When Apple dropped the floppy drive there was NOTHING better available right then. ... Nobody had heard of USB in 1998, and there was nothing available for it.
Internal floppy drives were still available for Mac laptops until the G4 Powerbook in 2001, by which time better alternatives—USB flash drives—were commercially available.
That aside lightning does have a few advantages over the 3.5mm.
1) better audio quality because lightning can transfer several times more audio data compared to 3.5mm. Which makes it possible to do 24 bit audio. Note: these headphones are already available.
Your Mac outputs 24-bit audio via a 3.5mm mini plug just fine. It can be done in a phone just as easily.
2) enable more interesting headphones. Because lightning power as well as data you can have noise cancelling headphones or headphones with built in dsp without having batteries in the headphone itself. Thereby decreasing the weight and price of said headphones.
That's a good reason to allow Lightning headphones. It isn't a good reason to
require them by removing the only wired alternative.
3) enables oems to implement different controls on their headphones.
They could do that, but I'd expect most Lightning headphones to be identical to non-Lightning headphones, just with a different cord and an extra DAC chip built into it somewhere. Why spend all that R&D effort on features that you can sell to just 14% of your customer base?
4) enable better built in microphones on the headphones (refer to point 1)
The biggest limitation on headset microphones is the size of the diaphragm and the enclosure, not the lack of power or 24-bit ADCs. If you took a Shure or AKG dynamic mic and wired it through an impedance matching transformer to an iPhone's audio input, you'd get dramatically better sound than you get from the mic on even the most expensive headsets, even if you didn't change anything else.
Your not supposed to be using your phone while its charging anyway . Why do you think they include a short cable with all Cell phones?
Lots of people use a cell phone to listen to music in their cars. Why wouldn't you have it hooked up to power while you're in the car to avoid draining your battery? And lots of people use those little emergency charge sticks to charge up their phone, too.
When did Apple last use a proprietary connector on Macs? I can't think of a single one (except for the power connector, where until recently no standard existed).
ADB, used for keyboards prior to the introduction of USB, though the physical connector itself complied with an industry standard. Before that, Apple's video connector and serial port connectors were semi-proprietary. (The physical connector complied with a standard, and the serial port's signaling complied with a standard; it just wasn't the connector or the standard used by the rest of the industry.) But basically, nothing built in this century unless you count internal connectors.
I've considered before Apple using its AirPlay technology for wireless music, as it is capable of lossless delivery.
Over Wi-Fi. If you think non-LE Bluetooth has steep power requirements, you ain't seen nothin' yet. And the latency....
We are transitioning from TWO universal standards and one propriatory to ONE universal standard and one propriatory.
We're transitioning from two public standards and a proprietary standard that nobody uses to one public standard and one proprietary standard that about 95% of iPhone users will be forced to use if they want to keep their existing headphones. That's tantamount to flipping off your entire customer base. Just saying.
We'd still be using the headphone jack in 2030 if someone didn't have the balls to kick it now.
Nobody has provided even one reason why we shouldn't still be using it in 2030. It works well enough for the overwhelming majority of use cases, and it does not preclude the use of Lightning or other digital connections for the
tiny percentage of devices that would benefit from it (e.g. noise canceling headphones that draw power from your phone).
By contrast, the extra cost to consumers caused by removing it is huge, both in terms of having to buy adapters (or adding $10 to the cost of every pair of headphones) and having to carry them around (or buy all new headphones).
The only possible theoretical advantage is making phones thinner, and they're already so thin that they slip out of your hands, which makes that not a real advantage, either.
Smaller devices. Fewer wires.
Nope. It actually takes twice as many wires to pass digital data as analog data. The bare minimum for USB is two twisted pairs of wires—one for each direction, for a total of four wires plus a shield. A headphone cable contains two wires plus a shield. That means that a Lightning headphone cable must by definition either become thicker or significantly more fragile. Your choice.
Why on earth would that be, BT has way more bandwidth than needed to get excellent sound through, a even small buffer on the receiving end would take care of any connection variance. You just invented stuff bud.
Technically, it does have the bandwidth for 96x24 uncompressed. Unfortunately, the Bluetooth audio standards don't support it, and buffering results in poor game play, because the user will perceive the delay between touching the screen and hearing a sound associated with that touch.
I get you. Screen size is good, actual body of the phone is too big. Those bezels need to be trimmed down, and not just for aesthetics:
Headphone jacks on the top/bottom don't really affect that as much as the home button and the speaker do, so I doubt that removing the mini jack would have any meaningful impact on the bezel size. Also, making the bezel size smaller has a big impact on case designs. It is already difficult to touch the edges of the screen when your phone is in some cases. So I'm not sure that reducing it further would actually be an advantage so much as a nightmare.
I do think that it's not just thinness that makes something difficult to hold, but the width, height and weight of the object. I can hold a credit card very easily for example and that's very thin. The iPhone 7 will be thinner and also narrower, and because of that I believe it will actually be easier to hold than the 6/6s
You hold a credit card by the face, which gives you a large grip surface. You avoid holding your phone by the face, because you'll get fingerprints on the screen. Thus, making phones thinner reduces the grip surface in ways that are a non-issue for credit cards. And if you reduce the bezel size further, that only compounds the problem.
Spurred on by a market which had been accelerated and inflated by the iPhone 7, just like what happened with USB when the iMac came out.
USB was quickly adopted by every major computer manufacturer, not just Apple, so most manufacturers were already tooling up to offer USB accessories. It might have been accelerated availability of USB keyboards and mice, but only by the small percentage of vendors that already made Mac keyboards (because ADB went away). And it created a market for USB floppy drives that otherwise wouldn't have existed. However, that's not going to happen here, because they aren't replacing a proprietary tech with an open standard. They're replacing an open standard with a proprietary tech.
Apple doesn't care what poster's say. Apple cares about the tens of millions who put their money on the table and buy thin iPhones, and at a very nice profit margin, as opposed to the much smaller numbers (a few posters here?) who buy thicker less profitable mobile devices from the competition.
Tens of millions of people buy Apple phones because they run iOS, so they're compatible with their existing apps, they don't have to learn how to use a new OS, etc. They buy new phones because they're faster, have more storage, have better features, and run new versions of iOS better. If users are overwhelmingly saying that they don't care if Apple makes the phone any thinner, it is safe to say that those same tens of millions of people would buy Apple phones even if they didn't get any thinner.
To the extent that thickness can affect weight, that might sell a few phones. Otherwise, I doubt that the thickness difference between the original iPhone and the current iPhone 6S series has had any meaningful impact on Apple's sales. Feel free to show evidence to the contrary.
So let's look at this realistically. Apple has four redundant ways to get audio out of the iPhone: 3.5mm, Lightning, Bluetooth, and Wifi. Three of which are standards, one is proprietary. Three are multifunction, one is audio only. Now, let's say you have to choose one to get rid of in order to make room for some must have new tech.
Let's look at this realistically. The space currently used by the audio jack is maybe a quarter of an inch by half an inch by the thickness of the phone. This might make a tiny difference in battery life, but not more than a few percent, I suspect. By contrast, the camera sticks out the back of the phone, and can't be easily made thinner. If you fixed that by making the phone half a millimeter thicker and making the battery half a millimeter thicker to match, it would probably boost the battery capacity by 20% or more, without compromising functionality, and I guarantee that not a single user would complain about that extra half a millimeter. Which of these approaches seems more sensible?
But as far as cables are concerned, Apple has avoided the wireless charging. And most people on here even proclaim it a gimmick. I wonder if Apple every implements it what the general consesus will be. I am guessing a lot of people will immediately take a different stance.
Anyone who actually cares about the environment will decry it. Contactless charging is inherently inefficient.
The issue at hand is, although the 3.5mm audio jack isn't technologically antiquated, its form factor is. There's *nothing* that dictates an audio port/connector needs to be the length, width, and shape of a 3.5mm jack, other than it's a physical form that has been around for almost 40 years (and it's larger sibling- the 6.5mm- has been around for almost 140!). Let's face it, if the jack isn't going to be addressed by Apple, it's going to be addressed by some other manufacturer like Samsung, LG, etc because we're at that point.
There's a reason for its design. It is the smallest plug that doesn't break easily. It's easy to snap off the 2.5mm variant. And it is round because the complete lack of any orientation makes it easier to plug in than any other possible design. It might be possible to make a version that isn't as deep by reducing the length of the shield contact further, and if you did, you could probably maintain compatibility with existing plugs, so long as people didn't insist on shoving harder until they break things.
You could design an incompatible port of similar size (at the risk of causing considerable confusion) with slightly smaller contacts, but not much. It really isn't worth it to shave a millimeter off the length of the connector, IMO.
But other than that, the form factor is pretty optimal unless you go to a surface-contact design like MagSafe.
