...or Apple punishing us for the £15 billion tax bill?
Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Suppose they've got to get the money back from somewhere, not sure it should be us though, we didn't hit them with it
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Apple's Phil Schiller Recommends Lightning Dock for Charging an iPhone 7 While Listening to Music
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Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Suppose they've got to get the money back from somewhere, not sure it should be us though, we didn't hit them with it
What was the proprietary system? I have one and I can't see it. USB C is not proprietary, just not well adopted. Are you referring to MacBook pros because the same is true there. Thunderbolt is not proprietary.
All of this doesn't matter either. There are so many real world scenarios where this breaks. My daughters daisy chain their headphones so that they can watch the same film. I see kids with headphone splitters listening to their music together all the time. Bluetooth won't cover those scenarios and I won't be buying headphones that only have a lightning connector as this locks kids out from sharing the audio from non apple devices. So is a dongle the way ahead or Bluetooth? Bluetooth then needs to support concurrent connections or we need the adapter dongle. If an adapter is required for everyday situations then the wrong approach has been taken surely. What connection does apple expect people to have at the end of their wired headphones? Lightning? What if I want to use those same headphones on a non Apple audio device? Surely people can see this? What am I missing apart from this argument that they've done it before: they haven't
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Switching to USB-C wouldn't solve the problem of not being to charge your phone and listen to music at the same time. But you are probably right in that the people who want to complain will no doubt just find something else to gripe about.
And your examples don't make sense. If my MBP doesn't have VGA port, I will need an adaptor to connect it to a projector or display. Who cares if the standard that replaced it (HDMI or DVI or whatever) is proprietary or not?
Before thunderbolt was thunderbolt it was "mini display port" and upon release was used EXCLUSIVELY by apple. And before that, you had to buy Mini-DVI breakouts, that were rendered obsolete the moment MDP macs were released. ALSO proprietary:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-DVI
someone already developed micro usb/lightning dual port, and some form of smart adapters are completely feasible.
fact is, 3.5mm is ancient design that takes a lot of space and allows 0 to nothing in terms of connectivity. devices have been going from "baseline" to "expand when necessary" for a while now, why is this such a surprise to everyone?
it was literally the oldest thing on an iphone at this point, and except for plugging something in you can't do anything with it.
Lightning connections allows for a dual 3.5mm active splitter, while a passive 2x 3.5mm splitter will first, deliver two different levels to different headphones (because impedance) and also drop in level significantly (since its passive), so with a lightning adapter (which is the same as 2x3.5mm dongle) you'll get more for the same form factor
bluetooth:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Bluetooth...239636?hash=item1c59e49fd4:g:VnYAAOSwo0JWMZ73
+ any passive splitter you wish. + no issues of yanking and damaging the port on the iphone and less dangers of fraying the headphone cord.
in my opinion, wireless is the future.
Well, thats just it! Your everyday situations are NOT the same as mine, or someone elses! That's why adapters are the ONLY way if you don't want your phone (or laptop) to look like this:
http://home.bt.com/images/02-HDMI.jpg-136399281567902601
you can argue the same for EVERY port thats on this picture, because there's someone who uses an iphone and needs this output.
Apple figure majority are using apple headphones supplied with their phone (which is most likely true), majority are listening on the go (wireless or no need for charging) which is arguably also true.
I don't care that I need to use an adapter on my MacBook Pro Retina, to use all my gear from before Thunderbolt was invented, because in 95% of other situations the computer is better for it
Your arguments make sense: I am simply making he point that previous examples are not directly comparable: laptops tend to be in a bag and chucking in a few adapters is not an issue (as an example). I am also arguing that there are too many real world examples, for too many people for this to be the right call at this moment in time.
I am not a Luddite, I swear. I accepted the decisions of the past because when I stopped and thought about it, I realised that the real world impact was minimal. I don't think that is true in this scenario.
Thing is, all of these are problems with an existing solution. As far as Bluetooth goes there have been headphones for a long time that allow more than one pair to be used simultaneously to share audio. Apples interpretation of the Bluetooth connection is also compatible with standard Bluetooth, so no issues there.
When it comes to wired connections Lightning audio, although not new, is still relatively in its infancy. Now that Apple has made it the sole physical interface for its devices, expect splitters to be just one of a plethora of accessories that come to market before long.
The compatibility factor is also something that can/will and already does have solutions. There are headphones on sale now which offer both Lightning and traditional 3.5mm analog connections. While they are on the higher end of the price scale at the moment, it's another thing that will quickly filter down now that Apple has drawn a line in the sand.
As far as equipment goes, well, manufacturers aren't going to ignore hundreds of millions of customers. That would be financial suicide. Just as we now have, for instance, HiFi systems and separates which have a Lightning dock built in. We will get equipment which have a Lightning socket for headphones, neither Apple or the manufacturers of the equipment want to prevent this from happening.
Enacting a new standard is something that always has and always will have a percentage of people up in arms to begin with. But one thing is certain, it's the way things are to be from now on for Apple devices, like it or not. Our choices are twofold and extremely simple.
Either we go along with the new way of doing things and over a period of time replace/purchase appropriate headphones and accessories to suit our use cases. Or, we refuse to accept the change Apple has made and move to an Android device with a traditional headphone port.
I was with you until that last scentence. I assure you that if they had dropped the headphone jack and switched to USB-C you would hear considerably more moaning than you do now. Nothing would change, and 200 million customers would have to replace all of their lightning cables and accessories, buy even more adapters and throw their lives into even further turmoil, to switch to a standard that is in use in very few devices and locations. Even the new Beats W1 equipped headphones still have a micro USB port, which may or may not have changed based on Apple's choice here, but you can bet it was in part driven by the ubiquity of micro USB chargers.
One thing about all of Apple's other adapters ... As pointed out above USB-C wouldn't eliminate adapters in this move, either. So it's not the adapter per se that's the problem here. It's the loss of functionality. When you use a DVI to VGA, or Thunderbolt to FireWire, you're not losing anything ... the adapter merely converts one to another with the same functionality you had before.
Dropping the 3.5mm port literally removes functionality that a single port doesn't provide, and Apple, nor others have offered replacements for that loss yet.
Well yes they have. Belkin has a 2x lightning splitter. Total port count on retina macbook is smaller than on first gen unibody. Original MacBook Pro unibody had:
2x USB, miniDP, Firewre, stereo out, ethernet, mic/line in, even ExpressCard!
new one has:
2x USB, 2xTB, stereo out, HDMI
all together less ports and need for more adapters.
The new MacBook has a single port and requires a dongle for everything except if you charge it. It's fine though, most of users will go wireless and wont bat an eye, others will use dongles and will be just as happy. you needed a dongle or converter cable even with FW when retina dropped FW400 port. (previous MBP had BOTH FW400 and 800 ports)
what are you talking about. it is in the fine print on the footnote on the site. All test are on 256-Kbps AAC encoding - that is how you meet all their claims of "high-quality AAC audio" and "5 hr battery life". Apple didn't test them on some 48/24 random BT stack. We are talking about the iPhone 7 and the AirPods - not Unicorns.
You seemingly were talking about shortcomings of bluetooth, in that case lightning allows even more (to bypass iPhones DAC for example)
Sorry no. From all appearances, the Belkin adapter does not allow two Lightning headphones to be plugged in and share the same audio together. It only allows for one power connection and one audio connection. I have to plug in a "Y" adapter to split the output of 3.5mm jacks right now on an iPhone 6s. So I don't have a problem buying an adapter. The problem is there isn't one. Will there be? Who knows? And I can't do it with BT at all as far as I know.
I don't have a problem eliminating ports. Just don't eliminate functionality with the new technology you're replacing it with.
Your justification is rubbish.
1. The oldest electronic technology in the iPhone is actually the battery. The theory behind the modern battery dates to about 1840. Much older.
2. The battery takes up much more space than the headphone jack - in fact most of the internal volume is consumed by it!!!
3. For these reasons I propose that these obsolete, space hogging batteries be removed from all iPhones.
See what I did there?
One difference between this move and the disk drive removal is that it was quite feasible to move all data from disks to the HDD or external storage via USB (actually FireWire at the time, I guess). Speaking from experience here. After you got your data moved, you didn't need the drive anymore at all. We kept them in case we got disks from others, but this was already rare because their storage limits were already a huge hassle (remember MS Office on 13ish disks?). And it happened a lot less than I feared at the time. It was a transition with a clearly defined 'from' and 'to'.
The difference here is that the 'to' seems ambiguous at best: headphones themselves aren't going away and neither is the headphone jack. It connects devices with short lifespans to devices with potentially long lifespans.
When removed, the 3.5" floppy had not been in use for that long -- at least compared to the headphone jack. And all the equipment associated with it was computer equipment, that is, equipment with a relatively short useful life. Floppies were, fundamentally, a computer to computer interface instead of a computer to human interface.
In short:
Whether one likes Apple's move here or not, the move away from floppies was of a fundamentally very different nature.
The difference here is that the 'to' seems ambiguous at best: headphones themselves aren't going away and neither is the headphone jack. It connects devices with short lifespans to devices with potentially long lifespans.
When removed, the 3.5" floppy had not been in use for that long -- at least compared to the headphone jack. And all the equipment associated with it was computer equipment, that is, equipment with a relatively short useful life. Floppies were, fundamentally, a computer to computer interface instead of a computer to human interface.
In short:
Whether one likes Apple's move here or not, the move away from floppies was of a fundamentally very different nature.
I don't disagree. There's a similar move from Apple's HD 20 disk drive that many continued to use long after Apple introduced SCSI. At a certain point Macs dropped compatibility for it, and for a few remaining Macs which had an external floppy disk port, the drives could be used read-only to copy information over to another disk. But that didn't stop those drives from being useful or being used, long after Apple dropped support for them.
Likewise with the floppy disk. Many people still moved files using the floppy disk for several more years after Apple dropped the drive, as it was still the easiest, most cost effective, most compatible way to move certain files between computers. The external floppy drive was the most popular USB add-on after a printer for the original iMac, and impossible to obtain (and it wasn't just to transfer the contents). Apple didn't even add a writable CD drive until 4 years after it dropped the floppy. And yes there were USB thumb drives, but they cost $40 for 8MB. That's about $10 for the same amount of storage a 30-cent floppy disk offered. Add to that, few if any PCs had USB ports, which required the purchase of expensive and hard to find USB dongles, and software drivers which were often buggy at best, and required upgrades to Windows 98 which few companies were running at the time. By 2002, yes most floppy disk usage was replaced by e-mail, USB flash storage prices were dropping as ports were becoming more mainstream, and re-writable CD media was becoming affordable (if not universally compatible).
So there are some similarities to it. But in the end, it doesn't exactly work because the functionality of the floppy drive was replaced entirely by what replaced it, regardless of how expensive it might have been, not to mention the quality improved. The functionality of the headphone jack on the other hand has not been replaced entirely with what's currently available, even combining both USB & Bluetooth.
I was pointing out the marketing double talk going on. For all the talk of "future of audio" The entire back end is running on old tech with AAC lossy compression. There is not even mention if they finally supporting AptX or updated the DAC in the phone (again, the audio specs on the site are exactly the same as the 6s). And yes the limitation of Bluetooth 4.2,... The future or Audio over bluetooth is BT 5.0 due at the end of the year. So in the end all they did was take out a port.
You are back to a wire if you do that - So what is the point of all this? And now the DAC on a 650 dollar phone is an accessory?
This user posted a picture of his earbuds, which clearly shows a right angle 3.5 plug.
The Lightning adapter is not angled. His phone is now significantly longer than before. Long enough that the pouch will not close.
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I read none of those comments as people using headphones in a car. I read them as people can no longer connect a cable from their phone's headphone jack to their car's auxiliary port.
Not everyone owns a car with Bluetooth. Heck, my pristine 2004 Audi A4 has neither Bluetooth nor an Aux Jack.
And I would never, ever, conceive of wearing headphones while driving.
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Jobs said in an interview long ago that consumers pay Apple to make decisions that require 'courage' (his word).
He elaborated by saying if Apple makes the right decisions, then people continue to buy. If Apple doesn't make good choices, people will not buy product. I see that as an honest statement, but perhaps he gave us too much credit.
But you can bank on the fact that someone at Apple researched that interview, and took it as something passed down from on high. Phil was just quoting God, I mean Jobs.
So cramming a dock in your pants pocket while charging with a portable charger is considered innovation?
1. wrong. Li-Ion batteries are from 1970.. which makes them 7 decades younger than 3.5mm headphone jack.
2. yes of course, this is what the next break through should/will be. you can't bend physics tho
3. i completely agree... when they can be replaced by something more efficient. like lightning connector for example.
moot point. you couldn't split VGA anymore when they removed it. Progress sometimes means you can't do things like you used to do it. for example, my old Nokia 6310i could hold charge for 8-14 days. I didn't have to carry my charger when i went on vacation!
Your "I have to buy an adatper now" argument is invalid. That was true from switch to Mini-DVI and DVI to MDP on all macs, that was true for switch from 30-pin to lightning, that was true for mostly EVERY CHANGE EVER.
Even the switch from DIN5 to PS2 and then from PS2 to USB called for *an adapter*.
YES, change means something is different! You all sound like grumpy old men.
Oh and lets not forget you can't just as easily split digital video as you can VGA. (if we talk about splitting).
Technically lightning allows a device that can split your signal into 10 different locations without signal loss (its called an audio interface, a lot of people already use things like that). Headphone jack is a relic
Dongle city...
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I had to buy an external one...
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There are other scenarios for me - planes, trains and automobiles...any long trip really.
I've also charged mine while walking via power bank.
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You must live a sheltered life...I watch movies on my devices while on the plane over wifi provided by the airline. Helps to change with a power bank so that you have 100% when on the ground. Then there is car use
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No, I meant the concept of a battery - It's made up of an anode and a cathode with electrons flowing between them through an electrolyte to produce an electric current. This concept is hundreds of years old.
And in case you didn't notice I was attempting to be facetious.
Do you even read what you're replying to?
Where was I complaining about having to buy an adapter? I even acknowledge in my post that I DO have to buy an adapter now to split a 3.5mm Jack into to, so that's not the problem.
The problem is that they took away functionality that many people use today, and have not offered a means to replace it with Lightning or BT, despite offering a $40 adapter that appears to do it, but doesn't. In fact for $40, all it does is offer a Lightning pass-through for charging, and an audio passthrough. Considering an audio adapter costs $9 and includes a DAC, ADC, and amp, that seems a bit excessive.
While I understand your point about not splitting VGA, that wasn't a really common thing, nor was it recommended -- VGA has enough signal problems driving one monitor without ghosting and interference. Splitting a 3.5mm Jack for multiple headphones is quite common with many uses from the kids playing a game or watching a movie together in the backseat of a car, to a DJ, monitoring the feed he's sending to the sound system.