The opinion is right, IMO. If you dig in far enough, you'll conclude that the judge is really saying, "If you're too stupid to see if that kiddie porn image is a.jpg or.exe, you don't have any right to balk when the government's program runs on your computer."
Either way, there was a warrant that covered this, making much of this opinion mostly of academic interest and immaterial to the decision. And it's a district court, which means it doesn't set binding precedent.
And because those opinions don't affect the outcome, there won't be grounds for a higher court to appeal this and rule on it (certiorari will be denied), so that bit probably isn't broadly relevant beyond the folks involved in this particular case.
They had a warrant to search the house, based on probable cause, and they confiscated the computer. The perp knowingly downloaded something that he thought was child porn and opened it (which turned out to be malware that reported his location). And even the distribution of that malware was authorized by a warrant.
At no point was this a warantless search of a computer. At no point was due process violated. This is solid constitutional law. The summary is just a ridiculously alarmist, factually inaccurate analysis of the case in question.
This was an open-and-shut search with a warrant, arising out of the FBI running a kiddie porn site after taking control of it. The warrant authorized the deployment of malware disguised to look like kiddie porn that, when opened, would cause the target's machine to identify its IP address, operating system, etc. This was then followed by a search warrant for the residence, during which the computers were confiscated and their contents searched. That search was covered under the residential search warrant, so no additional warrant was needed to search the contents of the machine that was confiscated.
The defendant has no prayer unless he can show reasonable cause for the jury to believe that someone else was using or controlling the computer in question at the time, or unless he can convince the judge to throw out the warrant based on the investigative technique itself being illegal in some way (fruit of the poisonous tree).
I wouldn't be so sure the DAC takes less power than the drivers...
In fact, it probably doesn't. A typical USB all-in-one DAC chip like you'd use in cheap headphones (e.g TI PCM2901) draws 178 mW (252 mW peak). A typical headphone amplifier would draw under 100 mW, I think, with a maximum output in the low-to-mid tens of mW.
You really cannot fathom future headphones with only digital inputs?
In twenty years, sure. Now? No, for many reasons:
Lack of support: You'd need all the phone manufacturers to support digital audio across the board.
Incompatible standards: You'd have to have two entirely different sets of electronics—one with a USB audio interface chip for Android, and one with an entirely different chipset for iOS.
Size: Typical USB audio converter chips are about 14mm x 9mm, which is bigger than the inside of a typical earbud. So you're going to have to get used to a fairly sizable DAC pod. And if you have that thing hanging on the cable anyway, why not go all the way and just put the DAC in the phone where it belongs?
Computer compatibility: You'd need a different cable with a normal USB connector for OS X, Windows, Linux, etc.
Audio recording: High-end headphones used for audio recording can't readily be digital-only.
That last one is worth further explanation. Most audio interfaces do have some digital audio I/O, but it would be something like S/PDIF or ADAT, not USB. You can't readily synchronize two USB interfaces with one another; it leads to horrible problems if you try. And even if you could, the quality of the DACs and amplifiers in high-end audio gear is going to far exceed the junk that they would put in a set of digital headphones, so there's no benefit to those systems ever changing to send audio to headphones digitally. And even if somebody put out a set of digital headphones with amazing DACs and amplifiers, you'd still need an additional digital output from the audio interface to dedicate just to that, which means you'll have to wait for the old gear to stop being used. If you assumed a twenty-year replacement cycle, it would still probably be too conservative.
So high end headphones will probably still have analog inputs until long after the last iPhone in the world has gone to cell phone heaven. And the low-end stuff won't be digital (at all) because it will triple the manufacturing cost and will make the earbuds bigger than your ears. That leaves only a small number of products in the "midrange consumer" quality class that can feasibly go digital, and even then, only if Apple and the other manufacturers agree on a single standard.
So no, I really can't fathom future headphones with only digital inputs. The downsides far outweigh the upsides.
Let me put it a different way. Digital audio isn't exactly a new thing. Probably half of Apple's employees weren't even born when the S/PDIF optical cable first became available. And in those 33 years, nobody has seriously contemplated moving away from analog headphones. If digital headphones were a good idea, it would have happened at least twenty years ago, and probably thirty.
The reason it is a bad idea comes down to simple economics. It is cheaper to put one DAC/amplifier into the device than to put those into every product that needs to make sound. To overcome such a fundamental force, you'd need a reason far more compelling than making a cell phone half a millimeter thinner.
But even then it's not the DAC that takes the real power, it's the amplification - which EVERY headset that has it's own batteries is already doing!!!
Yes and no. Yes, it is amplifying something, but it isn't the signal. It's the noise. They amplify the noise up to the level of the audio signal, then mix it in out-of-phase. That's why when you switch the switch off, the headphones keep working passively; the main signal isn't in the amplifier's path at all.
If they made the main DAC and amplifier circuit be powered off of the headphone's battery, the headphones would be completely useless unless you turn on the headphones. For most users, that would be undesirable, because they don't want to have to deal with running down those extra batteries unless they really need the noise cancellation.
Its time to kick the wireless headset market into high gear and get lots of models from lots of competitors getting iterated multiple times a year and getting cheaper all the time. How do we do that? Simple. Eliminate the 3.5mm jack.
I think you'll find that the vast majority of headsets sold are cheap $10 earbuds. No matter what, wireless will never be able to compete with "almost free", particularly for folks who are constantly losing them.
Besides, if I wanted another device to have to charge every night, I'd have a smartwatch....
Nothing is preventing it from existing. People are complaining because of what I affectionately call SJ's Law in honor of the guy who almost single-handedly made it relevant:
"All else being equal, and in the absence of explicit preparation to the contrary, the probability of having the right adapter is inversely proportional to the importance of having that adapter."
In other words, even though it is possible to get an adapter for your phone, the odds of having that adapter with you when you need it are approximately zero unless you explicitly planned ahead and made special arrangements to carry it with you just so you could have it at that particular place and time.
I'm guessing that whatever they replace it with would be more fragile and not stand up well to the kind of abuse people wearing headphones are likely to give it.
The replacement is almost certainly Lightning, and you're correct that it does not stand up well to that kind of abuse. Most of the time, this manifests itself as a broken-off plug inside the jack. So now, you have a phone that not only can't be connected to headphones, but also can't be recharged.
You don't like progress and are not doing technology right if you don't replace your excellent $15 earbuds with some $200 fancy shit that you buy at the Apple store.
It's not just that. Those $15 earbuds will work, but only with an expensive adapter. Or they'll start making earbuds with built-in DACs, but the earbuds themselves will be heavier. Given a choice, I'd rather have a little more thickness on my phone than extra weight hanging from my ears. The negative user experience for folks who continue to want wired headphones is considerable.
And unfortunately, wireless audio still sucks. There's nothing quite so annoying as pausing playback on your phone, then watching your phone decide after five seconds to save power by disconnecting the Bluetooth audio connection, hitting play, then having to jump back ten seconds because you missed an entire line of dialog while Bluetooth reestablished communication.
Wired earbuds still represent the most power-efficient, user-friendly approach in every way other than the wires, so it is no surprise that a large percentage of users still choose them. Besides, I've had many cell phones that lived because of a headphone cord slowing their fall. So even the wires present an advantage at times.
This article stinks of Apple marketing. It shows they're starting to get a little desperate.
Agreed. With that said, sufficiently advanced Apple marketing is indistinguishable from rabid fanboyism.
USB sticks eventually truly replaced floppies, but they weren't ubiquitous either for several years yet.
That's partially true. When they removed the floppy drive from desktop machines, they basically didn't exist, but you could also buy an external floppy drive if you needed one, and on a desktop, that wasn't a big deal.
On mobile devices (laptops), Apple continued to make floppy disks available up through the Wallstreet (until '99), and IIRC kept the controller around up through the Pismo, which is how third parties managed to keep floppy drives going up through the Pismo. So it wasn't until the PowerBook G4 (2001) that you stopped being able to get internal floppy drives. By that time, flash drives were somewhat more common.
Of course, by that point, most of us were uploading files to servers anyway, unless we were carrying stuff home. And external hard drives were ubiquitous long before then, and were approaching the convenience of floppy disks, but were a lot more reliable. (I can't tell you how many times I extracted files from an unreadable floppy disk block-by-block.)
Many noise-canciling and higher end headphones are battery powered.
But they're not likely to power the DAC with that battery, because probably 90% of their users are going to use the 3.5mm mini plug. So why take the battery life hit on the headphones for 90% of users to save battery life on the phones for 10%?
I mean maybe a few of them will do something clever where using a different cord causes it to switch power on, but I'd expect the vast majority to just drive the DAC and headphone amplifier from the iPhone's power supply.
For that matter, an iPhone is rechargeable, whereas most noise-canceling headphones use a normal AA battery (last I checked), so it makes more sense to let the phone take the power hit even for those 10%.
I think the move is uncalled for and I dislike it, but most people I know that use headphones regularly with their phones tend to go through them fairly quickly.
All the more reason not to add ten bucks worth of unnecessary DAC hardware to every pair.
They make cases that thicken your iPhone dramatically and give it a little bit more battery life. The problem with using external cases is that a battery requires a hard wall around it to protect it. This adds considerable volume. And an external battery, because it cannot share the phone's charge circuit, has to include all of that redundant circuitry as well. So you could double an iPhone's battery life internally by adding about 2mm of thickness, but a case that doubles the battery life adds about 8mm of thickness. That's fine if you were planning to use a case anyway, but if you weren't, then that's a lot of wasted space.
To make matters worse, because of Apple's Lightning port licensing rules, unless you buy Apple's hunchback of Notre Dame case, AAFAIK, all of those external battery cases make your phone incompatible with lightning accessories. So if Apple ditches the headphone jack, those third-party battery case users won't have any way to connect their phones to any kind of wired audio output without removing the phones from their cases (thus eliminating the extra power boost, along with any protection that the cases might provide). That's a terrible user experience if ever I heard of one.
Incidentally, that's yet another reason why removing the headphone jack is such a very bad idea.
USB, FireWire, "RS-232-like" Serial I/O, analog audio out L/R, Analog Audio In?, Analog Video out, Power, and a few other signals I can't remember right now.
USB, FireWire (on some devices), stereo audio input and output, 3.3V power output (for accessories), serial (for accessories), composite and S-Video output (on iPod Photo only). And the USB contacts could be used in either device mode or host mode (on hardware that supported it). In fact, IIRC, many iOS devices could actually drive standards-compliant USB audio interfaces through the dock connector, so with a small amount of effort, it was possible to provide digital audio through that connector as well, albeit slightly indirectly, and with less than 100% compatibility.
Why would you sell a phone with a long-lasting battery when you could sell a phone AND an external battery? Or, better still, licence a 3rd party to make the external battery!
No, it isn't rocket science; but it DOES make the 3.5mm jack nearly as fat (5-6 mm) (or maybe even fatter) as a USB connector [technik.com.hk], which of course won't do in ANY phone.
No, it doesn't. That jack is built the way that it is because it is designed to be a complete waterproof package in a device whose case can't be designed to provide any additional waterproofing. You could waterproof Apple's existing headphone jack by putting a rectangular gasket on the underside of the top face of the phone and putting a box sticking out of the back face, so that the back plate of the phone forms a complete box around the jack except on top, and the rubber gasket forms the top. A flat (FFC) ribbon cable would then be pressed slightly into the rubber gasket to ensure a solid seal. That ribbon cable would, in turn, be connected to the main board. Such a design would add zero thickness to the device, and would only take up about a millimeter or two of additional space in the horizontal and vertical directions to accommodate the walls.
Of course, that might require moving some other components around or something, so it might not be quite that trivial, but waterproofing a headphone jack sure as heck doesn't require you to use a giant behemoth of a jack like the ones you linked to there.
As a percentage of the size of the battery, I'd imagine all the empty space taken up by the 3.5 mm jack is quite a lot.
I don't think you realize just how much of the inside of an iPhone is used by the battery....
Headphone jacks are tiny. IIRC, they are slightly shorter than the plug itself (the plug sticks out through a hole at the end), and they're in the neighborhood of a quarter inch wide, or maybe a third of an inch. So that's something like 1/8th to 1/4 of a square inch, as viewed from above, give or take. The battery in an iPhone 6s Plus is 4.7" x 1.9", or about 9 square inches. Thus, the empty space taken up by the 3.5mm jack is only about one or two percent of the space taken up by the battery. So you'd gain an extra 15 minutes of talk time, give or take, on a device that currently provides 24 hours of talk time.
By contrast, making the phone thicker by 1mm would allow you to increase the battery capacity by about 30–40% (and would also mean that the lens wouldn't awkwardly stick out). Making it 2mm thicker (still 2mm thinner than the original iPhone) would almost double its battery capacity—and that's without shifting components around on top of one another to give you even more room for a bigger battery.
I've been using iPhones since 2007, using wired headphones approximately daily on the original iPhone, the iPhone 5, and the iPhone 6S. In all that time, I've never had a port fail other than the one on the original iPhone, which exactly once got into a state where it thought the headphone cable was plugged in when it wasn't. Even that was easily fixed by plugging in a pair of earbuds and unplugging it a couple of times. Oh, and it was almost five years old at the time.
Bluetooth, by contrast, has been anything but reliable. I've tried using an A2DP receiver in my car, and it frequently gets into states where I have to power cycle the equipment to get the iPhone to talk to it again. And so does the non-A2DP bluetooth (headset profile) receiver built into the car. There have been at least four occasions when I've taken a phone call, and said, "Hold on a minute. I have to pull over and power-cycle my car." That's just nightmarish by comparison. And that's not even counting the iOS 9.2.x bug where the A2DP stack would stop working until you rebooted the phone... about once a week. So by comparison, I've had much, much better luck with analog audio. That's unsurprising, because simpler technology is almost invariably more reliable.
As for swimming in salt water, that will seriously oxidize the case, so it would be inadvisable even if the phone were perfectly waterproof.
The amount of power needed for wireless charging would probably make it impractical to charge your phone off of a USB port on your computer while traveling. That's a pretty serious downside. Contact charging (e.g. with a magnet that holds two pieces of metal together), sure, but probably not wireless.
Finally, capacitive buttons on the sides of a phone would be a nightmare. You'd accidentally press the volume buttons all the time while you're holding the phone, because it doesn't take any force to press a capacitive button (and it isn't possible to solve that, because even if the touch sensor were more like a touchscreen, a hard press from the finger would still be indistinguishable from a light brush from a flatter part of your hand). And such a design would make it much harder to build usable cases for the phones, too. There are good reasons why Apple still uses mechanical buttons in current iPhones even though they used capacitive buttons in the iPod line way back in 2004.:-)
All in all, what you describe sounds like a major decrease in usability, all in exchange for only mostly hypothetical improvements in reliability.
6) 3.5mm jacks add cost and thickness to smartphones. This is the real reason (of course) why they're being ditched. Just like laptop makers are aiming for the thinnest laptops, phone makers want to make the thinnest smartphones. USB type C (which Thunderbolt 3 uses) has a height of ~2.6mm, meaning a full millimeter can be shaved off the device thickness. They could add a bump around the 3.5mm jack like they do for rear cameras, but I suspect that's considered ugly. there are 2mm audio jacks, but all the above problems remain, and people would still need an adapter or new headphones.
Am I the only one who thinks that having a camera sticking out of the back of your phone is exceptionally poor industrial design? Let's see:
I can't place the phone face-down because it will scratch my screen.
I can't place the phone on its back because it will scratch my lens.
So basically, with that design, cases are pretty much mandatory.... As far as I'm concerned, if you can't make the lens recessed into the back far enough that it isn't at risk of being damaged when you put your phone down, your phone is too thin.
You've NEVER had headphones on, got near some large electrical device, and had any interference at all? No buzzing or clicks? Really??????
Nope. I've had problems with microphone-level audio near lighting dimmer boards, but that's several orders of magnitude lower voltage. In fact, normally, headphone cables aren't shielded at all, because the extra capacitance compromises the sound quality. Don't believe me? Cut one open some time.
The only time I've had problems with electrical interference on my iPhone was when I was using a cheap 5V power supply to power it while using analog audio, and I was getting noise passed along the ground wire. This is, of course, why proper car audio almost always involves transformer coupling (or, ideally, an optocoupler). And a Bluetooth receiver plugged into the same jack would have the same problem with noisy power for the same reason, so moving to wireless doesn't actually solve that problem; it just shifts it from one device to another.
But are they better than wired headphones with an end to end audio channel? No.
End-to-end audio channel? Do you mean running a digital signal all the way to a circuit next to the speaker? The answer is that there's no difference either way. At the voltages involved, there's minimal loss caused by those three or four feet of wire, and almost no opportunity for any significant amount of induced noise—certainly nothing that can't be corrected for using a trivial amount of EQ (which iOS really ought to do a better job of providing, BTW).
In the best case, if the headphones provide a really high-quality DAC with a decent amplifier, the quality might be ever so slightly better, but probably not enough for the user to hear the difference. In the worst (and most common) case, if the headphones use whatever twenty-cent junk DAC and amplifier that they can get their hands on, the quality of so-called end-to-end digital will be much worse.
Either way, the cost difference to get even a small improvement in quality is considerable, so you can safely assume that on average, the quality will be worse, not better. This is not to say that users won't think it is better (usually because of designs where the amplifier in the headphones is deliberately slightly hotter than the amplifier in the iPhone so that it sounds louder when connected by Lightning than by the 3.5" cable), but it won't be better in a truly controlled A/B test.
6. Thickness - I don't need a thinner phone.
Yes you do. You just do not realize the value yet because none exist.
That's a joke, right? They're already so thin that I keep dropping the darn thing over and over. I literally cannot hold my iPhone 6S (or my iPhone 5) when out of its case without dropping it at least three or four times per day. Thankfully, I have nice, soft carpet in my house, and I rarely take them out of their cases. The only way I would want a thinner phone would be if it weighed so little that its wind resistance would limit its terminal velocity to the point that you could drop it on concrete without damage hundreds of times in a row. That's not going to be possible any time in the next decade, and probably longer than that.
As someone who uses a holster anyway, thinness is not a virtue. It is 100% vice. It limits battery capacity and features without providing any real tangible benefit whatsoever. In fact, I want the exact opposite of thin. I want a phone that's at least twice as thick as the current phones so that I don't have to put it in a case to keep from dropping it constantly. I want a raised bezel around the edges so that it is more drop resistant. And I want the extra thickness to be filled with battery capacity so that I can reliably use it all day at 100% CPU utilization without charging it (or, more accurately, so that whatever random daemon has wedged itself into a tightly rolled loop this week can reliably use 100% of one CPU without my battery lasting less than a day).
... to protect the thin and therefore increasingly fragile phone.
You forgot "increasingly droppable". When you're holding a phone with a screen, you pretty much have to hold it by the edges, or else you're getting fingerprints all over the screen and reducing visibility. The thinner the phone, the less friction, and the more likely you are to drop the phone.
DVDs were replaced by online downloads and streaming.
And perhaps more importantly, for users who still needed DVD drives, you could get an external drive, and almost nobody needed them except in specific locations (usually at home or at work), so the lack of portability caused by the external bricks wasn't a big concern.
Contrast this with a cell phone that people carry with them everywhere, used everywhere. And multiply the cost of that adapter times all the places you might want to have one (home, car, backpack, your desk at work, your friend's house, the hotel room you're staying in on the opposite side of the country) and it adds up to a much bigger hassle, IMO.
This is more like the MacBook where they replaced multiple standard ports with just USB-C and made all the users buy dongles to get the ports they needed. People were not happy.
That was just plain incompetent design, for many reasons. For one, the main target market, IIRC, was students. Apparently, nobody remembered being in a crowded dorm room, where a laptop serves not only as a computer, but also as a cell phone charger. Or if they did remember it, they somehow failed to recognize that almost every user in their target market needs to be able to charge their laptops while charging a USB device....
Add to that the extra risk of damage caused by the removal of magsafe, and the complete lack of any additional benefits to make up for that removal, and you have a recipe for a lot of unhappy consumers. I really can't even begin to imagine what they were thinking when they designed that. Wasn't there even one single person who looked at that design and asked, "Wait, are you serious?"
... probably disenfranchises some barely-measurable fraction of the market...
I think you'd be wrong about that number. I'd imagine at least a third of users use the headphone jack regularity, and that nearly all of them use it at least occasionally.
And the bigger problem is that the ones who use it occasionally do so without having to think about it right now. In the future, every time that a user suddenly realizes that "Oops, I don't have my adapter; I can't do that" while they watch their Android-using friends just plug in effortlessly, they'll question their decision to buy an iPhone. The more times a user questions their decision, the less loyal they'll be when they replace that device. Even if it is only a very occasional pain point, the damage to the brand is still considerable for those users.
Slashdot Mirror
Ooh. Fifty gigabytes. That will almost hold the contents of my phone. Once. Or the contents of one of my DSLR's flash cards.
Only hipsters think the cloud is a viable means of moving large quantities of content between devices.
The opinion is right, IMO. If you dig in far enough, you'll conclude that the judge is really saying, "If you're too stupid to see if that kiddie porn image is a .jpg or .exe, you don't have any right to balk when the government's program runs on your computer."
Either way, there was a warrant that covered this, making much of this opinion mostly of academic interest and immaterial to the decision. And it's a district court, which means it doesn't set binding precedent.
And because those opinions don't affect the outcome, there won't be grounds for a higher court to appeal this and rule on it (certiorari will be denied), so that bit probably isn't broadly relevant beyond the folks involved in this particular case.
They had a warrant to search the house, based on probable cause, and they confiscated the computer. The perp knowingly downloaded something that he thought was child porn and opened it (which turned out to be malware that reported his location). And even the distribution of that malware was authorized by a warrant.
At no point was this a warantless search of a computer. At no point was due process violated. This is solid constitutional law. The summary is just a ridiculously alarmist, factually inaccurate analysis of the case in question.
This was an open-and-shut search with a warrant, arising out of the FBI running a kiddie porn site after taking control of it. The warrant authorized the deployment of malware disguised to look like kiddie porn that, when opened, would cause the target's machine to identify its IP address, operating system, etc. This was then followed by a search warrant for the residence, during which the computers were confiscated and their contents searched. That search was covered under the residential search warrant, so no additional warrant was needed to search the contents of the machine that was confiscated.
The defendant has no prayer unless he can show reasonable cause for the jury to believe that someone else was using or controlling the computer in question at the time, or unless he can convince the judge to throw out the warrant based on the investigative technique itself being illegal in some way (fruit of the poisonous tree).
In fact, it probably doesn't. A typical USB all-in-one DAC chip like you'd use in cheap headphones (e.g TI PCM2901) draws 178 mW (252 mW peak). A typical headphone amplifier would draw under 100 mW, I think, with a maximum output in the low-to-mid tens of mW.
In twenty years, sure. Now? No, for many reasons:
That last one is worth further explanation. Most audio interfaces do have some digital audio I/O, but it would be something like S/PDIF or ADAT, not USB. You can't readily synchronize two USB interfaces with one another; it leads to horrible problems if you try. And even if you could, the quality of the DACs and amplifiers in high-end audio gear is going to far exceed the junk that they would put in a set of digital headphones, so there's no benefit to those systems ever changing to send audio to headphones digitally. And even if somebody put out a set of digital headphones with amazing DACs and amplifiers, you'd still need an additional digital output from the audio interface to dedicate just to that, which means you'll have to wait for the old gear to stop being used. If you assumed a twenty-year replacement cycle, it would still probably be too conservative.
So high end headphones will probably still have analog inputs until long after the last iPhone in the world has gone to cell phone heaven. And the low-end stuff won't be digital (at all) because it will triple the manufacturing cost and will make the earbuds bigger than your ears. That leaves only a small number of products in the "midrange consumer" quality class that can feasibly go digital, and even then, only if Apple and the other manufacturers agree on a single standard.
So no, I really can't fathom future headphones with only digital inputs. The downsides far outweigh the upsides.
Let me put it a different way. Digital audio isn't exactly a new thing. Probably half of Apple's employees weren't even born when the S/PDIF optical cable first became available. And in those 33 years, nobody has seriously contemplated moving away from analog headphones. If digital headphones were a good idea, it would have happened at least twenty years ago, and probably thirty.
The reason it is a bad idea comes down to simple economics. It is cheaper to put one DAC/amplifier into the device than to put those into every product that needs to make sound. To overcome such a fundamental force, you'd need a reason far more compelling than making a cell phone half a millimeter thinner.
Yes and no. Yes, it is amplifying something, but it isn't the signal. It's the noise. They amplify the noise up to the level of the audio signal, then mix it in out-of-phase. That's why when you switch the switch off, the headphones keep working passively; the main signal isn't in the amplifier's path at all.
If they made the main DAC and amplifier circuit be powered off of the headphone's battery, the headphones would be completely useless unless you turn on the headphones. For most users, that would be undesirable, because they don't want to have to deal with running down those extra batteries unless they really need the noise cancellation.
I think you'll find that the vast majority of headsets sold are cheap $10 earbuds. No matter what, wireless will never be able to compete with "almost free", particularly for folks who are constantly losing them.
Besides, if I wanted another device to have to charge every night, I'd have a smartwatch....
Nothing is preventing it from existing. People are complaining because of what I affectionately call SJ's Law in honor of the guy who almost single-handedly made it relevant:
In other words, even though it is possible to get an adapter for your phone, the odds of having that adapter with you when you need it are approximately zero unless you explicitly planned ahead and made special arrangements to carry it with you just so you could have it at that particular place and time.
The replacement is almost certainly Lightning, and you're correct that it does not stand up well to that kind of abuse. Most of the time, this manifests itself as a broken-off plug inside the jack. So now, you have a phone that not only can't be connected to headphones, but also can't be recharged.
It's not just that. Those $15 earbuds will work, but only with an expensive adapter. Or they'll start making earbuds with built-in DACs, but the earbuds themselves will be heavier. Given a choice, I'd rather have a little more thickness on my phone than extra weight hanging from my ears. The negative user experience for folks who continue to want wired headphones is considerable.
And unfortunately, wireless audio still sucks. There's nothing quite so annoying as pausing playback on your phone, then watching your phone decide after five seconds to save power by disconnecting the Bluetooth audio connection, hitting play, then having to jump back ten seconds because you missed an entire line of dialog while Bluetooth reestablished communication.
Wired earbuds still represent the most power-efficient, user-friendly approach in every way other than the wires, so it is no surprise that a large percentage of users still choose them. Besides, I've had many cell phones that lived because of a headphone cord slowing their fall. So even the wires present an advantage at times.
Agreed. With that said, sufficiently advanced Apple marketing is indistinguishable from rabid fanboyism.
That's partially true. When they removed the floppy drive from desktop machines, they basically didn't exist, but you could also buy an external floppy drive if you needed one, and on a desktop, that wasn't a big deal.
On mobile devices (laptops), Apple continued to make floppy disks available up through the Wallstreet (until '99), and IIRC kept the controller around up through the Pismo, which is how third parties managed to keep floppy drives going up through the Pismo. So it wasn't until the PowerBook G4 (2001) that you stopped being able to get internal floppy drives. By that time, flash drives were somewhat more common.
Of course, by that point, most of us were uploading files to servers anyway, unless we were carrying stuff home. And external hard drives were ubiquitous long before then, and were approaching the convenience of floppy disks, but were a lot more reliable. (I can't tell you how many times I extracted files from an unreadable floppy disk block-by-block.)
But they're not likely to power the DAC with that battery, because probably 90% of their users are going to use the 3.5mm mini plug. So why take the battery life hit on the headphones for 90% of users to save battery life on the phones for 10%?
I mean maybe a few of them will do something clever where using a different cord causes it to switch power on, but I'd expect the vast majority to just drive the DAC and headphone amplifier from the iPhone's power supply.
For that matter, an iPhone is rechargeable, whereas most noise-canceling headphones use a normal AA battery (last I checked), so it makes more sense to let the phone take the power hit even for those 10%.
All the more reason not to add ten bucks worth of unnecessary DAC hardware to every pair.
They make cases that thicken your iPhone dramatically and give it a little bit more battery life. The problem with using external cases is that a battery requires a hard wall around it to protect it. This adds considerable volume. And an external battery, because it cannot share the phone's charge circuit, has to include all of that redundant circuitry as well. So you could double an iPhone's battery life internally by adding about 2mm of thickness, but a case that doubles the battery life adds about 8mm of thickness. That's fine if you were planning to use a case anyway, but if you weren't, then that's a lot of wasted space.
To make matters worse, because of Apple's Lightning port licensing rules, unless you buy Apple's hunchback of Notre Dame case, AAFAIK, all of those external battery cases make your phone incompatible with lightning accessories. So if Apple ditches the headphone jack, those third-party battery case users won't have any way to connect their phones to any kind of wired audio output without removing the phones from their cases (thus eliminating the extra power boost, along with any protection that the cases might provide). That's a terrible user experience if ever I heard of one.
Incidentally, that's yet another reason why removing the headphone jack is such a very bad idea.
Sorry, slight correction: Those are the dimensions of the battery in the iPhone 6s Plus. :-) That would basically be the entire interior of a 6s....
USB, FireWire (on some devices), stereo audio input and output, 3.3V power output (for accessories), serial (for accessories), composite and S-Video output (on iPod Photo only). And the USB contacts could be used in either device mode or host mode (on hardware that supported it). In fact, IIRC, many iOS devices could actually drive standards-compliant USB audio interfaces through the dock connector, so with a small amount of effort, it was possible to provide digital audio through that connector as well, albeit slightly indirectly, and with less than 100% compatibility.
Competition.
No, it doesn't. That jack is built the way that it is because it is designed to be a complete waterproof package in a device whose case can't be designed to provide any additional waterproofing. You could waterproof Apple's existing headphone jack by putting a rectangular gasket on the underside of the top face of the phone and putting a box sticking out of the back face, so that the back plate of the phone forms a complete box around the jack except on top, and the rubber gasket forms the top. A flat (FFC) ribbon cable would then be pressed slightly into the rubber gasket to ensure a solid seal. That ribbon cable would, in turn, be connected to the main board. Such a design would add zero thickness to the device, and would only take up about a millimeter or two of additional space in the horizontal and vertical directions to accommodate the walls.
Of course, that might require moving some other components around or something, so it might not be quite that trivial, but waterproofing a headphone jack sure as heck doesn't require you to use a giant behemoth of a jack like the ones you linked to there.
I don't think you realize just how much of the inside of an iPhone is used by the battery....
Headphone jacks are tiny. IIRC, they are slightly shorter than the plug itself (the plug sticks out through a hole at the end), and they're in the neighborhood of a quarter inch wide, or maybe a third of an inch. So that's something like 1/8th to 1/4 of a square inch, as viewed from above, give or take. The battery in an iPhone 6s Plus is 4.7" x 1.9", or about 9 square inches. Thus, the empty space taken up by the 3.5mm jack is only about one or two percent of the space taken up by the battery. So you'd gain an extra 15 minutes of talk time, give or take, on a device that currently provides 24 hours of talk time.
By contrast, making the phone thicker by 1mm would allow you to increase the battery capacity by about 30–40% (and would also mean that the lens wouldn't awkwardly stick out). Making it 2mm thicker (still 2mm thinner than the original iPhone) would almost double its battery capacity—and that's without shifting components around on top of one another to give you even more room for a bigger battery.
I've been using iPhones since 2007, using wired headphones approximately daily on the original iPhone, the iPhone 5, and the iPhone 6S. In all that time, I've never had a port fail other than the one on the original iPhone, which exactly once got into a state where it thought the headphone cable was plugged in when it wasn't. Even that was easily fixed by plugging in a pair of earbuds and unplugging it a couple of times. Oh, and it was almost five years old at the time.
Bluetooth, by contrast, has been anything but reliable. I've tried using an A2DP receiver in my car, and it frequently gets into states where I have to power cycle the equipment to get the iPhone to talk to it again. And so does the non-A2DP bluetooth (headset profile) receiver built into the car. There have been at least four occasions when I've taken a phone call, and said, "Hold on a minute. I have to pull over and power-cycle my car." That's just nightmarish by comparison. And that's not even counting the iOS 9.2.x bug where the A2DP stack would stop working until you rebooted the phone... about once a week. So by comparison, I've had much, much better luck with analog audio. That's unsurprising, because simpler technology is almost invariably more reliable.
As for swimming in salt water, that will seriously oxidize the case, so it would be inadvisable even if the phone were perfectly waterproof.
The amount of power needed for wireless charging would probably make it impractical to charge your phone off of a USB port on your computer while traveling. That's a pretty serious downside. Contact charging (e.g. with a magnet that holds two pieces of metal together), sure, but probably not wireless.
Finally, capacitive buttons on the sides of a phone would be a nightmare. You'd accidentally press the volume buttons all the time while you're holding the phone, because it doesn't take any force to press a capacitive button (and it isn't possible to solve that, because even if the touch sensor were more like a touchscreen, a hard press from the finger would still be indistinguishable from a light brush from a flatter part of your hand). And such a design would make it much harder to build usable cases for the phones, too. There are good reasons why Apple still uses mechanical buttons in current iPhones even though they used capacitive buttons in the iPod line way back in 2004. :-)
All in all, what you describe sounds like a major decrease in usability, all in exchange for only mostly hypothetical improvements in reliability.
Am I the only one who thinks that having a camera sticking out of the back of your phone is exceptionally poor industrial design? Let's see:
So basically, with that design, cases are pretty much mandatory.... As far as I'm concerned, if you can't make the lens recessed into the back far enough that it isn't at risk of being damaged when you put your phone down, your phone is too thin.
Nope. I've had problems with microphone-level audio near lighting dimmer boards, but that's several orders of magnitude lower voltage. In fact, normally, headphone cables aren't shielded at all, because the extra capacitance compromises the sound quality. Don't believe me? Cut one open some time.
The only time I've had problems with electrical interference on my iPhone was when I was using a cheap 5V power supply to power it while using analog audio, and I was getting noise passed along the ground wire. This is, of course, why proper car audio almost always involves transformer coupling (or, ideally, an optocoupler). And a Bluetooth receiver plugged into the same jack would have the same problem with noisy power for the same reason, so moving to wireless doesn't actually solve that problem; it just shifts it from one device to another.
End-to-end audio channel? Do you mean running a digital signal all the way to a circuit next to the speaker? The answer is that there's no difference either way. At the voltages involved, there's minimal loss caused by those three or four feet of wire, and almost no opportunity for any significant amount of induced noise—certainly nothing that can't be corrected for using a trivial amount of EQ (which iOS really ought to do a better job of providing, BTW).
In the best case, if the headphones provide a really high-quality DAC with a decent amplifier, the quality might be ever so slightly better, but probably not enough for the user to hear the difference. In the worst (and most common) case, if the headphones use whatever twenty-cent junk DAC and amplifier that they can get their hands on, the quality of so-called end-to-end digital will be much worse.
Either way, the cost difference to get even a small improvement in quality is considerable, so you can safely assume that on average, the quality will be worse, not better. This is not to say that users won't think it is better (usually because of designs where the amplifier in the headphones is deliberately slightly hotter than the amplifier in the iPhone so that it sounds louder when connected by Lightning than by the 3.5" cable), but it won't be better in a truly controlled A/B test.
That's a joke, right? They're already so thin that I keep dropping the darn thing over and over. I literally cannot hold my iPhone 6S (or my iPhone 5) when out of its case without dropping it at least three or four times per day. Thankfully, I have nice, soft carpet in my house, and I rarely take them out of their cases. The only way I would want a thinner phone would be if it weighed so little that its wind resistance would limit its terminal velocity to the point that you could drop it on concrete without damage hundreds of times in a row. That's not going to be possible any time in the next decade, and probably longer than that.
As someone who uses a holster anyway, thinness is not a virtue. It is 100% vice. It limits battery capacity and features without providing any real tangible benefit whatsoever. In fact, I want the exact opposite of thin. I want a phone that's at least twice as thick as the current phones so that I don't have to put it in a case to keep from dropping it constantly. I want a raised bezel around the edges so that it is more drop resistant. And I want the extra thickness to be filled with battery capacity so that I can reliably use it all day at 100% CPU utilization without charging it (or, more accurately, so that whatever random daemon has wedged itself into a tightly rolled loop this week can reliably use 100% of one CPU without my battery lasting less than a day).
You forgot "increasingly droppable". When you're holding a phone with a screen, you pretty much have to hold it by the edges, or else you're getting fingerprints all over the screen and reducing visibility. The thinner the phone, the less friction, and the more likely you are to drop the phone.
The iPhone 6S is just plain unholdable, IMO.
And perhaps more importantly, for users who still needed DVD drives, you could get an external drive, and almost nobody needed them except in specific locations (usually at home or at work), so the lack of portability caused by the external bricks wasn't a big concern.
Contrast this with a cell phone that people carry with them everywhere, used everywhere. And multiply the cost of that adapter times all the places you might want to have one (home, car, backpack, your desk at work, your friend's house, the hotel room you're staying in on the opposite side of the country) and it adds up to a much bigger hassle, IMO.
That was just plain incompetent design, for many reasons. For one, the main target market, IIRC, was students. Apparently, nobody remembered being in a crowded dorm room, where a laptop serves not only as a computer, but also as a cell phone charger. Or if they did remember it, they somehow failed to recognize that almost every user in their target market needs to be able to charge their laptops while charging a USB device....
Add to that the extra risk of damage caused by the removal of magsafe, and the complete lack of any additional benefits to make up for that removal, and you have a recipe for a lot of unhappy consumers. I really can't even begin to imagine what they were thinking when they designed that. Wasn't there even one single person who looked at that design and asked, "Wait, are you serious?"
But I digress.
I think you'd be wrong about that number. I'd imagine at least a third of users use the headphone jack regularity, and that nearly all of them use it at least occasionally.
And the bigger problem is that the ones who use it occasionally do so without having to think about it right now. In the future, every time that a user suddenly realizes that "Oops, I don't have my adapter; I can't do that" while they watch their Android-using friends just plug in effortlessly, they'll question their decision to buy an iPhone. The more times a user questions their decision, the less loyal they'll be when they replace that device. Even if it is only a very occasional pain point, the damage to the brand is still considerable for those users.