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Apple Surveying MacBook Pro Users About Headphone Jack and Other Ports
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Simply put:
- We own, on average, thirty sets of headphones ranging from earbuds up through high-isolation drum kit headphones
- We use them for different purposes in different environments
- They all need to work with every piece of equipment we're using, whether it is our cell phone, our laptop, our expensive audio interface, or our music keyboard....
No, he'll probably quote the survey and say "Over 50% of current MBPro users use the port less than twice per day! That's not enough usage not to push them to use Beats wireless headphones. Now just $129!"
Mixing on the go seems a lot more complicated when you describe it that way. Just choosing the right simple set of headphones must be quite an ordeal.
I hope Apple posts the true outcome of this survey.
I don not hope they use this as a marketing thing with the intro of a new MacBook:
Schiller:" Last summer we held a survey, asking our MacBook Pro customers if they ever used the headphone jack. Well, a staggering 92% said never to use it! So, to make our MacBook even thinner.... we have made the ultimate portable Mac... no more ports....! Here it is...... The MacPad!!"
I don not hope they use this as a marketing thing with the intro of a new MacBook:
Schiller:" Last summer we held a survey, asking our MacBook Pro customers if they ever used the headphone jack. Well, a staggering 92% said never to use it! So, to make our MacBook even thinner.... we have made the ultimate portable Mac... no more ports....! Here it is...... The MacPad!!"
That's only half true. Most of professional equipment still uses 1/4" jacks, because they are much better at taking abuse. However, I don't think I've actually seen a 1/4" plug on a pair of headphones in... maybe thirty years, give or take?
Instead, everybody leaves an adapter permanently plugged into the jack to adapt it to take 3.5mm headphones. And every so often, one of those adapters shatters when somebody yanks a cord sideways, thus protecting the hard-to-replace 1/4" jack in the equipment from the damage that it would otherwise take. Then somebody reaches into a drawer, pulls out another 50-cent adapter, and they go on like nothing happened.
Remove it Apple and push your decades loyal customera to a better solution. One without a fruit as a name.
As a developer I use the SD card slot pretty much daily to burn images onto the card for testing. No wifi option for me unfortunately
I wan't just describing mixing with that comment; most people who do mixing are also doing recording. Most of that was more about the recording side of things, and not wanting to have a single set of specialized headphones that only work on your computer and a whole bunch of others that can never be used with your computer. It's just a bad way of doing things.
But yes, mixing is complicated. You might do a rough mix with headphones, but you'll eventually end up stuck behind a set of near-field monitors to fine tune it. And when you're done, you have to go listen to the music in a wide range of environments with different types of speakers, different types of headphones, etc. so that you have an idea of what your listeners will hear, and if you change anything, then you get to repeat that process.
They have't decided yet but are rumoured to be releasing it soon? I want all the ports apple. ALL OF THEM
Remember when everyone had an issue with Apple removing 5.25" floppy discs, 3.5" floppy discs, SCSI, parallel ports, CD drives, Flash, Ethernet ports, FireWire, optical etc.
I do, and they all soon got over it because there was a better solution.
If you honestly think uprooting your entire ecosystem over a single use port is the better solution then so be it, everyone else who's not stuck in the past will move on.
I don't care what the port looks like, I care that the hundreds of dollars I have invested into headphones work with my device without a dongle
Here it is...... The MacPad!!"
The ultimate MacBook Pro is already here! And just for $129.00!
You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential. - J. Ive.
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This is different. Because there is no better sollution out there. One time, just ONE time, we had an universal standard! My Sennheiser headphones work with my Laptop, my desktop, my iPhone, my Camera, my psp my ... everything. To start fragmenting that for the sake of 0,5 mm thickness of a device is not innovation, it's stupid. Of course, selling adapters and proprietary hardware is good for companies, but not for consumers. You need to see things a bit more critical and not praise everything as "the future" just because it's new.
If you think headphones you need to charge every 5 hours are the future, nobody is stopping you from getting these. Everyone who prefers practical sollutions will continue to use wired headphones with the standard headphone jack.
Imagine you buy $ 300,- beats headphones with a lightning port today and Apple switches to usb-c with the iPhone 8.
Apple is really pushing it since a couple of years with it's bad product design. It sould be form follows function, not the other way around! Im often asking myself, how much can I take before I switch?
Yes, I was a bit peeved when they did not include one in the Mac Pro 2013. SD cards are still used for video and photography right...? Mac Pro is for "Pros" and Final Cut "Pro" X and you cannot directly transfer your shots? Photography...? or Video? Please
Take away everything that "Pros" use for work...and no work...Humm....is that their strategy?
What are you left with? an iPad...
Removing something was because there was currently a better way of doing it (generally). Taking away the phone jack is not a better solution.
I get where you are coming from but pros normally use wifi to be able to instantly send a handful of JPEG's to a tablet to show customers on the fly. Most shoot RAW, and videographers are shooting HD. Transferring 100GB of RAW photos or a few hundred GB's of video over WiFi would be ridiculous at current speeds.
I'm not saying that isn't where we will be in 5-10 years, but right now it would make absolutely no sense.
Please, think it through. The headphone jack is likely the cheapest piece of electronics in the entire laptop. In addition as part of the other electronics connectors they source from their suppliers it is probably likely that they pay only a fraction of the cost or nothing at all for these things.
If Apple would want to cut costs on the MBP there are far better and more effective ways to do so. Examples? 1. Eliminate MagSafe 2. Replace the bottom of the laptop with hard shell plastic 3. Revert to non custom made components.
These are all things that save percentages on a laptop, while the cost of a headphone jack is somewhere in the percentages of a percentage.
Newer cameras have mediocre Wi-Fi transfer. They support 802.11n, but most people use them in computer-to-computer mode, which IIRC is limited to 802.11b speeds.
Either way, they pale in comparison with the 104 MB/sec. data date that Apple's built-in reader should be able to achieve (with appropriate flash cards).
And Apple's readers aren't even state-of-the art. UHS-II has been out for five years now, and leaves Apple's UHS-I hardware behind in the dust. UHS-II hardware tops out at a theoretical maximum speed of 312 megabytes per second (about 2.5 gigabit), which is more than you could realistically hope to achieve via Wi-Fi even if cameras suddenly got 802.11ac support.