together.
So as you can see, that example was very carefully chosen as a prime example of why we have standards, and why if you're going to break something that has been standardized since before 95% of Apple employees were born, you'd darn well have a much better reason than "we wanted to put in a better speaker that nobody uses anyway."
I guess this is what they meant when they said, "Together we'll go far."
As in, "Together, we'll go to jail."
Apparently you haven't tried one with their hottest sauce....
What part of "when used iPhone 7s start to make their way to emerging markets" didn't you understand?
Just because something is expensive when new doesn't mean it is expensive five years later. The one thing Apple has going for it growth-wise is that the hardware tends to keep working. But between the iPhone 6's digitizer failures and the iPhone 7 requiring a $10 adapter to work with headphones that cost pennies apiece, their recent history does not spell long-term growth in those markets.
Not to mention the addition of the short ground to add an extra pin for a microphone, the addition of short detection on the mic line to detect plug/unplug and clicking of the button, the addition of sideband data on the microphone to provide more complex controls, The advent of low-removal-force jacks that minimize damage, the advent of jacks that use the case as part of the jack to make the jack thinner....
Incidentally, run-flat tires have existed in one form or another since the 1930s; technically, the concept predates radial tires, if not the specific modern implementation.
On at least two occasions, I ended up saving people's work by copying and pasting data from a floppy disk to a new file using a raw block editor. The floppy disk absolutely sucked immeasurably if used for anything more permanent than carrying a file from your hard disk at work to home or vice versa, and the emergence of the Internet largely relegated it to the dustbin of history.
USB sticks, unfortunately, are misused in the same way that floppies were, often with similarly unhappy endings. Worse, they are largely unserviceable when they do fail. Honestly, I almost think we'd be better off if those had never been invented at all, but maybe that's just me being cynical.
It wasn't the same as the laptops, but I know the one you're talking about—on the pre-unibody Minis. It looked like a FireWire connector that was round on both ends. And yes, I do remember knocking them loose on occasion. The unibody design, for all its serviceability headaches, did at least manage to rid us of external power bricks and flimsy connectors. (Then again, the pre-unibody Minis were also a pain in the backside to service, so I guess I shouldn't complain....)
Experimentally, Apple's 30-pin cords survive a vacuum cleaner encounter. Apple's lightning cables do not. Ask me how I know. :-D
IMO, the 4s was a disaster of design, with twice as much glass as was reasonably necessary, leading to fragility purely for show. And the result was that all the beautiful design inevitably ended up inside a plastic and rubber case.
At some point, Apple's hardware people forgot that although elegant form is important, if the function isn't there, it doesn't matter how shiny the turd is. Frankly, I think it started when they put a recessed headphone jack in the original iPhone, and it has been downhill since then. Each consecutive generation has fixed some things, but made others considerably worse:
Every iPhone model has had at least one thing that I consider to be a significant design flaw. Most had more than one. Maybe I'm more critical than most consumers, but where some see genius, I see half-assery. Things that should have been immediately obvious—not putting buttons directly across from one another on opposite sides of a device, for example—seem to constantly escape Apple's notice. It is as though they have forgotten many of the most basic lessons of human-computer interaction, and they're having to learn them all over again.
At least that's just proprietary software. Grab yourself a Windows PC, download a USB bus dumper app, install the Windows drivers, send a few MIDI commands to it, figure out how the commands correspond with the original MIDI commands, and write an OS X driver that initializes the device and sends and receives messages. It is probably not much more than a week's work. Then sell the driver for $25 a copy.
By "every audio manufacturer", the GP didn't mean every headphone manufacturer, or even many headphone manufacturers. When I buy a pair of headphones that costs $200, I expect to be able to easily use it with my laptop, with my phone, with my tablet, with my home stereo system, etc. All of those devices have a 3.5,, mini plug. That means that any headphones that I will buy within the next 20-30 years will have a 3.5mm mini plug. In theory, it might also have a Lightning cord.
But the thing is, carrying around an adapter in your pocket all day sucks. Having to remember to bring a different cable if you plan to hook your headphones up to your phone sucks. So having a different connector on that one device inherently makes the cell phone a poorer user experience for anyone who owns more than one device. Unfortunately, for Apple, approximately 100% of all the users who spend more than $10 on headphones own more than one device.
This can't end well unless the case manufacturers save Apple yet again by building a case with a built-in headphone jack. Of course, if they do that, then it will be the best of both worlds, in which case this probably won't hurt Apple much at all. We'll find out soon whether Apple was foresighted enough to think of that solution or not.
"The tire is almost 200 years old. It had its last big innovation about 70 years ago (radial tires). It's time to move on," Joswiak said, when asked why the new Apple car uses spider legs.
I mean seriously, what does the age of a technology have to do with whether it is the best choice for its particular purpose? I've never read a more mind-blowingly ignorant comment from a major corporate exec in my entire life.
No, they provided a copout. It came down to a choice between slightly better speakers that most people will never use anyway (because it is usually rude) or a headphone jack that lots of people use every day, and they made the wrong call. I've already (since the announcement) heard three people who have used iOS for years say that they're seriously considering switching to Android because of this. That number represents about 50% of the iPhone users in my team at work, and 100% of the iPhone users who were present at the time. I know that anecdotes aren't data, but if Apple's upper management isn't absolutely scared sh**less right now, then they don't deserve to be there.
From where I'm sitting, if the case manufacturers don't save Apple from themselves by building cases with built-in headphone jacks, this will probably mark a turning point where Apple rapidly accelerated their descent into niche-playerdom. There's a very small chance I'm wrong, and that the iOS users that I know are all just the 1% of power users that Apple doesn't care about anymore. For the sake of my Apple stock, I hope so, but I'm not holding my breath.
You do realize how completely unalike those two examples are, right?
Removing the floppy drive wasn't a big deal because USB floppy drives provided a viable alternative, and internal floppy drives were still available for portable devices for three or four years after Apple removed them from the desktop (all the way through the Pismo).
Adapters for portable devices suck. Adapters for ultraportable devices like phones suck absolutely.
The Mac Mini does not have and has never had a magnetic power cord. And if yours is loose, that either means you didn't shove it in hard enough or the cord is defective. Fortunately, I'm pretty sure it is a standard two-prong AC cord, and that they cost about a buck and a half from your nearest Radio Shack, Fry's, Best Buy, etc.
Just to clarify, I'm not talking about the cables breaking. I'm talking about the cables momentarily disconnecting. The only Lightning cable I've had break was an Apple cable that was so thin that the vacuum cleaner ate it. Now, I use third-party cables because they are thick enough and inflexible enough to not get sucked up. (Thin is almost never a virtue when it comes to cables.)
No, the dozen or so devices I've used are moderately flaky with Apple's cables, too. I mean, they're not horrible—they never fail when they're just sitting there—but when you tug on them at an angle (like headphone cables frequently do), they do lose contact pretty reliably.
Yeah. This is like that time I hired a Bangkok prostitute to disinfect my computer while I....
You are aware that the camera still sticks far enough that they could have made a similarly sized bulge and put in the existing headphone jack, right?
Except it isn't like that, because A. they replaced it with something that is objectively better in every respect, and B. nobody carried around a printer with them in their back pocket.
This is fundamentally different than any previous Apple "transition", because it removes functionality that connects a device that you carry around in your pocket to another device that you carry around in your pocket. Adapters are not even sligthly annoying on fixed assets like printers. They are mildly annoying on semi-mobile assets like laptops that you carry around in a laptop bag. They are intolerable on a cell phone.
Cell phone manufacturers have tried insisting on nonstandard connectors and adapters before. In every single case, they eventually gave up and moved back to commonly available standards. This isn't courageous. It is arrogant and brazen. There's a difference.
Now all they have to do is be the first company to build that into an iPhone case.
No, it's objectively worse in every way. There's exactly one situation where it could theoretically be slightly better, and that would be if manufacturers precisely tune the output of their powered amplifier circuitry to match the headphones, but even that won't be a substantial improvement, and comes at a high cost (which means almost no headphone makers will do so). And even in that situation, the only reason it would be slightly better is because Apple still hasn't bothered to give people any meaningful degree of control over the EQ curve of their headphones in iOS, which is fundamentally a software defect, not a hardware defect.
Even the technical people get stuck when they're not at home, because chances are their friend's house doesn't have an Apple TV or whatever.
That and developing countries. The difference between a $2 set of earbuds and a $2 set of earbuds with a $10 adapter is non-negligible, and will only further slow iPhone's growth outside of the first world when used iPhone 7s start to make their way to emerging markets.
I did the math based on a more accurate estimation of Apple's amazingly tiny 3.5mm jack, and IIRC, I came up with 12 minutes. Most of the battery life improvements likely come from a more efficient CPU with lower-power idle states (which also likely makes it a bit of a myth if you're actually using the device in a non-negligible way).
The GP is right. The lightning connector is amazingly flaky and unreliable in my experience even when using it exclusively for charging, much less for audio. I can't imagine the amount of continuous frustration that Lightning-attached headphones would cause. The contact points are an order of magnitude too small to be robust against even the smallest amount of physical motion. I mean, it is more reliable than micro-USB, but that's like saying that a go-kart is safer in a rear-end collision than a Pinto; if the bar is low enough, you're sure to exceed it....
The f-stop is low, but the *effective* f-stop for depth-of-field purposes (computed by multiplying the f-stop times the crop factor) is huge. This is why focusing almost doesn't matter, because essentially the whole universe beyond a sphere that starts three or four inches out from the lens is always roughly in focus.
These devices with multiple cameras try to fake depth of field by using multiple angles to create a depth map and then applying some sort of blur, hence the marketing jargon "DSLR-quality". All it really means is that there's at least a small amount of subject isolation under certain circumstances.