Apple's rumored removal of the headphone jack on iPhone 7

@TickledLizard

http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/7/11874706/iphone-7-lightning-headphones-reasons

http://daringfireball.net/2016/06/headphone_jacks_are_the_new_floppy_drives

http://www.macworld.com/article/3087526/ios/strawphone-arguing-against-the-iphone-7.html

@TickledLizard sound quality would depend on the dac in the headphones. Great headphones with a nice dac would sound great, cheap headphones with a crap dac would sound like such.

@Ignorant Unless they somehow pass through analog audio on unused pins or something similar. Which would render this even more pointless than it already is. (though the addition of dacs to every headphone is pretty wasteful and ridiculous as well)

@candreasen there are already lightning headphones on the market, they have built in dacs, it’ll be the same for USB-C headphones as well.

@RiotDemon It’s not so much an OS thing but a manufacturer thing. Granted, they’re one of the same when it comes to Apple.

(WP user here, so “technological advancements” of these “features” don’t concern me.)

@narfcake

You’re the first person I “know” with a Windows phone.

I’m just trying to think of an appropriate reaction, as I never planed for this type of scenario.

@TickledLizard It was much less shitty than $30 Android phones.

(What, you expect me to give up catshirts for a “better” phone?)

@narfcake

To be fair, the specs on low-low end Android phones are better than they were a couple of years ago.

@TickledLizard Yeah, they’re at least “usable” now, but they’re still below that of a comparably priced WP.

I have a Moto E, but I’ll be giving up a lot of camera quality versus the 640.

@TickledLizard I also have a windows phone. It’s my backup for when the iPhone acts up

@sohmageek

You just want to get on my good side by saying what you think I want to hear

Well guess what? There’s only room for one first person I “know” with a Windows phone

@TickledLizard my son has one too (he’s just shy of 2… We use it for Pandora in his room. He does not have active cell service on it) and my wife. My grandmother. They were cheap phones when moving to tmobile. Everyone but my grandparents have switched from them. They were ok. But iPhones are what we like
-sent from my iPhone SE

@RiotDemon I’m an android user as well, but I’m still concerned about the old android manufacturer trick "do whatever apple’s doing"
It’s gotten better in the past few years but honestly besides your samsung, LG, maybe one more, a lot of android manufacturers seem like they would still follow apple’s design decisions off a cliff.

@candreasen Not just seem.
Why did LeEco ditch the headphone jack?
The Moto Z has no headphone jack

@candreasen I’ve had two HTC phones now and I’ll probably get another. I have an iPhone at work and it annoys me. I don’t know why.

My brother has gone through a shitton of iPhones because his work pays for them… Even when they get mangled. He’s never happy with them, but he sticks with them since he has so much stuff bought trough iTunes and doesn’t want to start over.

At least with android, if I want to get a Samsung, LG, or whatever, I can still keep all my apps, no matter the brand of phone.

@narfcake Jumping in late to this but… to be fair the WP devices are cheap because MS can’t give them away.

@RiotDemon until bluetooth has lossless codecs across the board wired will always sound better, granted as the content gets lower and lower bitrate people notice less…

@thismyusername Well, there’s aptX, but that’s not all that common still.

@narfcake
AptX is good, but not equiv to wired with any phones worth more than $30. Just my take.

@RiotDemon See this is the most reasonable argument for it, but as people have said, we just aren’t there yet. I know maybe 5-10% of people I encounter use bluetooth headphones, and I don’t see Apple driving joe bloe on the street using his apple earbuds to go bluetooth. The expense and increased complexity for little benefit (to the majority of people) makes no sense to me. I mean they certainly wont give bluetooth earbuds out with the phones for free, and the inevitable adapter will be a monstrosity. The uses of audio vs charging jacks, be the jack microusb or lightning or type-c are just so different that using the charging port for audio would result in a completely different level of physical strains on the connector. Take it from someone who tried to use an external DAC to listen to music on a daily basis, it wears out the cables, connectors, everything, and fast. Also, bluetooth, even in new revisions, varyingly (in my experience) sounds somewhere between choppy and unusable and good, but still notably worse if you’re into nice headphones.

Seriously though … one of the rumors is that ditching the jack would allow a speaker system a la the iPad Pro. I know what you’re saying, who would want that? Well, a surprising number of people frequently listen to content on the crappy internal speakers, according to podcast analytics.

@MehnofLaMehncha It won’t (allow more battery)- look at a teardown on iFixit of an iPhone- there’s a tiny gap where the headphone jack is, and since the phone can’t get thicker, your only option is extending the battery forward a negligible amount.

@MehnofLaMehncha They need to visit a college campus. Everyone using a phone has headphones wired into their phone. That being said, if Apple says “no more wires” the Apple community will say “no more wires, wires suck”. Even if you do not agree now, wait until it happens.

@caffeine_dude The headphones can plug into the lightning jack. So you’ll need special headphones or a dongle.

@MehnofLaMehncha
I listen to podcasts and spoken voice kinda all day long. My experience: .I dont care about crappy speakers or crappy headphones for spoken voice; the excellence of the sound reproduction simply doesnt matter in that context - as long as i can understand what’s being said, and there’s no snap crackle pop hiss, i dont care. For music, i do care, a lot. Different experiences, different goals.

Fwiw, most of my friends who go back and forth between music and spoken voice kinda have a similar take. Speaker qual matters only for music and video soundtracks, and for that, in-phone speakers we can currently build, great ones or shitty ones, wont be good enough for music, and are just fine for spoken word reproduction. So i’m not sure what the point would be for slightly better in-phone speakers as a trade-off factor here.

I should mention i dont have much skin in the game. I use a 6s daily for podcasts and audiobooks. Other than that, i’m an android person for normal use, including music and video.

I still think it’s a bad decision in the current market. It comes across to many as a case of corporate arrogance, with weak technical justification, as tho Apple wants to distract people from the absence of profound innovation or features. And it will piss off customers and potential customers, and some people will move off the IOS platform because if it. I cant imagine IOS will actually gain users over this. But i am mostly watching from the outside.

(I am not, in any sense, a hater. The Iphone is a fine device. I just dont like this choice, if it happens, and some things about Apple’s choices irritate me at times.)

@f00l if the improved battery means you can listen all day without plugging in, wouldn’t that in fact be an improvement over the headphone jack, assuming you don’t wear the headphones all night?

@smartr
I get day long battery life (8-12 hours) now playing audiobooks and podcasts. I usually listen to that w bt headphones. The increased battery life gains by that slight additional space would likely be incredibly small in any case, and i would likely have to charge my headphones and or phone at some point. Am kinda prepared for that jic.

For music i listen to various devices, with nice wired over-ear headphones, usually senns. The idea of having to deal with a dongle is really annoying.

If the entire high-end phone market transitions away from standard jacks, i suppose i’ll adapt and deal with it. I wont be pleased about it.

@f00l

Talk about your first world problems …

And first world responses.

@MehnofLaMehncha
Indeed. Guilty. However, 1st world stuff is what most of us deal with everyday.

@PocketBrain I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if one of those things or something similar came to pass in the next 5 years

@sohmageek I see what you’re saying but not really, if the phone isn’t designed to be waterproof then water will get in through seams, charging ports, etc. just fine, and if it is designed to be waterproof then it’s far from impossible to waterproof the 3.5mm jack, look at any waterproof/water resistant smartphone on the market now.

@sohmageek Myeahh, my Galaxy S5 is waterproof and has the standard jack.

@sohmageek
Are obsessions ever truly useless? I thought tge point of an obsession was the obsession in itself.

@sohmageek Three words:
Bluetooth Speaker Dock.

@sohmageek I love the Qi wireless charging for my really nice Android phone! I’d never own anything Apple again.

@SpenceMan01 Dragonflies are quite nice, probably the route (only, using the CCK) I’ll take if I get stuck upgrading before less unwieldy options come out. But, here’s hoping a CCK-sized or smaller dongle gets released with this bad-idea phone.

@mikejb0329 This has nothing to do with the OS.

The first Android phone, the HTC Dream/G1, did not have a 3.5mm jack. Apple’s then iPhone 3G did.

@narfcake hah, I totally forgot that my first HTC aria had a specialty jack. It was also the FM antenna. Those ear buds were awesome though, and they came with the phone.

@Kevin Headphones: the next speaker docks.