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Woz Laments No Headphone Jack on iPhone 7, Sees USB-C as Future of Audio
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Yep the fat part is an example for rubbish. BT is getting better for sure but it's still not as good as wired connection and there are still Headphone specialists like Sennheiser, AT who use the 3,5 headphone jack and will continue to do so, wheter Apple and some "wireless is the future" people accept it or not.
I do have BT headphones and love them, but sometimes it's nice just to plug them in and listening to a podcast without worrying about battery or audio signals.
Going by that future tag, I'm sure one slot toys like the MB are the future too?
Woz is right again here
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
Be funny if they include an adaptor. At least if its in there you won't have to pay for it separately I suppose. Good old Apple
I doubt they will include an adapter. When Apple ejected the disc player from iMacs, did they ship OS X updates on disc with it? Do they throw in Thunderbolt to Firewire or Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapters? Did the rMB ship with a USB3 to USB2 adapter? When has Apple abandoned a jack on a piece of hardware but then shipped that hardware with a free adapter to make the new work with the old?
If they include Lightning-terminated headphones in the box, they can spin "superiority" and "the future" of embracing an "all digital" connection like Lightning, glossing over the issues:
- that our ears can only hear analog.
- the the phone must still have a DAC & AMP within to work as a phone, and thus the
- redundancy of having 2 DACs & 2 AMPs to make this change work now.
My best guess: Lightning buds in the box, Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter sold separately for $29.99-$49.99. There's a lot of profit in getting a fair chunk of new iPhone buyers to pay an additional $30-$50 in the same transaction.
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HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
Can't do it with just cables. There must be a DAC & AMP in the chain. To boost sound quality to existing headphones likely requires:
- better quality source file(s) (the AAC file itself),
- technology in the adapter massaging the sound in some way,
- better quality DAC and/or better quality AMP in the adapter, etc.
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The Note 7 has all of that, with a 3.5mm jack to top it all off. No reason why Apple couldn't do the same. They're only doing this to bring in licensing revenue for Lightning audio devices, including 3.5mm -> Lightning adapters, Lightning 3.5mm + Lightning (for charging) breakout adapters, etc.
Nobody cares what WOZ thinks. He's not a part of the company, or has done anything technology wise since the late 70's. You might as well be interviewing McLovin on what he thinks about Apple products.
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Except wireless audio / charge is here and avaiable today, teleportation not so much
You re seriously suggesting people to buy a seperate pair of wireless earphones as a realistic solution to hear music while charging?
How bout Apple giving for free a second wireless earphone when you buy the wired ones?
You are missing the point: I suspect this isn't about wired vs wireless: it's about digital vs analogue. If you look at what happened with video, it's now illegal to buy a Blu-ray player with analogue video outputs since Dec 31st 2013. This was forbidden by the 'analogue sunset', which was an agreement called the AACS between device manufacturers and content producers, where rights holders (e.g. Hollywood) wanted to plug a potential piracy hole; an all-digital path makes end-to-end digital copy protection possible, which benefits the music industry but not the consumer. I'll bet they are planning the same with audio.
People complain about laptops not being as fast as Desktops but still laptops became more popular. Same with wired internet connections. Laptops are fast and wifi is fast and stable.
We can expect wireless audio to be the norm. Maybe Apple will impress us soon.
We can expect wireless audio to be the norm. Maybe Apple will impress us soon.
Wireless is the future. Switching to USBc means throwing out 4 years worth of Lightning cables and accessories, only to replace them with a new "standard" that is currently hard to find anywhere, much less a 7-11 at 3AM the way I can pick up a Lightning cable now. By the time USBc actually saturates the market, Apple will likely have removed all ports from its phones. And in the meantime, there will be a proliferation of adapters, just as there are now with the new Retina Macbook, because it will be many years before every legacy port device is replaced with a native USBc one.
The way I see it, is Apple is saving me huge expense replacing all my Lightning cables, which I won't even need in another 5 years by the time USBc finally achieves a critical mass.
I don't know. Everything I've ever read about Woz leads me to believe if not for Steve Jobs, Apple wouldstill be making the Apple II. Woz is a tinkerer. He seems much more interested in hacking code, and home brew projects than the polished finished product we've come to know as Apple. Jobs could have never created with Apple, but I doubt we'd have had the Macintosh and iPhone without jobs.
Of course they will, that's another £40 adapter that a high percentage of users will need to buy. This is Apple.
I'm not sure why everyone keeps interviewing Woz about what he thinks about technology. Is he a great, once-brilliant man? Yes. And I only say once-brilliant because of the plane accident, which messed things up a little. Do we owe him a ton for what he did co-founding Apple? Yes. But he clearly doesn't stay that up to date with technology any more. I think it's probably best to ask him broader philosophical questions relating to the computer industry, and not his opinions about specific ports or implementations of tech. Wireless is clearly the future, and it will only get better over time.
As someone who finally got an automobile with Bluetooth and a premium sound system quite recently, I must say that the audio range sounds pretty spectacular for me. From what I can tell I seem to have a better ear than many people, but I'm no audiophile. I'd estimate 80-90% of people just don't care for that little bit of extra high or low, and they probably don't even have speakers capable of rendering that sort of excellent range. And for the people who do care, there's an adapter or Lightning headphones which are better because they can have a higher-quality on board DAC. The audiophiles will get what they want, the average user will get the convenience they want—as long as there is an easy charging solution!
Bluetooth is hugely inferior to wired from an audio fidelity perspective; Woz is 100% correct about that. It could be, however, that your wireless headphones are better than your wired ones, which would mean your comparison is not apples-to-apples.
Who knew that Woz was such an audio snob? Rich person problem. Most people don't have fancy enough speakers or headphones to notice much of a difference between Bluetooth and wired. Will be a minor kerfluffle and then forgotten. This issue is officially: OVERBLOWN.
To each his own. The way I see it is this -- if I'm listening to my headphones enough to run down my 20+ hour wireless headphone battery, then I will happily charge it once a day to avoid this:
Grab a tangle of headphones sitting on my desk as I head out the door, and plug them in. Stuff the whole affair in my pocket as I ride the subway. Getting the headphones yanked out of my years by a passengers bag that gets snagged on the cable. Pulling the headphones out when I get to work, unplugging them, winding them up and shoving in my pocket, then off to a meeting. Then back at my desk, pull out the headphones and untangle wires and then plug into the headphones, then plug in power separately. Listen and work, until someone comes by and says I'm needed right away. Unplug the phone, and go, unplug the headphones and warp them up as I'm headed to my bosses office, shove them in my pocket. Then go back to my desk, and untangle headphones again, and repeat. Then lunch. Pull out my credit card and the headphone wires have gotten tangled up with it and everything comes out of my pocket and falls on the floor. Shove it all back in, get my food, pull them out and untangle them again. Plug them in again. Get the cable caught on a door knob as I'm throwing away my trash, yanking them out of my ears. Repeat the same morning work headphone shuffle in the afternoon. Then go to the gym, where I have to run the wire under my shirt to keep it getting caught on stuff as I workout. Then pulling the cable out so I can set the phone on the stand while running on the treadmill where I accidentally hit the cable and pull the phone off the stand, yanking the headphones out of my ears as it falls. Then shoving everything into the gym bag as I shower, and untangling them yet again for the ride home. When I get home, once again pull out the headphones, untangle them and plug them in. The phone needs charging so I have to sit wherever the cables are. If I go to get a glass of water in the kitchen I have to unplug the phone and take it with me or stop the music. If I lay in bed listening to an audio book, I'm restricted to the distance the cord reaches from the charging phone on the nightstand. If I fall asleep and roll over, I'll get tangled in the wires and risk pulling the phone off the stand and off the charger. Then that's a whole other problem to clean up in the morning.
Thank you, but I will chose plugging in my wireless headphones once a day rather than do the wired shuffle all day long. Put them on, press a button, instant music. Take them off, press a button, off. No more tangles, no more cable management.
All digitally equipped headphones will be platform agnostic going forward. All that will be required if you change platforms with your $1000 headphones is a $50 cable swap (and that's only to avoid an adapter). That way manufacturers make one set of headphones that can be used with everything. The only headphones with a fixed, undetachable cables will be the cheap drug store variety that people buy when they forget their's.
Wireless headphones will have a hybrid Digital/analogue ports which can be plugged into a digital source for listening and charging, or analogue for legacy equipment.
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Very true.
But nearly every movie is obtainable via less-than-legal methods... yet none of those movies were captured through the analog hole.
So what exactly did Hollywood accomplish by plugging the hole?
As for music... do you think pirates are recording music over the headphone jack? No! They are stripping the DRM off the digital copy.
If Apple removes the analog headphone jack... it will have ZERO effect on piracy.
But I guess Apple still has to pay lip-service to the record labels.