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Apple

Apple Quietly Kills the Old-school iPad and Its Headphone Jack (theverge.com) 93

Posted by msmash from the Apple-graveyard dept.
Along with introducing a new iPad Air and iPad Pro during its Let Loose event, Apple quietly killed its ninth-gen iPad -- also known as the last iPad with a headphone jack. From a report: The 10th-gen iPad is now the sole entry-level iPad in Apple's official lineup and, as such, has received a $100 price cut. Released in late 2022, the 10th-generation iPad arrived starting at $449, or about $120 more than base entry-level iPads from previous years. Apple justified the price increase with new iPad Air-like features, like a 10.9-inch screen and USB-C support.
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Apple Quietly Kills the Old-school iPad and Its Headphone Jack More

Apple Quietly Kills the Old-school iPad and Its Headphone Jack

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  • Bring back FM radio (Score:1, Informative)

    by davidwr ( 791652 )

    I know Apple doesn't play ball with FM radio, but for my last two non-Apple phones, I deliberately chose phones with FM radio. Why? It works without an internet/cell connection.

    • Get a Sony Walkman. Works good

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tzanger ( 1575 )

      I have access to FM radio but just ... don't use it. Not in probably over a decade now. Might be nice for alerts/etc. but I can't think of a reason I'd want it on my phone. If I'm in a situation where radio might be the best option, I have the little emergency radio in my kit, which also incidentally has an HT and foldable whip antenna for two-way communications.

      • There's still strong memories of having much of the local phone, cable, and internet infrastructure trashed from a windstorm that happened nearly 4 years ago. While buried wires were not likely harmed in the wind there were plenty of overhead power lines that powered these systems gone. Many of those little green boxes that stick up in backyards for service access were damaged by fallen trees or such. What cellular phone towers that survived and had backup power were quickly overwhelmed from people tryin

    • I know Apple doesn't play ball with FM radio.

      What? Are you suggesting that users should have the right to consume content that is not blessed by Apple and forced to be paid for to be available? Outrageous!

    • Yeah, because the only way you can listen to music on a phone without using an internet/cell connection is bloody FM radio.

  • I can't ever see myself buying one again. If they can't have a fucking earphone jack for that price, I am not gonna buy some crappy adapter or super expensive, instantly lost bluetooth crap.

    • ...bluetooth crap I have to separately charge for no fucking reason at all.

      • ...bluetooth crap I have to separately charge for no fucking reason at all.

        You do realize it has a battery in it, right?

        /s

        I have the feeling that you had no interest in Apple products to begin with, and so they were right to not consider you as their target market.

        • To charge the phone, you must plug it in separately from your headphones, and swap back and forth. Because it has ONE PORT.

          Or you buy an unwieldy, ugly, expensive, separate adapter. Or buy a wireless charger and put the phone in upside down. Ugh.

          • My phone battery lasts all day. I honestly can't recall the last time I had a need to charge it at the same time I was using it to listen to music. (Setting aside the fact that I vastly prefer wireless headphones to having to deal with an extra cable dangling around.)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by caseih ( 160668 )

      But, but... it's so thin.

      If you're worried about losing the dongle just fix it to your headphones with some tape. Or hot glue. Or cut the headphone wires and solder the dongle right to it.

      Seriously, though, in my experience if you actually use a headphone jack on a phone or tablet regularly, it will wear out relatively quickly and and become unreliable thanks to clever designs that make the jack small and thin.

      Would a tablet 10mm thick with a multi-day battery and a full headphone jack really be so unpopul

      • My headphone jack for the phone works fine, and I use it for my PC as well for meetings. Never wore out. Replaced the iphone 6S with a 6SE last week, only to discover right before a meeting that it had no jack, despite the form fact being 100% identical to the previous phone.

        Apparently, it was supposed to have ear pods or something, but not in the box. I suspect this was a buy, take pods out, then return the phone scam. Eventually I'll get a dongle, but it's massively annoying. But not as annoying as n

      • I use my headphone jack all the time on my phone and have never had one wear out. There's a reason the port has been unchanged for decades- it is solid and just works.

      • You're definitely doing something wrong or misdiagnosing the problem, I've never had a headphone jack wear out on anything and I keep my phones/laptops/tablets 5+ years.

        Headphone cables wear out, but the jack is pretty solid unless you do something stupid like jam a screwdriver into it.

        Bluetooth headphones have a delay which make them useless for editing music, the sound lags behind the visual of the waveform, and not consistently, making it really difficult to tell where what you just heard is located on

        • Bluetooth headphones have a delay which make them useless for editing music, the sound lags behind the visual of the waveform, and not consistently, making it really difficult to tell where what you just heard is located on the screen.

          Brave. Just like when Macs added that idiot touch bar, only to remove it after years of nonuse.

      • I never had a problem with any headphone jack, like everyone else.

        Do you mean the one on the iPad or iPhone was particularly bad?

    • But but but apparently all the cool kids are wearing them

    • You do know that headphones with a USB-C jack exist, do you not? A search for examples got me this link as one of the results: https://www.pocket-lint.com/be... [pocket-lint.com]

      Why would the title of the article make mention of USB-C headphones for Android? Maybe because the 1/8" headphone jack is lacking on products not from Apple also. In a extra bit of irony there's USB-C ear pods from Apple being featured. Wow, imagine that, Apple USB-C headphones being used on Android devices. It's almost as if USB-C headphones ar

      • ONE port. No charging and listening on headphones at the same time. Literally swapping back and forth, or buying more accessories. Screw it.

    • Please go on using wired headphones. You people are a free source of entertainment.

  • There's so much edge real estate, just give us 2 or 3 USB-C ports. Yes a dongle is a pain but USB allows some other nifty audio features like powering a small headphone amp for bigger cans, digital interface etc. Having more than one port also would let people charge and used wired headphones without an even wonkier dongle.

  • headphone jack is a necessity (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gillbates ( 106458 ) on Tuesday May 07, 2024 @03:07PM (#64454790) Homepage Journal

    Anyone who has ever tried to do home recording with bluetooth headphone knows of the BT delay problem: the audio you hear through the headphones is delayed, in some cases, by several hundred milliseconds. Which means that if you're recording against a backing track, your playing/singing will be out of time. When you play back the combined tracks, your part will be behind the beat and you'll sound like an amateur. And recording multiple tracks in this manner only compounds the problem.

    So, if you want to do professional, or even demo quality audio recording, you need at least a headphone jack, because that audio is not measurably delayed. Apple devices might make great status symbols, but they're really more for consuming content, rather than creating it.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by cstacy ( 534252 )

      USB C dongle with a headphone jack is cheap. That's what I do for pro audio (BT is only for groovin on the radio). What's the problem? However, a second USB port would be nice (as always).

      • "There's a dongle for that."

        Yeah... too bad they don't offer a "pro" model or something with these kind of useful features built-in.

      • That's what I'm using, the USB-C on my phone is wired for headset, so with a $1 usb-c -> 3.5mm jack dongle, I can plug a full headset with mic, and it works just fine, I have no problem with it.
        Note also that my phone BT stack support SBC, LDAC, AptX HD, etc
        However it seems a lot of phones don't have this possibility, they can only use BT, or a full external usb-c DAC, too bad for them.

    • Or you get a class-compliant USB-C soundcard for it. As an avid Linux user, I have to give credit where it's due: iOS not having the option to install drivers for peripherals has nudged lots of pro audio gear manufacturers towards class compliance. Which also means those devices are Linux compatible.

      But you're right. Buddy has a couple old iPads on which he runs music software and synths. If he comes over to jam, I just give him a bunch of mini-TRS and plug the other end in my mixing console or converters.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Also, Apple boasts the USB-C as a feature, as expected. It's not a feature. It's a legal requirement that they long and gravely opposed.

        Only on the iPhone.

        The iPad had USB-C ports even before the pandemic. It's one of the reasons why there are two different Pencils - they released the iPad with lightning port and Pencil, then a couple of generations later they released it with a USB-C port, so the Pencil 2 is for that.

        The Macs had USB-C even before the iPads. Even before when it was inconvenient as nothing

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Pieroxy ( 222434 )

        Also, Apple boasts the USB-C as a feature, as expected. It's not a feature. It's a legal requirement that they long and gravely opposed.

        iPads had USB-C long before Apple was legally forced to do so by the EU. The first USB-C iPads were released in September 2020 [wikipedia.org] while the EU made it mandatory in 2024 [dxomark.com]

        There are lots of things one can criticize Apple for. But not that.

    • Anyone who is recording anything against any kind of track can plug in a USB-C audio interface. If you're using your iPad as a professional sound I/O device you've made some poor choices regardless of whether it has a headphone jack or not.

      • First, Rick Beato uses Pro Tools [apple.com]. So a soul might think that they could pick up an iPad and at least get started making music with it.

        I'm thinking of two use cases here. The first is the guy who has been recording on his iPad with the headphone jack and now discovers that in addition to the new iPad being exorbitantly expensive, it can't even do what his old one did. So this guy instead figures it's time to break the Apple habit and discovers that he can do quite a bit better for quite a bit less. He

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by e3m4n ( 947977 )
      I guess the usc-c port or lightning port to headphone jack would still work.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      Anyone who has ever tried to do home recording with bluetooth headphone knows of the BT delay problem: the audio you hear through the headphones is delayed, in some cases, by several hundred milliseconds. Which means that if you're recording against a backing track, your playing/singing will be out of time. When you play back the combined tracks, your part will be behind the beat and you'll sound like an amateur. And recording multiple tracks in this manner only compounds the problem.

      So, if you want to do professional, or even demo quality audio recording, you need at least a headphone jack, because that audio is not measurably delayed. Apple devices might make great status symbols, but they're really more for consuming content, rather than creating it.

      The thing is, most music these days is crap, derivative, boring, uncreative and heavily edited to add base (at the detriment of the treble and middle). Then transmitted at low bitrates from online sources... so the product and source are not quality, so having a quality output at the end of it is utterly redundant.

      If you like music, over bluetooth is about the worst way to listen to it but music died in 1997 with the advent of Autotune (I mean really dead, not just mostly dead).

  • I don't like Apple products but my wife absolutely loves and uses her iPad daily. She's still using a 4th gen iPad. I noticed that since this new iPad announcement you can get the 9th gen iPad new for $249 now at Amazon. This is the last model with the headphone jack. So I bit the worm and just ordered her one. I hope it lasts as long as her 4th gen has. I know she wouldn't like a tablet without a headphone jack. My last Apple purchase was her 4th gen iPad. If I could just get her to switch to something els

  • for some Airpod Pro... Oh crap! Wired headphones are actually BETTER for audio? https://www.klipsch.com/blog/h... [klipsch.com].

  • Its sad, dac/amps make headphones sound so much better. The LG phones had them, but LG is discontinued. Think the Sony and Asus gamer phones have them. Samsung tablets don't have headphone jacks anymore. But entry level samsung and motorola do. So the high end and low end users use wired headphones, but the middle class will gladly buy bluetooth?

    Its strange, I can understand replacing sdcards since they could include a TB internally, but most are still cheaping out on internal storage.

    But dac/amps are s

    • If it's that important, you can always get a USB-C DAC and use that [amazon.com], and it will be better than any included-in-the-device DAC that ever shipped in a phone or tablet from any manufacturer.

      • As someone who worked on integrated audio for mobile phones, I can say that the specs on those external gizmos will be better, and they may score better on lab equipment (noise floor), human hearing capabilities will be met fully with integrated stuff, and the transducer (speaker) will be the limiting factor. On the dongle you linked one would use the same headset as directly on the phone jack, and it would sound the same (barring the phone manufacturer messing up badly, which can also happen). GSMarena sto
  • The iPhone obsoleted the iPod. The iPhone should obsolete the iPad. Make the iPhone unfold into an iPad, or make the iPhone plug into an iPad for a bigger display and battery.
  • ... because I quietly quit buying their shit when they dropped the headphone jack. Yes, any of it. Switched riiiight over to devices with headphone jacks. Still there. Still loving my classic headphones.

    • Do you expect nothing to change on the interfaces available on your electronics ever? That printers would always use Centronics parallel ports? Displays would keep using VGA? I learned to expect that with every new device I'd have to buy something like a half dozen adapters and cables to hook it up to my old accessories and peripherals. It sucks but that's the price of progress.

      I love my classic headphones too, an expensive high fidelity headphone set I bought many years ago. I just bought a $10 USB-C

      • The adapters are too janky. I have a lot of computers, laptops, audio components, mixing equipment and other devices that use headphone jacks and standardizing on them makes good sense even if phones didn't exist. I don't mind if things change, but they need to change for the better and simply eliminating valuable options isn't the kind of change I'm into. Fortunately, consumer choice is a thing and I used mine to switch to phones I love, partially for having a 1/8" jack.

        For me personally, the svelt wasn

        • The adapters are too janky.

          This is "janky"? https://www.apple.com/shop/pro... [apple.com]
          Or this? https://www.apple.com/shop/pro... [apple.com]

          I bought two of each because I knew I'd likely lose one eventually, and because if I had one for each set of the two headphones I use most often that I'd be less likely to lose them. So far that's worked for me since I was able to locate one of each with a quick search before typing this. I doubt the other adapters are truly lost, I just don't feel a need to look that hard for them right now since I was able to f

  • It would be great if this turned out to be the last example of Tim Cook's "courage". If this crap keeps up, Apple products soon won't have any connectors at all.

  • My Kyocera has a 3.5mm courage jack and Pogo pin charging. Another Sonim may be my next phone. Sure there's no 3.5mm adapter, but you can change batteries and plug in headphones or an adapter for 3.5mm while still charging. My PinePhone was tough to get accustomed to. Point being there is still innovation and useful ports--you just have to leave the fold.

  • My brothers and I have been buying electronics for Mom for many years because otherwise we might not have ready means to communicate with her. She'd answer her home phone fine but if she was driving or otherwise out of the house then we could not call her, and with pay phones disappearing she might not be able to call any of us. We got her an iPhone some time ago, and then an iPad, both with Lightning as that was the standard at the time. The iPad got to be so old that it was having trouble rendering som

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