"Thinner phone" is a stupid requirement. A thinner phone will be mechanically weaker.
Yes, Apple retired Floppy disks and DVD readers, because those were replaced by something better. This is not the case here.
A Bluetooth headphone will give you an inferior experience. A lightning converter will give you a worse experience because I can bet it doesn't stay plugged as firmly as a headphone in a high vibration situation (e.g. people exercising) and you can't have the charger plugged while you listen to music
Just as a reminder it was the EU who ended the BS of every company having a stupid proprietary charger.
I agree with the bluetooth being inferior, I hate that the standard headphone jack is going away. If it isn't broken, don't fix it.
That said I've been told that the 3.5mm jack takes up a surprising amount of internal space, and that between freeing up that space and a few other tweaks, getting rid of the jack substantially boosts battery life. Still, I think it's not a great trade-off, now you have to babysit a new battery in your headphones, which probably won't last a full day of use.
On a personal note, anticipated lack of a standard headphone jack is one of the reasons I upgraded to a 6S recently, this way I'll have the best 3.5-mm phone Apple made for a while. If I do have to upgrade later on, I'll be strongly tempted to get an SE instead of a higher end phone, as long as it has a 3.5mm jack.
You may think that the current iPhones are thin enough, but almost nobody actually uses the phone on its own. You need to take into account the thickness of the case, and now that people are playing Pokemon Go, it really needs to be a battery case, which is even thicker. So the base phone needs to be thinner.
(They can't just make the phone a little thicker and put the extra battery inside it because reasons.)
I'd say bluetooth is good enough for using the device(s) as a phone - but a jack might be better for connecting a high-end stereo system. On the other hand, even for that, you would probably be even better off with a digital output, and a good DAC (either in the amplifier, or as a separate unit).
and I'm very happy (not for use with an Apple device though, I use it with a Sony Xpedia Z3+, my laptop and my desktop via a recent generation usb bluetooth dongle (for AptX support).
To use a 3.5mm jack headset you need to add power amplifiers inside the phone, do proper impedance matching and hope that noise in the path does not corrupt the data. But sending power and digital data solves all these problems, the wires don't need to be as well made either!
"If you look at the previous generation of phones, things like Nokia phones, you had to have an adapter," he reasons. "If you want to connect headphones to professional equipment, you also need a professional adapter."
No, this was (for the most part) an anomaly. (Sony loved this crap.)
And the "adapter" you need for professional gear costs all of .25, unless you want to plug your headphones into BNC, then it's maybe 1$ in parts and 15 minutes at your bench.
Funny thing. My old sony-ericcson phone was the first that came with a hands-free that had a separate minijack above the mic, so you could use any headset with the (wired) handsfree (and it also had a standard "long" minijack for control+mic+output).
Sony made a couple of brilliant mp3 players with proper line out for a while - until Sony Music got upset about "piracy", and apparently the ensuing battle within Sony killed a lot of great products. Which turned out to be a net loss, as was obvious to anyone - it happened that Apple took the marked with the iPod, but it was obvious someone would).
If they are moving to a paradigm where I can't listen and charge at the same time, the 6 will be my last iPhone.
I wish they would stop trying to shave millimeters off my phone thickness and address actual user needs like battery life. When was the last time any of you said, "Damn, I wish this phone was thinner!"? Probably never. But many of us regularly bemoan the battery life of our devices.
I think users would be happier day-to-day with a larger battery, but in the ATT showroom they are more likely to go for the thinner phone with a small battery and no headphone jack.
For me the only thing that would make eliminating the headphone jack worth it is if they put a lightning jack on both ends and made the phone perfectly symmetrical. With literally no top or bottom, no right or wrong way to hold it, and finally a way for my phone to sit in the cup holder with a charge cable coming out the top and maps showing in the right orientation!
The trick in making all this work of course is what you do with the rest of the buttons. If Apple could come up with something truly better than what we have had all along for lock, volume, silent, and home, that would be really neat.
In other words, I can see justifying removal of the jack as part of a holistic redesign which really evolves how we interface with the device. Removing it to make the phone just a bit thinner would be disappointing.
While working on mobile phones, I've found a number of problems with the TRS style jack.
One is they trap lint internally, which can often result in the internal switch that detects insertion permanently thinking there is a headphone in it (Google "phone thinks headphones are in"). The external speaker is usually muted when a jack is inserted, so when this happens, the phone doesn't make any sounds. Lint is very difficult to remove from the outside the connector.
The other problem--which the original inventors couldn't have anticipated--involves the hook switch (hangup button) on wired phone earbuds. The switch usually works by shorting the microphone to ground. The problem is that, because of the geometry of the plug, the microphone is also shorted to ground while the plug is inserted or removed. To avoid erroneously interpreting insertion/removal as a hangup, the software must wait for the button to be held for around a second. This precludes doing other interesting things with the button, like having double clicks, or clicks with different durations perform other functions. It also feels a bit awkward to have to hold it for so long.
I think Apple did this too late. If they had done this with an earlier release where smartphones were still "advancing" I think they would have gotten better conversion.
Now what can they possibly offer in the next iPhone that offsets the loss of the headphone jack? Wireless headphones are just not all the way there and I don't really want to have to think about charging another device and then get mad if I forget to charge it then have nothing to listen to for the day.
Unless they offer something substantial with the next iPhone and assuming the headphone thing is true, I probably won't buy another iPhone.
The BBC failed to mention that there is also a 2.5mm jack available. Quite a bit smaller, but I haven't seen one for a while (~5 years).
After replacing so many headphones because of cables breaking, I'm really happy Bluetooth headphones. Although when I want to enjoy music, you can't beat decent headphones with a half decent soundcard/ DAC.
It's not quite 19th c. technology. It was .25 inches, but it had only two conductors, the tip, and the ring, separated by an insulator. Hence the "tip" and "ring" nomenclature for analog telephone wiring. Analog phone technology is remarkably back-compatible. You can use an 80 year old phone today. Not many, if any technology products could claim that level of compatibility.
But, so what? Analog phones are going away. They just lasted longer than most other technologies. So should codecs and amps inside of mobile devices. Those things belong with the transducer, so they can be tuned to the characteristics of the transducer.
The original 1/4" phone plug for switchboard use had a ball tip, rather than a pointed one. It's almost compatible with modern 1/4" jacks, but the proper jack is a "long frame telephone jack". I use those with antique Teletype machines. Unlike 1/4" audio jacks, the ring is not a ground, and the shell is always insulated.
One of the most backwards compatible technology I know of is railway signaling infrastructure - altough it's not a consumer product like a telephone:
There are still fully mechanical control centres where you have to switch the switches by hand and turn a crank (to generate a bit of AC) to signal another control centre the current state of your tracks. Doesn't matter if the next station uses relais-logic or computers, it works.
> So should codecs and amps inside of mobile devices. Those things belong with the transducer, so they can be tuned to the characteristics of the transducer.
Amplifiers/DACs are not simple devices that can be crammed into a pair of headphones without significant compromises in audio quality. The DAC in an iPhone is acceptable for most uses but an amplifier requires a fairly large quantity of discretes and a large power source to drive many headphones. Here are some pictures of the inside of a minimalist audiophile headphone amplifier (Objective2), and with the DAC daughterboard added:
Furthermore, if the DAC/amp are internal to the headphones then the headphones themselves become significantly more expensive. For high-end usage most users will want to use their DAC/amp with multiple pairs of headphones, it's cost-ineffective to have a $200 DAC/amp unit built in to every single pair of headphones. Consumer gear is also cheaper, but you're still talking about the difference between a pair of headphones costing $30 and costing $50.
Also, there's not really any consensus on what "proper tuning" actually means with headphones. Some people like an absolutely flat "reference/analytical" sound, but this is only a small subset of high-end users, and consumer gear is not tuned anywhere near a flat response curve. And it's a highly perception-based area where different individuals hear totally different aspects of headphones, with a high degree of placebo effect.
The long-term fix for audiophile users is probably going to be to move to external DAC/amp units rather than integrating the DAC/amp into the headphones. This means yet another thing you have to carry around and keep charged (my Fiio X5ii lasts maybe 6-8h on a charge). I'm not currently aware of any that use Lightning, but if there's a market they will eventually exist. Consumer users probably won't care about the negative impacts on quality too much, but rather about how Lightning headsets are now going to be quite a bit more expensive.
I like that the 3.5 mm connector is fairly simple and is does not break easily.
I have seen many broken micro-usb connectors, and a couple of broken lightning connectors.
I cant remember ever seeing a broken 3.5mm connector, the cables break before the connector.
Do i want a thinner phone? No, i want a phone with better battery life. Like phones had back in the day(2005) a week or two was not uncommon.
When for some reason, my bluetooth headphone's connectivity is acting up (happens often), I can take my wired headphone and plug it in without even looking, knowing that it WILL work.
One of my car's electric windows has stopped working. For my next car, I want something where there's a fallback to a mechanical crank (the way car windows used to be).
I've had cranks fail in a variety of ways too. The fix is the same as for the electric ones: open the door panel and repair/replace the failed component.
I'm just old enough to remember cars with mechanical hand cranks to open the windows. You couldn't open the passenger side window if you were driving. It was dangerous to open the driver's side window if there was a lot going on. The rear passenger windows often didn't open at all in cheaper cars. The number of times you'd leave a window open by mistake was far higher because cars didn't alert you about it.
I'd much rather have electric windows that are cheap and easy to repair than reintroduce hand cranked windows, even just as a back up.
How is USB-C working out as a connector, from the ruggedness standpoint? It has a huge number of pins (24) in a small space. How many insertion cycles can it survive in the real world? Is connector wearout going to limit phone life?
That's over 13 cycles/day for two years. Probably fine for most users.
Edit: The official spec is only available via a zipped folder of PDFs, here's the particulars to save readers the effort.
5.7.1.3
Durability or Insertion/Extraction Cycles (EIA 364-09)
The durability ratings listed in Table 5-16 are specified for the USB 3.1 connectors.
Table 5-16. Durability Ratings
Connector Standard Durability Class High Durability Class
USB 3.1 Standard-A connector 1500 cycles min 5000 cycles min
USB 3.1 Standard-B connector 1500 cycles min 5000 cycles min
USB 3.1 Micro connector family 10000 cycles min
The durability test shall be done at a maximum rate of 200 cycles per hour and no physical damage to any part of the connector or cable assembly shall occur.
The reason why this obvious option isn't part of the discussion is because thinness is just the smokescreen. The real reason Apple et. al. want to move towards digital connections for headphones is DRM. They want to control the entire signal chain of their valuable (Beats = $3b) music content.
This is the sort of thing the market will sort out anyways. If there is enough of a market for people who don't care about the 3.5mm port, apple will be fine. People like me will buy something else. Just because apple doesn't have expandable storage hasn't made samsung discontinue it either. Same deal with the headphone jack.
While I'm with you and won't be buying one for reasons beyond the 3.5mm jack (but that would be a deal breaker if I was on the fence), I'll be more surprised if the removal of that feature stops scores of people lining up to get the latest phone (along with a new set of over-priced headphones).
At the end of the day, it's "give up the 3.5mm jack" or "don't get the latest iPhone" and I'll wager that they'll have no problem generating lines filled with people that just have to have the iPhone 7 because...Apple! Apple has a near-religious following. I got a kick out of a friend of mine who upgraded on release when they ditched the 30-pin connector. He'd recently purchased an alarm clock, an add-on for his home stereo and had already owned several other 30-pin reliant bits. They were on eBay the following week. Out of the non-techies I know that purchased the iPhone 6, none of them could tell what, specifically, they were getting over their existing iPhone 5S (that's a grand-anecdotal-total of 3 folks, though).
If there is resistance on this release due to there not being enough compelling features, that resistance will eventually give way. Many people are so wired in to Apple's products that lock-in will win. Maybe they'll wait until the 8. But eventually Apple will be making money on sales of ear buds with Apple-only connections and will benefit from yet another component that locks them into their platform. And the folks who spend $200 on supposedly high-end ear phones[0] will now feel even more compelled to stick with Apple's product line.
I'm biased and this is a little overly cynical. I've never owned an iPhone and the two Apple devices I've ever owned: an iPad that belongs to my wife and an iMac that I use as a display (target display mode) because, at the time, it was a little less than a comparable "screen only" device with similar specifications (and it was physically prettier, to boot). I've not logged into it, directly, in two years and don't really get the appeal of OSX.
[0] I've never understood this. I have a pair of 25 year old studio headphones (AKG, 1/4" jack, big, over-the-ear with a very long cord). I needed them due to equipment and was sicked that they ran 10 times the price of a pair of solid headphones, but I was amazed by the quality they produced. I didn't want to buy these, but after 25 years of heavy use (and the manufacturer still makes the model I purchased), I can't say I feel bad about the price. The Beats/Bose headphones? I can't tell the difference between them and a pair of $30 active noise cancelling headphones I purchased from Big Lots. Granted, I can't plug my AKGs into a phone even with an adapter -- they're too quiet.
> it received complaints that the headphone jack was sunk into the casing.
I had forgotten that. I paid $12.99 for an adapter that shouldn't have been necessary. I expect with modern times, the Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter will be twice the price, and just as unnecessary.
"Studying Moore's Law and the history of technology, it's clear we're not going to stick around with something analogue for long"
Dediu didn't study the basics of sound reproduction, which are all analogue. All the fancy ones and zeros end up in a stupidly innacurate shaking paper cone. Ignoring a few esoteric exceptions, that's the best that we've got.
When I use my iPhones for music (currently have a 6), I use one of two headphones:
- Plantronic BackBeat Pros
- Westone UM4r
The BackBeat's are great wireless, noise reducing over the ear headphones. I need to remember to charge them.
The Westone's are in ear monitors that, depending on type of bud you put on them, have noise reducing capabilities. They are wired. They are also some of the most amazing monitors I've owned over the years. (It hurts the time I lost a pair).
Sitting in a quiet space, the Westones will blow the Plantronics out of the water. In a plane, if I am not trying to comfortably sleep, the Plantronics are great. If I want to lay my head to the side -- IEMs rule the day.
Apple has yet to produce a set of headphones that feel comfortable for me or deliver decent quality. I can't bike/run w/ Apple's headphones, they fall out (or hurt).
If they go the route of no 3.5mm jack, I'll likely insist on one of those stupid converters.
I've yet to see anything from Apple or Beats that compares to upper end IEMs for quality, or upper end over the ear phones for noise reduction.
> "Studying Moore's Law and the history of technology, it's clear we're not going to stick around with something analogue for long," he says.
The real world is still analogue, and as long as we have biological brains there will need to be a digital to analogue conversion somewhere to interface with it.
Phone manufacturers might want to move that conversion out of their devices, which is understandable because analogue electronics is expensive and good quality even more so, and that change would make it someone else's responsibility.
In the end if this does go through it might not be totally a bad thing if the new digital connector is also a standard (and provides power, I might add). That way it would be possible to get a good quality DAC and reuse it everywhere.
[+] [-] raverbashing|9 years ago|reply
Yes, Apple retired Floppy disks and DVD readers, because those were replaced by something better. This is not the case here.
A Bluetooth headphone will give you an inferior experience. A lightning converter will give you a worse experience because I can bet it doesn't stay plugged as firmly as a headphone in a high vibration situation (e.g. people exercising) and you can't have the charger plugged while you listen to music
Just as a reminder it was the EU who ended the BS of every company having a stupid proprietary charger.
[+] [-] entee|9 years ago|reply
That said I've been told that the 3.5mm jack takes up a surprising amount of internal space, and that between freeing up that space and a few other tweaks, getting rid of the jack substantially boosts battery life. Still, I think it's not a great trade-off, now you have to babysit a new battery in your headphones, which probably won't last a full day of use.
On a personal note, anticipated lack of a standard headphone jack is one of the reasons I upgraded to a 6S recently, this way I'll have the best 3.5-mm phone Apple made for a while. If I do have to upgrade later on, I'll be strongly tempted to get an SE instead of a higher end phone, as long as it has a 3.5mm jack.
[+] [-] brianwawok|9 years ago|reply
Did they? How did Apple get away with it?
[+] [-] Camillo|9 years ago|reply
You may think that the current iPhones are thin enough, but almost nobody actually uses the phone on its own. You need to take into account the thickness of the case, and now that people are playing Pokemon Go, it really needs to be a battery case, which is even thicker. So the base phone needs to be thinner.
(They can't just make the phone a little thicker and put the extra battery inside it because reasons.)
[+] [-] e12e|9 years ago|reply
FWIW I recently got one of these:
http://us.creative.com/p/sound-blaster/sound-blaster-e3
and I'm very happy (not for use with an Apple device though, I use it with a Sony Xpedia Z3+, my laptop and my desktop via a recent generation usb bluetooth dongle (for AptX support).
[+] [-] rayiner|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] x2398dh1|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonmoy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lips|9 years ago|reply
No, this was (for the most part) an anomaly. (Sony loved this crap.)
And the "adapter" you need for professional gear costs all of .25, unless you want to plug your headphones into BNC, then it's maybe 1$ in parts and 15 minutes at your bench.
[+] [-] e12e|9 years ago|reply
Sony made a couple of brilliant mp3 players with proper line out for a while - until Sony Music got upset about "piracy", and apparently the ensuing battle within Sony killed a lot of great products. Which turned out to be a net loss, as was obvious to anyone - it happened that Apple took the marked with the iPod, but it was obvious someone would).
[+] [-] jurassic|9 years ago|reply
I wish they would stop trying to shave millimeters off my phone thickness and address actual user needs like battery life. When was the last time any of you said, "Damn, I wish this phone was thinner!"? Probably never. But many of us regularly bemoan the battery life of our devices.
[+] [-] vidarh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1anh2kqowg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sliverstorm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zaroth|9 years ago|reply
The trick in making all this work of course is what you do with the rest of the buttons. If Apple could come up with something truly better than what we have had all along for lock, volume, silent, and home, that would be really neat.
In other words, I can see justifying removal of the jack as part of a holistic redesign which really evolves how we interface with the device. Removing it to make the phone just a bit thinner would be disappointing.
[+] [-] jeffbush|9 years ago|reply
One is they trap lint internally, which can often result in the internal switch that detects insertion permanently thinking there is a headphone in it (Google "phone thinks headphones are in"). The external speaker is usually muted when a jack is inserted, so when this happens, the phone doesn't make any sounds. Lint is very difficult to remove from the outside the connector.
The other problem--which the original inventors couldn't have anticipated--involves the hook switch (hangup button) on wired phone earbuds. The switch usually works by shorting the microphone to ground. The problem is that, because of the geometry of the plug, the microphone is also shorted to ground while the plug is inserted or removed. To avoid erroneously interpreting insertion/removal as a hangup, the software must wait for the button to be held for around a second. This precludes doing other interesting things with the button, like having double clicks, or clicks with different durations perform other functions. It also feels a bit awkward to have to hold it for so long.
[+] [-] swang|9 years ago|reply
Now what can they possibly offer in the next iPhone that offsets the loss of the headphone jack? Wireless headphones are just not all the way there and I don't really want to have to think about charging another device and then get mad if I forget to charge it then have nothing to listen to for the day.
Unless they offer something substantial with the next iPhone and assuming the headphone thing is true, I probably won't buy another iPhone.
[+] [-] gcb0|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] velox_io|9 years ago|reply
After replacing so many headphones because of cables breaking, I'm really happy Bluetooth headphones. Although when I want to enjoy music, you can't beat decent headphones with a half decent soundcard/ DAC.
[+] [-] Zigurd|9 years ago|reply
But, so what? Analog phones are going away. They just lasted longer than most other technologies. So should codecs and amps inside of mobile devices. Those things belong with the transducer, so they can be tuned to the characteristics of the transducer.
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iliis|9 years ago|reply
There are still fully mechanical control centres where you have to switch the switches by hand and turn a crank (to generate a bit of AC) to signal another control centre the current state of your tracks. Doesn't matter if the next station uses relais-logic or computers, it works.
[+] [-] c22|9 years ago|reply
I think it depends on where you are. A lot of lecs only take dtmf signalling these days.
[+] [-] paulmd|9 years ago|reply
Amplifiers/DACs are not simple devices that can be crammed into a pair of headphones without significant compromises in audio quality. The DAC in an iPhone is acceptable for most uses but an amplifier requires a fairly large quantity of discretes and a large power source to drive many headphones. Here are some pictures of the inside of a minimalist audiophile headphone amplifier (Objective2), and with the DAC daughterboard added:
http://teribil-audio.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/D300-766...
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9lKWLE_sO84/UDUDtC2ApHI/AAAAAAAABB...
Furthermore, if the DAC/amp are internal to the headphones then the headphones themselves become significantly more expensive. For high-end usage most users will want to use their DAC/amp with multiple pairs of headphones, it's cost-ineffective to have a $200 DAC/amp unit built in to every single pair of headphones. Consumer gear is also cheaper, but you're still talking about the difference between a pair of headphones costing $30 and costing $50.
Also, there's not really any consensus on what "proper tuning" actually means with headphones. Some people like an absolutely flat "reference/analytical" sound, but this is only a small subset of high-end users, and consumer gear is not tuned anywhere near a flat response curve. And it's a highly perception-based area where different individuals hear totally different aspects of headphones, with a high degree of placebo effect.
The long-term fix for audiophile users is probably going to be to move to external DAC/amp units rather than integrating the DAC/amp into the headphones. This means yet another thing you have to carry around and keep charged (my Fiio X5ii lasts maybe 6-8h on a charge). I'm not currently aware of any that use Lightning, but if there's a market they will eventually exist. Consumer users probably won't care about the negative impacts on quality too much, but rather about how Lightning headsets are now going to be quite a bit more expensive.
[+] [-] callesgg|9 years ago|reply
I have seen many broken micro-usb connectors, and a couple of broken lightning connectors. I cant remember ever seeing a broken 3.5mm connector, the cables break before the connector.
Do i want a thinner phone? No, i want a phone with better battery life. Like phones had back in the day(2005) a week or two was not uncommon.
[+] [-] hackaflocka|9 years ago|reply
When for some reason, my bluetooth headphone's connectivity is acting up (happens often), I can take my wired headphone and plug it in without even looking, knowing that it WILL work.
One of my car's electric windows has stopped working. For my next car, I want something where there's a fallback to a mechanical crank (the way car windows used to be).
[+] [-] c22|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onion2k|9 years ago|reply
I'd much rather have electric windows that are cheap and easy to repair than reintroduce hand cranked windows, even just as a back up.
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tombrossman|9 years ago|reply
That's over 13 cycles/day for two years. Probably fine for most users.
Edit: The official spec is only available via a zipped folder of PDFs, here's the particulars to save readers the effort.
[+] [-] perilunar|9 years ago|reply
If thinness is just a cover for wanting digital, then go TOSLINK and have digital with analog fall-back. They already have it in the MacBook Pros.
[+] [-] xkcd-sucks|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] userbinator|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dublinben|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm2187|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dingo_bat|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdip|9 years ago|reply
At the end of the day, it's "give up the 3.5mm jack" or "don't get the latest iPhone" and I'll wager that they'll have no problem generating lines filled with people that just have to have the iPhone 7 because...Apple! Apple has a near-religious following. I got a kick out of a friend of mine who upgraded on release when they ditched the 30-pin connector. He'd recently purchased an alarm clock, an add-on for his home stereo and had already owned several other 30-pin reliant bits. They were on eBay the following week. Out of the non-techies I know that purchased the iPhone 6, none of them could tell what, specifically, they were getting over their existing iPhone 5S (that's a grand-anecdotal-total of 3 folks, though).
If there is resistance on this release due to there not being enough compelling features, that resistance will eventually give way. Many people are so wired in to Apple's products that lock-in will win. Maybe they'll wait until the 8. But eventually Apple will be making money on sales of ear buds with Apple-only connections and will benefit from yet another component that locks them into their platform. And the folks who spend $200 on supposedly high-end ear phones[0] will now feel even more compelled to stick with Apple's product line.
I'm biased and this is a little overly cynical. I've never owned an iPhone and the two Apple devices I've ever owned: an iPad that belongs to my wife and an iMac that I use as a display (target display mode) because, at the time, it was a little less than a comparable "screen only" device with similar specifications (and it was physically prettier, to boot). I've not logged into it, directly, in two years and don't really get the appeal of OSX.
[0] I've never understood this. I have a pair of 25 year old studio headphones (AKG, 1/4" jack, big, over-the-ear with a very long cord). I needed them due to equipment and was sicked that they ran 10 times the price of a pair of solid headphones, but I was amazed by the quality they produced. I didn't want to buy these, but after 25 years of heavy use (and the manufacturer still makes the model I purchased), I can't say I feel bad about the price. The Beats/Bose headphones? I can't tell the difference between them and a pair of $30 active noise cancelling headphones I purchased from Big Lots. Granted, I can't plug my AKGs into a phone even with an adapter -- they're too quiet.
[+] [-] usefulcat|9 years ago|reply
So.. maybe just don't buy this hypothetical new iPhone?
[+] [-] chiph|9 years ago|reply
I had forgotten that. I paid $12.99 for an adapter that shouldn't have been necessary. I expect with modern times, the Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter will be twice the price, and just as unnecessary.
[+] [-] copperx|9 years ago|reply
Dediu didn't study the basics of sound reproduction, which are all analogue. All the fancy ones and zeros end up in a stupidly innacurate shaking paper cone. Ignoring a few esoteric exceptions, that's the best that we've got.
[+] [-] jmspring|9 years ago|reply
- Plantronic BackBeat Pros - Westone UM4r
The BackBeat's are great wireless, noise reducing over the ear headphones. I need to remember to charge them.
The Westone's are in ear monitors that, depending on type of bud you put on them, have noise reducing capabilities. They are wired. They are also some of the most amazing monitors I've owned over the years. (It hurts the time I lost a pair).
Sitting in a quiet space, the Westones will blow the Plantronics out of the water. In a plane, if I am not trying to comfortably sleep, the Plantronics are great. If I want to lay my head to the side -- IEMs rule the day.
Apple has yet to produce a set of headphones that feel comfortable for me or deliver decent quality. I can't bike/run w/ Apple's headphones, they fall out (or hurt).
If they go the route of no 3.5mm jack, I'll likely insist on one of those stupid converters.
I've yet to see anything from Apple or Beats that compares to upper end IEMs for quality, or upper end over the ear phones for noise reduction.
[+] [-] ajnin|9 years ago|reply
The real world is still analogue, and as long as we have biological brains there will need to be a digital to analogue conversion somewhere to interface with it.
Phone manufacturers might want to move that conversion out of their devices, which is understandable because analogue electronics is expensive and good quality even more so, and that change would make it someone else's responsibility.
In the end if this does go through it might not be totally a bad thing if the new digital connector is also a standard (and provides power, I might add). That way it would be possible to get a good quality DAC and reuse it everywhere.