The headphone jack is a legacy, bulky port. I would not be surprised to see a port-less phone in the next few years.

Apple has a really good track record of dropping things at the right time: floppy, CD-ROM, Flash, etc.

At each of those steps there were people decrying the loss of these things. Today however, most people don’t miss any of them. They made the right choice then and I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt now.

- CD-ROM -> Bigger hard drives, faster internet connections.

- Floppy -> CD-ROMs And BIOS upgrade

- Flash -> Better browser security, and faster javascript

Now for headphone jack, we have bluetooth. Slow, unreliable, requires to charge an extra device, when you run out of earphone battery, you are done listening. If you use the USB/Lightning to AUX, you can't charge your phone at the same time.

If lose the earpiece, you pay premium to replace it.

Also: I can't watch a video with a half-second audio delay. Half a second is being generous.

I'm not saying this excuses the removal of the headphone jack, but from a business perspective it does add up.

Really? I use AirPods when I'm out and about but when I'm at my desk I plug in a pair of $20 wired Sony earbuds that sound way better...

The biggest problem with them is poor isolation.

I see I'm not the only one :D I've also noticed other people and their wires hanging out more and more. I'm thinking wires are probably going to go out of fashion in the future and will look weird.

I'm not trying to push buttons. I use Jaybird X3s and feel comfort from the corded nature of the headphones. Here on the streets of NYC, I see AirPods more as fashion statements over an actual audio solution.

The instantaneous pairing sounds lovely, but I'm concerned most concerned with audio quality, bluetooth connection in a busy city, and general practical logistics both in and out of the gym.

I used to have JayBird X2s. They were fine but they definitely fell out from time to time and I'd always have to subconsciously "manage" the cord.

AirPods are my primary gym headphones and I'm never going back. I will pay double or even triple to replace them if I had to. That's how much value they deliver in my day to day life.

I've also had one fall out when I was out shopping. I was on an escalator and managed to pick it up, but now I'm super paranoid whenever I walk near a sewer grating.

On roads? Yes. Mountain biking? Depends on where I am.

> I've switched to bone conducting headphones for my daily commute by bicycle and they're great for listening to podcasts while still hearing the surrounding traffic.

Any brand/model you would suggest?

Maybe it won't work, but worth trying.

The X3s were not terrible, but, the AirPods are more comfortable and stay in my ears more firmly. I can wear them for hours and hours without them bothering me and I only dislodge them if I physically knock them out of my ear.

I once looked into these and got the impression that main goal is to make it possible to produce standard compliant devices as cheaply as possible.

Edit: I had written down some of the stuff I found: http://juhap.iki.fi/misc/qc35-windows-bluetooth-audio/

I generally believe that laws only need to be enforced when reasonable. But this law actually sounds reasonable...

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/10/31/is-it-legal-to-w...

The complete list, as far as I'm concerned: Original Macintosh OSX/macOS iPod iPhone AirPods

AirPods really are amazing, my singular complaint is that they're not waterproof.

But I also still carry around my wired UE triple.fi because I like having the option for going wired, better sound quality, less latency and especially less drain on my iPhone SE's battery due to disabled Bluetooth.

Even when nothing is paired/active just having Bluetooth enabled seems to drain phones batteries so much faster.

I agree with the others upthread that I’m not going back to wires after getting my AirPods.

For music, I get ~4 hours easily.

Apple's quoted battery life and charging times seem accurate to me.

I think it's very often the reverse – a disruptive replacement has to really blow past the incumbent in some respect, but it's quite hard for something new to be up to par with the old, polished thing in all respects.

PCs were less powerful than mainframes, MP3 is lower quality than CD, etc. etc.

If there was ever proof that we are brainwashed by consumerism in the same way the North Koreans are by the Kim's, Bluetooth headphones is it. Total worthless junk yet people still drop non-inconsequential amounts cash on it and rave about it.

On a side note I found this analysis of aptX very illuminating. I found it after the salesperson in my local B&W store tried tell me it was completely lossless http://www.sereneaudio.com/blog/how-good-is-bluetooth-audio-...

I should add that the portable Bluetooth speaker he was demoing sounded great compared to other offerings in the market that I have heard. I wasn't sure if this was more due to the codec or the general quality of the components. The speaker in question is the Dali Kaitch https://www.dali-speakers.com/loudspeakers/active/dali-katch... for those who are curious.

Apple doesn't support aptX so it's irrelevant to cableless iPhone users.

I definitely recognised it while still using them! When I'm not wearing the headphones, the wires are always getting tangled. When I am wearing the headphones, the wires are always getting caught on things.

I bought an iP6S instead of a 7 just for the jack because I wasn't a fan at all. Then in the span of four months, three jacks died on me in a row. I had a spare cable for my over-ear Momentum but the two intras are dead, and having to look for a replacement suddenly brought back to my mind the whole OMTP vs CTIA mess, if they have remote volume control at all. I'm seriously considering wireless for the next ones without even having used any.

> The codec optionally permits a "hybrid" coding scheme for applications where average and/or peak compressed data rates must be capped at a constrained level. This involves the dynamic application of a form of "near lossless" coding – but only for those short sections of audio where completely lossless coding cannot respect the bandwidth constraints. Even for those short periods while the "near lossless" coding is active, high-definition audio quality is maintained, retaining audio frequencies up to 20 kHz and a dynamic range of at least 120 dB.

And 99% of people don't care.

It's sad and pathetic watching this mission creep of audio degradation at the greed-fueled discretion of corporate profiteering.

http://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/iphone-6s-plus-audio-qualit...

He's done similar measurements on other Apple audio devices, including their $9 Lightning-to-headphone adapter and they all fare well.

Edit: As a side note the only positive I can see out of removing the headphone jack is the potential proliferation of quality DAC/preamp dongles. Still annoying though.

In absolute terms, you are certainly right. However, for most people, Bluetooth headphones sound good enough. I'll gladly give up some fidelity if it means I can lose wires.

Personally, I can't stand the sound quality of earbuds. My closed-back Audio Technica over-ear headphones can be unplugged from one device and plugged into another in seconds (no pairing/unpairing, turning bluetooth on and off, etc) and are always 'charged'. Plus they sound lightyears better than any bluetooth anything.

I haven't tried again since then. Had to re-pair them to get them to connect to my iPhone.

this is the first time I haven't been able to get them to connect but I've had several times where they won't say connected for more than 30 seconds

If I only use them with my phone (which I do almost all of the time), they will connect automatically quickly. But pairing between devices will probably always be more painful than a simple wire.

Worse, they're close to the same frequency band, and can interfere with each other. Wifi channel 14 is 2.484 ghz. Bluetooth is 2.4835 ghz.

Another reason why it's stupid for everyone else to follow Apple on this like sheep is because Apple also did it to sell their expensive Beats Bluetooth headphones. The other OEMs don't have a billion-dollar headphone division...

The other examples are not really good examples: - bigger drives and faster internet connections? I don't think most of the countries where Apple sells had those things at that time. But, hey, it is a premium product, so they expect you to pay premium for other stuff too (read their new bluetooth earplugs) - faster javascript and better browser? Chrome had those things, not safary, and it did had flash too.

I see here a lot of people talking about delays and how $2 wired earphones solve the problem. So I get people buy cheap and wants quality with their new iPhones. Cheap earphones with or without wire are always crap, the sound is horrible and the quality follows. It might be the reason of the delays: cheap stuff

No thanks, I don't feel like spending more money. With my current phone I can buy compatible earphones with zero delay for as low as $1.50 a pop. Bluetooth headphones just can't beat that.

Frankly, the ability to use $1.50 headphones is of vanishingly small significance.

(And, actually, dollar store headphones are surprisingly decent these days. I use them to listen to podcasts in the pool, without worrying too much about whether they get wet.)

I couldn't find anything below 10€ with decent sound quality, and it was hard to find something at that price that was good. Moreover, they lasted around 3-6 months for me, while a 25€ Bluetooth headset I bought 3 years ago is still working and the sound is better.

Looks like "AOSO" is a fantasy brand, they are also sold as "EarTime", "Dacom", "GranVela", ...

In fact, I bought them AFTER I had Bluetooth earphones, because of the inconvenience of having to recharge them.

I also got gigabit Ethernet in the apartment after using Wi-fi for some time.

In fact, I see the hate of wires as an irrational behaviour. They work better in practically all cases with only minor inconvenience.

I myself don't need to be walking or moving all the time either. If there's a chair, there are cables available.

But when I am on the move every cable stinks. I have caught the headphones wire on doorknobs and bus ticket validators so many times that now I gladly suffer through the unreliable bluetooth to avoid that.

My point is I don't think people can have an extreme opinion on the issue and still be objective, like I have seen so much online lately. Sometimes wires are better, sometimes wireless is better.

When they removed the CD-ROM Drive, a lot of people complained how they could possible do that, because apparently so many people used CDs a lot because in the real world internet connections often are not that fast etc. You will always get these kind of complaints but the majority will accept eventually and in a few years nobody cares anymore. I think it's better that way because modern bluetooth is really good (despite charging) and enables innovation in other areas.

Mind you, I'm also probably full of shit because everyone tells me that I can get exactly the same computer for half the cost of what I paid for my MacBook Pro and I'm yet to find anything that comes close. At least with the Apple stuff, there are objective things I can point to that justify the more expensive costs. With audio equipment, there's a slow curve up and then it just drops off once you get past a certain point.

As for Apple products, you might get the same spec computer for half the cost but Apple has really nice build quality and integration (or at least did when I got my MacBook). It's the same spec but it's just nicer.

I'm with you several hundred percent.

Didn't a serious of fairly rigorous tests way back conclude that nobody could tell the difference between a ~160kbps VBR MP3 and an uncompressed source (as long as a good MP3 encoder was used)? I think it was the Hydrogen Audio people behind it.

I think they decided ~192kbs was the point where there wasn't any statistically significant evidence that anyone could tell the difference.

And that's in ideal listening conditions when people are being asked specifically to listen out for differences. I think the margin for realistic listening situations is probably much wider.

No, the conclusion was that most people couldn't tell the difference above 192kbps, but to a trained ear many people could still tell the difference in 192 to 256, or 256 to 320.

It was 320 and above where there was basically nobody who could tell the difference unless they were using recording studio grade gear, which most people don't have.

It's real & severe downsampling, and incredibly noticeable.

Bluetooth 5 should have the bandwidth to solve this problem.

A few years ago I bought some USB DACs and separate headphone amplifiers and it made a world of difference, even to my relatively ancient ears.

At the very least, the audio quality degradation of most bluetooth devices has a worse impact than even your average middle tier Android phone's dac.

Typically a DAC has two components, the digital to analog part and an analog amplifier. So while the D2A won't typically be different, the audio amplification can vastly be different depending upon what you're trying to drive.

Unfortunately you can't remove the audio amplification and replace it with another, unless you're willing to do surgery on your macbook, say.

The best option is to buy a DAC with an amp that drives what you want it to. I have one that drives headphones that works like a charm, and I can hear not just the instruments clearer, but the location of the instruments recorded in stereo space better.

I bought an external audio interface to connect a condenser microphone and was shocked at how much better it sounded compared with the audio output at the back of my desktop (Realtek 24 bit...).

I noticed that audio interfaces tend to have a lot of big condensers on the inside. The kind which don't fit in a laptop, and especially in a phone. Now I'm not an electronics expert to comment on this, but I would guess that the big condensers are not in there just for the fun of it. Note that I'm talking about professional audio interfaces (the kind used by music producers, in the $100-$400 range), not audiophile ones (kilo$, buzz words)

That said, Apple had traditionally put very well isolated low noise DACs in their products. I'm not sure if that is still the case.

If you've inspected it, sure. If not, I would glare at it for a bit.

You also need an amp for audiophile quality headphones.

Do you know any audiophiles who use phones to listen to music?

I have a couple different sets of speakers and know that my larger ones sound better than the smaller ones (more “tinny” sound), but figured the core difference isn’t the quality of analog output on the source. Rather it’s the larger amplifier and larger size for bass generation.

And the Grado's look like a good set of headphones.

I would try listening to The King's Singers, which is an A Capella voice group that sings classical music. I can pick out individual voices in space from recordings that were recorded in the late 1980's. A good DAC won't smear them in space, and you can "lock on" to a voice and hear the tonal quality of it individually as if they were standing in front of you.

It would be a good idea to read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make sure you follow them when posting here. Your previous comment broke them as well.

I never spend more than $60 on headphones (ignoring my noise cancelling Bose).

Quality isn’t an issue. For something so small they sound quite good. For something so convenient they sound fantastic.

1. The battery doesn't always last. the benefits are huge so I'm OK with it though. I don't think I'll ever go full airpods just because I'm always going to be in situations where I have no battery in these.

2. My Nintendo switch and some other devices don't have bluetooth :(

Flash might be garbage, but its still super important.

Now lets talk about regular USB.... Apple dropped it without including a free adapter. They could have EASILY added one USB 3.0/3.1 port on the motherboard. There's plenty of space for it, but they would rather have you pay them tons of money for an adapter.

Not all USB-C cables are created equal.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15473777

I have had Flash disabled via a browser extension for what feels like years now.

There's now a dongle that enables you to do both...

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/1/16393078/a...

We move from a world where you can buy any set of headphones, and use them with any device, to a world where... nothing is compatible with anything else. Either you use a permanently connected dongle, or you buy multiple sets of headphones.

The future is stupid and I don't want to live in it.

How is an aux port obsolete for the task of transmitting audio? It does the job simply and perfectly, with a tiny connector.

I want to use any piece of stereo equipment made since the 1960s. That's a dongle.

Why don't we just ditch USB C too. Wireless charging and pairing via wifi/bluetooth.

Not that not having a headphone jack doesn't suck. It very much does

I plug my iPhone into my car's USB port (via the standard USB-A to lightning cable) and it works really well.

I also could have connected to my car via Bluetooth, or via the AUX input.

The USB connection works best and also charges my phone.

I did move to air pods so I have that option as well, but the wireless charge ability and the fact they are cheap removed my concerns. plus with apple providing both adapter for old headphone to charge adapter as well as new head phones with that same connector I am in the camp of, don't matter anymore.

Writing to a CD was slow. And cost about a buck. And didn't always work.

So, yeah, there's pain with going to wireless headphones. But in 10 years, we're going to forget that.

You're also wrong about charging the phone while using Lightning headphones; there are already adapters that can do that. Plus, it's not necessary to charge your phone all the time; that's what having better battery life is about. And better battery life is made more possible by freeing up precious internal space that the outmoded, single-use headphone jack used to occupy.

If you can't watch a video without an audio delay, that means you're using really crappy headphones. Fix that. Don't blame Apple.

That cost $160. Let's not dance around that. Airpods are extraordinarily expensive compared to the headphones everyone used to be able to use.

If you mean wired, those still work just as they did prior. The iPhone comes with the adapter.

BeatsX (with W1) are at $150, by the way. So the price is already down several percent! ;)

Let's make a comparison.

Is the alternative faster or more reliable than the original that it's replacing?

No, not by any typical (audio) criterion.

Power usage matters much more in wireless headphones. Bluetooth takes power. DACs take power (better ones and better algorithms use even more power). Better drivers use more power (without considering the big response boost you get with multiple drivers at the cost of additional power usage). With super limited battery size, all of these are cut with a corresponding decrease in quality.

The USB and lightning ports tend to get a lot of interference from the dozens of digital signals mere hundredths of an inch away. The size of the 3.5mm seems to ensure that it's more isolated.

Counterexamples to your claim: Thunderbolt? Magsafe? Magsafe2? The physical escape key?

All of your examples were actually significant improvements: floppy / CD-ROM took up immense physical space and removing them caused a significant improvement in space and weight. SSDs initially had less capacity, but at least they had way better performance and also improved upon space and weight.

> The headphone jack is a legacy, bulky port

The headphone jack doesn't save on weight, its alternatives aren't an improvement. It does save on space, and I understand that space is tight on a phone, but honestly, we've already had so many brilliant and slim phones that have headphone jacks that I don't really buy this as an excuse. Do we /really/ need ever so slightly slimmer phones every year? Remember the bent iphone 6es?

I'd be willing to buy this if there was something amazingly novel that USB-C provides for headphones, or if wireless earbuds lasted more than 5-6 hours.

Here's what it comes down to: my 2013 macbook pro is fantastic, and none of the new stuff regarding ports is a genuine improvement to my experience, but all of it adds to potential frustration when I eventually have to make the switch when the hardware can't keep up anymore. I feel similarly with my iphone SE.

I really wish they'd stop futzing around with everything just for trivial improvements.

In contrast, the nano SIM card has been around since the iPhone 5 came out in 2012, but cheap smart phone (think Samsung J-something[1]) still use micro SIM cards. Pointless fragmentation to save a millimeter.

If Apple wants to drop legacy cruft, how about they start with 5400rpm hard drives??!

[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_j2_(2017)-8900.php

How are any of those counterexamples? Thunderbolt wasn't dropped and most users don't care a single bit about Magsafe and/or the physical escape key.

Power: Magsafe 1 being incompatible with Magsafe 2, which is in turn incompatible with USB-C. No drastic improvement in either.

Data: Thunderbolt 1 and 2 were at least port compatible. Thunderbolt 3 is the same thing as USB-C, so the cable won't fit and you have to buy an adapter, so in effect thunderbolt was dropped. I get that it's a different story internally, but from my perspective, it's again frustrating.

Anyway, at face value, I'm happy that they /finally/ decided to collaborate with everyone else and agreed on an industry-standardized connector, but damn. Even then, I keep reading horror stories re: cable compatibility for USB-C because the standard is so complex. Oh well, it'll settle eventually.

Anyway, none of this bothers me as much as headphones specifically, which cost a lot of money, last decades, and aren't a throwaway item like adaptors and cables. So if you're going to make me change them or use an annoying dongle, there had better be an excellent reason :-(

Anyway, make up your mind. Are you furious that Apple had the courage to adopt a standard like USB-C, or are you happy? Choose one. :)

As far as I understand, Intel co-developed Thunderbolt with Apple on their own. The standard was published, but this isn't the same as an open and public collaboration the way other standards are, e.g. USB has the USB Implementers Forum, which is a consortium of companies. Plus, they used to charge royalties, and only recently did intel make the standard royalty-free. Good for them for doing that.

To me it looks like they did what they wanted on their own, then eventually slapped it on top of the existing USB-C standard when it didn't get much adoption elsewhere. I don't know why Apple would care about that in the slightest, but I can imagine Intel does.

> Anyway, make up your mind. Are you furious that Apple had the courage to adopt a standard like USB-C, or are you happy? Choose one. :)

Why? Can't it be both? I'm happy that they found the "courage" now, but unhappy that they found it after floundering through a bunch of different options first. I'm also unhappy that they took away my darned headphone jack in the process :-)

However, I am very glad that I can now charge my laptop with pretty much any USB charger* and a cheap cable. I consider not having to buy $88 replacement chargers a huge win.

*Yes, even the tiny iPhone brick can charge my MacBook, albeit very, very slowly.

https://griffintechnology.com/us/breaksafe-magnetic-usb-c-po...

I still have a FW800-Thunderbolt adapter...

We’re not luddites. We’re not short sighted. We understand tech moves on. That’s all fine and also irrelevant, because the situation here is that real tech used be lots of people every day with no real replacement is being yanked out from under us in the name of profit. Stop acting like you’re woke and the rest of us just need to catch up. It’s insulting as hell.

Buy virtually any other phone, if it's that important to them?

My current phone is rapidly disintegrating. If I had the time, I could argue that the current method of production and rapid obsolescence did, in fact, take both my current phone away, and my ability to easily transition to the new model being offered without having to rethink how I listen to music.

1. Abandon all proprietary connectors and adopt USB-C only on the phone. Keeping the Lightning port while moving MacBook Pros to USB-C-only was incredibly dumb because it immediately made the new products less useful than ANY older and less-expensive combination. Let’s see: older iPhone with charge cable and earphones that seamlessly plug into both the phone and the computer, or new-and-expensive-for-no-reason computer that can’t do any of that!?

2. Put multiple ports on the phone to avoid port-unavailable issues during charging; or, make sure that so-called “wireless” charging is working first so it can be a viable alternative. Instead they just broke a bunch of things and figured at some unspecified point in the future it would all work out. Well, what exactly is the point of buying the product in the meantime?

3. Assume that people will still want wired earphones. Wireless is NOT automatically better, for any number of reasons (risk of loss, sound cutting out, constant recharge, worse sound quality).

I have wireless headphones and I basically hate them; seems that every other time I want to use them they’re already out of battery, or they just STOP working halfway through some music. And it’s one of those products that can’t be used while it’s being recharged. As a result, I just use them way less, and it is a step backwards in every conceivable way. All I want is a wire.

After owning every iPhone since 3G up to 5s, I ditched Apple, and bought a new phone last week specifically because it had a headphone jack.

My WHOLE PHONE cost only a little bit more than Airpods alone. It's a Chinese phone that offers incredible value for money and I can't be happier(Xiaomi Note 4, for those interested).

Sure, it's specs don't quite match up to the flagship models from A and G, but it had what I wanted - a headphone jack(cheap, good, battery-less and reliable audio), a large-enough screen, lots of ram and a fast-enough processor.

I believe the dropping of the headphone jack was not meant as a way of herding users to better tech, like the CD-ROM ect. They could have left the jack in the iPhone 7 and released the AirPods anyway, as a cross-over test. The market would've decided on the winner. But they didn't do that. They didn't do that because they knew AirPods would not have sold as well.

It was just a blunt move of trying to increase profits. Just like the death-by-a-thousand-dongles decision.

Bad Apple. Bad.

I picked up a Xiaomi Mi A1 for ~$325 last week when my Nexus 5X died of sudden bootloop. I think it's very similar to the Note 4 but is part of the Android One initiative which means it runs stock Android and should get updates more regularly. I think it's marked up a bit in my market but it was still cheap enough and is a great device—awesome build quality, fast enough, and has a headphone jack!

All in all, all four of my headphones use the 3.5mm jack. Don’t see myself paying premium now for half-thought solutions, thank you.

Apple is not a god when deciding what ports to drop, alright? Just because they practically indoctrinate an industry to follow in their footsteps doesn’t mean it’s always right. I’m all for leaving really old or badly designed ports IF there are better alternatives. What’s currently out there is buggy at best.

The sound is quality truly amazing.

> Well the major difference is that optical drives were becoming more and more obsolete with the increase in streaming and download services. With spotify, netflix, amazon prime, itunes, etc, the main uses of optical drives for dvds and music disks were decreasing in popularity pretty rapidly. The only uses I ever have these days for my optical drive is to install drivers for new hardware in my PC, which in most cases can be found online anyway. And even this isn't needed on Macs because, unlike customisable PCs, you'll never need to install drivers for a fancy new PCIE wifi card.

> The headphone jack is different, because it isn't being replaced by convenient online services. Sure there are wireless alternatives, but the cost increases, difficulty of pairing, and the fact that 3.5mm is a standard across a huge range of devices from simple headphones to complex audio recording/mixing/playback setups means it just cannot be replaced. They could remove the optical drive without including the external drive because most people wouldn't need it, they definitely could not have removed the headphone jack without including an adapter in the box because of how popular the jack still is.

Guess what? It started syncing my entire contacts list. I just wanted to pipe audio from my phone to the car speakers, not share my life with a rental car.

So for those of us who value compartmentalising our lives, we'd very much like that bulky 3.5mm headphone jack, in addition to Bluetooth. Thanks.

I didn't know that iOS didn't prompt you for that.

http://www.hyundaibluetooth.com/content/dam/Bluetooth/Hyunda...

I don't know about you, but I regularly - at least 5 times a year - find the battery drained in my Bluetooth peripheral when I wanted to play audio, typically before or during a long trip. I keep wired headphones in my jacket pocket for these times, as a backup. I use three different peripherals often, and I don't track their charge state - the first I know about low battery is when they start giving warnings, usually about 10 minutes before they shut down, leaving me in silence. I don't have the time or patience to be checking their charge statuses constantly, or continually plugging them in to charge up, meaning disconnecting them from their home locations and needing retrieval before use.

Call it what you will, but the headphone jack is superior to its predecessor, unlike the floppy, cd-rom, etc. When I heard they were discontinuing it, it felt wrong - it felt intentionally radical. And I knew there was no way I was going to pay extra for some Bluetooth earbuds I will definitely lose on my morning runs.

2) CDROM -- was just about as obsolete at the time it was removed -- also not even close to the same thing

3) flash -- well that did cause some people problems, but I didn't really care at the time, and it isn't really the same thing either.

The headphone jack may be old, but it is still way more useful than either a floppy disk or a CDROM were at the time they were removed. In the case of the floppy drive -- they were already on the way out, and the CDROM drive was there to replace them. When they ditched the CDROM drive, it could easily be replaced by a USB thumb drive or similar device -- which was still standard hardware, didn't have to be made by Apple, and was a reasonable replacement for the device removed. Having to have a separate adapter in order to use a standard set of headphones is, IMHO, NOT a reasonable replacement for just having the jack. And, yes, I DO believe that at least part of Apple's motivation was to make money by selling you Apple-branded headphones with their proprietary connector on it.

It's a legitimate gripe by paying customers. Apple is welcome to make whatever decisions they want on the hardware they sell, and we should not be essentially told to shut up when we (very reasonably) disagree with their decision.

In short, the marginal cost in space, power, and BOM is negligible; and the value is high. I can't see myself buying a smartphone without a 3.5mm jack until wireless earbuds don't need to be charged more than once a month, and I can forget to put them back in the case for a couple days in a row without losing the ability to listen to audio.

AirPods are a miracle; a true "wow" product. And as an aside, the audio is really surprisingly decent. I'm a professional classical musician, so my ears aren't terrible.

Without being an Apple product buyer myself, I feel I can get a good pretty read on Apple products' success by the degree of condescension / stridency in reviewers' language. Like some Garner hype curve for fanboyism.

Judging by your tone, Airpod is still rising in popularity, yet to break through to mainstream, but may still do so.

AirPods are a miracle

Seriously? Headphones?

However, if you could go back in time by a short amount of years to show anyone the current iteration of music player and air pods then I think they would find the technology to be tantamount to magic and therefore a bonafide miracle.

At the other end of the scale you have the Apple fan and if they find these Airpods things to be miraculous then I think they are only being fair about what has been achieved here technologically to bring music to the consumer.

Equivalent to an act of God?

You don't think you're being utterly hyperbolic here?

If I ever need a replacement in a pinch, almost every convenience store has an inexpensive pair of compatible headphones, good ones can be bought online or at audio stores.

Headphone jacks also double as line-out jacks, allowing you to play audio through any of the billions (!) of compatible systems without noticeable RF interference even in congested conditions.

I'm just saying: keep the jack there, it's cheap, it's convenient, it costs next to nothing in any way (BOM, water resistance, space), it gives customers good and valid options, even if they ultimately want to shove a little plug in the hole and forget about it.

It is not like a CD-ROM drive at all, because it is ubiquitous and common in use (unlike optical media at the time of the superdrive removal), and removing it does not notably improve the device in any way. It doesn't hinder form factor, it doesn't hinder any selling point of the device, and it makes hundreds of millions of people happy.

Four years ago, when Apple started removing laptops with optical drives — they only finished this time last year — from their lineup, very few people were still using optical media on a regular basis. Today, almost everyone who uses headphones uses wired ones when they have the option to.

There's a difference between avant-garde, and jumping the gun.

Removing USB A from laptops for "professionals" and removing 3.5mm headphone jack is not really helping anything. USB C adoption will continue but there so many USB A products out there that it is inconvenient to the customer with zero advantage. Yeah I'd really like less ports on here for no decrease in price or increase in portability and would like to carry dongles said no one ever.

* Bluetooth has to work flawlessly - I hear there's been some issues even on iOS 11 and Android's Bluetooth has always been terrible

* USB C Audio has to work flawlessly [1]

1: http://pocketnow.com/2016/09/08/the-impending-horror-of-usb-...

The drop of headphone jack comes with one problem: I can't charge and listen to music at the same time unless I pay for the earbuds, or get a third-party thunderbolt hub which has serious quality issue...

P.S: Mr. Robot saves whatever he wants to store away on discs. Kinda interesting. He probably doesn't trust hard drive as much as discs, and thinks discs will survive longer.

> At each of those steps there were people decrying the loss of these things. Today however, most people don’t miss any of them.

Those statements don't really support each other. There's no particular evidence that Apple's timing was good, just that they dropped it and eventually nobody cared. But if they dropped it years before everyone moved on, then their timing was awful, not great, even though the end-state was the same.

Flash is a particularly weird example since Flash on mobile largely never existed, so claims to "drop" it are nonsensical. You can't drop that which didn't exist. Yes there was a brief attempt at Flash on Android, but that came long after the iPhone.

Dropping flash on desktop would have been a better example, but Apple didn't actually have the courage to do that, at least not on their own. It was more a unified push by all the browser vendors combined with Adobe themselves dropping support for Flash.

https://www.google.com/amp/bgr.com/2016/12/12/steve-jobs-iph...

I get that it's not ideal and that adapters are awkward but it seems like it's such a minor inconvenience for your use case. I would expect that audiophiles are used to adapters to go between 2.5mm, 3.5mm, and 1/4" stereo already. What's one more?

And yes, I really do prefer what I already have (my headphones working without a dongle).

Edit: I'm not even an audiophile btw

Don't have one.

>need to plug them into a TV or game system

Don't have either.

You're completely right that I need adapters but that doesn't mean I'm ok with getting increasingly more of them. Especially when I get nothing out of them except backwards-compat for hardware that is simply not of the legacy type.

Adapters are easy to forget at home, lose on the go, break, etc. pp. They're detrimental to the user experience and hence should be restricted to support of legacy hardware.

What's your criteria for when that future will have arrived?

They have a good track record of dropping technologies in order to push their own proprietary technology instead. And failing most of the time, resulting in ultimately adopting the standard that everybody else is using.

CD-ROM -> Internet/USB stick

Ethernet -> WLAN

Flash -> HTML

etc -> pp

The only proprietary port on today's Macs and iDevices is the lightning connector, which is quite obviously better than the abomination that is microUSB, which the competition uses.

I can't fathom how people can delude themselves into believing such easily disproven myths.

I set up the equivalent Square card-reader device for my kids' school parents group, together with a dedicated iPad with cell connection. It's magic... even the most technophobic mum can operate it.

Sure, would be a problem if (or when) the iPad died, but it is stupidly cheap (and contract-free!) compared to a dedicated payment machine.

I think I bricked my phone once when I was messing with rooting/overclocking. I don't do that anymore, I bought a pretty solid LG phone for like $80 (new) from a lower end mobile provider it functions better than this other phone by ZTE that had a finger print sensor, it kept freezing after running say more than 4 apps.

Edit: The podcast was about PayPal Beacon

We have a UniFi access point that is brilliant. However, I don't use 5GHz because the signal can't penetrate though more than 2 brick walls, which is an issue in some of the bedrooms.

I thought it would be a big deal - I was wrong. It's fine. If you still want to use your cheap/expensive wired headphones, you can.

Seriously though, using the corner esc key to get into normal mode sucked anyway.

Will there be a backlash to this? Possibly, but if dealing with a shitty keyboard is the cost of getting a high-end machine with great build quality, maybe not. People will come up with more and more workarounds to fix something which wasn't a problem a few years ago.

Map both ctrl and esc to caps lock key: when it's pressed and released on its own, it sends an Esc; when it's used as a modifier key (pressed together with another key), it sends a Ctrl.

http://www.economyofeffort.com/2014/08/11/beyond-ctrl-remap-...

I am not sure I buy the one size fits all argument. That is mostly an Apple thing.

Also, while it's true Apple quality was higher the last few generations are much worse. We have had numerous service issues come up, keyboards now break... I can't see Apple quality being what it once was.

But now I decided it's easier to learn the "standard" configuration than to configure every computer I have to touch.

Habits are strange.

Although now, I keep turning on caps lock when I use other people's computers.

Nevertheless, esc is still super far away from all the letters which is presumably what you are likely to be pressing.

I have an iphone and the airpods and I haven't missed the tangled mess of the old earbuds at all.

Flash is still important even though its written like garbage.

Your last argument is as dumb as can be too. You're trying to say because people have forgotten what they were made about, it doesn't matter. So since people forgot that the iMac they had was USB only and couldn't use older devices, its not important. It may not be now, but it was important then.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Between Apple and Google, you think APPLE'S business model is the harmful one?! We're talking about (1) actually charging for their products vs. (2) tracking your every move and collecting all the personal information about you they possibly can so they can sell you ads better, right? I'm actually not sure I can even name a tech company with a business model as simple and honest as Apple's.

NBC must therefore be "dishonest" because they're showing you 30 second ads. Despite the fact the business model of serving content for with ads has been a successful (and accepted) business model for decades.

Google's privacy policy is open. No one is forcing you to use it, just as no one is forcing you to watch NBC.

https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/

The other is an integral part of my daily life and knows virtually everything about me, who I communicate with, where I go, and is almost mandatory in modern society. I have no control over the software that runs on it, and the organization that does control it already has my money. If I want to exit the relationship, there are maybe one or two serious competitors (depending on if you include non-google android).

No one is forcing you to interact with Google. You choose to interact with them because they have the content that you want, or they provide a service that you like.

And more importantly, you've accepted their privacy terms by using their service. In other words, you have interacted with them on your terms.

I once had a friend frequent this record store, because every time he walked in the store, the owner would tell him, "You need to listen to this." And my friend would walk out of the store with a fresh vinyl pressed record with songs that he would spend hours listening to.

Was my friend be tracked? Yes. Did he experience targeted advertising? Yes. Was he subjected to unethical or immoral behavior? I don't know, but he kept coming back.

If you are the one opening up the browser and going to websites that do such unsavory things, such as trying to understand their customers to provide better content, then isn't the onus on you to not visit those sites?

Not what the discussion was about. The question was which business model was more 'honest'. And I'm not sure you can fairly say that bulk data collection across most parts of the Web which most people are unaware of, is an honest way of conducting business (Not to mention shit like [1] and [2]).

[1] https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/09/yes-google-uses-its-power...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/us/politics/eric-schmidt-...

But if you feel Apple's business model is truly more honest, here's a wikipedia page you should go read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Apple_Inc.

If Apple could actually take advantage of the potential customer information they have access to in the same way I'm pretty sure they would.

Google provides services to everyone in the world. Apple provides services to the social elite, and only them. A person of moderate means living in Ghana? Apple doesn't care about you; you may as well be invisible.

> I'm actually not sure I can even name a tech company with a business model as simple and honest as Apple's.

Because sending in the swat team when you think a journalist has a preview model of your doohickey is "simple" and "honest"? Apple does the same sort of shady stuff as any other BigCorp, they're just better at making things look fashionable, so people tend to give them a pass on it. After all, this is the same corp that patented the black oblong with rounded corners. There is nothing 'simple' about Apple's business model.

I think the best evidence of Apple having an honest business model was the FBI V Apple encryption case. Have you seen any cases where Google has done this? I haven't. Either Android is not as secure and the FBI can get into any Android phone they want or Google has complied with a similar order...

> Have you seen any cases where Google has done this?

I haven't seen any case where Google has sent in the police to raid someone's house and confiscate their stuff. I haven't seen any case where Google has manipulated the legal system to claim rights over "black oblong with curved corners". Google doesn't have a history of taking things other people have done and then claiming that they were first to market. I haven't heard people complaining of Google designing planned obsolescence to drive future sales. I haven't heard of a case where Google designed their antenna incorrectly, and then blamed the users for "holding it wrong".

Apple is a very successful company and has broken a lot of ground, but calling them "honest" is horseshit. Don't mistake "a greater focus on user privacy" for "an honest business model". They're orthogonal things.

Having a greater focus on user privacy adds to their honesty in this regard in my opinion, as they are protecting our personal data and not selling it, and even defending access to it.

This kind of argument has been going on for well over a decade at this point - to suggest that google isn't honest and open about its business model at this point is simply choosing to be willfully ignorant.

I've given you plenty of well-known examples of Apple behaving badly. This isn't to say "Apple is the Devil", but that they're not this shining knight that some people paint them as. They behave dishonestly when it suits them as well.

Here's another example: tax evasion. Apple is the doyen of tax evasion. Is it legal? Yes, but stretched to the limit. Is it honest? Nope; it requires fiscal shennanigans, and they're not afraid to throw their weight around to keep things cosy for themselves. If they truly were honest, they'd pay their taxes, like the general public expects of good citizens.

How many regular consumers are aware that their android phone tracks their location and stores this data on googles servers nearly continuously? And that every single google assistant query is recorded and saved on googles servers? And that all this data is used to target ads and refine google services?

I don't disagree that Apple has unpalatable aspects to their business, as do all business of that size, but in my opinion they are more honest and upfront about how they make their money when they are compared to Google.

If Google wasn't dumping prices, there would be a local cheaper alternative. Now it's impossible to compete with them. Ad-supported will always be cheaper than pro-privacy and there is no enough people to pay little premium to have cheap-but-pro-privacy device/service. The only way to stay afloat is to sell with hefty premium like Apple does. But then it's not really affordable to poor people.

Apple doesn't care about "elite". They charge price they see fair and provide their services to anyone who can pay that price.

Apple's not dumping prices. Where is Ghana's local cheaper alternative to Apple?

> The only way to stay afloat is to sell with hefty premium like Apple does

There are plenty of other companies that are surviving without the hefty premium Apple charges. Apple managed to reach $200B in liquid cash assets; clearly their path is not "the only way".

> Apple doesn't care about "elite". They charge price they see fair and provide their services to anyone who can pay that price.

... how do you think elitism works?

s/Apple/High-priced lawyers/, to see how empty that argument is against elitism.

Google is the cheaper alternative.

> There are plenty of other companies that are surviving without the hefty premium Apple charges. Apple managed to reach $200B in liquid cash assets; clearly their path is not "the only way".

Of course Apple could go a wee lower. But they won't be able to compete with $50 Android anyway. Very few people will pay even little extra for Apple's privacy-oriented devices if they didn't have premium style&hardware. Once they produce that style&hardware, they get to today's price. $50 or even $100 won't change much in terms of reachability.

> ... how do you think elitism works?

And how do you think elitism works? Elitism is working with select clientele based on some subjective criteria.

High-priced lawyer who charges premium is not elitist. Lawyer who works only for celebrities is elitist.

Google and Apple charge the same amount for maps, music, apps, mail, and operating systems. Google isn't seriously in the hardware game - it had a couple of smartphone handsets, but mostly left it to other manufacturers. Google does not make miniservers, desktops, general-purpose laptops, all-in-ones and so forth. Other companies do, and google does not set their prices. Google does not dictate that a smartphone must sell for $X.

So no, Google is not the "cheaper alternative". Their software sells for the same price, and for the most part other companies sell the hardware.

So, where is Ghana's local cheaper alternative to Apple? Come on, you started this free-market claptrap that every locale has the ability to make a Silicon-Valley-quality giant, so where is Ghana's?

> Very few people will pay even little extra for Apple's privacy-oriented devices

This whole 'privacy' angle is a very recent development in Apple's history. It wasn't much of a notable issue before.

I could start listing all the super cheap Android phones as Apple competitors. But that'd be very simplified story, because they'd be nothing without Google's software and promotion. And if Google charged for the software as well Android brand, those phones wouldn't be as cheap. Now end users pay that fee with their eyeballs.

I never said that every locale has ability to make a quality giant or whatever. I said that Google dumping prices make someone else hard to enter. Especially at the cheap end of the market.

Apple's 'privacy' angle was very clear for at least a decade. They didn't pay as much lip service to it, but they products are clearly very different from Google. And been that way for a looooooong time.

There's a reason "pass me the aux" is a meme and not "pair your phone with my bluetooth speaker, oh wait it's not connecting, let me try disconnecting, do you see it? Yeah it's GHS-9013 I think, okay, I hit the pair button, do you see it now?"

it sure seems like things are getting worse, when all my phone upgrades have been forced:

1. original iphone wipes itself when i connect it to a new computer. ouch. my own itunes account, but somehow not recognized, and zap. went to android after this.

2. first android was the nexus. it had a known hardware bug where the soft buttons were being triggered randomly without being touched. started to drive me insane.

3. enter a unibody aluminum HTC. owned it for 3 years. i missed the sdcard slot but grew to love it anyway because it was durable as hell. it fell down a flight of concrete stairs. then carried on about its day. eventually the camera died on it (all pics started coming out hazy and red). i still see people using htc 7s even now.

4. enter nexus 6p. decent phone. screen was not very bright which was annoying outside but otherwise checks all the boxes. and it still gets the latest updates-- thing runs on oreo! but now its falling apart. the glass at the back broke twice, the sim is loose, gps works half the time, the plastic bottom fell off..

5. and so here we are today. cannot find another 6p. the pixel looks worse in many ways (fugly and bezels are even bigger while the software is the same). the v2 with no headphone jack?? and all these phones with glass backs that are actually even thicker than their predecessors that are obviously not going to last very long (anyone out there have a screen shatter?? lets double those odds). everyone using their own bloatware and not updating anything... android ones only really available in eurasia... ugh. do not want to crawl back to apple. someone help? blackberry, where are you?? lol

Samsung S8 or LG V30 have probably the best hardware (great AMOLED screens, jacks, SD card slots, etc), but the software might be lacking - there's some bloatware, some "me too" apps, and updates aren't quick. Although I have been told that the software situation is much better this year.

I think something like OnePlus 5 sits in the middle, almost a Nexus replacement - good (but not great) hardware for reasonable price, almost stock software, and it's kind of enthusiast phone, so it will very likely get working LineageOS for years to come.

The battery life is insane, easily can make it 2 days and I'm an extremely heavy user. I love the plain vanilla Android stock and I got a deal where I got the Hassleblad camera Moto mod for free which is a great addition.

Bluetooth works great for me (good enough quality, no stuttering) - what kills it is latency. Latency makes watching videos very uncomfortable. There's also faint static in nearly every pair of bluetooth earbuds I've tried (and not just cheap ones, $100+ ones do this too).

There's some issues with reliably connecting though.

Sometimes it is unavoidable though... for example my car's bluetooth implementation however is horrible - very laggy and sometimes unresponsive.

In contrast, $2 throwaway headphones work 100% of the time. Sure, the audio quality isn’t great but it’ll be better than any phone speaker and you can drop only a little more for a big improvement.

This annoys me because I like the Bluetooth concept – and have since I bought my first BT-equipped phone around 2004 – but the tragedy of the commons has hit really hard. It’s 2017 and turning Bluetooth off and back on is still a useful way to fix problems FFS!

If Apple and followers want to make this switch, they need to start blacklisting or warning for buggy devices (“x is unable to play back reliably; contact VENDOR support” or “sound quality will be low due to …”) — after fixing anything hokey they’re still shipping, of course. Trying to paper over the skimping just tarnishes the entire industry.

I was also just in an airline lounge last weekend and got a huge amount of drop outs on my bluetooth headphones. I'm guessing because of a strong wi-fi signal to the point where the music was stuttering badly.

So it's got a ways to go yet.

And there's the issue, the 3.5mm works with something I can buy for a couple of dollars in the supermarket and it just works. A good bluetooth headset costs an order of magnitude or two more and I can't find out if it's good until I take it home and open the packaging.

Even streaming from my phone to my PC is something I've found to be incredibly laggy.

Complexity has its price — it’s hard to get right and corner cases continue creeping in with wider use.

If there’s a popular example of over engineering, the replacement of a dirt cheap 3 foot cable that works perfectly 100% of the time, with zero lag and zero signal loss, with an expensive, battery powered wireless signal solution which lags, cuts out, creates security issues and dies after a few hours of use must be it.

In at least one of the cases, this was because of stuff (some sort of gunk) getting into the port. Before anyone says that wasn't a problem with the port itself, having a physical port allows problems like that to happen. Problems of that sort don't exist with wireless technologies.

it's not merely "technically possible". I've had this actually happen to me, and I'm sure others have too.

I had the Pixel 2 in my cart thinking I could convince myself of a no 3.5 mm future, and like hell I could so I aborted the checkout. At this rate, if they do not bring it back, I will wait until I can get superb USB-C headsets inexpensively... or most likely, Samsung S9 is going to be my next upgrade.

Loved Google's Nexus and even the Pixel 1, but they have gotten complacent, do not listen anymore and actually believe that copying Apple in any way shape or form makes them look better.

Can't wait for that Librem phone either. That one sounds better than anything else Google has to offer at least for the HN crowd, if not wider...

Google have arguably made their BT stack worse in Oreo. Since it got the upgrade at the start of the summer, my Pixel XL v1 no longer plays nicely with my car, and is pretty poor with my BT headphones. Even if I bought the fabled AirPods, they wouldn't use the W1 magic to talk to my phone, so I sincerely doubt they'd fix any problems I have.

Luckily, I have the fallback of the 3.5mm jack, and so largely the impact of these BT issues are small for me. But the article mentions that the Pixel 2s are also suffering BT issues, and Google won't even comment on them. If I buy one and find the same issues with it, then I have to rely on the dongle to get music from my phone to my car, and I can't charge it at the same time any more.

Except that a lot of the complaints are not specific to the Google phone. They're about removing the headphone jack, and what people claim are inherent problems with doing so. If AirPods can be used to counter such claims then they're definitely relevant.

I'm one of those people who believe that eventually all consumer devices will use wireless headphones. It's not going to happen instantaneously, and the transition will be awkward, but eventually it will be complete and issues like you're talking about will be non-issues. This kind of thing has happened many times before.

Did USB stick proponents ONLY use USB sticks? What about computers that only use 3.5 inch floppy disks?

So far, I've been very happy with my Stylo 2 Plus. Battery life is amazing (the battery is usually at about 75% when I plug it in for the night), the screen is sharp in spite of being 720p, and plenty bright. I can't see spending more than $250 on a phone these days, except for bragging rights.

(This applies to S8 and above, S7 and below were bad.)

Yes, I tried it for a day without a screen protector and ended up with scratches on the screen.

Scratching definitely isn't a problem. Cracking is a risk, but a basic case dramatically reduces the odds of that.

EDIT: And where the heck do you get one in the US?

Pixel is an amazing phone and aside from the privacy aspects... I can't see needing more phone. The camera is better than any phone camera I have ever used.

We need to get away from the Android / iOS duopoly

Look, this is inevitable. The titans have decided this thing is dead, so it's going to happen. The thing that pissed me off most about the iPhone 7 and convinced me to leave wasn't the lack of a headphone jack, it's that Apple was/is confused about what to do about it. You can't go making USB-C only computers and then have all of your phones using something different. I get that this is shitty, but at least if we decide that USB-C is the way forward we can end the Great Dongle Wars.

And no, moving iPhone to USB-C would of course not end the Great Dongle Wars, nor even get rid of a significant chunk of them. Most dongles are necessitated by all kinds of old ports, mostly video, on laptops.

http://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/lightning-adapter-audio-qua...

OK what the hell, I thought they were just outputting analog through Lightning from the internal DAC but instead they put a second conversion chain in the adapter? Damn.

> You need iOS 10 for the adapter to work on older devices. iOS 9 and before predate the headphone-jack-less iPhones, but if you have iOS 10 it works great on my old iPhone 5S — not that you'd need it to.

And it works just fine on older lightning devices too, that's really impressive.

https://cdn2.gsmarena.com/vv/pics/google/google-pixel-2-1.jp...

Getting a little tired of Google's obvious lies (still bitter about their lie about OIS in the past, and now the dual-camera, too).

I'm at the point where I'd be happy to see Microsoft make their own Android phone, use the Arrow launcher to hook into Windows.

What I lament is the inability to charge and use headphones at the same time with this adapter. They have another adapter "coming soon" in their store which will do both.

That said, it's been 25 hours since my last charge and I'm still at 71% battery, so it's less impactful than I thought it would be.

I'm a little concerned about the reports of screen burn-in I've seen on reddit, but the other rumors about discoloration did not impact my model, so it's just 'wait and see' now for me.

Overall, I really like it.

I don't know what the reason is, but I doubt it's a matter of cost.

For example in terms of parts all phones already have a DA conversor and an amp to be able to send analog audio to the speakers. The actual headphone jack costs close to nothing.

It might even be more expensive for Apple to manufacture the lightning to headphone adapter...

Get rid of it, all of it, along with plastic media drives and plastic media, game cartridges, magnetic hard drives, SIM cards, full size USB ports...all this crap, go away already, please.

It is a consumer hostile move, no matter the quality of the wireless earbuds.

I speculate they probably negotiated this as part of the iTunes library access some years ago.