I say no. I use my iPhone heavily as a synth or guitar processor etc. Bluetooth latency is too high to make it useable wirelessly so I require a hardwire into a mixer to perform. The iPhone has the lowest latency audio stack of smartphones when used with a wire. This is important and removing the headphone jack means dongles or latency. What makes this especially bad is that the iPhone camera connector dongle is already required when plugging in many MIDI controllers. This has prevented me from upgrading beyond my 6s as many of my apps are challenged without a real-time audio output that doesn’t also use my lightning connector which I need for the camera connector.
This is the rub. With the removal of the jack, Apple is telling us that their phones are not [music/audio] creators' tools. Apparently it's their desire that creators use, what, iPad? Their ever-disappointing line of laptops? The outdated Mac Pro? I just don't know.
I do know that from the entire collection of screen sizes and hardware configuration options I'd like to choose my mode of creation, but Apple seems to think that telling me "iPhone is not a creation device" is Just Fine®.
It’s a mistake. We’re paying $1000+ for this tool that presents itself as a versatile information slinger, well I hope it can do more than Facebook, Instagram and Gmail. This is an amazing platform, completely damaged by its limited IO. Apple is moving away from its roots. Not good. Creators will go elsewhere, their desirable creations will become native elsewhere, and the sheep will follow.
While I don't like this answer, I feel like it's probably the most accurate.
Anecdotally, I know a lot of iPhone owners, and of them only one person uses their phone for music content creation. And my hunch is that one friendship may just be a statistical anomaly compared to the greater population of all iPhone owners.
I think it'd be a mistake to ignore them. Content creators are cool and they set trends and fashion. The first iterations of the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone were nothing special, yet they were successful because they were used by cool people. i.e. Apple products became status symbols.
It's the same thing as the Macbook Pro. Not to mention letting the Mac Pro stagnate. They seem to have abandoned power users and decided to focus on mass consumers.
The most successful companies are those with a minority of power users who evangelize them at every turn. Apple only became the behemoth it its because of the steadfast dedication of its most loyal customers.
They can do whatever they want. That said, there are certain classes of power users (creatives) that are very loyal users, and it seems like a good core demographic to cater to. Devs are probably much less loyal, but catering to creatives would likely cater to us as well.
The problem with catering directly to mass consumers is that the minute some other brand becomes more fashionable, they will jump to it. And if at that point creatives have been sufficiently fed up with the non-utility of Apple products, they might have already abandoned ship, and Apple will not have a code demographic to fall back to (or to keep it fashionable in the first place).
1) It's more like I already have the iPhone without the jack and I already attempt to make use of the thing for creation and the Bluetooth lag is a problem.
2) Even if that weren't the case, I'm not arguing power- of course a full-fledged computer has more power. It's about convenience. When does inspiration strike? Often when all I have is my phone; I can't walk around with my laptop at the ready.
Have you checked the Samsung Galaxy S8/Note8 line? It seems that these phones include a customized sound framework for very low processing delays, AND they include jacks. Google for Soundcamp.
The other problem with Android is due to sideloading and app hacking, the best pro level apps (which are expensive for apps) have mostly chosen to avoid Android rather than experience high levels of piracy the last time I researched it. (KORG Gadget for example doesn’t exist on Android)
Maybe these aren't mainstream problems, but they do reflect a change in Apple's brand. Apple used to position themselves as the brand for artists, musicians, and other creative types. They even used to hide an optical audio port in the MacBook Pro headphone jack -- talk about a niche feature!
But around the same time iPhones lost their headphone jack, the laptops lost their optical port: https://appleinsider.com/articles/16/11/02/new-macbook-pro-d.... I'm sure it's ultimately because Tim doesn't care as much as Steve about this stuff, but it does feel like something is being lost.
Both companies stocks soared under each, largely because of their cost cutting / monetization of every aspect of product. However, in both cases, such maneuvers wound up alienating their core supporters and causing strategic brand identity issues.
Eventually the board will have to replace TC (and most of the stagnant C-levels) and hopefully, like Microsoft, this will lead to a revitalization of Apple.
The "XS Max"...really? Sounds like they've outsourced more than just manufacturing to China.
Steve Jobs pulled Firewire and ExpressCard ports out of the Macbook Pro at a time when they were used by creators to integrate with their tools and workflows. Apple decided that they were not the future, and faced a ton of complaints for removing them.
Jobs was CEO when Apple rewrote Final Cut Pro, which was hugely controversial among filmmakers when it was released. He was CEO when they dropped Shake. He was CEO when they decided to drop DVD drives, and decided to forego Blu-Ray drives.
There are a lot of reasons to dislike Apple's decision to drop the headphone jack, but invoking Jobs' dedication to what creators want doesn't pass the laugh test IMO. Apple under Jobs had no problem pissing off creators when Apple thought they were right about a technology change.
This is just silly. First, Steve Jobs would have cut these obsolete interfaces just as ruthlessly as Apple has done so under Tim Cook. Jobs had a long history of doing so. Second, this almost certainly wasn't even Tim Cook's call. I don't think Tim tells Jony Ive and the iPhone team which design decisions to make.
Saying Jobs would have cut those is contrary to one important fact: Apple under Jobs did not cut those interfaces. He "would have" later? Why? Surrounding market conditions aren't that different. Bluetooth audio is almost 20 years old. A2DP was available mid 2000s.
Jobs certainly wasn't afraid of change but he also seemed to have an appreciation for things that just work, and 1/8" audio jacks & cables have a lot of virtues here. Seems likely that's why they stuck around through his tenure even though he could have put them on the chopping block in favor of wireless as easily as he did floppies and serial ports.
And the optical interface... there's a better argument it's recently become obsolete than there is about 1/8" audio, but far from being "just silly" it's a very concrete illustration of integrating a premium feature with niche utility neatly into the overall package. It's one thing that communicated that Apple was interested in using its margins to make sure the product wasn't just an experience, it was a tool that had the right affordances, the right blade on the swiss army knife for one stripe of professional/enthusiast.
Maybe a more common denominator approach will serve Apple equally well. Or maybe things like touch bars ultimately won't as meaningfully differentiate Apple products. Time will tell.
> Bluetooth audio is almost 20 years old. A2DP was available mid 2000s.
Yes, but for instance NFC, which made pairing within the Apple ecosystem much more attractive, is considerably more recent, as is the processing and charging technology in e.g. the AirPods.
> Jobs certainly wasn't afraid of change but he also seemed to have an appreciation for things that just work
Those who think 3.5" floppy drives and CD-ROM drives just worked in the same way that 1/8" jacks just work have yet to grasp just works.
As for the rest of the airpod tech... inductive charging is old, resonant coupling is roughly contemporary with A2DP, and even Qi-branded resonant coupling is 2010ish. Amenable NFC tech or other means of easy pairing are older. If these were somehow a crucial key to The Future™ that Steve Jobs himself had seen in a vision, there's little reason those couldn't have been out sooner (with Apple's resources, possibly before his death). And all this assumes that for some reason the form headphones take with the airpod is for some reason the primary line for marking the obsolescence of 1/8", which isn't a solid assumption because (a) plenty of people are happy for their application with other devices and (b) for some applications, the prevailing bluetooth profiles are still inadequate even assuming universally adopted airpod tech in all bluetooth audio devices and (c) how far away are we from universally adopted airpod tech? and (d) 1/8" would still be closer to just works.
I don't know if you lived through them but they were very unreliable. Floppy drives can suddenly become unusuable for whatever reason, CDs become scratched. Not to mention their limited storage space.
USB was miles better. It was the right call. It's the same with the headphone jack.
It's not obsolete, they're trying to force it to be. There's lots of high quality analog stuff especially for pros out there with 10+ years of life still in it and Bluetooth is a relatively complicated, expensive, underperforming (latency/fidelity/reliability) alternative. It also raises the barrier to entry to headphone manufacturing meaning we'll have less choice, less competition, and as I hope we all know, that leads to less value for consumers.
According to Google’s official documentation: “Android 5.0 (API level 21) and above supports a subset of USB audio class 1.” This subset is more limited than the full class 1 specification, limiting audio to two channels of 24-bit PCM data with a frequency up to 48kHz. There’s no default support for high sample rate audio over USB out of the box.
Individual smartphone manufacturers can implement full audio class specifications on top of Android’s default and many do. In fact, Google supports all three of the USB Audio Classes with the Pixel 2. However, this leads consumers not knowing what to expect from their handsets. You can find forums full of users struggling to understand why products don’t work with their specific smartphone, along with headache-inducing workarounds requiring specific apps and USB OTG cables.
While that’s quite unfortunate for you, is this a use case that affects a lot of users? I imagine that people in your situation are far less common than those who think the bundled headphones are good enough.
Hardly an edge case. Consider the revenue generated by the Line6 Helix or Headrush and their many clones; it's a substantial revenue generator for these companies. Most live music musicians also purchase custom molded IEMs to protect their hearing and listen to a click track. Digital wireless audio simply does not work here. Even major brands like Sennheiser forgo digital transmission on their monitoring wireless packs because 5ms of latency is enough to induce combfiltering and throw a performer off.
I get that wires are better for serious musicians. I doubt that the number of people depending on their iPhones for low latency audio work is dwarfed by the number of people doing latency insensitive things like listening to podcasts or iTunes. iPhones are primarily consumer products, so catering to consumer and not professional needs first makes sense.
Heck, the stuff you mentioned appears to be purpose built audio equipment. How would that be affected by the iPhone ditching the headphone jack?
The difference is that now you won't see DJs in front of crowds using Apple products. Apple has decided to trade measurable cost-cutting for non-measurable brand prestige, and in the next few years I expect Microsoft to launch a new mobile/desktop hybrid with an ad about how Apple is what your grandparents use, and cool young trendy people use Windows.
> The difference is that now you won't see DJs in front of crowds using Apple products.
OK, I'll call BS. iPhones and iPads are barely used for live performances. On the Macbook side, other than USB-A, what have they gotten rid of that DJs truly need for performances? We were using USB MIDI interfaces and USB audio interfaces long before the optical audio out went away.
Meanwhile I know a few musicians who haven't touched a Microsoft OS in over 10 years (!). Yeah, Microsoft finally introduced an Audio API in Vista to take on CoreAudio, but that isn't new. Does anybody like Windows 10 given the choice? If anything, I'd expect Microsoft's infamous Update strategy to make anything Windows 10 a non-option for live gigs. About the only argument I can think of is that musicians with less budget might lean more towards a Windows-based DAW.
That wouldn’t be a new move for Microsoft. They have found some success with Surface and they’re expanding the line. However, they are making similar trade-offs to Apple where able. They may release a new, popular product, but it will just solidify the trends that people in this thread are complaining about.
I’ll repeat since you seem to have reading issues: how many serious musicians were depending on iPhones for live production instead of laptops or purpose built hardware?
You made a personal attack. If you do it again we will ban you.
Please keep the online calling-out/shaming culture well away from this site as well. That's a euphemism for people attacking each other, and we don't want that here.
I'm using the headphone jack right now connecting to wireless headphones with a failed Bluetooth section. The headphones will be sent back to the mfgr for warranty service.
I was not irritated by the thickness or weight of my iPhone 6 and its headphone jack. I am regularly irritated by the fact that I can’t charge my iPhone and plug in headphones at the same time.
Obviously I can plan around this, but it’s gone from something I don’t have to think about to something I have to think about.
Somewhat ironically, iPhones have only gotten thicker since the abandonment of the headphone jack. The iPhone X/XS, XS Max, and XR are all thicker than the 6/6S.
You can make the signal encrypted all the way to the approved Bluetooth device, making it harder to extract audio to a raw format if it's played on a phone.
This was originally going to read "Phenomenally stupid question, but why hasn't somebody brought out an adapter cable that provides both charging and a 3.5mm jack?"
But I figured I should google first. Does anybody have any firsthand experience with Belkin's adapter that lets you do both simultaneously? Asking since my wife's work phone just got "upgraded" and we found ourselves unable to listen to a podcast on our last road trip.
I bought this for my essential phone two weeks ago and it does actually work, like reviews state. It's been wonderful to get that jack back.
Bluetooth, as cool as it is, has never been 100% reliable for me. Getting random choppy audio and charging headphone batteries is something I don't want to deal with anymore when I am sitting in bed. I tried it for nine months, and the experience sucked big time.
Bluetooth still works fine in my car, though. So I'll keep using it there.
Is the connection stable enough to hold in situations where you would typically have a wired headphone connected?
The usb-c connectors with adapters on my macbook are terrible. On lots of adapters a slight push to the side will cause them to lose connection. They work only in stationary use, and some adapters didn't even work there reliably.
Which is frustrating since GoPro has solved this problem already. They use a single USB-C connector for both charging and audio input with a single dongle.
It wasn't about thickness - the taptic engine takes up the space that would have otherwise been used for the headphone jack. I would also wager that it makes waterproofing to IP68 somewhat harder (not impossible).
Does wireless charging meet the same performance levels of wired charging? Doesn't it take much longer to do an induction charge? It's like a lose lose here. Poorer audio quality with bluetooth, slower charging with wireless....
Much longer? No, unless you're comparing to using fast charge with a 30W charger and USB-C to Lightning cable. Somewhat longer? Yes. 7.5W is common for induction chargers. Apple's iPhone chargers in the box have long been 5W; I don't know what the wattage will be on this year's iPhone chargers.
Won’t do you much good, though when you’re trying to charge and listen while waking or in a moving vehicle. Unless what you mean is contactless charging - which would be ... interesting ... in public spaces (street or transit).
I was totally on the hate train with how ridiculous it was to remove the headphone jack, and how unnecessary Bluetooth headphones were...
...but once I got my first pair of Bluetooth headphones and realized I never need to deal with tangled/frayed/broken/caught wires again, I'm never looking back. Charging turned out to be, surprisingly, a non-issue.
I'm totally convinced Bluetooth headphones are the way forwards, and it's silly to have a jack for old tech. And for the small x% of the time or x% of the users where things like latency or line-out are needed... there's a dongle, it works perfectly, and it's fine. And if you need to charge at the same time, get a dongle that charges at the same time.
That's the whole point of dongles -- a smaller/simpler device for 90-99% of people, at the cost of a tiny bit more expensive/complex solution for the remaining 1-10%.
Ugh, no. Those considerations are fine for people who are like you.
Some of us have different considerations and we're sick of being run over by these convenience freaks
To all the downvoters, these are some reasons:
* Low latency applications
* Existing high-end hardware one may own (old Sennheisers mop the floor with a pair of "high end" Beats)
* same port in use everywhere for past 50 years, there are a ridiculous amount of products for it
* Ability to connect a non-USB headphone amp
* Everybody understands it
* No need to charge your headphones(!)
* No stupidly expensive tech to license to make something as simple and dumb as headphones
* No stupidly complicated tech to master to make something as simple and dumb as headphones
* WHY would you put logic and circuitry in a simple mechanical device?? Do manufacturers just LOVE skyrocketing costs?
* Do any of these guys value simplicity in design any more? Or is tech charging full-steam into unnecessary complexity?
And on the subject of wireless standards:
* Other 2.4ghz wireless standards have way better range. (I used to work in a large factory-type building with literally thousands of consumer printers all turned and broadcasting their individualized ad-hoc 802.11 signals. We would have chronic issues with the Wi-Fi (on account of thousands of networks) and I could be on the other side of the building with my headphones and still get clear audio. (Oftentimes it would cut out depending on location but the range I saw was a good 3x what I could get with bluetooth)
* * *
C'mon this is like 100-year-old tech that everyone understands and loves, EXCEPT for the cable. Way for the technology makers to throw out the baby with the bathwater, so that they can sell you their crap all over again.
I work in a games studio, where I have dozens of PCs, consoles and their controllers running all the time around me in close proximity - my bluetooth headphones(rather expensive pair of Sony over-ear headphones) constantly loses signal. If I as much as wave my hand in between the headphones and the phone, the signal is gone, they start stuttering like crazy. Bluetooth is absolute trash for audio transmission, I have no idea who though it would be a good idea to share the same frequency with other 2.4GHz devices for something so sensitive as audio.
> my bluetooth headphones(rather expensive pair of Sony over-ear headphones) constantly loses signal.
I had the same exact problem. Turned out to be a crappy bluetooth chip on the PC side, despite being a Bluetooth Class 1 device, rated for 100m range.
With a new bluetooth USB dongle, it even sometimes works between floors without drop outs (!).
Of course it might also be a manufacturing error in your headphones, extremely radio noisy environment, but never forget to check it's not simply faulty hardware.
Add to this the fact that, in practice, you can't really listen to high-res audio over Bluetooth.
(I am aware that audio quality has gotten better over time but you still rely on the specs of the Bluetooth chip on both sides which, in practice, usually means that you're still far away from lossless transmission.)
Realistically, you're already listening to audio that has been through lossy compression, and if you look at the AirPods they send the AAC bitstream over bluetooth, so what you hear out of the other end is exactly what you'd hear with a pair of headphones plugged into a jack.
The LAST thing I'd want is my mp3 data to be re-encoded as AAC. Double compression is bad, mmkay?
Also, as the other comment alludes to, many people have large libraries of FLAC (or other lossless format) music, and we've invested in the hardware required to play these files back faithfully
Not to mention all those old dinosaurs with CD and vinyl collections ;)
And yet, for their common customer, their music is either purchased from iTunes, ripped through iTunes (to AAC) or streamed.
It sucks, but people with huge FLAC libraries are the outliers, not the mainstream, and it's only sensible that Apple concentrate their resources on their largest market.
You're right, because the physical media folks are accommodated by ripping software. I'm still bitter about Apple's garbage FLAC support but that's a battle that I don't think we're going to ever win...
Apple started supporting FLAC in recent macOS and iOS versions, but just on the OS-/file system-level. I think that indicates that a future iTunes revamp will come with FLAC support, at which point the iOS Music app will have to support it as well.
But they did not put any resources into the new product, old phones also work with wireless headphones. Instead they removed tech and touted it as "new and improved".
In fact it was less-featured than the older product, nothing was improved.
Except that they created that market out of thin air. It's great for Apple to sell wireless gear, but they could have left the jack in, no problem, if it weren't a money grab.
They could have, but it would have meant compromises in other areas of the internals. They are packing so much into a tiny space and decided haptic feedback was more important.
There's the YouTube video of adding a headphone jack back into the phone, and it didn't look fun with the compromises made.
And yet the phones are getting thicker since they removed the jack, as another poster pointed out. And the last iphones with the jack were not thick. My jack-having phone is not thick.
Another thing that is really obnoxious is how there is now an inconsistency with how it's implemented.
Some phones use a pass-through system so USB-C headphones connect directly to the phone's amplifier / DAC (digital-to-analog converter); other cables might contain a DAC / amp themselves, while the last small percentage just transfer a digital signal.
Phones with speakers already have a dedicated DAC and amp. The headphone jack was just a way to interface with the amplifier. Manufacturers turned a small size issue into a giant consistency problem that didn't need to exist.
I have high end sennheisers and airbuds.
The only time I pull out my sennheisers is when im doing recording or live sampling.
Bluetooth is opensource, it's not overly complicated it's just new to you.
This technology was already being used in live performances with no one complaining.
Specifications are used to reference in conjunction with an implementation.
There are many specifications I could point to that would overwhelm most engineers yet they use those standards just fine.
Bluetooth is definitely not one of those "uses those standards just fine" cases... if a user has just a dozen peripherals, a even a 99% success rate starts failing on you pretty often
On a more personal note, I have to keep a mental map of which bluetooth devices will work with which bluetooth receivers... the tech is not NEARLY as universal as people like to think it is. Generally speaking, devices of the same vintage (or make) will talk to each other, but it is a crapshoot as to whether my a v2 headset will talk to a v4 USB receiver, or be seen by a new laptop/ipad/whatever.
The point I'm making is that it is a very complex standard whose use-case goes far beyond carrying audio from a device on a person to the headphones in his/her ears.
To give another example, GSM is also a very complicated standard (or more precisely, set of standards) but no one would really advocate for all landlines in buildings to be replaced with non-mobile GSM phones attached to the wall.
ISDN and SIP are complicated standards, but telecom engineers do advocate to their customers, whenever possible, to drop POTS in favour of VoIP softphone service run over the same lines.
VoIP-over-ISDN solutions are far easier to wire a large building for (it's just the existing ethernet drops, coming from the same switches the building already has, now carrying an additional VLAN); it removes many potential sources of interference; it increases voice quality; and it's just plain easier to deliver.
All that despite being, in pretty much every way, "more complicated."
"Three copper wires" understates the complexity of physical audio standards a lot. Most modern audio components can (still) deliver/accept SPDIF, for example, over the same wires that they deliver/accept analog audio. Many modern audio reproduction components can recognize TRRRS control signals. The headphone-jack audio path is a loose de-facto standard with a mess of variably-supported extensions.
Also, especially in consumer hi-fi systems, those "three copper wires" found on phono connectors can create ground loops, which is why the favoured standard for audio for most of the reproduction chain isn't the plain-jane analog audio path, but rather either digital, or analog-over-optical, or just analog with opto-isolation (and thus separate reference domains, requiring separately-powered active components); and why the audio production chain uses balanced analog. (And nobody has ever stuck a mini-XLR connector onto a smartphone, so they're not what we're talking about by "losing the audio jack" here. That'd be cool, though.)
To put all that another way: the classical analog-audio model, where you have a single current running all the way from a high-impedance microphone through an amp to a loudspeaker, is just not how modern audio chains look. There's a lot more active components, a lot more digital logic, a lot more circuitry. It's complex, just like Bluetooth is. (Which is not to say Bluetooth is good or better somehow; just that your smartphone's headphone connector doesn't win when measured on the axis of "simplicity of implementing the signalling standard interoperably with all devices the user would expect to plug it into." There are a lot of active components in a smartphone's headphone-jack audio path—just as many as in its Bluetooth audio path!)
Also, regardless of Bluetooth, headphones themselves have been gaining features requiring active components, like noise-cancelling, for years now. For such headphones, making them into wireless Bluetooth headphones comes at a cost of just one additional radio chip, connected to what was already a pretty complex on-board microcontroller. (Hell, many modern headphones have firmware. Wireless or not.)
Ground loops have never been a problem for headphones. And SPDIF over optical (presumably you mean ADAT) is considered vintage now.
The favoured standard for professional digital audio these days is some variant of Thunderbolt or USB, with Firewire for the old timers.
At the high end you'll see Audio-over-Ethernet (e.g. Dante), although it's not used much for low-end amateur or semi-pro production because it's not a cheap technology, and it only starts to make sense when you have tens or hundreds of channels going from one place to another - e.g. from a stage box to a front-of-house mixer.
Analog copper wire between microphones, guitars, synthesizers, FX pedals, and digital interfaces is still absolutely standard equipment in studios at every level.
Hum is avoided by using balanced three-wire balanced connections, which are almost as old a technology as mini-jacks.
Analog has zero latency compared to digital, it's at least as reliable, and it "just works".
Bluetooth is simply not a professional audio technology. It's not enough of a standard, and not reliable enough even when it's implemented correctly.
> Ground loops have never been a problem for headphones.
No, but they're a problem for consumer hi-fi systems, which use the same 1/8-inch RCA connectors.
> And SPDIF over optical (presumably you mean ADAT) is considered vintage now.
Yes, but it still exists, and you still have to consider its existence in the design of a modern component that could be hooked up as part of an audio reproduction chain, especially a component of a consumer hi-fi system.
My point was that the signalling standard which modern devices connected via a headphone jack have to obey if they want to be able to talk to "anything else that has a headphone jack", is complex, in the same way that e.g. USB-C is complex. Everything "needs" active circuitry just in case the other side isn't playing/expecting plain analog audio over the jack. ("Needs" in quotes because you wouldn't expect a $10 pair of headphones to work if you plug them into your CD player's SPDIF-out port, but you generally would expect the same of a pair of Bluetooth headphones that have their own internal DAC.)
> Bluetooth is simply not a professional audio technology. It's not enough of a standard, and not reliable enough even when it's implemented correctly.
Sorry, didn't mean to imply that Bluetooth was good, or that it was suitable for professional usage.
What I meant to assert, specifically, was that when comparing the signalling standard of the Bluetooth audio profile, to the de-facto signalling standard required on e.g. a smartphone's audio connector, the Bluetooth standard requires around the same number of active components at the [antenna] connector terminal, as the headphone-jack de-facto standard requires at its physical connector terminal, to achieve the same level of user-expected interoperability. (And something like Audio-over-Ethernet is even more complex in terms of the number of active components required!)
So, while Bluetooth might not be good, I wouldn't describe the thing being mourned here (the de-facto signalling standard backing the 1/8 inch headphone jack) as being very good either. It's also complex, it's also "not enough of a standard" (because it is extended with things like SPDIF and TRRRS connectors), and it's also frail—and comes with a host of problems of its own, like signal degradation over short distances and wire frailty, when implemented at the wire gauges consumers [rather than professionals] gravitate toward.
In the non-professional underground party scene it's still all analog quarter-inch hookups still
Do they make mixers now with channel strips of SPDIF connectors? I don't pay that much attention to audio hardware these days but I don't recall ever seeing a bank of optical connectors on the back of anything
Optical SPDIF was never meant for profesional applications. In fact the use of optical cable for that is completely unnecessary snake-oil to make it seem "more digital", or something like that.
Profesional applications usually use the same logical data stream over RS-422 differential pairs (with cat5 for fixed installations and plain balanced mic cables otherwise being usually used).
For consumer use there also is third variant with TTL signal over notionally 50R coaxial cable (ie. the cable that should be used for line-level audio with RCA connectors) that seems to be common on cheap whitebox AV tech and almost unheard of on anything brand-name.
Another thing at play is that most proffesional audio users outside of the broadcasting industry have exactly zero use case for standardized digital audio interface. In typical PA application you will either find some semi-proprietary "digital snake" or no external digital interfaces at all (with particulary hilarious example being Pioneers DJ mixers and players that use gigabit ethernet for file sharing and automation and then pass the audio on two RCA jacks, not even as balanced XLR). In modern recording studio you just record almost directly into computer and do everything in software.
I would beg to differ, the live music scene has a strong interest in standardization. Most of my sound reinforcement friends will wax poetic on the virtues of proper 1/4" coaxial cabling and a lot of these folks would probably shit bricks at the thought of having to replace their hardware.
Funny you mention Pioneer, I always found their use of RJ45 for comms to be kinda funny/ingenious. (Note that using RJ45 for other purposes seems to be a pretty common thing in the embedded world, from my own observations.) If you're talking CDJs they're usually hooked straight into a DJ-style mixer before the signal touches anything else; I thought balanced/unbalanced was a consideration more for microphones and guitar amps?
Yeah, BT is literally impossible to use live. Every ms counts, and here we’re on the order of 50-150. Even native drivers often aren’t good enough for wired equipment, forcing users to upgrade to ASIO drivers! I know I couldn't use my guitar interface or keyboard without them during my Windows days, though the situation is admittedly much improved on the macOS side.
Another thing is that primary thing you want to do wirelessly in live situation are mics and maybe instruments. That implies relative large dynamic range on input (certainly more than 16b samples), which is hard to do digitally in sane way.
Can you cite examples of people using Bluetooth in live performances? 20ms is intolerable for a band playing live together. Any hickups in signal for a major performance would also obviously be a problem.
Plus, I don't feel like the cable is all that inconvenient anyway. I got high-end headphones (And low-end earphones for when working out) and the cable has never been an issue to me.
Yes, maybe the wires tangle on the earphones, and then you untangle them.
Plus, for high-end gear I find that I don't move about with it a lot, so the wires are pretty much always in a similar position on my desk and don't create any problems either.
That is true, and one downside, but I would wager a lot of people don't have headphones plugged in for the entire day, and even then, you get what, 10 hours music playback on an iPhone these days?
I plug my iPhone into speakers every night to listen to music. I could connect over AirPlay, but that’s really unreliable everywhere else I’ve set it up.
I don't think so; I set up all my sound stuff before AirPlay 2 was out. I have an Airport base station with two different receivers (one Sony, one Denon), an Airport Express, and a Raspberry Pi running Runeaudio, each of which is connected to its own pair of speakers (or, in the case of one of the receivers, a surround setup). When I stream (from either iTunes on my MacBook or my iPhone) to any one of those, the music will have pretty frequent interruptions; it really shouldn't, either, because my MacBook is typically about five meters away from the Airport Express in the same room. The problem is significantly lessened when I play MP3 music instead of ALAC, and significantly worsened when I play 24-bit audio files, which suggests that bandwidth may be the problem.
Some of us don't want to. Why should we have to carry around an extra piece of hardware to support something that's worked fine since probably before you were born?
Well, I'm a Gen Xer, so yes, the audio jack has been working well since before I was born, but what I'm seeing a lot of in this thread is people with slightly niche use cases.
The end result is - don't like it? Don't buy it. It's not coming back, no amount of wailing or gnashing of teeth is going to change that, if it's a massive inconvenience for your particular use case, the iPhone isn't the phone for you.
The proliferation of AirPods and other wireless headphones points to most people just embracing the new normal, which in some ways is superior (I really don't miss wires at all).
What is this "not coming back" about? It hasn't gone away at all so far as I can see. The phone I'm typing on has a normal headphone jack. Bluetooth remains just as frustrating and unreliable as it's ever been. If the day ever comes that no phone is sold with a headphone jack anywhere, it'd be much easier to just stop bothering with music via phones than to put up with the endless hassles of a wireless headset.
Sorry, should have expanded to not coming back to the iPhone.
I must be an outlier here, but I have zero issues with bluetooth. My iPhone syncs straight away with my car (a 4 year old UK Ford Focus), unsyncs straight away when I leave the car, and the AirPods "just work"
You probably live someplace sparse without too much wireless interference, for now. Wireless doesn't scale. Go to a crowded office building or apartment complex and use it, or a conference packed with other Bluetooth users.
The trend is not so much driven by wanting unnecessary complexity (but that is the result), as by the desire to remove physical interfaces to machines. Optimistically this is just some haughty designer's prematurely executed ideal of human-machine symbiosis; pessimistically this is the transfer of means of user control over machines to the corporation, allowing external control over machines and thereby users.
I mean if you prefer old technology, that's all good. No one is stopping you from using your old headphones with your old phone.
The convenience of not having to untangle headphones, not accidentally yanking them out of a device when walking away, or being able to exercise with a device sitting somewhere else in the room is a welcome innovation IMO.
Yes, apple forced people's hand with removing the port (They aren't making these products for fun) to make money, but when has a business made bold moves if it didn't mean making money in the long run? When apple started removing ports, I bought stock, which payed for my new headphones.
Why is this always framed this in terms of old vs new technology?? There are other ways of looking at it. Simplicity vs complexity. Established, working tech vs novel tech (with fewer use cases IMO). Flexibility and options vs "you can have it any color you want, as long as it's black"
The seemingly blind fascination with novelty and "design" (extra emphasis on the finger quotes) within the tech community will be its downfall. There was nothing wrong with including both options (NOT a dongle); it is these legacy-type features which enable the rich interconnectivity that we have enjoyed up until very recently. So many seem so happy to steamroll the sometimes billions of people who are happy with what they have, just to sell them a bunch of new crap under the guise of 'innovation'
I don't know about you but the last few years I have begun to seriously question some of the fundamental values of tech, such as this obsession with disruptive innovation.
If existing wireless tech were truly innovative then it would be as seamless and interconnectible as past tech, which includes interoperability with existing tech without forcing the user to make sacrifices (like charging). This, and this trend towards software complexity and proprietary solutions (like lightning/thunderbolt vs usb) is the very thing that compromises that interconnectivity that so many of us enjoy and rely upon today.
Knocking off ports is not design, and it is not innovation. It's corporate conquest at the cost of existing communities.
edit: and the above doesn't even begin to factor in the decline in quality in nearly all areas of manufacturing over the past 30 years or so. Yes your Apple stock might have paid for a new pair of headphones but I can almost guarantee you that they were not made to nearly the same standards in materials and durability that they would have, had they been made in the past. You would have to pay considerably higher sum (not just from inflation adjustment) of money to get the same quality parts.
Meanwhile (and for example), Sennheiser still makes the HD280's, they're still awesome, and now they're going for like a hundred bucks (probably because of "no bluetooth", but also economies of scale and mfring optimizations), and they knock the socks off Beats' entire product line.
> Why is this always framed this in terms of old vs new technology?
Good point - that's not how it's framed for the Mac Pro: "Hey, man, forget about these old rectangular computers. New computers are round! That's just the way it is; go with the flow. Round is new, so it's better!!1!!1"
> ...I bought stock, which payed for my new headphones.
This reads as: "What's your problem? I have lots of money, so I can afford this."
When people talk about classism and privilege in the tech industry, this is the sort of thing they mean. Nobody claimed that bluetooth headsets aren't better in some situations—but their benefits are not necessarily in areas that interest everyone. "Forcing people's hand" to buy the more expensive but unneeded thing is precisely what the OP is complaining about, and your post does not address that argument even a little bit.
Then buy a budget phone that is cheap and still has the jack. Don't turn a comment about picking up new headphones into your manifesto on Bay Area elitism.
Sure, and those people won't get new iPhones at all, or if they do, can use the free dongle to use their old 3.5mm jack headphones with their new iPhone.
Nobody is being forced to buy expensive new headphones, or new phones.
I agree my comment does sound brash, which wasn't my intention.
But what I meant was, apple is selling products, and trying to maximize it's profits. If you don't like the feeling of manipulation, you don't need to buy into it. Marketting, social pressure, device ecosystems, they are all strategies that get you to buy, and keep buying.
And I implicitly did address the OP's comment, in that I agree. They are forcing people's hands, it sucks. But if you are going to buy into it, you might also recognize that other's will buy into it and try to make profit for yourself by owning a portion of the company.
I was in no way implying that I'm rich. I was implying that you can play the game too if you want. What do you think will happen as AI continues to develop? Either you sit idly complaining about robots taking your jobs, or you start trying to gain part ownership of the companies that will build those robots. You have to be proactive because companies don't give a sh*t about your wellbeing, they have no incentive to do so.
You know, the classist argument is probably stronger than my old-tech cheerleading, and is a good point that I was only barely thinking about. So, thank you :)
Apple’s market is people who want to pay more money for products that they at least consider to be superior. Complaining about the price of Apple products seems silly to me, it’s clear Apple doesn’t place much importance on affordability, but there are plenty of other companies that do.
What external hardware amp are you referring to? Bluetooth headphones have an amp, not wired headphones. And the phones themselves will continue to have an amp as long as they have speakers.
I was responding directly to the person above me who objected to the loss of the 2.5mm jack because he can't plug his amp into his phone anymore. This seems silly to me, because if using fancy headphones is important enough to you to carry around an amp, it is negligible additional cost to also carry around a dongle.
And for the small percentage of people who care about these things, use the included adapter.
As for me, I’ve had the earphone jacks in two if my iPhones go wonky on me. I fully realise few other people have this problem and it’s almost certainly down to me being a bit careless inserting and remove the jack, but still it happens. So I just got a set of lighting earbuds. Never had a problem since. It seems to be a much more robust and reliable connector. So on two of my phones with headphone sockets, I ended up not using them anyway.
I wish there was an adapter let me plug lightning headphones into my macbook. The current incompatibility between apple devices means carrying two sets of wired headphones, or ditching the packed in lightning headphones.
You’re on your high horse about the sennheisers but the commodity hardware we are talking about isn’t capable of properly powering those types of devices.
I feel like you’re kinda grumpy here for no reason? You clearly care about sound and want the best experience so why would you attach a non-usb amp to a crappy aux port on commodity hardware? You’d actually want a usb dac/amp in that situation. (Which you claim is a negative)
“Sick of being run over by convenience freaks” sorry to say it bud... but you’re the “freak” here (in the sense that you are the extreme of the extreme, don’t mean that in a derogatory way)
You can’t get grumpy about mainstream devices following the mainstream. You are not mainstream.
> You’re on your high horse about the sennheisers but the commodity hardware we are talking about isn’t capable of properly powering those types of devices.
I use sennheiser headphones with my smart phone on a regular basis.
> You clearly care about sound and want the best experience so why would you attach a non-usb amp to a crappy aux port on commodity hardware?
Because that's what is there, convenience trumps quality in many situations.
> You can’t get grumpy about mainstream devices following the mainstream. You are not mainstream.
On what do you base this? The article itself shows that the majority of headphone purchases are not bluetooth. It seems like the 'mainstream' uses headphone jacks.
"on-usb amp to a crappy aux port on commodity hardware?"
Well, the cool thing about flexibility is that I can do that if I want to, and it will still work if I don't. Yes the amps in phone headphone ports are crap but as long as you're aren't trying to walk around with $500+ cans with crazy high resistance everything still works fine.
And as for the mainstream, you really have to step back and think about all the people in this world with audio players... first world and third, high and low tech, city slickers and country folk, blah blah blah. What port do the majority of those devices have?
I own really good bluetooth headphone and they work great. But at the same time I own really expensive jack phones which are tiny and I can keep them in my pocket. And I have always string of various 10$ headphones (Philips mostly) that I loose when jogging and destroy when biking.
My point is - bluetooth getting better and more accessible - there is a place for compact and cheap headphones that do not require charging. And getting rid od headphone jack takes that away.
And they only work one way - you can use the adapter to use 3.5mm headphones with your iphone, but there is no adapter to let the iphone lightning headphones with an imac or ipad or macbook.
The lightning headphones are accepting a digital signal and have a DAC inside the cable. Even with the correct physically-wired adapter (you could create one by bridging a regular USB to Lightning adapter to the Lightning headphones, if you wanted), a computer attached to them would see a USB DAC, and would need a driver for said DAC. Until such a time as such drivers are written, for every OS, that adapter wouldn't function the way people expect it to (i.e. universally), so they don't bother making it.
"Not having a headphone jack" doesn't imply "Lightning connector headphones", though. Plenty of other phone manufacturers are also shipping phones without headphone jacks now. They tend to ship with earbuds that have a micro-USB or USB-C connector; which have a DAC inside; and where said DAC uses the USB audio standard.
That being said, there's nothing stopping Apple from making earbuds with a Lightning connector that are USB Audio compatible as well. There's nothing about the "Lightning protocol" that makes this impossible. They just... didn't, with their current Lightning earbuds. Maybe the number of people it would benefit didn't outweigh the cost-savings of eliminating USB signalling components, or added too much audio-latency, or something.
Not to mention those adapters break constantly and you can lose them. I'm on my fourth one and have been in a few situations where I wanted to use my headphones but low and behold, I don't have the adapter with me.
I haven't used one myself but I've heard the dongles are horrific. They overheat, and sound quality fades as temperature rises. This was a couple weeks ago my friends were telling me they couldn't get anything decent for their pixel2 on Amazon everything is cheap and produces the same result.
> That's the whole point of dongles -- a smaller/simpler device for 90-99% of people, at the cost of a tiny bit more expensive/complex solution for the remaining 1-10%.
I like your completely made up numbers. Basing of the sales numbers from the article, this is the argument you are making:
A smaller/simpler device for 17% of people and a solution that is up to 2x more expensive and far less convenient and functional for the remaining 83%.
After getting new fairly expensive Bose Bluetooth headset I started wondering about the lousy sound quality when making VoIP calls on PC (Windows/Lenovo). Turns out others have similar complaints [1].
Vendors seem to claim that the problem is the low bandwidth available. I suspect the real reason is that they don't want to standardize on more modern (complicated) codecs for this purpose as it would make the headset more complicated and increase cost.
Bluetooth is alright for audio only like listening to music. For games though (a huge percentage of users) Bluetooth is trash on the iPhone. The latency is a huge issue; something will occur in game and then there are noticeable delays before you here the accompanying sound. This ruins the immersion of games when it happens.
It still makes me mad that I can't use my Apogee JAM in any practical way with new iPhones. Bluetooth is way too laggy and there doesn't exist an adaptor that lets you use data and analog-out at the same time. The only option is to use the built-in speakers.
When I used plug-in headphones, they’d all break within weeks and start automatically skipping and enabling Voice Control, when I have all voice command options disabled.
Bluetooth headphones come with a headache, but mine haven’t broken in a month. I call it a clear improvement.
Yeah, I have the same problem. Cords on my headphone are always the first to go. But it's not really an issue, my cheap pairs are cheap enough that I don't care, and higher quality headphones have detachable cords that can be replaced.
I buy Etymotic in-ear monitors, pretty damn expensive.
Despite thorough personal grooming and only having them at a studio desk, the part of the cable that wraps around the top of the ear will still get eaten through to the copper by the oil on my ears after about two years.
Shitty or not, headphones—at least the ones that see thorough use—are consumables.
A good headphone design makes the parts that wear out replaceable. Bose does this with some of their stuff, as do others, I would guess. It should be considered an important part of the design.
I was buying earphones in the 20-30 dollar range. Yes, they were cheaper (though not the cheapest), but I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on headphones on my grad student budget.
How much should I expect to pay for quality headphones with the jack that last?
The Sony xbs can be had around $40-50 online, sound much better than cheapies, and cables last over a year. I usually grab a pair or two every xmas when they go on sale. My current pair has made it two years and been through the wash.
I’m a musician and have thousands of voice memos from writing tapes over the years. Those effing dongles disappear on me. I actually prefer the dongle + old iPod headphones to newer Lightning headphones, because I can plug them into EVERYTHING ELSE. Bluetooth headphones don’t play voice memos (built-in iOS application) back at a normal (acceptable) nitrate. It’s been that way for years and Apple refuses to fix it.
I’m sure there are plenty of other arguments for including headphone jack. I mean, I have probably 10 sets of nice headphones in my studio that all use a standard connector. It’s real frustrating to have to consider going Android just to get a headphone jack on my device.
..and when those Bluetooth headphones are AirPods, it’s very easy to never look back.
I do a fair bit of work with Logic and Ableton and consider myself reasonably advanced when it comes to audio production. When I am doing recording or mixing on my Mac, the built-in headphone jack is never used: it’s always a fairly high end audio interface. Since AirPods, I can’t remember the last time I actually plugged into the Mac’s headphone jack: it’s either using “pro” headphones via the audio interface or AirPods.
While I can appreciate the headphone-jack vitriol on iPhone, I can’t help but drawing parallels with the ditching of the DVD drive. At the time that happened, people were losing their minds for a variety of similar reasons. I used to own mixers that only took 1/4inch plugs and remember to have a 1/8inch adaptor was a real pain, however it just became commonplace. My point is that having a lightning to 1/8th adaptor is no bigger of a deal than having a 1/8->1/4 inch adaptor.
On the other hand, everyone but Apple seems to have this obsession with having their earbuds plug my ear canals (even if they're not "noise isolating" earbuds), in a way I find deeply uncomfortable.
The AirPods (and Apple's regular earbuds) might not fit every ear, but at least, for the ears they do fit, they fit without a sensation of having something jammed in your ear.
Ideally, Apple (or someone) would just make such non-intrusive earbuds in a few different form-factors, for the three or four most common ear shapes, rather than one-size-fits-all. As it is, though, Apple seems to be the only company making non-intrusive earbuds at all.
Question - have you tried the airpods themselves? Because they weigh far less I know people who always had Apple ear pods fall out have no issues with AirPods.
And remember - other wireless headphone manufacturers are available, Beats do over ear ones that use the same W1 chip (super simple pairing with mac devices).
I must be in the small % of people with ears that don’t work for AirPods. My right ear doesn’t hold it and if I’m moving at all (walking) it’ll fall out.
I wish they made in ear phones like the shure style ear phones - even Apple’s old design was better for me.
I've got AirPods and I'm sold. I'm not going back to wired headphones.
Apple has got proximity-based pairing nailed so well, it's easier than plugging a jack in. I can connect to other iPhones as easily as mine. Macs logged in to my iCloud don't need pairing at all. It works like it should, not like a typical Bluetooth crap.
The charging case is more convenient to carry than a bundle of wires. And of course I can walk around, zip my jacket, etc. without minding the wire.
It's more expensive, proprietary, it doesn't work well for some people. But I can definitely see why having AirPods Apple thought wired headphones are the next floppy drive.
I love my AirPods. I find them fairly comfortable and the audio quality is fine, perfect for podcasts (theory: the rise of AirPods and rise of podcasts are related).
However, AirPods don't require the removal of the headphone jack! The removal of the headphone jack is still so consumer hostile: it serves zero benefit to anyone apart from bluetooth accessory makers. If Apple really was serious about advancing bluetooth headphones, they would at least license the W1 for the pairing magic to other manufacturers.
Good Bluetooth headphones AND headphone jacks can exist at the same time! Anyone arguing for the removal of headphone jacks aren't grounded in any sort of reality tbh.
>However, AirPods don't require the removal of the headphone jack! The removal of the headphone jack is still so consumer hostile
This is key. When they removed the disc drive in the macbooks there was a decent argument to be made about more space for other ports (or reduced thickness). But the 3.5 mm headphone jack is literally... 3.5 mm, right? Another commentor even pointed out that the new iphones are thicker than the 6 line. I just dont ubderstand the argument here.
Agree, I love wireless audio and I've used decent bluetooth headphones on and off for a decade now. But that still makes the removal of the headphone jack a disaster and I miss it every day.
Apples user might have become accustomed to the dongle life but it is unbearable. Also, my non-standard dongle have started to glitch and buying a new one costs about 100x more than it is worth. Go figure.
It might have felt better if there was a reason for it. But no, there is absolutely no sane reason to ditch it other than forcing people to buy wireless peripherals. And that is just unacceptable. Too bad alternatives are running out.
This is all also under the assumption that bluetooth is good enough. It isn't.
This is also under the assumption that bluetooth is secure. It isn't.
> This is all also under the assumption that bluetooth is good enough. It isn't.
I don't think that's true. I don't think there's an inherit quality problem with Bluetooth, but it's just that bluetooth is an added cost, so manufacturers cost save on the audio components, or the headphones become expensive.
There are still incompatibility issues in practice.
And even still, you will get something that won't outlast the inbuilt batteries - which makes it absurd to spend money on them. I still use, on a daily basis, my $300 headphones that are a decade old. I can't find any bluetooth headphones fort $3-400 with NC that matches them. And they won't last a decade for sure (whereas my wired ones probably will last several).
> Anyone arguing for the removal of headphone jacks aren't grounded in any sort of reality tbh.
The problem is that there isn’t really a good argument to keep the headphone jack. It’s a redundant port because lightning/usbC and Bluetooth both handle audio. You would need a strong justification to keep it when you could use that space for other stuff in the phone.
What disadvantages come from the removal of a ubiquitous headphone interconnect that's been on our devices for years? iPhone's have gotten thicker since the removal of the headphone jack. Apple's made iPods much thinner than any of the iPhones, and they all had headphone jacks.
There's no problem. It's not redundant if you want to charge your phone and listen to audio at the same time - I have those Bose headphones noice cancelling headphones that everyone travels with. To use them, I need to carry around an adapter which is a pain. When I fly, I have to choose whether to charge my phone or listen to audio.
Look, I love my iPhone X, but I've gotten absolutely nothing out of losing the headphone jack. It's only come at costs.
..although Apple did not use the space for anything else when they removed it from the iPhone 7.
Whats the evidence? Scotty from strange parts actually managed to add a working headphone jack back to the iPhone, in the exact spot where it had been removed!
He cut out one piece of plastic relating to barometric pressure, and moved the taptic engine a bit. And all of this was on the 7, so Apple surely had space for a headphone jack on the 7+, right?
Maybe wired headphones are going the way of the DVD drive. But at this point, the change has felt very user-hostile. If they cared about their customers, iPhones would support USB-C and wired headphones.
> so Apple surely had space for a headphone jack on the 7+, right
That’s easily answerable by heading over to iFixIt. You’ll see the Plus models are near identical to the non-Plus in available space, just the Plus has a bigger battery and even more circuitry (do to the dual camera). Apple doesn’t waste any space inside their devices typically.
The pairing isn’t great IMO. So many calls take a minute to figure out AirPod connectivity issues. It’s frustrating switching airpods between a Mac and iPhone. Much of the time only left or right pair, and the only way to fix it is to put them back in the case and re-pair them. Sadly it doesn’t “just work”
Another common problem is the mics tend to rust out after about a year of usage, eventually breaking down. This happens if you use them for any exercise (which apple advertises them for) with sweat rusting the mesh on the bottom.
Eventually I switched back to a manual headphone cable with a mic built in. It always works...
The switching between iOS and Mac is indeed buggy. macOS also lacks system-wide support for airplay 2. I think they must be dealing with legacy code and/or support that needs modernized. Switching between iOS and iPad with AirPods doesn’t give people issues, so I don’t think it’s a problem with AirPod hardware or iOS.
Rhe sweat problem is interesting! I haven’t experienced this degradation, but I think my head’s sweat mostly runs off my nose. Is it because of how your hair is styled?
To be fair I wore them 2-3 times a week running. Sweat definitely roles off my ears onto the airpods. I bet sweat is particularly corrosive. The Apple store tried to brush off the rust and it worked a little better, but not consistently.
I would recommend buying cheap exercise headphones instead of using airpods.
I also sometimes prefer having the over ear headphones for some sound cancelation. You can buy reasonable headphones plus a mic-in cable for less than $50.
None of that requires there to be no jack. Im on the phone for hours at a time, need my hands and speaker isn't an option. Batteries are a real concern and getting a backup pair would be expensive.
AirPods warn you when they're low (it requires a considerable amount of time in-ear to get them low, about 4+ hours), then if you pop them in the case for 5 minutes, you get 45 minutes of play time.
Battery life is rarely a concern for me, and I wear my AirPods almost constantly. I even sometimes sleep with them.
That is 4+ hours in-ear. What usually happens is that someone wants to talk to you throughout your day, and you put them in the case for 5-10 mins and you gain an hour. Or you eat lunch with co-workers and they go in the case for a bit. Then, after work, when the battery is dying, you need to take a shower, so you put them in the case for like 20 minutes and you have enough charge for the rest of the day; then you go to bed and they fully charge over night.
Won't work for me at all, I have my headphones on for hours at a time. What makes it worse is that you could have your wireless ones and someone like me his wired ones.
Apple decided rightly or not that they don't care about me. So be it.
> Apple decided rightly or not that they don't care about me.
If you’re view is that every product should cater to the needs of everyone, then yep, Apple shouldn’t care about you as you are being unrealistic.
You get wired headphones and a dongle in the box, you can buy Beats headphones with the same chip as the Airpods with longer battery life for about the same price, or you can use a vast ocean of other wired or Bluetooth headphones. It’s not like you are forced to use something that doesn’t work for your needs.
if its that important of a part of your life, buy two pairs of wireless headphones. but given the ridiculously fast charge time of airpods, why worry? otherwise, I hope apple keeps tailoring the products to the normal use cases and not making weird compromises for pro audio users and those with extremely high usage times. that's speaking as a shareholder anyway...
The trick for the AirPods is duty cycling such that there is no down time. You put one in the case when the tone sounds, put it pack in your ear a few minutes later, and then charge the other one. You can be on a single call all day.
I loved everything about the AirPods except that they have no noise reduction. The New York City subway is loud as hell. Street noise is loud as hell. Even when not wearing headphones I wear earplugs to block out all the noise.
I don't understand the appeal at all of headphones with no noise reduction. How does anyone use them in a noisy environment without setting the volume uncomfortably high?
> How does anyone use them in a noisy environment without setting the volume uncomfortably high?
This is a large part of why doctors are starting to warn of an epidemic of hearing loss. Headphones with poor noise isolation tend to encourage people to crank the volume way too high.
a) Noise reduction usually requires a powered component, or some kind of neck brace to contain the battery required for active noise cancelling. This adds expense and weight.
b) Sometimes it's good to be aware of your surroundings! When I'm listening to music, noise is usually sufficiently blocked by the sheer volume of the track, and during podcasts and audiobooks I'm also not bothered by the sounds of the streets.
If anything, it's good to hear a siren, or the ramblings of a nearby crazy person in order to avoid them.
The only time I find noise cancellation useful is on airplanes.
The BeatsX are earplug type headphones that do decent sound isolation. They’re not as snazzy as the AirPods and they have some minor UX frustrations, but for the most part have been pretty good.
I'm in the same boat. I replaced the BeatsX tips with some 3rd party foamies and they do a pretty good job of damping external noise.
I don't recommend the PowerBeats though. No matter what sort of tips you use, they mute almost nothing. Also, the slightest breeze causes tons of wind noise.
Man, I really find myself on the opposite end of the spectrum here. The only thing I love about my airports is the charging case. Size wise it's great.
However, airpods are uncomfortable, always feel like they're going to fall out. I've already had to replace one of them because they're easily lost. The sound quality is so-so. I have to crank the volume way up because there isn't any kind of noise isolation, much less noise cancellation.
All around they're a very very average product offering.
this is not my experience. my MacBook often refuses to connect to my airpods. rebooting usually fixes it. sometimes I have to re-pair. then I also can't use them with other devices.
they also cut out quite often probably because I live in a crowded downtown area.
when they work I mostly like them but sadly for me they don't always work.
Can you replace the battery in your airpods? No? So you mean you're literally buying something to throw away every 5 years or so? How environmentally friendly, but I'm sure Apple is glad you've decided to make paying them a regular part of your life. Nothing about removing the headphone jacks had a point other than to increase profits. The phones are thicker, waterproof phones have headphone jacks, they parts are cheap, the next big thing isn't really a drop in replacement or better yet.
Same experience here, don't think I'll ever be able to go back to wired headphones. Especially in the gym / when running, the AirPods are amazing, they fit perfectly (unlike a lot of other headphones), never run out of battery and connect instantly to my devices.
I believe Apple made the right move, many other manufacturers are already following, bluetooth headphones are getting cheaper and quality is getting better.
Not sure I understand - wired headphones are much cheaper to manufacture, are inherently higher quality (they'll always have less loss and less latency), can fit just as well, don't have batteries to begin with, and are much easier to connect to devices. The only point that makes any sense to me is that wireless headphones are better for exercise, but why would Apple remove the audio jack just to indirectly improve the state of wireless audio for when people exercise?
This is just my opinion, but I believe that the whole notion of being more futuristic is also being fully wireless. And partially removing the headphone jack is just part of the move to a full wireless future.
Someone just had to be the first to introduce it to the mainstream, I’m fairly certain that it will be widely accepted in a few years.
I lived in that wireless future for a while and it sucked. Incessant connectivity issues, compatibility problems, irritatingly high latency, and the never-ending hassle of keeping all those batteries charged. I've abandoned it and gone back to wires for everything - keyboard, mouse, headphones, car stereo, kitchen stereo, phone headset, all of it. So much simpler; everything just works, all the time.
Well Airpods work perfectly well with my Galaxy S8. You don't need Apple phones to use them.
And my S8 also has 3.5mm jack for when my 2 hour calls exhaust the airpods battery or when I want to push a drum track from my phone synth to a speaker :-)
Anyone that has walked through Shinjuku, Tokyo or Shinagawa station in peak hour with Bluetooth headphones will be able to confirm that there is not enough spectrum.
I get audio drop outs with airpods everytime I pass through one of the above stations.
Funny how they really should have worried about this but apparently haven't.
But you can still use the lightning earphones that come together (or buy a dongle, since the newer model phones are dropping the adapter). 3rd party dongles are cheaper and some allow you to charge and listen to music at the same time.
I am amazed this issue isn't raised more often. The majority of my headphone usage is in downtown San Francisco. Any wireless headphones will break up like every other second. For my purposes they are useless.
Some adaptive system for adjusting the transmission power might help. Now I can leave my phone on the desk and wonder to the other floor and other end of the apartment with my AirPods working just fine.
Since a year or two in entire EU using any electronic devices is completely allowed (except for a takeoff and landing but that's for security reasons in case of emergency) so I'm not sure where are you flying. I've been using my Momentums' without a single issue for few years now and I fly a lot.
Mostly Eurowings, Ryanair, TAP, Alitalia, Aegean, British Airways, Austrian Airlines, Lufthansa, Iberia, Condor, Thomas Cook, Finnair.
I am yet to hear that I can turn Bluetooth on after the security debriefing and even though I fly regularly, so far just boarded like two flights where there was on-flight wlan available.
You have to turn everything off for takeoff and landing, but inbetween it's all fine - the only difference left between airlines is whether they'll leave people use airplane-mode during takeoff. But don't ask attendants - regardless of actual regulations, when in doubt on a technical point they will always err on the side of caution and tell you to shut it down.
It's not even because of the risk of interference - it's just that if everyone has their electronic devices out and there is sudden turbulence, or worse still, a crash, they become projectiles that cause further injury - laptops especially.
The rules changed fairly recently, but lufthansa.com now says:
> You can use your Bluetooth headphones during the entire flight without restriction – even during take-off and landing, unless the crew instruct otherwise.
britishairways.com:
> Bluetooth devices, e.g. wireless keyboards or headphones, can be used during the flight but must be switched off for taxi, take-off and landing.
I believe that Bluetooth was prohibited on Lufthansa as recently as 2017, so it might be worth to check for each airline you're using.
If you're on a Lufthansa flight I'd recommend reading the safety card or the in-flight magazine. One of them usually mentions BT is allowed at cruise altitude.
> I fly regularly and have yet to be on a EU flight where Bluetooth is allowed.
Really? Am I missing something? I've never been pulled up on using bluetooth headphones on a plane in the EU. The flight attendants have never said anything, and I've been in full view of them before...
Airplane mode generally disables all wireless connections, including Bluetooth.
EDIT: researching it that could be just a "be safe" catch all though, and regulation might actually mean just cellular in some cases. No idea how a normal person is supposed to figure out what exactly applies to the current flight then.
I worked at an airline two years ago on the rollout of inflight wifi and they advise customers to enable airplane mode and reenable wifi (if it's disabled). These days within aviation, "airplane mode" refers to disabling just of the cellular radios.
OnePlus did a poll that got the answer 88% of customers wanted them to keep the headphone jack. Which they then got rid of anyway. Presumably the poll was hoped or expected to reinforce a decision already made.
It's very clear consumers aren't clamouring for losing the jack. There are a lot more dollars selling wireless and they have an inherent limited life thanks to battery lifespan.
The SE, with a headphone jack, is roughly the same thickness as the new XS without. They both have bluetooth for those who might like wireless.
That's not Apple or whoever listening, that's them imposing.
To put this in perspective, the current OnePlus 6 is 155.7x75.4x7.8mm, so adding a mere 0.1mm to the thickness increases the total volume by about 1100 mm^3. A typical headphone jack that you might find in a phone has a PCB footprint of 9x14mm, so assuming it takes up the entire thickness of the phone that's about 1000 mm^3.
That does assume near perfect efficiency for the redistributed volume. Presumably working around the physical limitations of the where the jack needs to be versus all the other components, efficiency would not be so great.
But anyway who are we kidding? It’s not about making space in the device in the end. Perhaps that’s the straw that broke the camels back, but not what set Apple off in this direction to begin with.
A) They could make it thicker. It’s not an either/or.
B) No one was calling for the elimination of the headphone jack. Every poll shows broad support for it. Apple themselves said it took ‘courage’ which is not the adjective you’d use to describe an action that the world agrees with.
Sure they could make it thicker. But they won't because I suspect over the last decade they have done market research which tells them IMHO the obvious: nobody wants a thicker phone.
Common sense suggests that if the world wanted a thicker phone then one of the hundreds of OEMs would have made one and been successful at it. But yet that has never happened.
It probably takes "courage" to make a phone thicker... I see myself using my phone less and less to listen to music, sometimes because I forget the dongle. Mind you, I also have bluetooth headphones but they're not very handy on business trips where I need to think about yet another cable and about actually recharging them.
I've consistently heard people say that they would prefer a thicker phone if it meant greater battery life, so clearly there isn't nobody who wants a thicker phone.
I’m someone who always has the smart battery case on my iPhone, effectively doubling its size. I wouldn’t dream of leaving the house without the case attached. Apple has demonstrated that they can offer multiple models of differing dimensions and internals, but they won’t even consider this.
The strange parts guy on youtube added a headphone jack to the iPhone 7. So, I think the stated reason for removing the headphone jack to make room for the battery is complete BS.
> But it comes at the expense of more space for batteries or features that more people will use.
Yet Samsung did fit a 4000 mAh battery, a headphone jack, wireless charging, expendable storage, fingerprint sensor, 512Gb of storage AND a PEN in their IP68 Note 9.
Comparing the headphone jack and Ethernet port is silly. A great majority of users use the jack for headphones which are always within 1 meter of the device. Ethernet is often much further away, meaning wireless adds more value / convenience.
Not to mention that with Ethernet (and wired power) the user is tethered to a fixed place, while with wired headphones on a cell phone the user can get up and move freely, since both ends of the wire are moving together.
> the options for phones with headphone jacks and no crapware preinstalled are exceedingly limited.
A thousand times this. The current market for phones is absolute crap. We need more competition. (And we also need at least some of that competition to quit playing "follow the leader" when the "leader" is an imagined title, and the "leader" is clearly blind and thrashing...)
Android One has at least helped expand the options for phones with no crapware and a reasonable update policy. A decent number of them still have jacks.
Project Treble makes updates easier for OEMs but in no way guarantees that they will actually happen.
The Moto G6 for example has Treble but Motorola has said it will only get one major update, to Pie. It came out in May with March security patches, they released the May security patch in July, and then released the July security patch in September.
Android One devices will (supposedly) all receive 2 major version updates and 3 years of monthly security patches.
But when Treble is installed, isn't installing a ROM with the new version a simple business, at least for people who can follow technical instructions ?
As long as the bootloader is unlocked the ROM flashing process isn't really any different from non-Treble devices, at least from the user's perspective. It should make developing the ROMs significantly easier. Obviously there are Treble devices whose bootloaders can't be unlocked and third party ROMs are still impossible on those devices.
In principle a Generic System Image (GSI) can be flashed onto any Treble device and everything will just work. From what I've seen so far this is not really quite true and there will still need to be device-specific tweaks to ROMs, but the amount of device-specific code should be far lower than before and make life easier for maintainers. Hopefully the end result is more devices with functioning and well maintained ROMs available.
Yeah, they made a bunch of jokes/roasts about apple removing the headphone jack, and still having one on the pixel, and then just removed it on the pixel 2. Tech hypocrisy at its finest.
This, I see people calling the removal of the headphone jack a colossal failure, but if phones are selling, then how can it be a failure?
People have a natural resistance to change, 20 years ago my city saw major protests when it wanted to close a road and open up to the river underneath it. It would be a colossal failure, naturally it wasn’t and today no one can imagine the town without the nice nature stuff.
I think the headphone jacks are in that category. They weren’t really great, and now that they are gone, only niches really miss them.
The AirPods are such a nice product. I mean, Apple basically made Bluetooth not suck. They are locked to the Apple ecosystem, but they connect seamlessly across your devices, and Apple has frankly once again embarrassed the rest of the tech sector by making age old technology actually useable for people who don’t want to fiddle around.
Now, if removing the headphone jack had been a failure, it would probably have come back, and everyone else, the one-plus included, probably wouldn’t be removing it.
I’m not for or against it by the way. The AirPods would’ve worked with the headphone jack. I just think calling it a failure or a fiasco is silly when it’s so obviously working out great.
But Apple isn't the top selling phone any more. It's the Galaxy models. The only time new Apple phones retake the top spot is when they first release a new model.
>But Apple isn't the top selling phone any more. It's the Galaxy models.
The iPhone rarely was the top selling phone and never had the majority of the market (though it was of course a single company against 4-5 other companies anyway).
It was the phone that caught most of the top end (pricy) market and almost all of the profits, and it remains that.
That said, not sure what's this "isn't the top selling phone any more" is supposed to mean. The headphone-jack-less iPhone X killed it in the market:
That report is EXACTLY what I mean. Apple is having to push the narrative based on segmented data in order to appear to have market dominance. 'Early 2018' is when they released their last model - and prior to the S9 release. Even then, Apple was barely beating Galaxy models 2 and 3 years older.
That report was the moment I knew Apple had lost their position as the leader in the market, because they had to take specific dates in time to say they were best-selling...as opposed to a few years ago, when they were best selling all year long in a runaway.
Do you even read what you post links to? You are posting ONE quarter results from winter of 2018 that completely backs up what I just wrote. You need to at least review what you are randomly Googling.
As with most decisions that Apple makes lately, you are correct, it is not a disaster for them. Just like when you stick your middle finger up at another person, usually you won’t personally feel offended by your own finger. And if you don’t care if that person comes back to speak to you again or not, then I guess you’ve “won”.
You missed the whole part where the person that was supposed to have been offended (by all those armchair pundits) in fact not only keeps talking to you, but goes out and buys your product in even larger quantities...
While I’m definitely not a fan of losing the headphone jack, and don’t love not being able to use my headphones and charge my phone, I do see one positive side effect, and I wonder if Apple is doing it on purpose.
You can now buy $20 bluetooth earbuds from Anker that are pretty decent. Apple saying “guess what, everybody: you love bluetooth” has forced the market to respond, and that whole price-down-quality-up thing is really starting to happen.
This, of course, is of no use to people who depend on minimal latency. It will be a very long time, if ever, before bluetooth can match hardwired latency.
What we really need next from Apple is for them to replace lightning with USB-C. I’d love to see the ability to choose to externalize the DAC+amplifier without buying either a lightning-only accessory or a camera adapter. Oh, and also be able to charge the phone while we’re at it.
> Apple saying “guess what, everybody: you love bluetooth”
I'd think Apple's trick isn't really Bluetooth which remains often “not great”. It's the W1 chip:
“As well as making pairing and switching devices a lot easier, the W1 chip also increases the range of the Bluetooth connection and gives headphones a better battery life. For example, the Beats Solo3 has a battery life that lasts 40 hours and a range of up to 150 feet. Those numbers are just insane for Bluetooth.”[1]
Regarding latency: although I love my AirPods and I do not miss the headphone jack, there’s one real application that I doubt will ever be adequate over Bluetooth: monitoring the audio while you’re playing electric guitar through an amp simulator on your phone. The tiniest amount of latency really stands out while you’re playing.
Haven't found a set of BT headphones that have acceptable latency for gaming, so I thing the latency a problem for any audio application that requires low-latency.
> only a smallish subset of wireless headsets support it.
That was true a couple of years ago. Now apt-x support is pretty common even in $20 niche. You can buy FiiO BTR3 for $50 (at Taobao), and it supports everything from apt-X (HD and LL) and LDAC (contributed to the Android Open Source Project by Sony) to Huawei HWA, works as USB-DAC too, and you can plug your favorite headphones into it.
It's flat untrue, too. You can hear audio latency nearly down to single-digit milliseconds. In fact, there's a fun recording trick where you duplicate a track, pan it hard left and the original hard right, and then delay one by 10ms. (They get heard as two separate parts even though they're completely identical.)
Yeah that's probably fine. Humans have some sync tolerance because speed of sound is so low. Something 15m away will have 44ms delay of the sound compared to the vision.
But there are other areas where tolerance matters more I think. Say you press a key and sound comes either after 5ms or after 50 ms. I think that would be noticeably different.
Interestingly, I use Bluetooth headphones with my TV and I have never noticed issues with audio/video sync. Have modern Bluetooth stacks reduced the problem or is the TV compensating for the latency by delaying the video?
"100ms" probably comes from the long distance telephony investigations into round-trip time. If I remember correctly, 100-ish ms RTT was when people would start to notice the delay, and conversations became very difficult above ~200 ms. As a result, a lot of telephony hardware tries to keep latencies under that limit.
The brain obviously notices far smaller latencies.
Yes! goddamnit Apple. What’s with lighthning ports in iPhones when you make all this huzzy wuzzy talk that MacBooks are all usb-c because usb-c is the future.
Please be consistent. USB-C everywhere in all your devices. You’re a trillion dollar company now, get your shit together!
I wish there could be a transition period of, say, 3 product cycles on the phones where they had BOTH lightning and USB-C ports. It would be a little ugly and take up space (presumably side by side), but would make the transition a lot less painful. No real chance of Apple doing this, though.
Ended up attaching my dongle to my headphones with a Velcro cable tie after forgetting it one too many times (I need to take it on and off all the time to connect it to my Mac, as it doesn’t have a Lightning port - the fact that that situation exists feels like an omen that Apple aren’t quite firing on all cylinders). It sucks and looks stupid but it kind of solves the problem.
I wish they’d not removed the port, it’s a real pain and I’m not willing to go wireless until there’s a way to do it with zero latency. I’ll be really disappointed if the new iPad removes the headphone socket as it’s pretty essential for music making on the go.
I use a dongle too. I got it permanently attached on my headphones.
i think he makes a false dichotomy in his article. He is not bringing up a dongle at all and makes the choice to either a phone with a 3.5mm output or bluetooth. I would give this more credibility if this was discussed as well.
I get why some people are annoyed, but it’s not like the 3.5mm jack was so great.
If you forget the massive number of compatible headphones in existence, the 3.5mm jack isn’t that great. If we were designing the ideal audio interface today, it would not be the 3.5mm jack.
For an audiophile experience, you’d better love the DAC built into your phone. You also probably need to live with whatever audio processing parameters the phone manufacturer chose because probably few, if any, are exposed. You’re largely shut out of control over audio processing details.
Meanwhile, for mobile use you, need to thether your head to your phone and manage the cord. Not a great fit for mobile uses because you don’t want to move around too freely. It gets worse in the oft-mentioned scenario of charging while listening, because now you’re generally tethering your head to a wall or at least a battery pack. Not great.
The 3.5mm jack also doesn’t have a decent protocol for on-device listening controls. There are workarounds so maybe you can play/pause or skip tracks, but then again maybe not. There are wide compatibility problems. Forget about anything advanced.
It’s not like lightning connector is perfect, and neither is Bluetooth. I’m just pointing out that the 3.5mm jack isn’t a no-brainer by any stretch and it makes sense to look for something better, whether or no you think Apple or other OEMs succeeded.
> For an audiophile experience, you’d better love the DAC built into your phone.
that's why i use lg's v series of phones that include a high-end audio dac.
> Meanwhile, for mobile use you, need to tether your head to your phone and manage the cord. Not a great fit for mobile uses because you don’t want to move around too freely.
that's a false argument because the inclusion of an audio jack does not prevent the use of bluetooth. i use high-end headphones at work, home, and in certain travel situations like a plane and use bluetooth everywhere else like with my car and wireless bluetooth speakers.
you said the 3.5mm jack would not be the interface designed today, but yet, you didn't come up with an alternative. the sound with a proper dac and headphones and a physical audio jack is incomparable to bluetooth and bluetooth headphones. and having the physical audio jack makes it much easier to do what i want with the audio when i want. whether it's attaching to a bose bluetooth speaker or outputting audio to sample on my op-1, it's the best of both worlds.
the problem i have with apple is that they have never given a compelling and logical reason for removing the audio jack. my lg v35 has the audio jack plus a high-end audio dac and yet the design is every bit as sleek and compact as the iphone x phones, in fact, maybe even more so because the camera doesn't protrude.
so all of this is pointless arguing simply because apple can't even answer the question of "why", as in why even remove it in the first place.
Apple is pursuing the wireless future, as simple as that. Be it audio, data transfer, or even power. In the case of headphone jack, they pursue that goal by fixing the bluetooth flaws not by content with what we have right now. Is it a worthy goal to pursue? Time will tell.
I am not against the future but shouldn't we have the alternative ready before we kill the 'previous' version of something? For me the new wireless headphones are not an option because of lack of hi-fi options and because of the need of charging frequently. If we had the same exact experience (great sound quality for lossless and once a year charging) than I would be more inclined to buy it.
Caring about hi-fi headphone audio and needing to charge frequently while listening to audio is probably a combination of requirements that affects an extremely tiny portion of iPhone users. Also, there’s wireless charging.
Actually this is why most of the hifi heads bought iPhones, 6s had the best DAC that you can buy for a reasonable price (less than 1000 USD). I have converted all my collection to ALAC just to be on the Apple platform and be able to listen to lossless on my phone. I also use a decent entry level hifi headphone (Focal Spark - wired) this is where my hearing still be able to identify differences. The entire setup was not too expensive and it had great performance. Now, if I try to have it with the recent iPhone offerings, it will be certainly more expensive and slightly shittier, and I can just convert my entire collection to mp3s because the system does not support it anyways. On the top of that, I was able to listen to my collection on my proper audio system at home before while right now I am not able to connect the phone to the amplifier anymore. So, to summarize, Apple offers my a way more expensive solution that makes me miss out on many aspects of listening lossless music. It is simply not worth it.
The digital source material is a limiting factor for achievable quality, but so is the DAC that is to translate the source material. Some cheap DACs are not meant to translate specific bit depths and sampling rate, some supply the jack with less output power, some exhibit more crosstalk, some have more limited frequency responses. So yes, second to the source material, it's the DAC that is the limiting factor for good sound.
It's the speakers that is the limiting factor, by an extremely wide margin.
A cheap DAC can produce around 16 bits and 20 kHz. It's not difficult. A pair of $10 earplugs is much more limited in what sound it can physically play.
It actually isn’t that easy, like at all. A tiny DAC in a phone amplified to loudspeaker levels is going to sound qualitatively different from a stronger signal out of something built to that spec. Not to mention interference issues in analog signals at low power.
People charge their phone everyday so it isn't a massive deal to charge your AirPods as well. And the sound quality right now is more than good enough especially given that you're asking people to tradeoff their data usage.
I tend to leave my headphones in my backpack or jacket pocket. (well, actually both, they are so cheap that I have a half dozen sets of earbuds scattered around different places - I have a nice ~$150 set of earbuds at my desk at work, and cheap < $20 sets everywhere else)
If I have to charge them then I have to remember to take them out and plug them in, and also then have to remember to take them out of the charger and take them with me.
I'm not super sensitive to sound quality, but charging is a deal breaker.
I charge my phone once a day. I have to charge my AirPods many times a day, and often have to play games where I take one out to charge it while relying on the other one, and then swap them later. (Note: I like them so much I tolerate this insanity gladly.)
What makes you think it is normal to charge your phone every day? I charge mine on average every 4th day when the battery has run down to about 30%-35% (or at around 12 hours of screen time). I use two phones, one for daily use and another for work in the forest/on the farm. The daily phone is a Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 which can last for up to a week on a charge, the work phone a Motorola Defy of around 8 years old which now lasts for around 4 days, it used to last for a week as well. While I might be a bit of an outlier with these devices I don't see charging a phone daily as a norm to be espoused. In the age of "dumb" phones charging the thing once a week was the norm, not the exception. If these devices are to be the go-to for all things digital they should have longer autonomy.
Exactly this. People don't realize that almost nobody needs better CPUs in the phones and almost everybody would benefit from higher capacity battery. If batteries were developing at the same pace as CPUs we would have batteries that last for years with a single charge. For me the ideal phone is iPhone 6s that does everything that I have ever wanted to do with a phone, and even more that I do not actually need. The only missing feature is a long lasting battery.
I saw a Samsung ad today, boasting that the battery lasts all day... I was mildly disgusted that's where we're at. There are seriously devices that don't last the day?
Wireless is a terrible thing to base the future on. With wired you don't have to worry about interference or the fact that anyone with the right antenna can send/receive wireless. Of course it isn't always practical to use wired, but I think the majority of connection use cases work perfectly fine with a cable, don't need to be made wireless, and are in fact made worse by the usage of wireless.
You're trusting/hoping that [0] will never happen, or (for WiFi) that [1] will never happen. At least with most Internet usage there are additional layers involved that have their own security which can protect your in flight data, but the firmware on BT/WiFi chipsets doesn't necessarily have that sort of layered security.
Unfortunately, low latency Bluetooth codecs are fragmented between AptX, which can achieve 32ms latency but isn’t supported by iOS, and AAC which isn’t generally supported by accessories, especially the low latency variant.
So you’re basically stuck with AirPods or new Beats if you want low latency Bluetooth headphones for an iPhone. And this seems unlikely to change.
They’re also striving for the future where your phone is measurably, obviously thinner than 3.5mm. As in thin-enough-to-wear-on-your-sleeve thin.
It’s a long game, but I think part of their rationale is that we had to get rid of that thing eventually — which is inarguable, IMHO — and so the earlier, the better. If you’re forced to make wireless headphones that don’t suck, you will.
It's like a car manufacturer removing the engine, because "they're striving for an EV future", they just don't know how to build an EV car yet, so now you get one with no engine at all. Shotgun gets a hand crank. Onwards, Mr. Flintstone.
Exactly, this was a logical progression to that future. Want to make a completely wireless device? Take away the things that are easy to do wirelessly. First: audio, then power, next up is...?
I am still pissed at Apple for removing the jack and I held on to my iPhone 6s, until now. I ordered myself an iPhone Xs Max, but only because Shure now offers a Lightning cable for their IEMs. I use the SE846. The biggest issue with the Xs is still, that I cant charge and listen at the same time without using a dongle. And since I travel a lot, this could make me reconsider to buy Apple in the future.
Not pissed enough to reconsider the heavy iphone xs max investment apparently, which, in the end, might have made a difference compared to continuously feeding them money.
That's true. For me, the advantages of a stable Apple ecosystem outweigh the issue with the missing headphone jack. The fact that I can still use and upgrade my iPhone 6s is validation. With Android, I always fear that I don't get updates anymore after just two years. And I never liked Google's app store. There too many malicious apps in the store.
I probably use the new iPhone at least as long as I used the old one. The update cycles are getting longer as these phones get more powerful.
I'm pretty disgruntled about losing the 3.5mm jack, but I don't buy this idea that Apple did it to sell wireless Beats, for one reason: the product lineup sucks.
Apple knows how to make truly great audio hardware; the AirPods really are extraordinary. But the Beats lineup clearly hasn't received any serious attention, as evidenced by two things:
1) they still sell wireless hardware that doesn't have the W1 chip, two years after it was first released
2) for God's sake, all their devices charge over micro-USB!
Well, the article shows that Beats still has a plurality in the bluetooth market in sales dollars and units sold. Beats quality aside, I think that still makes a highly plausible (partial) motivation to push people toward bluetooth.
You’re not the only one. But now I feel like I’m the only one who has the exact same issues with Lightning connections.
I get the same pop when jacking in using the Lightning-to-3.5 dongle. And I mean, making the 3.5 connection first, Lightning second.
Also, Lighting (and I suspect USB C) female connectors are dust, lint, and particulate magnets. What happens when those get fouled, the gold plating on the Lightning cable is scraped off one or more of the pins. So then you have either a broken cable or one that will charge but only if oriented correctly. So same issue, rotate the connector and maybe it works.
AND the thing that pisses me off the most...I have to carry around some old earbuds with the 3.5 in case I want to watch some Netflix on my MacBook Pro because I can’t plug my new EarPids into it. There’s no Lightning jack on any Mac. And there’s not even a dongle for that use case. All the USB M to Lightning F are for charging only.
Huh, I got 3.5mm earphones and an adapter with my phone. Also, get AirPods. Unless you call for several hours uninterrupted every day, like somebody up thread claimed.
Airpods? Lets see. MacRumors Buyer's Guide says "caution - approaching end of life cycle" [1]
Furthermore they look terrible. They're white, and they look like I have an Oral B toothbrush in my ears. I have no option to avoid either of that? Thank you, no.
As for the discussion: I'd like to be able to enter a store, listening to music, with all my radios off. It is called airplane mode. Was removing 1 gbit ethernet from laptops a good idea? I miss it, but having an adequate amount of USB ports solves the issue. Why not have two 2 USB-C ports on a smartphone and be done with it?
I recently needed a new phone and ended up buying a Nokia 8. The fact that it had a headphone jack was one of my main reasons for selecting it. I'm not going to ditch my collection of high quality functioning headphones just to spend more money buying new ones and getting worse audio quality.
I use the headphones for phone calls, I often work remotely / travel and have maybe 3-4 hours on the phone a day on average. Wireless headphones don’t have a mic I can hold close to my mouth, and headsets look doorky, especially if I’m travelling. Not to mention that if the battery runs out I’m stuck holding the phone to my ear (no ability to mute) or on speakerphone (can’t work in an open office or public environment).
Not being able to charge the phone and be on the phone at the same time is incredibly annoying. Sometimes I take video calls on my laptop and I can’t plug the lightning headphones into my laptop without an adapter.
I didn’t think it would annoy me so much but there are times when I need to get work done and this gets in the way, and the alternatives just aren’t reliable enough.
Having a thinner phone is irrelevant because I have to put a case around it anyway.
It’s frustrating that we have so many different connectors (lightning, 3.5mm, Bluetooth, hdmi, mini usb, usb C, usb A, MagSafe, ...). I wish apple would pick one and go for it (usb C maybe?)
People can’t hear in some cases, especially as I work with people from all over the world and English is often a second language. You need to be 100% clear, consistently without failure.
Also, it looks weird if I don’t pull the mic closer. With your headphones people can’t tell you’re on the phone.
We’ve had telephones for over 100 years so I don’t think it’s too much to ask.
I'll bet they can't hear you as well as you think. I've gotten many calls from people who fade in/out no matter how many times I tell them I'm having trouble hearing them. It's because they can hear themselves and think it's fine.
no it was not, some of us still like our high quality wired headphones. with that said im also a great believer in having a dedicated device, while ill occasionally use my phone for convenience i generally use a separate device for music as it can provide much better sound quality and not hammer my phones already under capable battery but im a little more serious about my audio than most people.
it does however highlight an interesting point, most portable devices make a consideration for air travel in their design, the dell xps15 for example has a 97wh battery because 99wh is the limit for taking into an airplane cabin, yet turn on airplane mode on your phone and it disables all wireless connections, bluetooth included so if you were relying on your airpods to provide your in flight music youre out of luck
I’ve used my bluetooth headphones on all flights I’ve taken for the past few years, all of them in the EU.
I don’t hide it and I never had any trouble with it.
The original Ericsson Bluetooth development boards came with a CD full of documentation that included papers describing the effects of personal electronic equipment on avionics systems. They could have just asked you instead.
It’s possible to turn bluetooth on while in flight mode.
People use bluetooth headphones a lot in flight.
One of the premier use case of Bose’s noise cancelling bluetooth headphones is to use on planes.
No announcement is made to ask people to not use bluetooth.
No flight attendant asks people to not use bluetooth headphones.
Planes are not crashing.
It’s probably safe to use bluetooth headphones on a plane.
is that an iphone specific feature? (im an android user so not that familiar with ios) if not ive just not noticed it before
i guess it highlights how stupid the ban on wireless connectivity on planes is (not like it wasnt blatantly obvious that theyd never let a vehicle carrying hundreds of lives into the sky with unsheilded components that could be brought down by anyone with a ten quid nokia)
It works on my Android phone, and the last few flights I've taken have specifically said "we don't have WiFi, but you can activate airplane mode then turn on Bluetooth".
(Your writing would be much easier to read with capital letters and apostrophes.)
probably and were i not jobless, homeless and using a knackered old laptop with several non working keys including the at/apostrophe key and incredibly intermittent shift keys id likely use them more often but such is life
One argument I've heard is that it's not a single person who leaves their phone turned on that's an issue, it's when 300 people have their phone turned on.
I don't believe that one either, but it's a little more believable than thinking that a single phone can cause enough interference to affect the plane.
I certainly have had PC speakers that picked up interference from a GSM cellphone. Cell phones are wireless transmitters that can transmit in the 3 watt range. A typical CB radio is 4 watts. The radio in the airplane is in the 2-25 watt range, and it's trying to communicate with a ground station that might be a fair distance away.
I don't think the real concern was ever that cellphones would cause planes to fall out of the sky, however, there's real reason to be concerned that they could interrupt the pilot's ability to communicate with ATC, which I'm sure could get dangerous.
There's probably no faster way to get everyone to shut their phones off than a "this is your Captain speaking; a cellphone on board is preventing me from talking to the ATC" however.
if im not wrong the interference affects the sending/receiving equipment not the actual signal itself, the reason those cheapo pc speakers picked up the tell tale pips of an incoming mobile call is because they likely werent shielded (back in the days of cathode ray tvs/monitors this could be an issue as putting unshielded speakers too close to the tv caused issues)
but mission critical equipment like life support systems, airplanes and other such tech would never be allowed to be produced and used without at least basic shielding all round
Some planes are approved for Bluetooth (generally the ones with WiFi), others are not. Fewer are approved for cell signals (only the ones with inflight cell service)
I'm only going by the stuff I've read in the informational section of in-flight magazines [0]. I'm sure it depends on the regulatory environment of different countries, airlines and flights.
It used to be that running any uncertified electronic equipment at all was disallowed on takeoff/landing, no matter what the radio status. In the top hits on Google for "Portable IFE" I'm seeing WiFi devices on pages with 2012 copyright dates that claim no certification is required. Sounds like BS to me.
Well, I am going by the DO-178C/ED-12C (Software) and DO-254/ED-80 (Hardware) from the RTCA and EUROCAE which I have conveniently next to me since I am currently planning a Software Assurance Level D system for use in the A320.
Also I am going by the 2 Portable IFE systems from our hardware partners that I have in my Lab to play around with. Portable IFE systems are completely battery powered and have no connection to the Aircraft. The only "certification" that you need is that you would need to demonstrate that this device does not need certification. Which in the case of the 2 devices I have right here is fairly simple thing.
I like bluetooth headphones, but even the airpods have trouble connecting to my iphone at times, and UI to connect the headphones is a complicated 5+ tap process. And if they aren't airpods, then I have to go into the settings app specifically and add 3 more taps for even more annoyance.
And when I tap to connect a specific bluetooth headphone, it may or may not connect. If it doesn't, its an even more annoying process of turning bluetooth on and off and the headphones on and off to get a connection.
It's this part of bluetooth alone that is the most annoying part of them. On top of apple not giving a good dedicated UI to managing your bluetooth headphones. Burying it 3-5 screens deep is not a good user experience.
So Apple did it to fatten the bottom line of their Beats subsidiary, which currently owns about half the Bluetooth headphone market. So why is everyone else dropping the jack on their phones? They don't have a similar profitable arrangement. It seems like they're just pissing-off potential customers, but without an income stream to compensate.
It also reduces the bill of materials (cheaper and easier manufacturing), saves a decent chunk of space inside a very compact electronics device, and greatly improves ease of maintaining water resistance.
Not saying I like the trend, just that it does make sense even if you don’t sell wireless headphones too.
Removing the headphone jack, but allowing the option to use a dongle, I can live with. What really drives me nuts is all these (expensive) wireless headphones and earbuds, but the batteries are not replaceable. After a year or few they basically become useless because the batteries end up degrading and lasting only a fraction of when they were new.
I put a mid-range Kenwood head unit in my road trip car last year. So far only one person has been able to figure out how to pair their phone to it over Bluetooth (the instruction manual is in the glove compartment; doesn't help). The Bluetooth audio skips. The audio jack requires no set-up, works 100% of the time, and never skips.
Maybe that is more the fault of the head unit than anything else. Several years ago I bought and installed an aftermarket stereo which could play mp3s from a usb stick. I think it was a Kenwood in the $150 - $200 range. I recall being stunned by how horrible and behind-the-times the UI and menus were. I thought "all they had to do was copy the iPod menu layout" (or any other decent mp3 player).
That and other experiences with car infotainment systems have lead me to believe that any electronics that go in a car are at least 5 years behind their non-automobile equivalents.
This move to Bluetooth very much seems like planned obsolescence. In sure in a few years all the issues people have with Bluetooth will be "solved" by a whole incompatible spec.
The only problem with the 3.5m jack is that it's too cheap, unobtrusive, and reliable. You can't brand it, market it, or upsell it.
Problem with non-wireless headphones is that they break. One side of the headphones stops playing sounds; you can sometimes spin the connector and get the sound back, but that gets annoying, and it stops working eventually. The less wires and connectors, the less things can break, no?
Cheaply made products that break easily are always a problem; there are certainly a lot of terrible headphones on the market, with or without wires.
However, the problem you are describing:
> One side of the headphones stops playing sounds; you can sometimes spin the connector and get the sound back, [...] and it stops working eventually.
I suspect that might be terrible quality wires, not necessarily the headphones. The quality of patch cable at the usual big-box consumer stores has fallen dramatically over the last ~5-10 years. It can be really difficult to find a cable hasn't changed the outer protective wrapping from traditional softer rubber(?) to some sort of cheap plastic. The wrapping on the new cables can harden badly over as little as 2-3 months, leading to sharp kinks/bends forming over time that break the delicate wires inside.
The newer cables also tend to lack protective stiffeners at the ends for protection against damaging the wires if the cables is pulled at a right angle to the connector.
Once the wire has started to break, you might be able to get it working again for a while by turning the connector (if the break is at or near the connector) or otherwise moving the cable until the broken ends of the conductor touch.
On the other hand, most of the cables that I bought in the late-80s/early-90s still work fine. (they never formed permanent kinds) The problem is race-to-the-bottom we're seeing everywhere as businesses try to squeeze every last cent out their products. This will happen to wireless headphones eventually, but for now they are in a honeymoon period where they are still a "new(-ish) tech" that is experimenting with new designs. Eventually the value engineers and must-meet-growth-targets management will get around to "optimizing" their quality and longevity too.
FWIW audio cables in consumer stores were pretty much always PVC, though, as you like many other people discovered, there are quality plastics and cheap plastics. The former will last quite a number of years before turning hard and brittle, the latter won't, smells badly and probably gives you cancer for free, too.
Speaker, microphone and guitar cables for studio / stage use often have rubber sheathing (~neoprene), though many are just higher quality PVC.
> The newer cables also tend to lack protective stiffeners at the ends for protection against damaging the wires if the cables is pulled at a right angle to the connector.
Using the tiniest of ferrules seems to be a conscious design choice, though incorrect material and manufacture are commonly seen as well. In any case, a bad design that's poorly manufactured is not going to work.
As usual, non-consumer products don't have the problem, at all.
> The problem is race-to-the-bottom we're seeing everywhere as businesses try to squeeze every last cent out their products.
While that's certainly true, the ali/bangood-mentality also has to do with it. "Oh look, I can get $thisThing for 2.5 $ delivered from China, which normally costs 10 $". A compounding problem is of course, that the 10 $ store item is the same as the 2.5 $ Ali item, so you actually need to turn to the proper online store to get the quality matching price point.
> The wrapping on the new cables can harden badly over as little as 2-3 months
Exactly what happened to my headphones. I end up replacing the cable every 6-12 months. Fortunately user-replaceable cables make it almost a non-issue.
While it is true that headphone cables are prone to failure, from electronics point of view Bluetooth ones are massively more complex beasts, and almost certainly will have limited lifetime (batteries can last only so long). In comparison 40 year old headphones can work perfectly fine together with modern equipment, something I would not expect from wireless headphones of today.
Also repairing a cable is really easy task generally, and there is even easier solution available: make the cable replaceable, i.e. have it also be connectorized on the headphone end.
I don't think the OP suggested connetorising the headphone end as something the consumer should do, but rather as a suggestion to manufacturers. Many high-end headphones already have this, as it not only allows you to replace damaged cables easily, but also choose a cable length and type (straight or coiled?) that suits you. The ATH-M50x ships with three different cables, for example.
You know when I was young there was this whole profession of tv/radio repairmans. Swapping a headphone cable is exactly the sort of thing I imagine they would be perfectly fitted for doing.
But of course these days the whole concept of repairing things is completely bygone thing for most people, so yeah, maybe wireless headphones do make sense.
most half decent headphones these days have a standardised cable connection so replacing or upgrading the cable is very easy and can be cheap.
wireless however have other issues, what of the battery? over time it will wear like any battery does and their runtime will significantly decrease, changing the cable on a pair of wired phones will be a lot less hassle than cracking open your wireless phones to replace the battery
not to mention the fact that wireless devices have far more tech in them that could go wrong, a pair of wired headphones are fairly simple devices, theres a whole lot more tech inside a pair of bluetooth phones (battery, charging circuit, bluetooth components etc) and while theyre wireless theyll still have to be charged by way of a cable somehow so like a pair of wired phones they still have a wire, its just used for charging rather than sound but that doesnt mean it cant break just the same
AirPods, which I think is sort of a good reference here, charges wirelessly too. We’ll ser about the battery life though, I suspect you’re right about them eventually needing replacing. Likely a very difficult repair too!
the airpods charge wirelessly but the case that charges them doesnt as far as im aware so they still have a connector thats a potential point of failure just like a jack
And as someone who has owned many IEMs over the long term those cables all end up breaking. And for IEMs with replaceable cables it's the connectors that break.
I see another reason for Apple to exclude headphone jack from iPhone. Now third-party accessories makers can't bypass Apple's Lightning certification by using headphone jack for data transfer. For example, Square used headphone jack for their card reader.
It's definitely not a waterproofing issue. They have waterproof lightning socket with exposed contacts, therefore they can make 3.5mm one. Apple's rivals — Samsung and Sony both have examples of waterproof phones with 3.5mm jack.
> Audiophiles probably aren’t too keen on being unable to listen to high-bitrate files.
Ignoring issues of latency and connection robustness, is this a bandwidth limitation of Bluetooth or is it that the driver/codec support isn't there? Or is it audiophile hyperbole?
There's no technical reason why you couldn't stream lossless digital audio to a pair of headphones, which might well have a better DAC chipset than the phone.
Bluetooth radios generally operate at an order of magnitude lower power than wifi or cellular radios, especially in LE mode.
Really the Bluetooth protocol is mostly just a ultra low power 802.11. It has more channels but they are thinner bands are only 1-2 Mbit (depending on classic or LE mode).
That being said its not really a bandwidth limitation. One device can use multiple channels and thus you can easily get, say, the 6 Mbit that DVD quality PCM takes up.
It is more that being so low power means bluetooth gets pummeled with a lot of inference. This isn't much of a problem if you are using one channel and alternating to avoid hot regions but the 2.4 band is super congested. Trying to drive constant 6+ Mbit through Bluetooth losslessly would take way more power than most Bluetooth devices are capable of or willing to spend to accomplish it.
There are codecs which make Bluetooth audio suck less, but they are a fragmented mess. The two really popular ones are AAC and AptX. iPhones support only AAC while Android phones might either not support either or support only AptX. Sony has its own proprietary codec LDAC which only works with their headphones. To make matters worse, not all headphones support both AptX and AAC.
I suspect the issue is battery life in the headphones, due to hauling more data over the wireless link. Now, with headphones, you could put in a bigger battery and none's the wiser, except maybe the cost accountants. But it might be more tricky with earbuds.
No, it is not a good idea. It actually is a massive pain in the butt for iPad labs where we issue headphones to keep the students from getting distracted with each other. Now, the new iPads are rumored to not include the headphone jack. That is just going to be wonderful buying a bunch of adapters that can get lost or stolen.
Also, how the heck many things do I need a charger for now? Its bad enough they created a mouse that cannot be used during charging because of the poor placement of the charging port. If I was to go Bluetooth with the headphones, I need to buy a new cart with additional chargers for each headphone. Never mind loosing the damn things or their cost.
From an accessibility point of view, I take it Apple's design team has never heard of Talking ATM[1].
I've never met a Bluetooth device that connected and worked 100% of the time like wired headphones do. $10 headphones these days sound like $100 headphones from ten years ago. The technology has already peaked. There's no reason to spend more or to settle for a technology like Bluetooth that fails to work on a consistent basis. None whatsoever. I will never choose to buy a phone without a headphone jack because of that. It's that simple. Not to mention the low audio quality of Bluetooth. This is definitely an example of an inferior technology being pushed out simply for profits to replace a superior one.
Not for me. (Addressing the general industry trend)
The way I see it, taking a feature away needs to be justified with some proportional advantage.
The parts themselves are pretty cheap, so the only argument against the port is space. Apple did not use the space for anything useful (same battery , same features , more expensive). I have heard water proofing as an argument, but many manufacturers can do both & the jack is more useful than water proofing to me.
As I see it, manufacturers took a away a relatively useful feature for nothing in return.
The decision was very much guided by greed, and that very much irks me.
I think so. 3.5mm wasn't always a standard, it used to be 1/4". 3.5mm is a consumer standard, replacing it with Bluetooth makes more sense. I say this as someone who does Pro Audio stuff, I just don't use bluetooth for that. I've usually had to hook up a 3.5mm to 1/4" adapter for some headphones anyways. I have a 48 channel patch bay everything's wired into. Why would I complain about having to use a dongle to get non-latent audio for pro-purposes on my Phone seems a little absurd given the way most other pro-equipment behaves. And there's a dongle if people really care, and it came for free with my phone. I'd rather use bluetooth headphones anyways for most stuff, for convenience.
If you need pro-gear, there's usually a pro-option. Sometimes form factors change and you need to swap out some of your gear, it happens. Anyways, 3.5mm wasn't ever the 'pro' standard. It's a consumer level adaptation, and so is Bluetooth. I have no problem with it.
Absolutely no. The idea of introducing one universal connector standard itself sounds reasonable but it still is a way ahead of time. Nothing should be "ditched" before the new standard and its ecosystem matures (do you remember for how long did USB co-exist with COM&LPT and for how long did ISA slots co-exist with PCI? - that was good!). Also one port is not enough, I want to connect my wired headphones and a power bank to my cellphone at the same time without using any additional dongles! And at last but not at least there are things tat are so good (with simplicity of their technology nature contributing to this) even while being a very old invention that inventing reasons to ditch them is either hypocrisy (aren't big corporations pushing digital audio transfer technologies just to facilitate vendor lock-ins and DRMs?) or onanism. Do we really need to reinvent a wheel just because it is not patented?
It’s a big red herring when someone tells you “I have high end headphones and need hp output”, or “I record my guitar into iPhone and need a jack”.
- if you are really an audiophile you will have at least a Dragonfly or similar feeding your expensive cans off of USB. You would not use iPhone’s (previous) tiny dac/amp. Also note that iPads still have a builtin DAC/amp and that they are, in fact, really really good.
- Same for music making on iPhone. You will have one of many audio interfaces for iOS. I mean, come on, you are not recording guitars into your pc over a builtin audio input, surely?
I don’t believe this whole “cornering the market” argument. I do believe removing unnecessary hardware and making way for bigger battery/thinner phones or whatever other benefit may come out of it.
With the universal disappearance of the jack, I can't help thinking that there are behind-the-scenes pressures and incentives driving it.
As in television (and so, movies on television), all analog links in the chain of delivery are being driven out.
Even if you agree with that (and I don't), this means that simultaneously, any and all other use cases for these analog channels are simply fucked. Too bad, screw you.
Big entertainment, and its big dollars, monopolizing the platform for its own benefit.
I don't know this. I just can't help suspecting it -- not just out of thin air, though, but rather based upon what I've read about how these industries work and advocate, in general and in other specific cases.
It was a great idea because the removal of the headphone jack serves a lightning rod for everything anti-Apple, and drowns out other, more serious and valid issues with their HW and SW quality. There are a lot of real problems with their products to complain about, but all those valid complaints are drowned out by the rage over the stupid headphone jack. It's been two years, and people still can't get over it, and the press can't stop mentioning it. Great for Apple, because that's the only problem that gets air time.
I think this is a false comparison. If USB-C had been better defined and chosen by all manufacturers, we wouldn't have had a problem with replacing the headphone jack I feel.
Oh man, I’ve been using my 6s all this time and forgot. Just when I was thinking about upgrading to the Xs, this thread is a reminder of why I’ve been holding off.
Actually it worked out to the best for me. There’s two occasions where I use headphones: mowing the grass and working out. In both cases the headphone wire gets in the way and causes problems yet I was too cheap to buy a Bluetooth headphone set. By forcing me to buy Bluetooth headphones (I didn’t buy iBuds - I’m way too cheap for that!) Apple actually improved the quality of my life. Even if only a somewhat minor aspect.
I agree about those two specific circumstances. But just because you need no headphone port to be motivated to buy bluetooth headphones isn't justification. I have a long public transport commute where I don't want to use bluetooth headphones for many reasons. When I'm mowing or working out, I can use my bluetooth headphones. I get the choice.
I agree... mostly. Till the end when the author portrays the lack of a headphone jack as a complete block to using TRS connectors. iPhones do come with working wired headphones and at least used to include a Lightning-TRS adapter (it can be had for $9 if not). Not ideal, no. Offensive, maybe. But it’s a ridiculous overstatement to say that this requires users to spend hundreds of dollars on Bluetooth replacements.
These jacks come from, not the 20th century, but the 19th century! It boggles my mind how something we've have had since the 1880s is suddenly obsolete. There's a plethora of devices in existence manufactured over a span of decades that all interchangeably work together, and we toss it now out for what? Do we really believe that all devices for the next 130 years will work on the same bluetooth protocol?
I do not have experience with the iPhone and Apple's Bluetooth headphones, but I've tried a bunch of 3rd party brands with moto g and oneplus smartphones. Sadly at home we only have 2.4Ghz for Wifi, which means it's absolutely less than ideal to stream something over wifi and listen to it on wireless headphones.
I'm surprised this is not a problem for the iPhone, or I've never read anything about it yet.
As someone about to board a plane with my SO, one problem that would be nice is if apple devices could do simultaneous devices connected. My iPad plus headphone splitter is ok, but, I’m mostly on Bluetooth only headphones. If you want to share a listen, you need wired ones. Seems like they could fix this audio stack to allow this, or maybe we need a big upgrade to Bluetooth hardware to allow it.
Not saying that this is a proper solution for everyone, but Bose does support listening to the same phone with two pairs of headphones. You would just have to pair them.
I agree that this would be useful to have at the OS level though!
I'll never forget when I realized people were paying for ringtones. Why the heck would you do that? I just downloaded some and stuck them on my phone.
Then I bought Star Wars and watched it at home. VHS for the win! Then the same frickin' movie came out on DVD. I decided to buy it. Why would I do that? Because I was sold on the feature combination of DVDs. Then BluRay. I bought again. Why? The movie had new features, and BluRay was more cool.
I had become those people I was laughing at with the ringtones, spending money for stuff that either should be free or was basically worthless. I love movies. I have a lot of movies in various formats. But re-mixes of the same stupid movie? I'm being taken for a ride.
Now they keep the same movie, the same plot, the same hardware -- but re-make it with currently-popular actors. Why would people pay for this....I asked myself as I sat in the movie theater a couple of months ago.
There's less and less "new people creating new things that enriches society" and more and more "You bought X, you'll really love X1!"
Anybody that doesn't know where headphoneless-phones is going hasn't been paying attention. Ten years from now, when they've finally locked down DRM audio from the seller to the actual device you listen to it on? They'll be charging you multiple times to listen to the same sound.
Plus they make money on the hardware. Double bonus points for getting you on a hardware upgrade gravy train also locked in by vendor.
Terrible article that, like most comments and articles about the headphone jack, completely ignores Lightning and USB C adapters.
It’s much easier to make the case that removing the headphone jack is a huge money grab and inconvenience if you ignore the fact that a $9 dongle included with your phone lets you listen with any pair of headphones you want.
Possibly more annoying is that he ignores the Lightning to 3.5mm cables that are available. Those nice expensive headphones all have replaceable cables, you don’t even need a dongle.
It was an absolutely terrible idea. I use the headphone jack on my phone every single day, either for my high-quality earphones that I'm not in a hurry to replace, or for plugging in to a PA or stereo at a party, to stream music.
I don't want to carry a single around, and the 3.5mm jack is the standard for analog stereo audio.
The day I was sold on ditching the headphone jack was actually last week when a giant wave surprised us and nearly washed my wife's (brand new) phone away at the beach. We took it back to the house, rinsed all the sand and salt water off under the tap and it never had a single issue.
Most outdoor people (7+ days charging on solar or limited electrical outlet access) hate the idea of having to charge an extra device, when they could use a pair of cheap headphones. Hard pass for me too, I'll stick to my cheap, outdated tech.
The main complaint is that manufacturers of budget phones are following suit, but damaging themselves in the process because they're misguided about what their users really want. Having android phones with 3.5/2.5mm jacks would keep the analogue headphone industry alive, but if the whole industry moves to bluetooth only headphones, we're worse off for it overall.
I hope to never use wired headphones ever again and I appreciate my phone being waterproof. I know that some people like wired headphones, but that is no reason to think Apple ditched that connector only for profit reasons.
Not for me as wireless headphones are quickly lost and cost more then wired which were less then 10 bucks. If you lose/lost them not a huge deal you'll can easily afford another pair.
I'm still waiting for a decent pair of bt earplugs that wouldn't cost me a fortune. Still have to use Sony SBH50 + Marshall Mode EQ as a half-way solution.
What the people who keep complaining about this don’t realize and will never realize is that there are tons of users who prefer the new Jack and will never have any issues with it at all.
You keep arguing about this “fiasco” but in reality Apple is fine, the majority of users are happy and this is all just an imagined issue like when they introduced the iPhone which would fail because it was just an iPod with a phone in it, or the touchscreen that would never be able to compete with tactile keyboards or the tablet that didn’t even run a proper desktop operating system.
So I've tried using several bluetooth headphones before Airpods were around. They all sucked. Things like audio stuttering while inches away from the transmitter and short battery life is what made them suck. I gave up on bluetooth headphones for good; I hated them. Oh and the convenience of wireless wasn't even that important to me (or so I thought).
Now I have a pair of airpods and I love them. The improvement is marginal, but it's an improvement that touches many aspects of my life (commuting, cooking, sleeping, working). I love, love, love them.
> Does anyone truly believe they removed the headphone jack for any reason other than to sell more dongles and more wireless headphones?
I think Apple believes that wireless headphones are the future and they decided to prove that it can be done right. IMO they succeeded with airpods.
Removing the headphone jack was a forcing function. It's only an issue if you don't buy into the Apple ecosystem. Obviously that's a risk, but it's a risk that Apple has taken before.
Assuming it's some kind of cockameme plan to sell more dongles doesn't really fit the profile of Apple as a company, IMO.
I used a 15gbp bluetooth headphone 6 years ago without any problems on both linux and android; battery life was fine, even sound quality was acceptable. Colleagues have been using Bose ones for years. Apple didn't fix anything.
Bluetooth headphones are only really good since Bluetooth 4 and its Low Energy standard. Everything before used too much power and connections were to fragile, as you noticed.
If you tried other Bluetooth headphones than the Airpods now, you would also notice the better battery life. My work headphones (over-ear) only need to be charged on the weekend after over 40h of use and they are very light, too.
Yes. I've worked on phones in the past (Amazon's ill-fated Fire Phone) and there was no pressure that I perceived to sell more third-party accessories. There was, however, a very tangible pressure to make the phone thinner and lighter, and at the same time to pack it full of more shiny-seeming software features.
It's entirely conceivable, based on my experience, that removal of the headphone jack is attributable to ignorance and not to malice.
Does anyone actually want it thinner and lighter or is that just an assumption we have had and never questioned? I mean most people end up putting their device in a case anyway to protect it already. They are to structurally flimsy and fragile. Hell otterbox is valued at 2.5 billion and all they sell are thick bulky phone cases. A inch thick phone would be fine and have more room for battery, storage, etc, etc, etc... and still have room to have a sturdy case and most people wouldn't care.
Yes. I think this a “people want a faster horse” situation. The people who don’t want phones to go thinner and wireless everything aren’t thinking it through fully. I miss the head phone jack on my phone right now, I’d like longer battery life... but there is a future where a smartphone is the size of a credit card, is waterPROOF, and never plugs into anything ever. If you think it’s not possible, consider that the chips in each AirPod are more powerful than the one in the first iPhone.
I am temporarily annoyed with the audio jack removal, but I get it. It’s a “burn the boats” type strategy of pushing for the wireless, portless future.
Ignorance of what? I’m sure they knew some people would be upset about the decision, but they must have predicted that it would be worth it for their bottom line and aggregate customer satisfaction. And I have seen no data suggesting that their prediction was incorrect.
What reason is there to chase more thinness? Phones are thin and light enough as is. I'd rather my phone not blow away in the wind if I set it down outside.
Yes. I believe they did it for several reasons, and while selling more accessories is probably one reason, I suspect it’s a fairly insignificant one. I can’t imagine that dongle sales affect their bottom line much, and while AirPods are a big hit, that probably would have been the case regardless of the headphone jack removal.
I suspect the two most significant reasons were to reduce manufacturing cost/complexity and to improve reliability (one less physical port to get dirty and break, one less entry point for water damage).
Anyone who believes this needs to sit down and think it through.
Apple's success depends on the iPhone. Without it their services businesses become useless, their retail presence becomes an albatross, peripheral devices like Apple Watch, AppleTV start to look a lot less useful and forget about future growth in AR/VR. And so the idea that Apple would compromise all of that just to make a comparatively tiny hundred million or so is just crazy. And Tim Cook is anything but crazy.
The fact is that the market is moving towards wireless for everything. Audio included. And 99.999% of the world aren't audiophiles who can tell the difference (or even care if they can) between BT and non BT audio. So why waste valuable phone space for an insignificant number of people when you can improve battery life by say 5% ?
There is marginally more volume for the battery and camera/sensor array to take up. I'd rather have a thicker phone, especially one where the cameras don't protrude out the back, but I don't get to design these things.
Speakers are purely analog devices. The work on digital speakers has begun a century ago in 1920 and still hasn't yielded any usable consumer products. Moving the digital to analog converter into the speaker doesn't change anything. We will have analog speakers for at least another century.
Now if you were talking purely about the connector itself.
Whatever wireless technology was forced upon the population is not actually capable of replacing a wired connection.
* Bluetooth doesn't work in crowded environments.
* Standard Bluetooth sound quality is inferior without proprietary extensions to the protocol.
* Latency between device and headphone can be massive (500ms to 100ms),
* You have to recharge it.
* Devices have to be paired and sometimes "unpair" for no reason.
Bluetooth just sucks for audio. I'm sure there are hundreds of wireless technologies that are better than bluetooth, otherwise these proprietary extensions wouldn't exist.
You can in theory get <32ms latency with a special obscure subvariant of a proprietary standard of bluetooth (aka aptX LL) that no one has ever heard of for which you need a certain dongle and your headphone must support it. (hint your phone and headphones don't support it)
>Does anyone truly believe they removed the headphone jack for any reason other than to sell more dongles and more wireless headphones?
There are attributes to wireless beyond it being more expensive. Wireless isn't some gimmik to increase revenue. It genuinely is better in some ways and an acceptable complete replacement. If you're sold on wireless you don't need a headphone jack.
> It genuinely is better in some ways and an acceptable complete replacement.
And worse is some ways. It is not absolutely better; and, for plenty of people, not "an acceptable complete replacement".
Your claim in your original comment ("Anyone who has felt a tug at their head from headphones getting snagged by something accidently[sic] is quickly sold to the merits of wireless.") is also far from convincing that wireless is "an acceptable complete replacement", or even better than wired in more than one minor way.
> If you're sold on wireless you don't need a headphone jack.
In which case, I repeat, you keep using wireless. A headphone jack does not hurt those who want to use wireless. Removing the jack actively denies them a feature, while doing little for those who want to use wireless. Not to mention, removing the jack does not sell people on wireless, it forces them to choose between a dongle and wireless; or worse, a different platform.
I like wires. Every time i can, i choose to use a wire. Be it for internet or headphones.
The reason for my wired preference is security. I trust cables more than i trust wireless.
Bluetooth is insecure. I dont think it is secure to walk around in a mall with your bluetooth turned on. (correct me if i am wrong)
Wifi WPA2 is probably secure. However wifi WEP is completely insecure. For many years WEP has been widely used. Another problem with wifi are fake networks that use the same name as a public network.
Another interesting fact with wired headphones is they wont fall down directly on the floor, because of the wires. The same goes with the computer mouse.. sometimes it moves to the edge of the table and might want to fall.. the wire will hold it.
Wireless keyboards is definitively a no go since teorically its possible to passively listen for pressed keys just like a keylogger.
Wireless technology sure looks better without all the wires, however when people choose convenience(wireless), they lose some security.
The WPA2 standard is not secure against key reinstallation attacks, which can be used to decrypt packets in an MitM position. Most implementations of WPA2, though, have patched themselves in a backwards-compatible manner since discovery of this vulnerability.
The IEEE has put out WPA3 which fixes this vulnerability (among other changes).
Well that and I have some very nice headphones that I am obviously not going to ditch because some smartphone removes the single world-wide standard socket in existence...
> I dont think it is secure to walk around in a mall with your bluetooth turned on. (correct me if i am wrong)
You are wrong. I don't recall any Bluetooth security issues from just having Bluetooth on or from having an established connection. Those things are pretty well solved in all vaguely modern wireless standards.
The issues are always around the initial connection and key exchange. PIN-based pairing has various flaws in Bluetooth, but Bluetooth headphones use "Just Works" pairing, which I don't think has had any issues, other than the design compromise that it is vulnerable to MitM. That is vanishingly unlikely to happen with Bluetooth headphones though.
WPA2 is secure if you use a very strong password. WEP is basically extinct.
- You can't take lightning headphones
and use them as headphones in all
lightning ports.
- You can't take lightning headphones
and use them on any other Apple
product other then modern, premium
iPhones.
- It doesn't enable compatibility with
other new Apple products. In fact, it
hinders compatibility with USB-C ports
in newer Apple laptops. *What?*
- If Apple went all-in on USB-C with
laptops, the lightning port on new
iPhones feels like either an anachronism
or accentuates the lock-in attempt.
- Bluetooth really isn't very good, not
at a level that guarantees perfect,
continuous audio streams. It's not
an ideal step up from a good, durable wire.
- Air pods and other headphone upgrades
are double disposable, in that, not only
are they particularly expensive options,
but easily lost, stolen or destroyed.
Laundry and drop hazards, above and beyond
theft, basically add constant anxiety to
the total cost of ownership for air pods
in particular.
- General inconvenience of replacement
forces odd work-around strategies for
times when you can't find your headphones.
If you're running late, and you lost them
in the couch cushions or under the bed,
what are your options?
I can think of a number of additional diminishingly valuable what-ifs, but you get the point. Life always turns out better with the widely adopted standardized options, since headphones take on the primary expendable accessory, and the alternatives are hemmed in, such that they're always worse.
But now what? It's just going to be this irritating thing, until an excuse lets Apple back down while saving face.
It is painfully obvious that Apple removed the jack not because it was the right choice but because it lets them sell more accessories. Discussions about this choice should be framed in that perspective. It was a user hostile decision.
Samsung has had waterproof headphone jacks for years. My LG v35 has a quite nice "Quad DAC" and a waterproof headphone jack. It's absurd to think that Apple has eleventy billion dollars but can't design a waterproof headphone jack.
Had mine in my short pockets while wet wading and the damn camera flooded and died. I’m less than thrilled with apples waterproofing, headphone jack or no.
The case made by the article strikes me as surprisingly clear: 50% of dollars spent on wireless headphones we're going to Apple and they wanted that percentage to grow larger. Forcing their customers to buy wireless headphones directly increased the amount of money Apple makes and has allowed them to dominate another product segment.
This argument about the quality of the headphones seems very much beside the point. For those purchasing these newer smart phones, there is only one type of headphones that work. Clearly that is the one they will buy.
To paraphrase Doc Brown, "Where we're going, we don't need headphone jacks"
Airpods are awesome, and they'll only get better. A cord running to your pocket is seriously a thing of the past, and all these posts will age terribly. Just like the serial port ones, the floppy ones, the cd rom ones...
And for all this noise, what I can't for the life of my understand is why these people can't just use a god damn adapter. They make high quality DAC ones, too. Just leave it attached to your headphones. What's the damn problem? The rest of us get a better, thinner phone.
Did you read peapicker's comment before posting your own? (It's older by an hour). Some people need wired headphones and if the port is used for something else then they can't.
Also it's completely untrue that the iPhone is "thinner" without a headphone jack; this guy added a jack to an iPhone 7 without external modification:
The annoying thing about wireless headphones is that it’s yet another thing you need to charge. We need truly easy wireless charging to make it effortless.
Great, so now I've got a dongle attached to my earphones. How about the PA or stereo I need to plug in to, in order to stream music?
Should I just always carry a spare dongle in my pocket? Or rely on everyone having the appropriate Lightning/USB-C dongle already? Or maybe just use the industry standard 3.5mm jack, because it always Just Works.
