I've done similar tests on a late-2013 16GB Macbook Pro, and I've seen similar results. The only thing that would make additional RAM a lot better for me would be the ability to spin up more vagrant instances simultaneously for testing of larger / more complicated stacks of applications. But I've had multiple VMs, terminal sessions, outlook, omnifocus, evernote, atom, 3 or 4 RDP sessions, half a dozen different messaging apps (hipchat, slack, messages, irc, twitter, instagram), tower git client, itunes, safari, word, excel, kaleidoscope, docker (with a couple containers running), xcode, dropbox, antivirus, crash plan, and corporate VPN all running, along with half a dozen little menubar utilities (alfred, dash, textexpander, cloak, moom, flux)... and my system hardly ever breaks a sweat, RAM-wise.
What, exactly, are you doing that *REQUIRES* more than 16GB of RAM? I wouldn't *mind* having more ram - I could spin up more (or larger) VMs, which would be nice since I often work disconnected. However, I have yet to hit any hard limits, and I've spent 3 years putting this laptop through some pretty heavy usage. If *I'm* still in the level of casual user, I'm really interested to know how you define that term.
I have the same experience with my mid-2012 MacBook Pro with 4 GB of RAM.
OS X/macOS is simply (MUCH!) more efficient at memory-management that Windows.
Can't speak to Linux in that regard; but as far as my (pretty extensive) Windows experience, I have never seen a Mac in "swap file hell" like Windows routinely exhibits.
I think that those clamoring for more RAM either come from a Windows background, and are simply "scared", due to Windows-induced PTSD; OR they want to run multiple VMs.
You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much RAM; so I'm not opposed to such an improvement; but, in most cases, gigantic pools of RAM are not NEARLY as important to performance in macOS as it is in Windows.
Like a lot of "creative types", he kinda got bored with the increasingly-corporate-attitude of the Apple management at the time (keep in mind that this is the same management that drove Jobs away, too), and puttered-off to pursue other endeavors.
He is still on the board of many tech-oriented companies, usually as a creative-consultant kind of guy.
Plus, I get the feeling that he kinda likes being on "permanent vacation"...
Jobs was a high functioning sociopath. Woz was a goose that laid golden eggs. The thing is people like Woz can sometimes end up doing better under someone who exploits them than on their own, as long as the exploitation is sufficiently impersonal.
Yes, but Woz said he never quite trusted Jobs after that...
Microsoft says that continued usage of Windows 78, 8.1 and 10 increases maintenance and operating costs for businesses. Furthermore, time is needlessly wasted on combating malware attacks that could have been avoided by upgrading to macOS. Businesses like IBM save money with each of the 100,000 Macs that they have Deployed this year.
Damn! Windows 78. Slashdot, let us EDIT a Comment!
Microsoft says that continued usage of Windows 78, 8.1 and 10 increases maintenance and operating costs for businesses. Furthermore, time is needlessly wasted on combating malware attacks that could have been avoided by upgrading to macOS. Businesses like IBM save money with each of the 100,000 Macs that they have Deployed this year.
Finger scrolling on a touchscreen --- Stolen from IBM, US Patent 6278443
Kinetic scrolling on a touchscreen -- Stolen from Philips
Magnetic connector -- Stolen from Japanese appliance manufacturer
Landscape/portrait mode change based on phone orientation -- Stolen from the touchscreen myOrigo phone made in Finland
Browser Task switcher look & feel -- Stolen from Nokia
Large touchscreen phone idea -- stolen from me http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
That's not mentioning the wholesale lifting of the idea of cell phones, smartphones, and apps from Motorola, Blackberry, and others.
All of this is not only questionable; but more importantly, it is both off topic to this article and lawsuit, but more importantly, it is legally MOOT.
As it says in TFS, the ONLY reason this has been sent back down to a lower court, is that the reviewing court thought that the damages to be paid to Apple needed more "precise" calculation.
Liability, which is always a seperate issue in Civil (tort) law, has already been established.
Samsung lost. So all your whining is nothing but that: The petulant Whining of a sore loser.
So, mods, the +5 Insightful rating for the Parent simply points out (once again), the unbridled Apple Hate that manifests itself in Slashdot's asinine and broken "moderation" system.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with ICs. Only batshit insane woo-woo audiophiles insist on fully discrete designs.
An IC can have so much higher precision, tighter tolerances, higher efficiency and significantly better noise+distortion characteristics than even the best discrete designs, and at a fraction of the price.
All of that music you like to use when you're listening to your stereo? It passed through hundreds, if not thousands of ICs when it was recorded and produced, with absolutely no sonic degradation.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with ICs. Only batshit insane woo-woo audiophiles insist on fully discrete designs.
An IC can have so much higher precision, tighter tolerances, higher efficiency and significantly better noise+distortion characteristics than even the best discrete designs, and at a fraction of the price.
All of that music you like to use when you're listening to your stereo? It passed through hundreds, if not thousands of ICs when it was recorded and produced, with absolutely no sonic degradation.
I agree that there is nothing better as far as low-level opamps than the single-die construction of ICs. The fact that everything is sitting in close proximity, at the same temperature, with the same gain, is the perfect storm (in a good way) for differential amplifiers. No question there. And we have long-ago solved the current-foldback and slew-rate issues in overly-agressive negative feedback designs in low-level IC audio amplifiers.
HOWEVER, these advantages can easily break down when we get to the high-current requirements of POWER stages. The problem becomes getting enough current into, and out of, the dinky little pins that even most "Power" ICs have. Yes, I know that chip designers just gang-up a bunch of pins and call it good. But it really isn't the same. And when stuff starts suffering from power-starvation from instantaneous current-slugs overwhelming what you can deliver via reasonable PCB traces and IC-like pins, relative to what you can deliver to a TO-3 or (even better) a D-Pack discrete power transistor, can make all the difference.
Audio "Transparency" (ultra-low transient distortion and high slew-rate) all comes down to to keeping the impedance of the "power-supply" parts of the components, PCB, and other circuitry as low as possible, so that, no matter what, there is ALWAYS a "solid rail" no matter where you reference your "scope ground", and no matter where you stick the probe. You should NEVER be able to see "pertrubations" on that supply-rail, NO MATTER WHAT, or you have instantly LOST. Therefore, each and every precious milliohm removed really DOES make a big, big difference. Yes, it's somewhat of a PITA to balance the load on multiple discrete output transistors; but the methods for doing so are well understood, and time-proven.
That's not esoteric audiopile bullshit. That's "power electronics" design rules applied to audio reproduction.
Bottom line: Without getting into an entire whitepaper on power amp design, IMHO, Unless you can pump your power rails up to a few hundred volts (which then puts is out of the range of IC integrated power amps anyway, I think), I honestly don't think you can make as good of a POWER stage with those integrated amps for output power over a few tens-of-watts (ballpark figure), as you can with discrete output transistors, regardless of the technology or topology involved.
I assume that most brands that have multiple offerings will have options for both. Just as, some people buy smaller phones and some people buy bigger phones/phablets.
Apple is the outlier in not having product differentiation.
Sorry, everyone copies Apple. Even if they aren't "first". Where Apple goes, so goes the industry.
That's not conceit or fanboyism. It is historical fact.
Good luck getting literally every single hifi manufacturer to drop the 3.5mm and 6.35mm headphone jacks.
ARE there any REAL "hifi" manufacturers anymore? Almost everything under $3500 is integrated chip amplifier-based crap. It's the only way to cost-effectively (and PCB-size-effectively) achieve the SEVEN power amplifiers needed for 7.1 (the LFE is almost never presented as a speaker output) for your typical $250 "Surround A/V Receiver".
And I think that some of those have actually dropped the analog headphone out. I personally can't remember the last time I walked across my livingroom to plug in a set of headphones, or even if my Arcam receiver HAS a headphone jack.
OF COURSE Android manufacturers will remove the headphone jack. The headphone jack has been a thorn on manufacturer's side for ages because that analogue crap is hard to cater to.
It takes a lot of real estate for marginal gain. For all your engineering work, and all that real estate, you get a port that only outputs and receives audio to a wired device. Yay... USB and Bluetooth can already do that plus a bunch of other things, simultaneously, AND they take up less room. AND Bluetooth works without wires. The advantages of those technologies vastly outweigh the advantages of keeping the jack around.
"But the headphone jack is standard" I hear you whine. Yeah, so was the floppy drive. After USB drives became affordable, floppy disks became a relic. Same thing will happen here.
It just makes sense to remove that piece of crap from phones. Now everyone is just waiting for Samsung to do it. Once they do - and they will - you can kiss that obsolete piece of crap goodbye.
Most running clothes come with features for cabled headphones/ear-buds. Sometimes just holes to pull the cable through, extra pocket for the device, sometimes cable routing loops or clips. I'd rather have a cable so the expensive buds don't go flying.
Perhaps wear a headband/bandana when out running/exercising? It will have two benefits:
1. It will keep the sweat out of your eyes/off your damn glasses(!!!)
2. It will keep the earbuds in your ears.
There. TWO problems solved for the price of a headband/bandana.
Because garments typically have pockets on the sides, and many headphones are shaped such that it makes the most sense to have the cord come out of the bottom of the earpiece. So that leaves the cord in the arm's arc.
So you have it exactly backwards; the cord isn't long enough to avoid being in the way of the arm motion. For this reason I run using a small COBY mp3 player with no screen that fits in a shirt pocket. Otherwise I'd have to choose between a back pocket, where I'd sit on it, or running the cord inside my shirt which is just not comfortable when moving a lot.
Even in a shirt-pocket, it is hard to get the cable to have JUST the right amount of "slack" in it.
I think Apple has a high following of people who are have huge tactile sensitivity issues. Maybe the cord lightly flicking against the body feels like a jackhammer for some. That's the only way I can make sense of it.
I wear pocket-tees almost exclusively, and place my phone in the shirt-pocket. I don't use the wired headset/earphones with my iPhone 6 Plus very often, but I would use them more if I didn't have to constantly fight where to stuff the extra cord, so there was just enough that I didn't get "caught up short", and not so much that it didn't want to get inadvertently tangled in something and rip-out one or both of the earbuds.
Sorry, wired headphones/headsets actually DO suck with a phone, and not because of "over-sensitivity"; but rather because of just plain annoyance.
How do you know Apple customers don't like being ass raped? Considering that has been the whole history of the company, I can only guess that their customers must enjoy it. At work I was forced to use a Windows 3.11 machine (Mac) and I don't like it. It is very opionated on how you should do things. Unfortunately Windows 8, 8.1 & 10 are also wanting to tell us how we should work these days as well.
What in the HELL does Windows 3.11 (or any other Windows version) have to do with a Mac???
A2DP technically supports streaming AAC and MP3 directly. You don't have to recompress most music formats. If you're allowing for 300+kbps, you aren't going to have any audio quality issues worse than listening through earbuds in the first place.
Blind A/B/X testing shows that even "golden ears" cannot RELIABLY tell the difference between 128k AAC and "non-compressed analog". Personally, I FEEL like I can tell a LITTLE difference until you get to 160k AAC. But at the "iTunes Plus" standard of 256k AAC, I double-dog dare ANYONE to "pass" an A/B/X test.
Not quite. Bluetooth audio CAN be quite good. Not reference level headphone good, but fairly close. Getting it any better is likely a fool's errand since the DACs on anything but audiophile gear are 'OK' but not beyond. Expensive audiophile DACs are audibly better than iPhones. And pricier.
I'm impressed by my Sennheiser Momentum 2s. At $300+ they damned well ought to work well. I'm not so impressed by a slew of $80-$150 Bluetooth headphones I've tried. Pops, snaps, drops - the whole gamut.
Perhaps the price points will drop at some time.
Actually, expecting "audiophile" quality in a "mobile" environment is the very definition of a fool's errand.
Outside noise and vibration do a bangup job of obscuring fine audio details that are the only difference between "good" and "audiophile" quality, no matter what.
Bluetooth headsets are hardly "innovation" at this point and adding an incompatible proprietary chip "the W1 - oh, the courage" isn't good for anyone either. BT audio isn't good. It stutters, stumbles, pops, and cracks - even with "good" headsets. If they want to innovate - either fix BT audio or come up with some new standard as part of an open standards body and be the first to ship an implementation of that.
The W1 chip DID "fix Bluetooth audio". In fact, that's PRECISELY what it did.
And, BTW, it is NOT "incompatible". The W1 chip in the AirPods and Beats headphones happiliy works with standard BT devices, and the W1 chip in the iPhone 7 happily works with standard BT headphones/headsets.
And from what I have read, even when used "single-ended", the W1 chip SOMEHOW makes BT connections much more stable.
Wrong. Wired headphones were still possible with a dongle, but this shows that the slight added expense of a dongle and the need for a separate piece of equipment was enough to drive consumers to wireless audio. It shows that consumers really do prefer wireless audio, and even a slight increase in the difficulty of using wired headphones was enough to drive them to switch. As usual, Apple will be vindicated for their decision.
What "added expense"?
Apple not only included a Lightning-based headset in the box, but also included a Lightning to 3.5 mm ADAPTER CABLE in the box, too.
The iPhone 7 brought almost nothing new, outside of the fake bokeh effect (which frankly doesn't work very well and tends to blur sharp edges) on the Plus there is really no need to "upgrade" from a 6 or 6S. The iPad, iPhone and Apple Watch have all sufferred sales declines, there's no innovation, only iteration.
People keep buying them because if you're invested in iOS you have no choice, same goes for the new Macbook Pro. Frankly it's rubbish, poor performance (relative to other 'pro' grade laptops), worse thermal performance than its predecessor and the only new features are "thinness" and a capacitive function key arrangement. For a 'pro' laptop the choice of GPU and the RAM limitation are both particularly poor but this same issue can be seen with their Mac Pro, 3-year-old hardware, same high price!
despite predictions of doom from the naysayers on Slashdot and that around half of them went for a non-Apple product..
Nobody sensible predicted that Apple fans would reject the iPhone because of the lack of 3.5mm jack. The counter-prediction is what's being laughed at - that 3.5mm connectors will immediately die based on Apple's say-so.
You're the one who will be laughed-at by the end of this year, or the next year at the latest.
And no, the 3.5 mm jack won't IMMEDIATELY die; but it WILL almost immediately die from PHONES (and likely tablets, too).
Slashdot Mirror
First, define what you think you need. Look at the tests this guy reports running: https://www.zdziarski.com/blog...
I've done similar tests on a late-2013 16GB Macbook Pro, and I've seen similar results. The only thing that would make additional RAM a lot better for me would be the ability to spin up more vagrant instances simultaneously for testing of larger / more complicated stacks of applications. But I've had multiple VMs, terminal sessions, outlook, omnifocus, evernote, atom, 3 or 4 RDP sessions, half a dozen different messaging apps (hipchat, slack, messages, irc, twitter, instagram), tower git client, itunes, safari, word, excel, kaleidoscope, docker (with a couple containers running), xcode, dropbox, antivirus, crash plan, and corporate VPN all running, along with half a dozen little menubar utilities (alfred, dash, textexpander, cloak, moom, flux)... and my system hardly ever breaks a sweat, RAM-wise.
What, exactly, are you doing that *REQUIRES* more than 16GB of RAM? I wouldn't *mind* having more ram - I could spin up more (or larger) VMs, which would be nice since I often work disconnected. However, I have yet to hit any hard limits, and I've spent 3 years putting this laptop through some pretty heavy usage. If *I'm* still in the level of casual user, I'm really interested to know how you define that term.
I have the same experience with my mid-2012 MacBook Pro with 4 GB of RAM. OS X/macOS is simply (MUCH!) more efficient at memory-management that Windows.
Can't speak to Linux in that regard; but as far as my (pretty extensive) Windows experience, I have never seen a Mac in "swap file hell" like Windows routinely exhibits.
I think that those clamoring for more RAM either come from a Windows background, and are simply "scared", due to Windows-induced PTSD; OR they want to run multiple VMs.
You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much RAM; so I'm not opposed to such an improvement; but, in most cases, gigantic pools of RAM are not NEARLY as important to performance in macOS as it is in Windows.
Maybe that's why he stopped laying golden eggs?
Like a lot of "creative types", he kinda got bored with the increasingly-corporate-attitude of the Apple management at the time (keep in mind that this is the same management that drove Jobs away, too), and puttered-off to pursue other endeavors.
He is still on the board of many tech-oriented companies, usually as a creative-consultant kind of guy.
Plus, I get the feeling that he kinda likes being on "permanent vacation"...
LG has demonstrated this already at CES, and they are partnering with Apple to bring foldable OLED displays to the iPhone.
Jobs was a high functioning sociopath. Woz was a goose that laid golden eggs. The thing is people like Woz can sometimes end up doing better under someone who exploits them than on their own, as long as the exploitation is sufficiently impersonal.
Yes, but Woz said he never quite trusted Jobs after that...
Microsoft says that continued usage of Windows 78, 8.1 and 10 increases maintenance and operating costs for businesses. Furthermore, time is needlessly wasted on combating malware attacks that could have been avoided by upgrading to macOS. Businesses like IBM save money with each of the 100,000 Macs that they have Deployed this year.
Damn! Windows 78. Slashdot, let us EDIT a Comment!
Microsoft says that continued usage of Windows 78, 8.1 and 10 increases maintenance and operating costs for businesses. Furthermore, time is needlessly wasted on combating malware attacks that could have been avoided by upgrading to macOS. Businesses like IBM save money with each of the 100,000 Macs that they have Deployed this year.
Finger scrolling on a touchscreen --- Stolen from IBM, US Patent 6278443 Kinetic scrolling on a touchscreen -- Stolen from Philips Magnetic connector -- Stolen from Japanese appliance manufacturer Landscape/portrait mode change based on phone orientation -- Stolen from the touchscreen myOrigo phone made in Finland Browser Task switcher look & feel -- Stolen from Nokia Large touchscreen phone idea -- stolen from me http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
That's not mentioning the wholesale lifting of the idea of cell phones, smartphones, and apps from Motorola, Blackberry, and others.
All of this is not only questionable; but more importantly, it is both off topic to this article and lawsuit, but more importantly, it is legally MOOT.
As it says in TFS, the ONLY reason this has been sent back down to a lower court, is that the reviewing court thought that the damages to be paid to Apple needed more "precise" calculation.
Liability, which is always a seperate issue in Civil (tort) law, has already been established.
Samsung lost. So all your whining is nothing but that: The petulant Whining of a sore loser. So, mods, the +5 Insightful rating for the Parent simply points out (once again), the unbridled Apple Hate that manifests itself in Slashdot's asinine and broken "moderation" system.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with ICs. Only batshit insane woo-woo audiophiles insist on fully discrete designs.
An IC can have so much higher precision, tighter tolerances, higher efficiency and significantly better noise+distortion characteristics than even the best discrete designs, and at a fraction of the price.
All of that music you like to use when you're listening to your stereo? It passed through hundreds, if not thousands of ICs when it was recorded and produced, with absolutely no sonic degradation.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with ICs. Only batshit insane woo-woo audiophiles insist on fully discrete designs.
An IC can have so much higher precision, tighter tolerances, higher efficiency and significantly better noise+distortion characteristics than even the best discrete designs, and at a fraction of the price.
All of that music you like to use when you're listening to your stereo? It passed through hundreds, if not thousands of ICs when it was recorded and produced, with absolutely no sonic degradation.
I agree that there is nothing better as far as low-level opamps than the single-die construction of ICs. The fact that everything is sitting in close proximity, at the same temperature, with the same gain, is the perfect storm (in a good way) for differential amplifiers. No question there. And we have long-ago solved the current-foldback and slew-rate issues in overly-agressive negative feedback designs in low-level IC audio amplifiers.
HOWEVER, these advantages can easily break down when we get to the high-current requirements of POWER stages. The problem becomes getting enough current into, and out of, the dinky little pins that even most "Power" ICs have. Yes, I know that chip designers just gang-up a bunch of pins and call it good. But it really isn't the same. And when stuff starts suffering from power-starvation from instantaneous current-slugs overwhelming what you can deliver via reasonable PCB traces and IC-like pins, relative to what you can deliver to a TO-3 or (even better) a D-Pack discrete power transistor, can make all the difference.
Audio "Transparency" (ultra-low transient distortion and high slew-rate) all comes down to to keeping the impedance of the "power-supply" parts of the components, PCB, and other circuitry as low as possible, so that, no matter what, there is ALWAYS a "solid rail" no matter where you reference your "scope ground", and no matter where you stick the probe. You should NEVER be able to see "pertrubations" on that supply-rail, NO MATTER WHAT, or you have instantly LOST. Therefore, each and every precious milliohm removed really DOES make a big, big difference. Yes, it's somewhat of a PITA to balance the load on multiple discrete output transistors; but the methods for doing so are well understood, and time-proven.
That's not esoteric audiopile bullshit. That's "power electronics" design rules applied to audio reproduction.
Bottom line: Without getting into an entire whitepaper on power amp design, IMHO, Unless you can pump your power rails up to a few hundred volts (which then puts is out of the range of IC integrated power amps anyway, I think), I honestly don't think you can make as good of a POWER stage with those integrated amps for output power over a few tens-of-watts (ballpark figure), as you can with discrete output transistors, regardless of the technology or topology involved.
I assume that most brands that have multiple offerings will have options for both. Just as, some people buy smaller phones and some people buy bigger phones/phablets.
Apple is the outlier in not having product differentiation.
Sorry, everyone copies Apple. Even if they aren't "first". Where Apple goes, so goes the industry.
That's not conceit or fanboyism. It is historical fact.
Good luck getting literally every single hifi manufacturer to drop the 3.5mm and 6.35mm headphone jacks.
ARE there any REAL "hifi" manufacturers anymore? Almost everything under $3500 is integrated chip amplifier-based crap. It's the only way to cost-effectively (and PCB-size-effectively) achieve the SEVEN power amplifiers needed for 7.1 (the LFE is almost never presented as a speaker output) for your typical $250 "Surround A/V Receiver".
And I think that some of those have actually dropped the analog headphone out. I personally can't remember the last time I walked across my livingroom to plug in a set of headphones, or even if my Arcam receiver HAS a headphone jack.
You are so precious.
OF COURSE Android manufacturers will remove the headphone jack. The headphone jack has been a thorn on manufacturer's side for ages because that analogue crap is hard to cater to.
It takes a lot of real estate for marginal gain. For all your engineering work, and all that real estate, you get a port that only outputs and receives audio to a wired device. Yay... USB and Bluetooth can already do that plus a bunch of other things, simultaneously, AND they take up less room. AND Bluetooth works without wires. The advantages of those technologies vastly outweigh the advantages of keeping the jack around.
"But the headphone jack is standard" I hear you whine. Yeah, so was the floppy drive. After USB drives became affordable, floppy disks became a relic. Same thing will happen here.
It just makes sense to remove that piece of crap from phones. Now everyone is just waiting for Samsung to do it. Once they do - and they will - you can kiss that obsolete piece of crap goodbye.
Good riddance.
This. All of it.
Yeah, most people don't get bloody nipples from exercising in regular clothes. That's a pretty... niche effect.
He only gets them when "exercising" in the sling...
All that aside though, earbuds will likely go flying.
$2 for a headband/bandana.
Sweat problem solved (for your face and eyes at least). Earbud-ejection problem solved.
Ta-da!
Most running clothes come with features for cabled headphones/ear-buds. Sometimes just holes to pull the cable through, extra pocket for the device, sometimes cable routing loops or clips. I'd rather have a cable so the expensive buds don't go flying.
Perhaps wear a headband/bandana when out running/exercising? It will have two benefits:
1. It will keep the sweat out of your eyes/off your damn glasses(!!!)
2. It will keep the earbuds in your ears.
There. TWO problems solved for the price of a headband/bandana.
Because garments typically have pockets on the sides, and many headphones are shaped such that it makes the most sense to have the cord come out of the bottom of the earpiece. So that leaves the cord in the arm's arc.
So you have it exactly backwards; the cord isn't long enough to avoid being in the way of the arm motion. For this reason I run using a small COBY mp3 player with no screen that fits in a shirt pocket. Otherwise I'd have to choose between a back pocket, where I'd sit on it, or running the cord inside my shirt which is just not comfortable when moving a lot.
Even in a shirt-pocket, it is hard to get the cable to have JUST the right amount of "slack" in it.
I think Apple has a high following of people who are have huge tactile sensitivity issues. Maybe the cord lightly flicking against the body feels like a jackhammer for some. That's the only way I can make sense of it.
I wear pocket-tees almost exclusively, and place my phone in the shirt-pocket. I don't use the wired headset/earphones with my iPhone 6 Plus very often, but I would use them more if I didn't have to constantly fight where to stuff the extra cord, so there was just enough that I didn't get "caught up short", and not so much that it didn't want to get inadvertently tangled in something and rip-out one or both of the earbuds.
Sorry, wired headphones/headsets actually DO suck with a phone, and not because of "over-sensitivity"; but rather because of just plain annoyance.
How do you know Apple customers don't like being ass raped? Considering that has been the whole history of the company, I can only guess that their customers must enjoy it. At work I was forced to use a Windows 3.11 machine (Mac) and I don't like it. It is very opionated on how you should do things. Unfortunately Windows 8, 8.1 & 10 are also wanting to tell us how we should work these days as well.
What in the HELL does Windows 3.11 (or any other Windows version) have to do with a Mac???
Now, if humanity could just solve that pesky problem we have with stagnated battery capacity technologies vs increasing power demands.
Yep.
I have always said: "Why can't I just have the battery they use in a hand-phaser?"
A2DP technically supports streaming AAC and MP3 directly. You don't have to recompress most music formats. If you're allowing for 300+kbps, you aren't going to have any audio quality issues worse than listening through earbuds in the first place.
Blind A/B/X testing shows that even "golden ears" cannot RELIABLY tell the difference between 128k AAC and "non-compressed analog". Personally, I FEEL like I can tell a LITTLE difference until you get to 160k AAC. But at the "iTunes Plus" standard of 256k AAC, I double-dog dare ANYONE to "pass" an A/B/X test.
Not quite. Bluetooth audio CAN be quite good. Not reference level headphone good, but fairly close. Getting it any better is likely a fool's errand since the DACs on anything but audiophile gear are 'OK' but not beyond. Expensive audiophile DACs are audibly better than iPhones. And pricier.
I'm impressed by my Sennheiser Momentum 2s. At $300+ they damned well ought to work well. I'm not so impressed by a slew of $80-$150 Bluetooth headphones I've tried. Pops, snaps, drops - the whole gamut.
Perhaps the price points will drop at some time.
Actually, expecting "audiophile" quality in a "mobile" environment is the very definition of a fool's errand.
Outside noise and vibration do a bangup job of obscuring fine audio details that are the only difference between "good" and "audiophile" quality, no matter what.
Bluetooth headsets are hardly "innovation" at this point and adding an incompatible proprietary chip "the W1 - oh, the courage" isn't good for anyone either. BT audio isn't good. It stutters, stumbles, pops, and cracks - even with "good" headsets. If they want to innovate - either fix BT audio or come up with some new standard as part of an open standards body and be the first to ship an implementation of that.
The W1 chip DID "fix Bluetooth audio". In fact, that's PRECISELY what it did.
And, BTW, it is NOT "incompatible". The W1 chip in the AirPods and Beats headphones happiliy works with standard BT devices, and the W1 chip in the iPhone 7 happily works with standard BT headphones/headsets.
And from what I have read, even when used "single-ended", the W1 chip SOMEHOW makes BT connections much more stable.
Wrong. Wired headphones were still possible with a dongle, but this shows that the slight added expense of a dongle and the need for a separate piece of equipment was enough to drive consumers to wireless audio. It shows that consumers really do prefer wireless audio, and even a slight increase in the difficulty of using wired headphones was enough to drive them to switch. As usual, Apple will be vindicated for their decision.
What "added expense"?
Apple not only included a Lightning-based headset in the box, but also included a Lightning to 3.5 mm ADAPTER CABLE in the box, too.
The iPhone 7 brought almost nothing new, outside of the fake bokeh effect (which frankly doesn't work very well and tends to blur sharp edges) on the Plus there is really no need to "upgrade" from a 6 or 6S. The iPad, iPhone and Apple Watch have all sufferred sales declines, there's no innovation, only iteration.
People keep buying them because if you're invested in iOS you have no choice, same goes for the new Macbook Pro. Frankly it's rubbish, poor performance (relative to other 'pro' grade laptops), worse thermal performance than its predecessor and the only new features are "thinness" and a capacitive function key arrangement. For a 'pro' laptop the choice of GPU and the RAM limitation are both particularly poor but this same issue can be seen with their Mac Pro, 3-year-old hardware, same high price!
Just keep chantin' that Hater chant.
despite predictions of doom from the naysayers on Slashdot and that around half of them went for a non-Apple product..
Nobody sensible predicted that Apple fans would reject the iPhone because of the lack of 3.5mm jack. The counter-prediction is what's being laughed at - that 3.5mm connectors will immediately die based on Apple's say-so.
You're the one who will be laughed-at by the end of this year, or the next year at the latest.
And no, the 3.5 mm jack won't IMMEDIATELY die; but it WILL almost immediately die from PHONES (and likely tablets, too).
They make cheap wind-up cases for earbuds to prevent the tangling issue.
Yeah, I tried one of those.
You end up just replacing "untangling time" with "wind/unwind" time.