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?
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.