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The "quality" portable DACs, though, are massive, cost a fortune, and provide about 4 hours of battery life before dying. The current iPhone 6S DAC is about as good as you can get in that small of a form factor, and there is little doubt that you can expect to receive a DAC that is no better than the internal DAC (and likely much worse) on a pair of lightning headphones.

quality portable DACs are
1.) not massive
2.) yes they are expensive
3.) they provide on average 12 hrs of listening time...not 4 hrs.
 

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But this is literally your phone.
 
What the actual crap. Like seriously for the guys that started the smartphone trend they are so behind the curve. Waterproof/resistance? Had that from a few Android models for a couple years now. Dual cameras? Again, beaten to the punch. And removing the headphone jack? Seriously? Way to not support the most common audio interface on the planet. Oh but it has an adapter? Wow another add-on to make sure you don't lose, because its going to cost at least 20$ to replace. Could have just left the headphone jack in, but apple had to do something noteworthy otherwise nobody would have paid attention to whats become a continuing line of lackluster phones.

$9
 
The "quality" portable DACs, though, are massive, cost a fortune, and provide about 4 hours of battery life before dying. The current iPhone 6S DAC is about as good as you can get in that small of a form factor, and there is little doubt that you can expect to receive a DAC that is no better than the internal DAC (and likely much worse) on a pair of lightning headphones.

Furthermore, there are a ton of components that shape how you hear your music and which can either improve or decimate sound quality. The first that comes to mind is the quality of headphone drivers you're listening to your music through. No matter how good of a DAC you have, if you're listening to music through a pair of Apple earbuds it will never sound as good as the stock iPhone DAC with pair of professional-grade headphones, for example. My point is to say that while in the broadest theoretical sense an improved DAC could improve sound quality, portable DACs of the type to which you're referring (1) do not exist, but (2) would not be as cost-efficient of a means through which to improve your listening experience as buying even a marginally better set of headphones
You are thinking of today, not tomorrow.
 
You probably mean Lightning, not Thunderbolt. It's the same issue with the Macbook Retina today when you need to charge it and connect a USB device at the same time. I'm pretty sure someone will come up with a dual Lightning port adapter soon. Maybe we'll even see Lightning hubs.
If there are any USB headphones that work on the iPhone I wonder if you can use the Camera connector kit - that has a lightning power input + the USB port... But the lightning power also increases the available current for USB devices that draw too much power normally, so that might not work on the road if the USB headset (or usb audio dongle?) used too much power.

That would be a pretty cludgy way to do your cabling, but might work.. Midi devices, Mics, Cameras etc work on that USB port.. no idea if audio can though.
 
the last time i saw someone use their iPhone speaker to listen to audio. that would be this morning. maybe right now as i type this. so ridiculous.

i have probably $1000 of conventional headphones and earbuds (from apple in ears to audio technica monitors, nuforce x 2, beats x 3, jlabs x 2, sennheiser, sony, koss, and cutting the jack doesn't upset me given the included adaptor and the promising future that their wireless tech offers so for other people with a couple pairs of headphones to be so outraged is ridiculous.

Even the cheapest Chinese bluetooth speaker sounds better than "stereo" smartphone sound. 3x Beats, what a waste.
 
I have to ask...

Who here thinks carriers are just getting greedy and screwing everyone by making us pay full price?
.


No one is making you pay full price. RingPlus offers free full service that will work for most people. You need a phone that works on Sprint's network. Any Nexus phone works. Fully unlocked iPhones do too. Stop paying for what you can get for free.
 
From the photos, it doesn't look like you can charge while listening to headphones. If true, that's a pretty huge downside. The only option would be to spend more money on wireless headphones of some kind.
Why would you have to spend money on wireless headphones? For the majority of the people I know, they listen to music on headphone when on the go. If you are not on the go, you are somewhere with a computer to listen to music with.
 
#BlameBrexit. The best sales excuse for a price rise.
Look at the exchange rate. For every Pound Apple only gets $1.10. (20% VAT, and an awfully bad exchange rate). Do you think Apple should subsidize the British voters that fell for the lies of the weasel and mini-Trump?
 
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What is the problem?

They are providing you an adapter free of charge. And they're moving into the fully digital world.

To me it sounds like a win-win.
What about listening to music while charging? ANd bluetooth headphones linda suck
 
Because it's just time to move on and a large enough company needs to start it. It'll be another connectivity war since I think Lightning is apple-only, but kicking the analog bucket continuously down the road isn't the solution.

There's now getting around the "analog bucket" when it comes to audio. Sounds are analog.

Besides starting a connectivity war that will most likely shape up to resemble Firewire vs USB2 or Thunderbolt vs USB3, Apple has simply removed a connectivity option currently used by about 98% of iPhone users and 99.9% of wired headphone users and have replaced it with a dongle that sits outside the phone and prevents charging the phone while you're using it.

Lighting is a proprietary connector that Apple owns the license to, so it's going to have slow adoption, be expensive, and really just make things inconvenient for users. I won't be looking for a new phone until 2017, but due to my usage habits/needs, I won't be buying any phone that doesn't have separate 1/8" jack and data/charging cables.
 
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What does one do in order to both charge and listen to music at the same time? A frequent activity for me...
 
Sounds like you don't know how audio work. All headphones are analogue. You can't go fully digital.

Yeah, our ears are analogue devices, and somewhere along the line electrical energy has to be converted to acoustic energy that our ears can understand.

Passive headphones/speakers depend on having all the electronics "outboard" of the headphones, supplied by the maker of the device into which one plugs the headphones. It's a long, old tradition, but if one uses electrostatic or wireless headphones, the electronics are supplied by the headphone manufacturer.

In the end, it's really just a matter of where the D/A converter and amp are located.

Makers of high end audio gear have long recognized that, if they provide the electronics as well as the speaker drivers, they have more ways to tailor the sound of their product. Making a pair of headphones that must sound great with a "flat," standardized output from the A/V receiver or smart phone is, arguably, more challenging than if the headphones come with electronics that are complimentary to the speaker drivers' characteristics.

The trick, of course, is cost. It is cheaper to rely on the electronics maker to provide the headphone/speaker amp. Headphones rarely last as long as the electronics they're plugged into, so buying a new headphone amp with each set of headphones is going to cost more.

The makers of "quality" audio gear are happy with this - they are able to sell the benefits of superior audio to their customers and bump their prices a bit. People won't stop using headphones.

The losers are those who want a pair of cheap headphones, or those who want to keep using the headphones they already own. The cheap 'phones won't be quite as cheap as they were, and the people with pre-existing headphones will need an adapter until they finally do replace them.
 
I'm surprisingly not tempted to upgrade at all. It looks like a solid performance boost, but the 6S plus is still one of the fastest phones on the market and my day to day usage is pretty basic.

I'm really not a hater, but yes, the removal of the jack in favor of a proprietary standard + the added inconvenience they're passing onto many use case scenarios does turn me off. I rarely use headphones on my iPhone, but now when I actually need to monitor the input of my Shure Lightning mic I can only do it with latency-prone Bluetooth on the 7.. and I'm not spending $159 on EarPods either way.

The thing that excited me the most about the keynote was Mario.
 
You should learn about this sort of thing before posting, because what you've written is completely false.

All sound is analogue. "Digital Audio" is a stream of 1s and 0s that need to be converted to actual sound to be able to be heard.

The quality of sound coming from digital lies in the Digital to Analog Converter (DAC).

The lightning headphones will presumably still use the internal DAC in the iphone to output real sound.
I suspect they will move the DAC out of the phone to the lightning connector. This raises the question about the quality of the DAC that we are going to see in that connector.
 
Why would you have to spend money on wireless headphones? For the majority of the people I know, they listen to music on headphone when on the go. If you are not on the go, you are somewhere with a computer to listen to music with.
My works computer is my works computer. It doesn't have any of my music on it. That's on my (private) phone.
 
I suspect they will move the DAC out of the phone to the lightning connector. This raises the question about the quality of the DAC that we are going to see in that connector.

umm...you can't fit a DAC onto the lightning connector.
 
Going for iPhone 7 Black 32GB, already ordered Spigen Neo Hybrid case. Hey anyone know the music in the airpods video?
 
Thank you... I also shared a similar sentiment above.

People thought the iPhone only cost $199. Silly people. :D

I'm not sure this is true for everybody. As the subsidies have gone away, the plans have not gotten cheaper. In fact they have gotten more expensive. In the previous model, you paid $199 + say $50-$70/month for service for 2 years (let's ignore tax and activation costs for sake of argument and let's assume $50 is a low end plan and $70 was a high end plan). So anywhere from $1400-$1880 for a new iphone and 2 years of service. Now to buy a new iphone you have to pay $649 + the same $50-$70/month for service. After 2 years this cost is $1849-$2329. That's an increase of $449. If you have multiple lines (say 4) then you're average services cost per month could go down to let's say $40/month. That's still $649 + $40/month = $1609 so depending on the plan that's in the middle of the old cost and only after you have 4 lines. You'd have to average about $30/month per line in service cost to equate your 2 year total to the old model. Please correct me if i'm wrong here.
 
I suspect they will move the DAC out of the phone to the lightning connector. This raises the question about the quality of the DAC that we are going to see in that connector.
They can't move it out. The phone has speakers and needs a DAC to play sound.
 
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LOL at the price increase. I'll stick to my SE, I'm done spending $800+ on phones

Uhhhh...what price increase??

Ok, I see now. the Plus is priced higher this year? I never considered the Plus, so wasn't aware of the pricing. If Apple keeps going, they will soon be as expensive as Samsung.
 
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