> 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.