The 3.5 mm jack still delivers the absolute best sound quality compared to the other options available on a smart phone.
Most, if not all, of the other solutions will be a step backward.
> Patel misses the bigger problem. It’s not enforcement of DRM on audio playback. It’s enforcement of the MFi Program for certifying hardware that uses the Lightning port. Right now any headphone maker in the world can make any headphones they want for the standard jack. Not so with the Lightning port.
> Presumably Apple’s Lightning earbuds will work on iPads, too. But it’s going to suck having to use different headphones (or a dongle) for the Mac than you use with your iOS devices.
> Will MacBooks ship with a Lightning port in lieu of a headphone jack? If so, will they ship with headphones? (Probably not, I say. Cough up the extra $29 for a new pair of Apple EarPods.)
I'm increasingly irritated by Gruber's increasingly cozy relationship with Apple pitch-people (sometimes even using language only they use, like "with iPhone" or "on iPad").
But this is neither amazing nor apologism. He's ambivalent, at least in the text of this article. He is not defending the decision, extolling it's brilliance, saying Apple's doing the right thing.
(To the commenter who's about to say, "Cherry picking!": Please consider the likelihood that your brain is cherry-picking when you see the name "John Gruber.")
And I see no significant advantage to the change in technology itself. Optical ports provide a measurable advantage in sound fidelity over analog, but you haven't seen them eliminate composite or component ports from home receivers, because there are also significant disadvantages in cost and length of optical cables. I don't even follow that there's such gains to be made from switching to lightning...
Which leaves me at the obvious conclusion that this is just a ploy to sell more adapters and reap licensing fees from vendors at the expense of their customer.
And remarks he makes like "Cough up the extra $29 for a new pair" convey exactly the tone that is bothering us all.
Is it really not obvious what the advantage is? It's a huge advantage: to listen to music on headphones with your shiny new iPhone, you'll have to either buy some shiny new Beats headphones from Apple for $300, or to use non-Apple headphones you'll have to buy some kind of dongle adapter for $29.95. This is a giant advantage for Apple because it'll improve their profits.
The advantage to you is that you can feel warm and fuzzy about being a mindless Apple consumer and having a shiny new iDevice that costs a fortune and only works with other iDevices and forces you to buy new headphones. People like to feel like they're part of an elite in-group.
It's very simple: if you don't like the way Apple does business and treats you as a customer, then don't buy their product. The only reason they're able to get away with this kind of thing (using non-standard connectors is something they've been doing a long time) is because people line up like lemmings to buy their iDevices. If you buy an iPhone with no headphone jack, you really have no right to complain about it being missing; it isn't a surprise at this point.
I don't know how anyone could see those comments as favoring Apple, diminishing the problems, or somehow seeing them as acceptable.
I guess if you start out with the assumption that Gruber is an Apple partisan and nothing more, it's easy to read anything you want into his words.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7013002
[EDIT: The link above gives a few quick examples of particularly biting criticism against Apple by John Gruber. Not sure what I've said here that's so objectionable -- perhaps one of you could post a reply?]
As for quotes, cherry picked or otherwise, here are some that jump out:
> But I say at some point [3.5mm] will go away
> Apple has proven to be very good at timing the removal of established legacy ports.
> If it weren’t for Apple we’d probably still be using computers with VGA and serial ports.
> surely removing the deep headphone socket can only leave more room for a larger battery
> in five years we’ll look at analog headphone jacks the way we look at all the other legacy ports we’ve abandoned.
Gruber is not just arguing pro-Apple and saying this is the right decision. Indeed, he even says maybe "Apple is making a mistake," and goes on to include several serious problems with it.
Gruber's post is a reaction to Patel's characterization of Apple's move as user-hostile and "stupid." His reply is not, "Here's why I say Apple is right to make this move." Rather it is, "Right or wrong, and like it or not, here's some sober perspective on why Apple would/could do such a thing."
Yeah like 1/4" and XLR, which are used on most studio and enthusiast equipment. Why don't manufacturers ditch that in favor of USB or full fiber, the poor fools?
Some people live in a fairy land with heads up their ass...
I miss a lot of those ports. A lot of people do. Fumbling around the office for an Apple-compatible video cable is a relatively frequent event, in my experience.
And I don't remember old fashioned serial ports needing special drivers that would brick unapproved hardware, like some modern FTDI USB serial adaptors did.
"Legacy" ports are simple and reliable. Let's not abandon the simple and reliable 3.5mm headphone port.
That's only true because the only headphones that exist for smartphones are headphone jack or Bluetooth.
You can build a USB-C or Lightning headset with much higher impedance and use a digital signal to a higher quality DAC than the one built into the phone.
Most people don't want a higher quality DAC than the one built into the phone. High quality DACs are cheap. If the one in your phone isn't good enough for you, in two years you will get a new phone -- pick one with a better DAC, since now you know that's important to you. In the meantime, your $1000 headphones from four years ago will still work on all the phones with 3.5mm jacks, and so will the $6 pair you picked up on the boardwalk when you realized that there was no way in heck you wanted to wear the good headphones out on the beach.
You can plug a USB2 DAC into your phone?
A ton of people who own good headphones for their computer use a USB sound device instead of the motherboard's built-in audio. But today, similarly good headphones for mobile phones do not exist because phones can't drive them. This may not be a priority for a lot of people yet, but Apple is in a position to hugely increase the size of the market.
I'm not thrilled that it would create headphone lock-in on iOS vs Android, but you have to at least admit that it opens up opportunities for better headphones for phones than what's out there now.
If you'd tried to do this 10 years ago it would have been pointless because people's music libraries were all a bunch of MP3s ripped at 128 kbps. Now that Apple Music exists, Apple has direct control over the quality of the music they're streaming. If they want to make better headphones workable they can push out media in a format that makes them actually worth using.
Using an adapter to 3.5mm headphones doesn't feel like that big a deal to me. I would guess that Apple can output an analog signal over the lightning connector to allow a small passive cable (like DVI-I to VGA).
Going the other direction, someone (guessing Apple won't) could build a 3.5mm device that converts to a Lightning signal, but I'd expect it to also have to plug into a phone's accessory port to get enough power.
http://www.head-fi.org/t/595071/android-phones-and-usb-dacs/...
and of course lots of discussion.
99% of listeners aren't using headphones that are good enough to notice a difference in quality from an offboard DAC.
Personally, I don't really care about the headphone jack because I never use it. I will admit, I'm different than 99.99% of other users.
Should the analog headphone jack remain on our devices forever? If you think so, you can stop reading.
However, personally, I'll live with a thicker phone if it means I can have a larger capacity battery, let alone a 3.5mm jack
We already have a standardized 2.5mm jack to replace the 3.5mm one in space-constrained environments (just like 6.35mm is still around for hifi setups).
Why is everyone pretending we need to ditch analog audio completely for smaller phones when we can just start using 2.5mm (again!)?
Eh. Apple's done this before, as Gruber points out, and they basically won. Nobody at this point (at least, that I hear) complains about Lightning cables. Ditching the 3.5mm jack might be a bad idea, but Apple does have a track record of doing this, which is probably why they think they can get away with it now.
Lightning was a proprietary Apple connector that replaced the older proprietary 30-pin Apple connector. Not at all comparable to removing the 3.5mm jack.
I'm all for keeping the jack output, but using a 2.5 one doesn't solve the problem.
You mean a lightning to 3.5 and an usb-c to 3.5 one. With mandatory Apple/USB tax, DRM may or may not be included, and questionable DAC quality.
A fully passive 2.5→3.5 adapter is much easier, would work with all vendors, and has no potential DRM backdoor capability.
And we'd probably quickly see headphones with native 2.5mm plug and an included 3.5mm adapter, just like we currently have for "high-end" (read: $100) headsets and 6.35mm.
I'd pay for more battery life, but the bonus was just not worth it. It was easily twice as expensive as the phone I brought, with similar specs. Batteries last for a couple of days already, some more days are just not that big a differential.
No it's not.
> As an aside, whatever the merits of this decision, it’s not about device thinness. The iPhone 6 is the thinnest iPhone to date at 6.9mm. The iPod Touch has a headphone jack and is just 6.1mm thick. The iPod Nano: 5.4mm. The analog headphone jack is more costly in terms of depth than thickness.
> According to Kilburn, HTC’s consumer research shows people prefer thin smartphones — between 8 mm and 10 mm thick — as opposed to thicker devices with longer battery life.
One data point, but that's what HTC's claiming their customer research shows, and Apple's trends suggest their internal data points the same way.
There's clearly more than the one option going into the choice here.
That's not particularly thin, both Vivo and Oppo have models under 5mm. The former even managed to keep the 3.5 jack in the 4.75mm X5.
I think it'd be interesting to have an experiment where some flagship phone (like the Galaxy S*) is sold in two versions, one with double the battery life but a little thicker (and cases for both sizes are available), at the exact same price, to see which one people really prefer. Personally, I'd certainly go for the double-capacity version, but considering how popular iPhones are, I'm under no illusion that my tastes represent the mainstream.
Along those lines, I've had several waterproof phones with headphone jacks (and no rubber covers, either).
Palm tried to remove the jack with their ultrasmall Veer phone which had audio routed over a magnetic connector. You had to use an adapter to plug in headphones and it blocked off the power connector. The Veer was barely launched before HP pulled the "plug" on the product line, alas.
I didn't and really there are no arguments there why would it be better for anybody but Apple. The premise of the article is "once it's accepted that the analog jack must go, let's just write whatever."
It doesn't even discuss what the advantage for Apple should be. Which would make clearer why it's not for anybody else.
If Apple announced that they were using ground-up baby bones in their newest iPhone case, John Gruber would be there to patiently explain how there's a surplus of babies in the world, and besides dirty diapers don't really fit in with the whole Apple æsthetic.
If Apple announced that from this day forth the only way to get an Apple product would be in exchange for selling oneself into slavery under Apple, John Gruber would be there to patiently explain how this is a revolutionary new welfare programme which will ensure that no Apple customer ever goes to bed hungry.
I absolutely love Markdown: he genuinely made the world a better place by coming up with it. But he's about the furthest thing from objective when it comes to Apple.
But this certainly describes a very limited subset of people who listen to music through headphones, and even though I don't use it much I wouldn't like to see the analog jack go away.
But hey, Apple can now impose the change from the position of power. And they have Beats who will follow this change...
Does this guy ever write critically about Apple? I've come across his pieces over the years, and he honestly always comes across like a zealous ideologue.
Would you feel less defensive if I just called him a biased partisan instead of using an absolute-sounding word like "ever"?
What I object to is the instant dismissal of every Gruber article by people who can't see nuance but only black and white. It's simply not true that he is as partisan and in-the-tank for Apple as many people here think he is.
And the point is that this degrades our ability to have meaningful discussion.
> Would you feel less defensive [...]
Making assumptions about people's biases is exactly my objection about the reflex reaction many HN commenters have toward Gruber.
Sounds fair enough, but yet it still seems reasonable to mistrust Gruber's opinions on the basis of him having established a pattern of supporting Apple. The fact that he doesn't literally always come to their defense isn't really all that much of a mitigating factor, since his editorial integrity is already suspect.
> Making assumptions about people's biases is exactly my objection about the reflex reaction many HN commenters have toward Gruber.
I make decisions based on available information. Your post came across as derisive and snarky.
I'll point you in the direction of bsimpson's post, just above.
Yes, it will be thin too, but it will also have the same issues as going for a digital interface (annoying people with the change etc) -- but without any of its advanced capabilities (e.g. for device control).
> Should the analog headphone jack remain on our devices forever? If you think so, you can stop reading.
What's the advantage to removing the headphone jack? Is the jack some sort of bottleneck to sound quality that nobody noticed until now? I really don't see a benefit in removing the headphone jack, now or anytime in the foreseeable future.