Taking the Headphone Jack Off Phones Is User-Hostile and Stupid (theverge.com) 595
A WSJ report on Tuesday claimed that the next iPhone won't have the 3.5mm headphone port. A handful of smartphones such as LeEco's Le 2, Le 2 Pro, and Le Max 2 that have launched this year already don't have a headphone jack. The Verge's Nilay Patel has an opinion piece in which he argues that smartphone companies shouldn't ditch headphone ports as it helps no consumer. He lists six reasons:
1. Digital audio means DRM audio :Restricting audio output to a purely digital connection means that music publishers and streaming companies can start to insist on digital copyright enforcement mechanisms. We moved our video systems to HDMI and got HDCP, remember? Copyright enforcement technology never stops piracy and always hurts the people who most rely on legal fair use, but you can bet the music industry is going to start cracking down on "unauthorized" playback and recording devices anyway.2. Wireless headphones and speakers are fine, not great.
3. Dongles are stupid, especially when they require other dongles.
4. Ditching a deeply established standard will disproportionately impact accessibility.:The headphone jack might be less good on some metrics than Lightning or USB-C audio, but it is spectacularly better than anything else in the world at being accessible, enabling, open, and democratizing. A change that will cost every iPhone user at least $29 extra for a dongle (or more for new headphones) is not a change designed to benefit everyone.5. Making Android and iPhone headphones incompatible is incredibly arrogant and stupid.
6. No one is asking for this.
1. Digital audio means DRM audio :Restricting audio output to a purely digital connection means that music publishers and streaming companies can start to insist on digital copyright enforcement mechanisms. We moved our video systems to HDMI and got HDCP, remember? Copyright enforcement technology never stops piracy and always hurts the people who most rely on legal fair use, but you can bet the music industry is going to start cracking down on "unauthorized" playback and recording devices anyway.2. Wireless headphones and speakers are fine, not great.
3. Dongles are stupid, especially when they require other dongles.
4. Ditching a deeply established standard will disproportionately impact accessibility.:The headphone jack might be less good on some metrics than Lightning or USB-C audio, but it is spectacularly better than anything else in the world at being accessible, enabling, open, and democratizing. A change that will cost every iPhone user at least $29 extra for a dongle (or more for new headphones) is not a change designed to benefit everyone.5. Making Android and iPhone headphones incompatible is incredibly arrogant and stupid.
6. No one is asking for this.
Uhoh (Score:5, Funny)
cost reduction (Score:5, Insightful)
and they save a whole whopping nickel off each unit. move a few million units and it's easily 100k+.
Re:cost reduction (Score:5, Informative)
You're forgetting they'd most likely include a lightening port to 3.5mm dongle, which would cost more than the 3.5mm jack in the phone.
That said, They'd likely make a killing reselling lightening port Beats Audio headphones to the hipsters & clueless.
Re:cost reduction (Score:5, Interesting)
You're forgetting they'd most likely include a lightening port to 3.5mm dongle, which would cost more than the 3.5mm jack in the phone.
If they simply change the socket shape to something smaller and more waterproof, I'm good with that. I can put a cheap and light adapter onto all of my existing headphones and life will continue unchanged. A thin, waterproof phone is highly desirable - I once killed a high-end phone by falling into a river on my mountain bike, and I hate the faff of having to keep my phone in a waterproof case when I'm hiking or out on my road bike in showery weather (it always rains in Wales!).
But if they require an expensive adapter (active electronics or royalties), that's a big problem. I guess I'm not alone in using multiple headphones with my phone. I have good quality headphones at home and in the office, cheap disposable in-ear phones for cycling, sports headphones for running, a lightweight spare set that I keep in my laptop bag for travelling, etc. I don't mind buying a £2 adapter for each of these, but I don't fancy buying multiple £20 adapters, and I'm certainly not willing to carry an adapter with me just in case I need to use it.
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Headphone port has jack shit to do with waterproofing.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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The adapter would add a thin, weak connection point which, if leaned on, would experience high torque and damage either the phone port or the connector. The greatest length of a 3.5mm connector is *inside* the phone body.
An adapter would need to decode a digital signal, which requires first processing the packet-encoded signal to a line-digital signal, then feeding it through a DAC. You need the equivalent of an Arduino minimal model, packed in a small case. It needs to negotiate power, control noise (E
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>they'd most likely include a lightening port to 3.5mm dongle
No they won't! This is Apple. You'll pay 39.99 and buy it separately.
Re:cost reduction (Score:5, Informative)
That was bullet point #2 in the list: 2. Wireless headphones and speakers are fine, not great.
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Re:cost reduction (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: cost reduction (Score:3, Interesting)
Which, incidentally, will make it completely water proof.
Even IP68 rated phones can only survive brief dips because of the exposed headphone and USB jack.
Re: cost reduction (Score:5, Interesting)
"Even IP68 rated phones can only survive brief dips"
Then it's not truly IP68. The first number in the Ingress Protection rating, 6, denotes the system is dust-tight. The second number in that rating, 8, denotes suitable for continuous immersion in water under conditions which shall be specified by the manufacturer. Normally, this will mean that the equipment is hermetically sealed. However, with certain types of equipment, it can mean that water can enter but only in such a manner that it produces no harmful effects. Note, brief dips do not fit the definition of 'continuous immersion' which is typically a time period of MINIMUM 30 minutes (which, incidentally, is all most manufacturers will give you, the cheap fuckers.)
I've got IP68 LED units that are meant to operate directly in saltwater. And they have watertight plug sockets.
I find it hilarious that I can bother to do this with my own retail units while more advanced manufacturers can't even do it properly.
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They just want to make the phones thinner. Apple doesn't care how much it costs the customers since it's used to having customers that will buy anything they're told to buy. Apple has a tendency to make newer models with incompatible parts and they've never apologized for the inconvenience but rather brag about how much better the new product looks. Which is strange since the current iphone is thin enough that it's not difficult to bend it, there's no reason to make it even thinner and more fragile.
Re:cost reduction (Score:5, Informative)
Samsung Galaxy has been waterproof without removing the headphone jack...
Some early HTC / Dopod windows phones had no headphone jack. It was all pumped through the usb. And It sucked. It sucked hard core. I have no interest in ever buying a phone again without a headphone jack.
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Samsung Galaxy has been waterproof without removing the headphone jack...
Same with Sony Xperia phones. Most of the latter models are waterproof, and some can be submerged for a considerable amount of time.
This is more likely another lock-in, like non-standard charging ports on previous Apple phones.
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It's about waterproofing,pure and simple.
Well of course you'd say that. I think that's pretty unlikely.
It is much more likely that there are execs at Apple who are observing iPhones being used with all sorts of weird and wonderful sets of headphones/earbuds that Apple is not getting their fucking cut on.
Now, you won't be able to just use any old headphones. You use your fucking $75 Apple headphones.
But hey that's alright because they're bound to be LOADS better.
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absolutely NO ONE outside of 1 Infinite Loop REALLY knows
Assuming Apple is sticking with it's regular September release cycle, there will be workers in a Chinese factory making the phones right now who will have a strong suspicion. Also people in the supply chain who may or may not have received their annual order of 3.5mm components.
Of course Apple might test the waters by having only one new model without the 3.5mm jack. Regardless, when it comes to the iphone7, the decision would have been made months if not years ago,
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absolutely NO ONE outside of 1 Infinite Loop REALLY knows
Assuming Apple is sticking with it's regular September release cycle, there will be workers in a Chinese factory making the phones right now who will have a strong suspicion. Also people in the supply chain who may or may not have received their annual order of 3.5mm components.
Of course Apple might test the waters by having only one new model without the 3.5mm jack. Regardless, when it comes to the iphone7, the decision would have been made months if not years ago,
I do agree that the decision to drop the 3.5mm jack on the iPhone 7 would have been made months ago (likely not years, though); but they also have a lot of experience making suppliers and Contract Manufacturers quiet about such changes. And if nothing else, Tim Cook is by all accounts a logistics and supply-chain wizard; so I would imagine his regime has continued the sealed-lips policy for their "partners".
I'd actually sooner believe that Apple had purposely "leaked" the story, to test public reaction fo
Cost Increase...for customers (Score:5, Insightful)
...and they save a whole whopping nickel off each unit.
That's not the reason they are doing this. The 3.5mm jack is an open standard which anyone can easily use for free and just about any earphones will work with any phone. If each manufacturer can get away with replacing this with their own proprietary connector then now users will have to either purchase a dongle or a specially designed earphone where the phone manufacturer gets a cut because it uses their connector.
So this is not about saving a 3p/5c per phone this is about making ten times as much, or more, per dongle or earphone purchased. Better yet if these are like Apple's lightning connector the lifespan of the connector is a lot less than that of the phone so they can sell multiple connectors per phone and make even more money. Call me cynical but I have yet to see any real benefit mentioned to the customer from ditching the standard 3.5mm jack, and certainly nothing like enough to offset the pain involved in carrying around multiple dongles so your earphones can work with your tablet, phone an laptop.
Re:Cost Increase...for customers (Score:4, Interesting)
Pretty much exactly this. Apple is and always has been a HARDWARE company. Removing these things and creating a walled garden on even the equipment that is usable with their devices just feeds right into that model, but goes against the rest of the industry giants (mostly anyway). Problem is this will eventually kill them if they can't keep coming up with revolutionary ideas (and be first to market with them), because everyone can do it cheaper while still making money and being compatible with everything else.
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I find this scenario, even though it hasn't happened yet in Appleland oddly upsetting. On one hand I have some pretty high end headphone gear which requires wires and this pisses me off. On the other hand I never listen to music on my phone anyways because I fucking hate iTunes. I bought a Cowon portable music player (supports FLAC and has better sound quality than the iPhone). So in once sense I've already given up on the iPhone as a music platform. I shouldn't really be upset if Apple does this. OTOH some
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Analog wires (you can also call them antennas) are very easy to eavesdrop on. Bluetooth is much harder, even though it's still not _that_ hard. Security in your audio shouldn't be a reason to choose analog wires over BT.
I don't think the big security concern here is eavesdropping, but DoS. It's far easier to jam BT than analog cables.
Heck, walk past a wireless access point or microwave oven, and BT audio can drop out.
Re:Cost Increase...for customers (Score:4, Informative)
Pretty much exactly this. Apple is and always has been a HARDWARE company. Removing these things and creating a walled garden on even the equipment that is usable with their devices just feeds right into that model, but goes against the rest of the industry giants (mostly anyway). Problem is this will eventually kill them if they can't keep coming up with revolutionary ideas (and be first to market with them), because everyone can do it cheaper while still making money and being compatible with everything else.
You haven't been paying attention. This is Apple.
They don't come up with revolutionary ideas, at least not regarding their products. They don't have to be first to market. Let HTC/Samsung, or even some guy on Kickstarter be first to market.
They take new stuff that already exists, make it better, package it well, market it well, charge a premium. Nothing revolutionary about that.
As long as their competitors keep producing inferior quality products, they can keep pulling this kind of stuff on their customers. They only need to keep the quality bar very high, and they are safe.
Re:cost reduction (Score:4, Interesting)
Its not the money. Apple is sticking with their history. Trying to play "what would Steve do?".
Was it the first iMac ? Apple removed the non-standard serial ports, and the non-standard floppy drive. All replaced with standard USB ports.
ADB was good riddance, but floppy sorely missed as USB flash drives were still expensive. Apple did it anyway. They wanted to stand out.
Removing the optical drive from laptops is a no-brainer due to weight. Ethernet was not removed before fast wifi was ubiquitous.
Replacing the 3.5mm socket with a non-standard port is more of a worry. Will mean multiple cables and dongles needed for many years.
Not a huge problem, but not much of a benefit either. Unlike RS232, the 3.5mm audio socket "just works". There is good reason why it has outlived all those other ports.
And Apple, please stop obsessively making devices thinner until the engineers have improved battery life dramatically.
Re: cost reduction (Score:3, Funny)
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You're thinking like an Engineer and not a CEO. The engineer only sees the opportunity to save a nickel per unit, but the CEO sees an opportunity to see millions of Lightning or USB C to 3.5mm headphone jack adapters for $19.95 each. Or, better yet, an opportunity to sell a $99 of "premium" headphones with a USB C or Lightning jack.
Besides, it's going to be tough the reclaim the title of "thinnest phone ever!" with that damn headphone jack in the way.
Re:cost reduction (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it will be part of making the next iPhone waterproof, which except for "Make it thicker again, but with more battery" is the leading new feature users want. Current iPhones have a special moisture indicator at the bottom of the jack which, if triggered, voids the warranty.
Re:cost reduction (Score:5, Interesting)
Why use a waterproof jack? Just waterproof that part of the case. Put a solid box sticking in from the back case, rubber on the front case's interior face, and pass a flat ribbon between the case and the rubber gasket. It's not like Apple is ever going to remove the top bezel anyway. As an added bonus, the extra half millimeter it would add to the thickness would give us more usable battery life (which they're going to need anyway if everybody is forced to use Bluetooth).
Re:cost reduction (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone who makes really waterproof devices here. Submersible for 5+ years waterproof, not just IP68.
It's actually harder than people think to waterproof things. For example, rubber seals need compression. Phones are very thin and as we discovered with the iPhone bending problems not all that rigid. For your scheme to work the rubber would need to remain compressed for the life of the phone, in every phone. It's not impossible but it's hard to do without high failure rates.
The ribbon cable would also be a problem. Rubber doesn't work too well with sharp edges, like the sides of the cable. Wiggling could damage the rubber (people yank on their headphones all the time) and again you would need a lot of pressure to overcome it. Also, most plastic is not entirely waterproof and moisture will eventually permeate it.
That's why other manufacturers go for the rubber bung in the socket. Even then, they only rate the phone for 30 minutes under water... Being able to wash your phone is pretty awesome though.
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No one cares about having a phone that's submersible at 100M for 5 years; people just want their phone to not crap out if they drop it in the toilet or get caught out in the rain. AFAIK, IP68 meets those requirements.
Re:cost reduction (Score:5, Funny)
I am not sure whether Apple will just ship a Lightning Headset with that iPhone
What, macs4all, this wasn't covered in your iMissionary marketing material?
Oh wait I remember, Apple doesn't send material or anything to its volunteer salesforce, they let you guys find things on your own; they don't worry about you, knowing that you'll bend over no matter what.
Re:cost reduction (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck Apple.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
For some reason I think of Lily Tomlin, and replace a few words in the sketch:
"We don't care. We don't have to: We're APPLE."
Re:Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Apple (Score:5, Funny)
Can you imagine the number of times the phrase "I'll buy it anyway" is thought by their mindless customers?
Their customers aren't mindless (Score:3)
Re:Their customers aren't mindless (Score:5, Insightful)
there are very specific reasons they want an iPhone. For one, they're a Veblen good. E.g. something you buy because you can. There are very real social advantages to Veblen goods. iMessage is practically a social network, which is another advantage. iTunes is highly desirable and iMusic is $5/mo if you're in college and mostly just works. Apple has an entire ecosystem that powers a social network. I resent buying my kid an iPhone every 2 1/2 years (they last about that long before they're falling apart). But I'm smart enough to recognize that, like it or not, it is a very real social advantage. That's fucked up. But with the amount of fucked up shit in this world it's one of the more minor instances...
Yea, sure...
Teach your kids to be vain and pretentious assholes, and look down on the lower classes because they can't afford to buy things that are no good and offer no real value, other than marking you as a pretentious asshole. Then they can grow up to be neurotic assholes like yourself, that are constantly worried about what other people think of them and where they fit into the vicious culture of bullying that you have created.
Nobody in those circles are happy. They are all neurotically paranoid and on edge about what everybody thinks about them and how they are judged. And they make other people miserable by applying the same warped morality you demonstrate in your post.
What there is very real value to, is being able to afford the things you actually need because you didn't blow all your money purchasing vacuous status symbols.
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It's actually a clever bit of marketing spin. Their phones are pretty low end, equivalent to a 3 year old Android but they make out that they are "revolutionary" and bleeding edge tech by removing "old fashioned" features like the headphone jack. Same with their laptops, the spec isn't great but look how modern it is with it's single USB port that does everything... And, er, those 90s style dongles I have to carry around...
It's genius really. They figured out how to sell you something that is worse for more
User-hostile and stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
Never stopped Apple before.
Taking the Headphone Jack Off Phones Is User-Host (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason they're ditching the headphone jack is because the thickness of the jack assembly is getting in the way of their desire to make the phone thinner. I think they're ultimately shooting for having future phones as thin as credit cards.
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"The reason they're ditching the headphone jack is because the thickness of the jack assembly is getting in the way of their desire to make the phone thinner. I think they're ultimately shooting for having future phones as thin as credit cards."
I hope you get modded up -- too bad you are AC.. You are right.
I dont think I would want a phone without a jack -- at least not right now -- but maybe 2 or 3 generations from now a "phone" will be a little card with no real display or speakers -- which will display
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Second the motion, it's the same reason they moved to the Lightning jack too.
I also don't want to go without a jack, but it looks like that's how it will be.
Re:Taking the Headphone Jack Off Phones Is User-Ho (Score:5, Interesting)
the thickness of the jack assembly is getting in the way of their desire to make the phone thinner.
Quite possibly. But when you ask people, what they say they want isn't a thinner phone, it's more battery life, which you get by making the phone thicker.
Re:Taking the Headphone Jack Off Phones Is User-Ho (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't allow you to eliminate anything from the logic board. Basically the entire set of audio circuitry for the phone is still required for driving the normal speaker and the speakerphone speaker. The only thing that removing the headphone jack does is cut out a jack that is already really, really small.
So now consider the amount of space used by that headphone jack. I think the headphone jack is about a quarter inch by half an inch by the thickness of the interior of the phone (smaller than the 3.5mm plug, in fact, both in length and in thickness, IIRC). The battery in an iPhone 6S is a whopping 120mm x 48mm x 3mm (approx.). Removing the headphone jack, then, would give about a 1–2% boost in battery capacity. If you instead made the iPhone just 1mm thicker, the battery would increase from 3.3mm to 4.3mm in thickness, yielding at least a 30% increase in battery life (and really, more than that, because you aren't making the battery's packaging proportionally thicker). An extra 2mm would almost double the battery life.
The best part about using the thickness approach is that you could even give users a choice (audible gasps). Make several versions of the back case that allow for different thicknesses of batteries (by having various side wall heights), but are otherwise identical in construction. The extra R&D cost is basically zero for doing that, and the tooling costs should be minimal. Then, let the market decide whether users want more battery life or thinner phones. I'd be willing to bet that most users would choose the thicker phone with the longer battery life (unless they made the cost difference so ridiculous that it artificially skewed the market, which knowing Apple, they might just do).
Re:Taking the Headphone Jack Off Phones Is User-Ho (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Taking the Headphone Jack Off Phones Is User-Ho (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Taking the Headphone Jack Off Phones Is User-Ho (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they're ultimately shooting for having future phones as thin as credit cards.
And that's a very dumb goal. No one complains, "I wish my phone was thinner." People do complain, "I wish my phone had better battery life" and "I wish my phone's screen wouldn't break so easily."
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Controversial opinion:
Switch to the 2.5mm jack, instead of 3.5mm? - The one used on the older blackberry? It's significantly smaller, despite it only being 1mm smaller.
And how many people own 2.5mm headphones?
Re:Taking the Headphone Jack Off Phones Is User-Ho (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, here is a nice decent quality one with solder connectors
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/2-5m... [ebay.co.uk]
Vote with your wallet (Score:4, Insightful)
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Vote all you want, but the iPhone crowd will still win the election while standing in line to buy new overpriced dongles.
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All the motherboards I buy have PS/2 ports, and they work very well. Even in the cases where it's a combination mouse/keyboard port.
This is what passes for innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what passes for innovation when you run out of actual innovation.
Sure, the engineering is perhaps more elegant and you get rid of a few creaky parts like an amplifier and a jack, but what's the payback for that? If we're lucky a few extra mm^3 of battery? A device even thinner or smaller in some way, features most people don't want?
But this is what passes for innovation when you don't have ideas, and somebody made the fucking spreadsheet work, indicating it would be some tiny percentage cheaper to build and there would be a short-term bonus in terms of selling dongles and new headphones.
So really the only actual innovation is *financial* innovation -- squeezing a few more bucks out of end users and creating some licensing deals for "made for iPhone headphones" but not any innovation that anyone seriously thinks improves anything.
And you can bet that the dongles will be ass-ugly lumps sticking out the bottom of the phone, just asking to break the jack. Maybe somebody 2 years from now will finally get the green light to produce an Apple-approved adapter that makes the phone slightly longer but has a separate lightning and headphone jacks. But you can bet it will be a long delay before they approve it so they can capture every damn dollar of dongle spending.
Re:This is what passes for innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
If I had mod points I would mod you up.
My phone contract expires in about 8 weeks. With a contract renewal I will get a new phone. I have a bunch of criteria that I have around what I need but being 1mm thinner than the previous model isn't on my list. With Apple having issues with bending phones with the last release I would be tempted to think that unless they make the whole phone bendable a thinner phone will simply mean a fragile phone.
Removing the audio jack is design wank. A bunch of "creative types" has decided that they want a thinner, sleeker phone and that it would be cool not to have the audio jack. Marketing thinks it's great because they get to sell lots of Beats by Dr Dre headphones at vastly inflated prices. Customer think it's a con because they have wired headsets and are still smarting from having to replace their expensive Bose speakers because of the Lighting Connector. Change for the sake of change.
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Go contract free. We shaved down to $35 a month for two phones, but both were purchased outright. I minimize could buy new phones yearly compared to what most folks pay for their monthly contract. Though in reality we funnelled the savings into a little more retirement savings. Not sexy, but neither is working well into your 60's in the tech industry.
Re: This is what passes for innovation (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This is what passes for innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
Spoken like someone who is either deaf or who hasn't ever used Bluetooth headphones. There's really no comparison unless you're in a noisy environment or just listening to speech.
Also I don't want to have to fucking charge my headphones every few hours. Or press a sequence of buttons to re-pair them when I switch to a new device. Or waste phone battery powering a Bluetooth radio.
Re:This is what passes for innovation (Score:4, Insightful)
I've actually had a phone without a headphone jack for a couple of years and can confirm this. I bought a "Pluggy Lock" that locks into the headphone socket and gives you a loop to attach a strap to. I have arthritis in my hands so the strap saves the phone from falling on the floor every now and then, but of course means I can't use the socket for headphones unless I remove it.
It's a pain. I have a Bluetooth receiver for headphones (Sony) and the sound quality is okay for audio books but music sucks. Charging it is annoying too, especially as it can't go 8+ hours on a long flight. Occasionally I have to remove the Pluggy Lock for some reason, but at least I have the option. Unfortunately most good phones available in the west don't have strap loops any more, so I have to live with this.
It would be 10x worse if the headphone socket was combined with the charging/data port. No strap, no charging and listening at the same time (essential on long flights).
Re:This is what passes for innovation (Score:5, Informative)
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apt-X is also heavily lossy compression. Slightly less heavily lossy than SBC, but at the around 350kpbs bandwidth you get on a typical Bluetooth audio channel it is around the same quality as a 160bps MP3 file.
IoT (Score:3)
Hey! It ain't my fault someone hacked your IPv4 address and all you get through your headset is this ditty [youtube.com].
This is a great idea that saves me real money (Score:5, Funny)
...since it alone ensures I will never buy an iPhone.
just like ripping the dvd drive out of laptops (Score:3, Insightful)
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Except the reason no one cared about DVD drives going the way of the dodo was because the people who don't care about DVDs get their videos from the internet. Taking out an audio jack that, in one form or another, has been in use for the last 70 years won't fly the same way because there's nothing there to replace it realistically, Not without buying a dongle or changing your headphones, which is change for changes sake.
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"I was at my friends house, and asked to use a USB port to charge my cigarette(e-cig), but she was charging her book (kindle). The future is stupid."
Re:just like ripping the dvd drive out of laptops (Score:5, Insightful)
Taking out an audio jack that, in one form or another, has been in use for the last 70 years won't fly the same way because there's nothing there to replace it realistically,
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.
Don't most phones ship with a pair of headphones, including the iPhone? Won't they just ship with a pair of lightening earbuds, so there won't be any real pain in the upgrade except for those edge cases where people have some fancy extra expensive headphones, which are probably not earbuds, so having an extra dongle won't make all that much of a difference to those people.
There's not much downside for Apple. They'll still sell phones; The phones will ship with earbuds to keep most happy enough; They'll also sell new beats headphones, which will start shipping with lightening connectors and probably include a lightening to 1/8" jack adapter for use on traditional equipment; They'll cut off the extremely cheap competitor market for headphones.
Downside, they'll lose a smallish segment of people that were already considering on making their next upgrade an Android device.
It's a gamble, but it'll probably net them more profit than not making the move.
Don't buy the phone (Score:4, Informative)
I am sure there will be plenty of manufacturers that will be glad to take up the slack.
Don't even bother bitching about this. (Score:2, Insightful)
So, the headphone jack is apparently the argument that finally brought forth the "No one is asking for this" argument?
Hey consumers, where the fuck were you 172 pointless "upgrades" and $500 MSRP dollars ago?
Don't even bother bitching about design changes now. The monopolies aren't listening anymore. Consumers lost the ability to provide feedback that would result in action long ago.
Re: (Score:3)
What monopolies? There's like a hundred different phones you can buy, for anything from $50 to $700. You've got more choice in quality smartphones than ever.
No more standard headphone jack??? (Score:4, Funny)
Will jack-less phones have FM radios? (Score:2)
That would be a loss...
There's a very specific reason why (Score:4, Interesting)
I need my iPhone to have a headphone jack. I love making DJ mixes on my phone. I use an app called dJay, which allows me to mix using my itunes library. I've gotten quite good, to the point where I will occasionally sit on the bus or at a bar making a mix, and I don't need a monitor, as I can tell where to start the mix using the waveforms of the song.
Anyway, this only works if the sound and screen animation of the song beats are perfectly in sync; if theres ANY delay, I can't mix. I have tried doing this by using a bluetooth speaker instead of headphones, and it never works. It's always off by some delayed amount.
If Apple actually does this, this is the one thing that will make me never want to upgrade. I know they would make dongles, but that adds other issues, such as what if I need to mix while having the phone plugged in because I'm running out of battery power? Anyway, don't do it, apple.
And if anyone wants to hear my mixes made on an iPhone with no monitor and just a pair of headphones, here ya go: https://www.mixcloud.com/xevio... [mixcloud.com]
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And you must be an idiot who lives with his mother. See how that works?
DRM? My music is DRM-free. (Score:2)
Why does he think that this will be DRM'd? My music is already DRM-free.
Re:DRM? My music is DRM-free. (Score:4, Informative)
DRM in the form of something like HDCP. If the phone only allows an authorized (read as licensed) set of headphones to connect, and the link is encrypted, they've just plugged the analog hole that the media companies have been wanting to get rid of since, well, forever.
Yeah, been there before (Score:2)
Apple's attitude (Score:2)
When even "iVerge" criticises Apple's attitude this harshly, you know it's some real shitty attitude.
Bluetooth (Score:2)
This is sort of a side issue, but if you are still using wired headphones you are really missing the boat. Bluetooth headphones are as cheap as $20 for good enough models. I can't imagine going back to wired headphones.
What is the problem anyway? (Score:2)
I have only two headsets/earbuds I really use anyway, so if I just leave an adaptor on those what is even the issue?
Re: (Score:3)
Single usb-c port computers will lead to exponential sales of docking dongles - combined powerbank, usb hub, card reader, displayport/vga/hdmi out.
For several years expect to be fleeced $50-100, until the Chinese flood the market at $20.
Devil's Advocate (Score:5, Insightful)
Since everyone's hating on replacing 3.5mm jacks, I'm going to play devil's advocate.
6 reasons that 3.5mm jacks will go the way of the 3.5" floppy drive:
1) Analog audio cables need shielding from outside interference. Cheaper cabling is inadequately shielded. Digital signals are more resistant to minor interference.
2) 3.5mm jacks are finicky. I've owned many extension cables with 3.5mm plugs that need fiddling with. If I don't rotate it just so, and plug it in at just the right depth, I get abnormally low volume, one of the channels won't work, or certain frequency ranges won't play.
3) 3.5mm plugs aren't universal. There are ones with 1, 2, or even 3 rings, and the above problems are more prevalent if a plug is connected to a receptacle/adapter engineered to expect a different number of rings.
4) Data sent through the 3.5mm jack is an unencrypted analog signal. This means it's vulnerable to side-channel attacks and surveillance. Someone could surveil/inject data going through the microphone channel (assuming the phone uses an analog microphone), or the headphone channel. A simple 'not' inserted into or removed from a sentence could cause substantial disruption to a target. Of course phone networks and smartphones are often surveillable in multiple ways, but not by everyone; also, phones are sometimes used as personal audio recorders, which may not be surveillable. An encrypted digital signal, with a handshake protocol but no master key (i.e. backdoor), could prevent these attacks.
5) Phones tend to come with noisy/cheap amplifiers/DACs. This means that even if you plug in your $500 headphones you're going to get noise, and there's nothing you can do about it. Moving these components into the headphones means that phones can accommodate top-end audio. For some reason, smartphones have their cameras heavily scrutinized, yet their audio components are glossed over by reviewers and consumers. Go figure.
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.
The DRM issue is orthogonal to the encrypted digital signal issue. If an unencrypted MP3 file is sent over an encrypted interface, then who cares? The 'protected content being stolen via the analog hole' is the potential bogeyman, but it's not going to be an issue. Music is sold DRM-free today, and people are unlikely to start buying DRM-ed music in the future; it won't matter unless CDs go away, anyways. In the unlikely event the encryption protocol isn't cracked, it will only matter for content that is only available via streaming, which will probably be a minority of audio that people would care to preserve. Furthermore, just as you can buy (outside America) HDCP-compliant devices that decode the signal and then happily pass it on unencrypted, you'll be able to get the same for audio, if there's demand for it.
Re:Devil's Advocate (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't you hate people who play devil's advocate just to be a PITA? My responses to (what I consider mostly silly) arguments.
1. Shielding - Never had any problems in any phone I've ever owned. If shielding is an issue in the "new & improved iphone", then add a damn 1/10th of a mm and put some shielding back in. I'll trade a bit of imaginary interference for bluetooth drops & pairing difficulties any day.
2. Finicky jacks - this is perhaps one of only two points that I think has some credence. I've had a couple of finicky jacks myself but you know what--a quick squirt of contact cleaner solved the problem perfectly. Want to talk about finicky? Bluetooth pairing on some devices. You know what's even more finicky? When your BT headset battery starts to wear out and you can't replace it. Wired headsets have a much longer lifetime than BT headsets.
3. Universal plugs - While it's true that there are variations of the 3.5 mm plug, I cannot remember a single time in the past 15 years a time when I plugged a 3.5 mm headset into an apple or android phone and it failed to work. I can remember plenty of times when I couldn't get bluetooth to pair.
4. Unencrypted data - The second fair point. However, device manufacturers like square have started encrypting their data and this is only applicable to a tiny fraction of phone users.
5. Cheap DAC - This may be true, but my wired headsets are unequivocally better audio quality than any of my bluetooth headsets.
6. Thickness - I don't need a thinner phone. I want a phone with better batter life. Hell, increase the thickness and give me some more battery life.
Net net--I will not upgrade to a phone that is missing a 3.5 mm headphone jack anytime soon. I am sure it will happen int he future, but not in my near future.
Counterpoints (Score:3)
1. Shielding - Never had any problems in any phone I've ever owned.
You've NEVER had headphones on, got near some large electrical device, and had any interference at all? No buzzing or clicks? Really??????
5. Cheap DAC - This may be true, but my wired headsets are unequivocally better audio quality than any of my bluetooth headsets.
But are they better than wired headphones with an end to end audio channel? No.
People who still use wired headsets (I do also) are the people who will benefit MOST from our dig
Re: (Score:3)
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
Re:Devil's Advocate? Nah. (Score:3)
Wait. Are you saying Apple is the Devil, if you're the devil's advocate?
Then allow me to be the devil's prosecutor:
1) All wire cables need shielding. You're assuming a digital signal will fail less often than analog due to strong RF interference. But since digital cables use wires too, they too will fail if the field is intense enough, probably at about the same point as analog does (just as digital TV tuners do). And I've *never* experienced interference from my analog cables.
2) You bought cables with
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Trends in the Tech Industry (Score:5, Insightful)
No one asked for systemd either, but look what happened.
Speaking more broadly, I honestly can't tell if this is because most of the major problems have been solved, people are too ignorant of the thought processes that went into the original tech, people don't know their history, people have too much faith in overly-complex technology that couldn't possible fail, people honestly, think they're just that much smarter than the installed base of users and want to increase "Quality of Life" (as one notable Borg put it), people want to make their own mark, or people are disingenuously trying to achieve lock-in on their newfangled contraption. No doubt, it's a mixture of all of the above.
Speaking as someone who's only been around in the industry for 15 years or so, I've already seen this pattern repeat way too frequently. I can only imagine what people who've been writing COBOL for the past 40 years think of it all...
Please, for the love of God, stop breaking sh*t that works fine.
Re: (Score:3)
No one asked for systemd either, but look what happened.
That is patently false. SysV init is a fragile, horribly broken piece of shit that should have died 20 years ago. Having used systemd-based Kubuntu for some time now, I'm finding most things work far better than they ever did under SysV init:
1) Boot times on my virtual machines are much, much faster than they ever were under SysV init. The clever hacks piled on top of it to make Linux boot faster were so fragile that they broke at the drop of a pin.
2) Hardware interaction is far more reliable than it eve
Disappointing (Score:3)
I've been waiting for a jack off phone to come around for years, it's about time the sex toy industry capitalized on the market for mobile devices, but if it has no headphones that's a deal-breaker, I can't have everyone in the house hearing what I'm doing; and if it's user-hostile and stupid to boot, I mean, who the hell thought those would make good features?
I'm surprised this kind of bomb is coming from Apple of all people, makers of the famous iBrator.
Re: (Score:3)
the market will decide whether apple is right or not
No it won't, the average consumer will have no clue until it's too late, in the meantime the rest of us will suffer or be forced to build our own phones / listening devices for music I already paid for, and still own the CD.
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Yeah, it will. These phones represent a [large] minority of the marketplace. You really can buy a different phone. And you can buy a CD player.
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Yup, just like Microsoft didn't listen to the market and didn't bring back some semblance of the Start Menu in windows.
That's a decent example since what MS did was to ignore and avoid the issue for just enough iterations so that when they did "bring back" something that was a huge compromise, people took it as good enough and thanked them for it. Two steps forward, one step back... it's a great way to move the herd along.
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Re:A few comments (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they couldn't. It's an analog signal at the jack, and a DRMed digital or scrambled analog signal would sound like noise through any traditional set of headphones.
Re: (Score:3)
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