Seven years later, Apple was right to kill off the 3.5mm headphone jack
appleinsider.com1: I do not wish to charge my headphones.
2: I have many headphones with higher quality sound than earbuds can provide.
3: Bluetooth still kinda sucks, even after all this time.
4: Bluetooth is subject to denial of service, security concerns.
5: Apple's purpose with the decision was to increase revenue, that is all. You all are now paying $$$ for headphones with batteries, etc. onboard, and they no longer had to implement an audio amp or jack. win for apple, not the consumer.
6: DRM control over what the user can/cannot listen to.
> 6: DRM control over what the user can/cannot listen to.
Do you have a real example of this? Because this sounds like BS.
Believe it, or not.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/analog-last-defense-ag...
edit: removed unnecessary words.
> 1: I do not wish to charge my headphones.
Then use the dongle
> 2: I have many headphones with higher quality sound than earbuds can provide.
Then use the dongle
> 3: Bluetooth still kinda sucks, even after all this time.
Then use the dongle
> 4: Bluetooth is subject to denial of service, security concerns.
Ok suuurrreee, then use the dongle
> 5: Apple's purpose with the decision was to increase revenue, that is all. You all are now paying $$$ for headphones with batteries, etc. onboard, and they no longer had to implement an audio amp or jack. win for apple, not the consumer.
Or you could, you know, use the dongle. Literally everyone I know that has AirPods loves them and wouldn't consider going back to wired.
I think your comment would be better if you simply suggest using dongle.
That’s a poor solution. I’ve used the dongle and the failing mechanical parts (twist of the cables, Bulkiness etc) make it unreliable.
How do you use the dongle while charging your phone in a car, while jacking out to a 3.5mm aux input?
By spending 1 minute seaching Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NZMMTKW
How about buying a phone that doesn't require me to buy adapters?
Why would I want to settle for a substandard phone?
/s
That’s a joke. 7 years later I am still picking up headphones then remembering I can’t plug them in without going to find a dongle. If there was an iPhone with a headphone jack I would buy it.
For sure. This seems to be a press agent "inspired" article. Even if you use Bluetooth headphones, why wouldn't you want the option.
I can’t imagine having to use a cord for a headset in 2022. My AirPods switch seamlessly between my Mac, iPad, Watch and MacBook. Cords her tangled, caught in things are horrible for running etc.
Not to mention that would I run and go to the gym with just my watch.
I have AirPods, but also several sets of earbuds, IEMs, and quality headphones. Once a week I grab a set and realize I can’t plug it in. Doh!
But you look like this guy.
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Lobot
There’s something retro and cool about cords.
Cultural norms change. Everyone thought that the people were going to look silly and pretentious when the AirPods came out. Now it’s normal. The same with the Apple Watch.
Surely even people who love Apple a lot must realize that this is is just propaganda, right?
"Apple was right all along, says Apple"
What's funny is that I'm far from an Apple lover and I could be accused of being a shill for removing the headphone jack. I was initially skeptical, but it forced me onto bluetooth headsets which had come a long way up to that point. I listen to podcasts quite a lot, and I'd often snag the cord on door handles (it's amazing how catchy that cable could be), and audio quality isn't a huge factor. So overall it was a good change for me.
I feel the opposite about touchid if it matters. Honestly it seems forgotten, but I much prefer the intentionality of touching my phone in order to unlock it as well as having a physical home button.
According to Apple it might be.
But we aren't asking any end users in the article, because screw them, right?
Anything that enables the environmental irresponsibility of AirPods is only "right" from the perspective of the shareholder.
Certainly not the species.
> Anything that enables the environmental irresponsibility of AirPods is only "right" from the perspective of the shareholder.
Spare me. Companies are busy dumping waste all over this planet and you want me to care about something the size of 2 grapes?
Considering only the size of the discarded item(s) hardly covers the entire waste scenario.
Fine, consider the entire "cost" of manufacturing, shipping, etc. I'd wager my 1 pair of AirPods is hilariously tiny verses what some companies do in a hour if not a few minutes. Framing this as an environmental issue is just ridiculous. It's the same BS behind oil companies trying to convince people that not recycling is the big issue, not them.
Way to miss the point. You're going to use a lot more than 1 pair, Buster!
Oh the humanity! I cannot take people like you seriously. I could by 100 pairs and still do considerably less damage than some companies do in the time it takes me to check out.
Yes, I would care very much about 2 grapes if it cost me 150 bones and 30 minutes to replace them.
What is the environmental irresponsibility of AirPods?
You cannot replace the batteries without prying them apart, and Apple by default just tells you to throw them away and buy new ones.
There are rare earth minerals in the speaker drivers.
It looks like they recommend recycling them https://support.apple.com/guide/airpods/disposal-and-recycli...
And use 100% recycled rare earth elements according to the tech specs https://support.apple.com/kb/SP856?viewlocale=en_US&locale=e...
1) Your link only mentions the magnets, nothing else in relation to rare earth elements.
2) Plastic is not recyclable in a lot of jurisdictions. Seattle stopped collecting it all together.
3) Most people will not ecycle things. Most people will just throw them in the trash instead of driving to a big box store to drop of headphones for ecycling.
3a) Sure, this behavior is common across electronics (being lazy, throwing away) but when you design an electrical device to never be repaired you are just making things worse.
That's not what they will tell you on the phone. https://youtu.be/RQqk45ps9kg?t=31
"It would cost more than it's worth to like... break it apart, to open it up, and replace the battery" (because we designed them that way)
Have you ever heard of planned obsolescence?
To your second point, the problem isn't that they come from recycled. The problem is that they won't be recycled again.
Have you seen the tear down of the AirPod? The batteries make up the bulk of it.
That's so weird. My headphones are comprised of mostly.... headphones.
And that's not even addressing the issue of the charging curves of lithium batteries that make those batteries fail sooner than they should.
Bluetooth headphones are good != Apple was right to remove the jack
There is no reason to remove a feature that works perfectly and is invaluable in some situations. Bluetooth headphones will never be sufficient for music performance, audio production, and rhythm games, for example. And it's not like Apple shies away from features that affect only a tiny portion of their userbase, such as Lockdown Mode.
I’m holding on to my iPhone 6S until it dies irreparably, and would have probably bought a new iPhone by now otherwise, exclusively because all of my headphones are wired and I hate messing with bluetooth. But sure, great decision.
Why wouldn’t the $9 lightning to 3.5mm adapter solve your problem?
They didn't have one until Apple created it.
Now they should have lower fidelity audio, and/or more shit to carry around and fiddle with, and/or fail unexpectedly when least needed?
You actually can't understand the consumer side of this? Or just like Apple?
I understand it. I was annoyed by the removal of the headphone jack at first. I have a pair of Sennheiser headphones with 3.5mm and I previously used the adapter with them. I didn’t notice any lower fidelity audio with them and leaving the tiny adapter on the 3.5mm jack didn’t really feel like I was carrying anything more around. I’ve replaced the headphone cable on my senns twice and it was never through use of the adapter(usually because I’d get up and pull my computer to the floor and it fell on the jack), plus the Sennheiser cables are like $30 vs $9 so I’d rather have the adapter fail. I did a sound test with my wife’s Bose QCs and they sounded the same or better than my wired Senns. Now I have my own pair and I don’t miss fucking around with wires at all.
> Now they should have lower fidelity audio
Like most things audiophiles say: I call bullshit.
http://soundexpert.org/articles/-/blogs/audio-quality-of-lig...
> Audio quality of Apple Lightning to 3.5mm adapter (A1749) is almost as good as in-built mobile audio solutions by Apple, though it has slightly worse df-measurements. Mostly due to the higher jitter. But if you listen music you will not hear the difference; it is too subtle to be perceived.
This is a subjective matter. Calling it bullshit is not an accurate way of looking at it (or listening to it).
There are use cases for audio where "good enough" is simply not sufficient. You may never have need for these use cases.
But in those cases you wouldn't want to use a 3.5 mm headphone jack even if your phone or computer had one. You'd want to use a digital interface such as Lightning or USB.
Music on a phone or computer is digital. To get analog output for the headphone jack the device includes a DAC to convert that digital audio to analog and probably analog amplifiers to get the analog signal to the right level. The quality of the DAC and the analog amplifiers chosen by the device maker place an upper limit on the quality of the audio.
To get the highest quality you want to be able to choose the DAC and amplifiers yourself.
I know what my use cases are. Why do you keep trying to tell me what I want or need?
> You may never have need for these use cases.
And I'd argue the number of people who actually do have a "need" are stretching the definition of "need" to it's breaking point. Yes, if you need near-zero latency then AirPods might not be for you but that's a tiny segment of the population.
This says the Lightning to 3.5mm adapter doesn't cause meaningful quality loss.
Nothing about Bluetooth, which seems to be buggy, insecure, widely-poorly-implemented..mWiFi's bastard-child.
Well I was replying specifically to someone talking about the dongle being lower quality so yeah...
As for Bluetooth, especially when talking about the AirPods, it works just fine for vast majority of use cases normal people have.
You know these dongles increase your audio latency, right? Fidelity is faithful to both time and space. Latency is temporal distortion.
(it's probably better than BT, but nothing beats a hard line)
You know the vast majority of users don't care? No one is saying you should use AirPods as your monitors while you record but for listening to music/calls/podcasts/etc they work just fine.
Now argue the total security of a phone with Bluetooth enabled.
Now argue to the risk of stepping outside your house.
Come on, the truth is almost none of us need to worry about this. To each their own and you get to pick what your balance of security and convenience but disabling bluetooth is a little too tin-foil-y for my tastes.
Do you know that your bluetooth beacon is used to see how long you linger in front of what shelves?
I'm guessing no.
Do they fail frequently?
I'd bet that many (most?) people would plug their headphones into the adapter and leave it until the headphones or adapter failed.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not for Apple or the adapter, but I'm not convinced by the adapter hate either. I do wish I could find Bluetooth devices that didn't suck, though.
Do cheap, tiny copper cables fail frequently?
How long have you been sampling the electronics market?, heh
Haha, I might be unreasonably amused by your rephrasing of the question.
The adapters (cheap, tiny copper cables) seem as sturdy or sturdier than many of the cables attached to headphones and ear buds (also cheap, tiny copper cables).
So maybe the question should have been "do they fail more frequently than the cables would themselves?"
I've seen more people with wireless than wired headphones for many years now, there's been a couple of instances since I got my fairphone when I miss the headset jack, mostly in cars with old stereo systems. If I had a car like that I'd buy a Bluetooth DAC probably.
Previously: "AirPods don't “just work”" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30084901
If I use the same pair of headphones paired to my work computer and my phone, I cannot unlock and look at my phone without it taking over.
I have "solved" this by having three pairs of headphones. #1 paired to my phone. Used for my commute. #2 left at work, paired with the computer. #3 left at home, paired with the computer when I'm WFH.
It gets expensive/old pretty fast. Also a lot of charging needs to be done.
The culture of "Apple Knows Best" died years ago. People are realizing the lightening port and removing the Jack isn't innovation--it's just a cash grab.
At some point there needs to be some sympathy for consumer preferences. I'm an Apple customer due to the bloat/clunkiness of their competitors rather than an appreciation for Apple itself.
Apple charges more for less and their users line up to pay instead of walking away. As long as this keeps happening, Apple will keep taking away and gouging their users. People are stupid and gullible so I think Apple is doing the right thing here - fleece the sheep while they keep coming. The main downside is that other companies observe this behaviour and try to emulate it but that doesn't work because people who avoid Apple probably don't want to pay premium for substandard products so these companies die of and there is less and less competition and innovation in the market so we are left with Apple and Samsung $1200 phones/tablets instead of decent XYZ brand devices for more reasonable price - say $300-$500.
So, I guess there is no possibility that their hundreds of millions of customers recognize that they are paying more for more? I guess all of us are just idiots. Markets don't work that way. Over time unsatisfied customers change the market dynamic. That hasn't happened. Perhaps you should reevaluate your criteria for determining "more" and "less" in terms of product value to the consumer.
Markets work by way of hype. Among that artificially creating the impression of wanted hotness, by hiring student extras camping in front of the store, which opens the next day.
Wired headphones suck for 90%+ of the population. We can talk about the cost of AirPods but they are objectively better in most all situations.
I was a hold-out on the AirPods having using bluetooth headphones before and hated them but I got AirPods as a gift and almost immediately fell in love. Way easier to carry (no tangled wires, and yes, I knew how to wind them up but that wasn't always foolproof), super easy to pop in your ears for a few minutes or a few hours, and no cables to get in your way.
I lost my original AirPods (or they were stolen) and I decided to just use the wired headphones while I continued to hope they would turn up. WIthin 2 days I had an order placed for a new AirPods because wired headphones are a huge step backwards (wires get caught on things and tug at your ears when you extend too far).
I generally find audiophiles to be nearly completely full of shit when it comes to "audio quality" and while I know bluetooth doesn't allow for the highest quality possible it's well past "good enough".
Show your sources for that 90 percent claim. You're not having a good faith discussion, and emotion is making (or losing!) your argument.
Maybe ask yourself why you're so unwilling to be wrong?
Perhaps sunk cost fallacy?
Ahem. On headphones Pros: - Not bound to an insecure protocol. - Compatible with jacks a century old. - Decent headphones can cost as low as 5EUR on a convenience store and still sound better than most of BT headphones
Cons: You can't do jogging fine, but you have tiny and cheap media players with clips easily attached to the neck of your T-shirt.
I'd still rather have the option.
I love having AirPods Pro. Super easy, seems to just work™. Where I have issues with connecting to vehicles.
I have a pickup truck that has bluetooth and a 3.5mm jack. The problem is that when I start the truck, it takes about a minute for it to connect to my iPhone. While it's connecting, it's playing FM radio extremely loud. It's gotten to the point now where I just gave up on bluetooth and use a permanent dongle to 3.5mm just so that I don't have to deal with bluetooth.
It's easy to act like any change to your product was the "right" thing to do when people are going to buy your product no matter what you do.