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Taking the headphone jack off phones is user-hostile and stupid

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Re: Taking the headphone jack off phones is user-hostile and stupid

#101

Post by rufius »

r721 wrote: post #97
gergles wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And now you can walk with your phone in your pants pocket or purse (or anywhere), without a wire dangling! Citation needed. Have you actually used Bluetooth headsets? Unless the phone has unimpeded LOS to the headset, expect the sound to drop samples, or introduce static, or otherwise be shitty and horrible. Have your phone in a pocket on the other side of your body from where your headphones' antenna is? Enjoy shi…

Additional problems: 1. Hassle with batteries 2. I'm not really sure but from quick research it seems most of wireless headphones still use lossy codecs for signal transmission.

I think you're right regarding codecs. Either way, not enough to convince me to carry one around due to my own experience.

Re: Taking the headphone jack off phones is user-hostile and stupid

#102

Post by jccc »

SloopJon wrote: post #37
rplst8 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing the 3.5 mm audio jack to the floppy drive is ridiculous. The jack has become far, far, more ubiquitous than the floppy drive. Additionally, the things that use the jack are often of higher quality and not disposible like a floppy disk was. And this ignores the fact that the floppy disk/drive was technologically usurped by other removable storage formats. The 3.5 mm jack still delivers the absolute best soun…

Yeah, this is amazing apologism, even for Gruber. "And in five years we’ll look at analog headphone jacks the way we look at all the other legacy ports we’ve abandoned." In five years, there are going to a lot of crappy Lightning earbuds in drawers and landfills.

> Maybe now is the wrong time, and Apple is making a mistake. I don’t know.

> Patel misses the bigger problem. It’s not enforcement of DRM on audio playback. It’s enforcement of the MFi Program for certifying hardware that uses the Lightning port. Right now any headphone maker in the world can make any headphones they want for the standard jack. Not so with the Lightning port.

> Presumably Apple’s Lightning earbuds will work on iPads, too. But it’s going to suck having to use different headphones (or a dongle) for the Mac than you use with your iOS devices.

> Will MacBooks ship with a Lightning port in lieu of a headphone jack? If so, will they ship with headphones? (Probably not, I say. Cough up the extra $29 for a new pair of Apple EarPods.)

I'm increasingly irritated by Gruber's increasingly cozy relationship with Apple pitch-people (sometimes even using language only they use, like "with iPhone" or "on iPad").

But this is neither amazing nor apologism. He's ambivalent, at least in the text of this article. He is not defending the decision, extolling it's brilliance, saying Apple's doing the right thing.

(To the commenter who's about to say, "Cherry picking!": Please consider the likelihood that your brain is cherry-picking when you see the name "John Gruber.")

Re: Taking the headphone jack off phones is user-hostile and stupid

#104

Post by unwiredben »

smt88 wrote: post #87
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any hole in the phone case compromises reliability. Water, dirt, static electricity. Holes are hated by hardware designers. In Apple's case with their stress on look and feel I'm surprised the designers haven't been able to ditch the headphone jack years ago, simply based on "it looks better without the hole".

I've owned a few dozen phones for work and personal use, including some old flip phones. All of them had headphone jacks, and none of them failed due to the headphone jack. I've never even heard of a headphone jack being the point of failure. Along those lines, I've had several waterproof phones with headphone jacks (and no rubber covers, either).

I worked on several of the Palm smartphones. The original Pre was notorious for having the headphone jack fail, and some of their older Treo devices also often had jack failures. This wouldn't kill the phone, but did really affect its usability.

Palm tried to remove the jack with their ultrasmall Veer phone which had audio routed over a magnetic connector. You had to use an adapter to plug in headphones and it blocked off the power connector. The Veer was barely launched before HP pulled the "plug" on the product line, alas.

Re: Taking the headphone jack off phones is user-hostile and stupid

#105

Post by deelowe »

adrenalinelol wrote: post #6

You aren't forced to buy a new iPhone, better yet the one you have probably doesn't really need to be upgraded at all. Apple will understand you're displeasure if you vote w/your wallet; they won't care about your displeasure if you tweet them or complain in the comments section.

When an industry leader makes decisions that are anti-consumer, other members in the industry have a duty to speak up. Whether we support Apple or not as a consumer is irrelevant.

We also don't have to use IE as a browser, windows as an OS, cisco devices for networking, or anything else. That doesn't mean we won't take issue when a market leader makes a decision that will take the industry in a bad direction.

Just like how the industry rallied against IE and pushed for open standards on the web, the hardware industry is calling foul on this decision for the very same reason. We need hardware to remain open and standard in the exact same ways and for the exact same reasons we need our browsers to be.

Mark my words, this change is about DRM. It's about music, movies and TV. It's about ensuring that the apple store is able to attract and retain more publishers than everyone else. It's about lock-in and not just hardware lock-in but DRM/licensing lock in. The very first thing we'll see after this is implemented is a protocol to secure audio transition similar to what's been implemented in hdmi. This isn't about thinner phones. If it were, they'ed just implement a smaller analog solution. It's not like the phone is pushing 10 amps through that connector. It would be trivial to make it smaller.

Re: Taking the headphone jack off phones is user-hostile and stupid

#107

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #35

I'd be completely comfortable for replacing it with USB-C. You already have the port, it's an industry standard, it's de facto open to use for anyone. It's smaller, both in terms of thickness (which I don't care much about by now, but I'll grant it's a thing), as well as volume. What concerns me is that the most popular phone and probably listening device in the world, will move towards a proprietary sound system, fr…

The iPhone is definitely not the most popular phone in the world. Its market share is about 15%.

Re: Taking the headphone jack off phones is user-hostile and stupid

#108

Post by markbao »

Four opinions, going off of this article and partly in response to Gruber's[0]:

1. There was a functional reason that CDs and floppies went out of style: low capacity and the Internet. What’s the functional reason to get rid of analog headphones? It’s not quality – analog headphones have excellent sound quality, and 99% of people won’t be able to tell the difference with ‘digital’ sound, right?

2. So what happens if I want to charge my phone (e.g. from an external battery) and listen to headphones at the same time? Do I have to use some sort of ... dongle? That’s going to get silly.

3. Wireless headphones are ideal, but the price-to-performance ratio still sucks. Maybe if in the future we all have excellent wireless headphones, it might be a good idea to remove the headphone jack and provide a legacy wired output through the Lightning port, but we're not there yet.

4. Why do this in an era of declining iPhone sales growth?

Admittedly, analog headphone jacks will go away at some point, but I hope it's not before we have an elegant solution to these problems – like wireless headphones, perhaps.

[0] https://daringfireball.net/2016/06/headphone_jacks_are_the_n...

Re: Taking the headphone jack off phones is user-hostile and stupid

#109

Post by jaynos »

jwebb99 wrote: post #77

I don't understand this push to get rid of the analogue headphone jack. It's a solution in search of a problem--like removing physical buttons from the Kindle...the alternative (touch screen page turns) is more high-tech, but not as pleasant. I'm sure audophiles would appreciate a digital interface for their headphones, but everyone else is perfectly content to use cheap $5 earbuds for their highly compressed audio f…

>I don't understand this push to get rid of the analogue headphone jack.

I think I read that removing the headphone jack is needed to make phones thinner.

I don't care for a thinner phone. Leave the analog headphone jack. My phone is usually in my pocket when using the headphone jack and the jack does a very good job of keeping the headphones connected. USB-C or lightning cables are much easier to knock out of the port thus interrupting my listening experience.

Re: Taking the headphone jack off phones is user-hostile and stupid

#110

Post by sametmax »

campezzi wrote: post #96

I would normally agree, but Apple has a good track record of yanking out things that were considered crucial and turned out to be relics from the past in desperate need of innovation (or replacement). My optimistic prediction: the increased demand for wireless headphones will drive manufacturers to constantly improve their products and drop prices to remain competitive - two years from now, we won't even remember the…

Oh we will. Because the people listening the most to music are musician, and they entire stack is linked by jacks. So they will carry adapters everywhere, one for thunderbolt, one for usb-c, and hate it.

I know I will, because I won't buy a new headphone in the next 2 hears, mine being very expensive.

That doesn't mean I think it's a bad move. The thunderbolt migration was a good move. Removing the floppy and the DVD player is a good move. And removing the jack it probably one.

I actually look forward for the day where my phone, laptop and flatscreen only have USB-C port as input and ouput.

But it will be annoying for a while, and way more than 2 years.

Espacially since wireless headphones are a f*ing pain to use.

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