Re:What the Heck Is Happening at Apple?
by ryanhuff on Monday October 31, 2016 @12:12PM
(#12838160)
I don't care about USB charging. What I do care about is not having to carry an awful dongle to listen to music. Been there, done that. And, I care about not having to charge my headphones before I listen to music. People might say I should just leave the dongle on my headphones. I lived through that already with an Android phone years ago, and it sucked.
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That's a perfectly valid criticism. I think ditching the headphone jack, while having little effect on me personally, isn't a great move. At the same time, Apple has a long history of ditching compatibility early (floppy drive, cd drive, vga, etc) and with generally good effect long term, so I'm not sure that they actually made the wrong decision here.
Except that (as I recall) the floppy drive was completely obsolete when they did that, so almost no one cared. And the CD drive was not very painful either. The story is completely different for the headphone jack. It is not in the least obsolete, and it being missing is a huge pain for a lot of people.
It was a completely bonehead move on Apple's part IMHO. I know they had their reasons for doing it, but I still think it was a big mistake.