Apple Surveying MacBook Pro Users About Headphone Jack and Other Ports

[kwikdeth]

honestly, i care less about the headphone jack on the MBP than i do on the phone. I havent used the port on my MBP in years and years. However, I still use my phone's headphone jack almost daily.

more misplaced priorities. go tim go.

 

[littyboy]

It's not even about saving space or making a device water resistant if they are removing it from a large device like a MBP. It's definitely about profits if this ever happens.
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honestly, i care less about the headphone jack on the MBP than i do on the phone. I havent used the port on my MBP in years and years. However, I still use my phone's headphone jack almost daily.

more misplaced priorities. go tim go.

Maybe not you, but many students that I've seen at universities still use it.

 

[Rocket Man]

I use it daily...so does all my students in the art and music program. They can't expect everyone to shell out money for those ugly EarPods or any other 3rd party wireless?

They gotta make room for the..uhmm 'Super Duper iTap your wallet' engine.
Courage!

 

[SeattleMoose]

Apple is the cable / adapter companies dream. Every few years introduce new half-baked I/O standard that never really gets popular and then dump it for yet another du jour standard (FW400, FW800, PCI-Express, Thunderbolt, HDMI, Lightning, Display Port, VGA, etc.). And in the end it doesn't make our lives any better. On the other hand the churn makes a lot of people rich as we have obsolete Macs, cables, adapters, and peripherals that are obsolete. Either via HW or SW drivers no longer supported. Way to go Apple...think different.

 

[shareef777]

I'd love a ThinkPad hackintosh that's fully functional. Alas, we're all trapped in Apple's walled garden when it comes to macOS and iOS :-(

 

[MH01]

Did the survey ask if we need more than one port?

Or how many adapters we are prepared to buy?

Space is a premium on laptops......

 

[doelcm82]

I agree for iMacs and Mac Pros for sure. But for mixing engineers and indie artists, being able to mix on the go with a simple headset plugged into the 3.5 mm jack on a MacBook Pro is just a necessity

I understand the part about being able to mix on the go with a simple headset.

A simple USB-c headset should do the trick. When you're mixing on the go why do you care what the port looks like?

 

[MH01]

Apple is the cable / adapter companies dream. Every few years introduce new half-baked I/O standard that never really gets popular and then dump it for yet another du jour standard (FW400, FW800, PCI-Express, Thunderbolt, HDMI, Lightning, Display Port, VGA, etc.). And in the end it doesn't make our lives any better. On the other hand the churn makes a lot of people rich as we have obsolete Macs, cables, adapters, and peripherals that are obsolete. Either via HW or SW drivers no longer supported. Way to go Apple...think different.

This !!!! I've got so many damn adapters, and once apple dumps them, they are useless.

 

[33man]

What's the obsession with Apple requiring dongles for everything? It's not like there is a lack of space for proper USB ports, thunderbolt and so on. We're going to have to end up carrying a whole array of different adapters to connect our stuff.

Easier mounting, no really need of repair, just change the broken adapter(I admit never saw an ethernet port getting broken but...). and also these adapters are money maker, you loose them, buy them... Anyway not sure this is the way to go as we will end up having terminal rendering an image from a big back end server in cloud from Apple. You want new iPhone? Keep same device we added 4cpus to your cloud iphone...

 

[rickyipcw]

Newer camera models have WiFi data transfer, so this maybe Apple's way of nudging photo professionals to upgrade their camera gear as well?

The camera needs to be powered on for wireless data transfer or via USB cable. A built-in card reader is very important for convenience and going lightweight. The bigger problem is, WiFi gives more factors of bottlenecking the efficiency of data trasmission. For high end DSLRs (Canon 5DS, for example), a raw image file can be as large as 80MB, just FYI. You need some really fast LAN to match the speed of a high end SDXC card paired with a suitable card reader. Besides, you have no access to WiFi in some regions.

I don't believe all professional photographers are willing to go full wireless just because Apple has too much courage.

 

[AppleBytes]

Will they supply a free dongle for all our Thunderbolt 1 & 2 hard drives and displays? Or do we have to buy our own dongles this time around?

 

[iMcLovin]

omg, glad I switched back to PC for my work machine. They cant just deliver sound through bluetooth. Theres a slight lag, if you are timing audio and video its not good enough.
and USB-C, sure its a nice I/O but the world isnt finished with USB 2/3.

 

[Shirasaki]

You've a lot to learn. Without Apple the tech world would be a steaming pile where Flash and resistive touch screens reign supreme. Single use ports days' are numbered.

But see FireWire. Superior in every way but now? And see antenna gate.
Apple is not god. At best, Apple pushes the innovation of industry.

 

[Jack Burton]

Jesus wept.

What is going on over at Apple?

 

[ghost187]

Maybe this is why the MacBook Pros are delayed lol.

 

[skellener]

And here lies the sheer stupidity that is Apple right now. USB-C is taking over. Why didn't they just switch to it and ditch Lightning on the iPhone?? If they ditched it you could have one cable - with the same connector on both ends - to plug in your iPhone to your Mac. Whether to charge, or to sync or to tether. One completely reversible cable. Plus, you could use the new headphones that should also have included USB-C rather than Lightning to listen to music on the Mac. It's win everywhere! But instead, if you buy a set of Lightning headphones, they work with exactly ONE SINGLE DEVICE. They won't even work with your new Mac without a silly adapter.

Oh and we're at 1000 days plus for no rev on the MacPro.

B I T E M E P H I L

 

[Komiidian]

Apple should focus more on pushing out new products on time than messing with ports people actually use and need. All this commotion and delay is just making me wonder whether apple is beginning to lose its touch? I mean currently microsoft is beating apple in the innovation game with their surface pro and surface book and offering people what they are looking for while apple has concentrated on making minor "updates". I think the thinner trend is coming to an end. After a certain point people don't care whether the computer is thinner if thinness comes at the cost of usability or at the cost of not being able to plug in your desired peripherals.

 

[emm386]

So, the new "new" MBP will be waterproof then? Or is it because they have not enough space inside of the darn thing? Or is it just Apple , trying to figure out, how much they can "innovate" without pissing off its customer base?

 

[jwdsail]

Get rid of that useless Thunderbolt port and get us USB-C, users of TB are more of a minority than the headphone jack ones...

Um, you do understand that TB3 uses the SAME connector as USB-C... is vastly faster than the still craptacular USB-anything, does all the great things TB1/2 does, but even faster than both... right?

 

[Michael Goff]

probably not immediately after though..
if the 2016 mbp is a redesign, we'll probably see it for the next few years (as in- i can't personally remember apple releasing a redesigned computer then redesigning it again at the next update).

i'm assuming if any design decisions are based off this survey, we likely won't see it until 2020 mbp.

That makes more sense. Though I'd say maybe 2018 sos they could look like they're pushing MacBooks ahead in design or some crap like that.

 

[Mactendo]

Another question asks this.

 

[loby]

Well the next MacBooks will have no headphone jack.

If apple takes the headphone jack off the Macbook line it will really show they have completely lost touch and are completely in a "really distortion field". Understand, but don't agree with taking it off the iphone and they have a good argument, but to take it off their MacBooks, especially the MacBook Pro is idiotic. Going totally USB-C will require everyone who actually uses their MacBook for production instead of just iMessages and FaceTime to carry around a bunch of adapters everywhere they go...totally unproductive.

Understand why Apple has chanced their view point on "working" MacBooks. Since they made their money, they do not need to work anymore, thus is why the thinner and less everything is now their motto. Look at their focus, thinner, less power so it does not generate heat, emojis, watch bands, no ports for real work....

Tim Cook just uses his MacBook to look at spread sheets and maybe read political correct agenda google news posts and Apple news and does not want to type any longer. Siri to do everything, iwatch to unlock you MacBook because it takes to much to remember your password because he and his team are getting old or to much effort to type at the login screen..give me a break.

Taking away the phone jack to try to build the beats product line is what I am thinking....

 

[rick3000]

I use Thunderbolt, USB 3.0, and the headphone jack every day.
I use the SD and HDMI weekly.

Removing ports from the MacBook Pro is not okay, it's the MacBook Pro, not the MacBook Amateur.

I do like the new combined USBC/TB, but I need at least 2 of them on a Pro machine. I already use a bunch of adapters (Ethernet->USB3, etc), and I would very unhappy if they required me to carry around any more of them. They need to let people adopt new wireless headphone tech over the next few years before they push no headphone jacks on the Pro line.

 

[moxin]

pretty sure Apple don't want to make laptops waterproof. in both cases removing the headphone jack is simply useless. Come on Apple.

 

[mkldev]

As a music composer, I use the headphone jack in my MacBook Pro daily. Probably half my daily laptop usage involves Finale, and about a third of the time, I'm in some random location listening under headphones so that I can hear clearly.

For composing, wireless headphones are absolutely inadequate. I have to be able to hear with absolute precision. The slightest bit of compression artifacts are enough to cause me to miss a subtle dissonance until it is too late to fix it.

And latency is also critical. If I click a note and there's an eighth of a second delay before I hear the note, my productivity goes to zero. So Bluetooth is a complete non-starter.

And that's not even considering the power problems. When running Finale, the app itself sucks down my entire ten-hour battery in about 2.5–3 hours. If I have to add the huge power consumption of lossless audio over Bluetooth, it would turn a computer that is already just barely usable for composing into a toy.

So basically, if Apple wants any musicians to use Macs after next year, the answer is simple: It's fine to take the ports off your little toy MacBook, but leave the Pro the **** alone.

Clear enough?

 

[Bawstun]

LMAO!!! I didn't think it could get this bad. Wow. New management needed. Preferably before they tank sales across ALL their devices.