"Thinner phone" is a stupid requirement. A thinner phone will be mechanically weaker.
Yes, Apple retired Floppy disks and DVD readers, because those were replaced by something better. This is not the case here.
A Bluetooth headphone will give you an inferior experience. A lightning converter will give you a worse experience because I can bet it doesn't stay plugged as firmly as a headphone in a high vibration situation (e.g. people exercising) and you can't have the charger plugged while you listen to music
Just as a reminder it was the EU who ended the BS of every company having a stupid proprietary charger.
I agree with the bluetooth being inferior, I hate that the standard headphone jack is going away. If it isn't broken, don't fix it.
That said I've been told that the 3.5mm jack takes up a surprising amount of internal space, and that between freeing up that space and a few other tweaks, getting rid of the jack substantially boosts battery life. Still, I think it's not a great trade-off, now you have to babysit a new battery in your headphones, which probably won't last a full day of use.
On a personal note, anticipated lack of a standard headphone jack is one of the reasons I upgraded to a 6S recently, this way I'll have the best 3.5-mm phone Apple made for a while. If I do have to upgrade later on, I'll be strongly tempted to get an SE instead of a higher end phone, as long as it has a 3.5mm jack.
> getting rid of the jack substantially boosts battery life
Yes, as you say, by moving the power draw for the DAC to another device, which must be charged separately. This isn't a real gain in battery life in any way.
I just got the One Plus 3 which has the USB3 type C and the 3.5mm jack right next to each other and I have to say the jack is only slightly larger so I don't see the point of replacing it.
Oh and it felt too damn thin as it is I was constantly wary I would accidentally bend it or scratch the metal casing so i got a rubberised cover. Now it feels a lot better to hold.
They ship the phones with a small adapter that goes from micro USB to lightning. You're allowed a proprietary port into the phone as long as you provide the adapter for free.
The EU did, here's some background[0]. As for Apple, they didn't 'get away' with anything as far as I can tell. While iPhones are very popular, they make up well under 20% of the global smartphone market. It's a bit early to say standard headphone jacks are obsolete, but the notion sure does generate clicks and catchy headlines.
You may think that the current iPhones are thin enough, but almost nobody actually uses the phone on its own. You need to take into account the thickness of the case, and now that people are playing Pokemon Go, it really needs to be a battery case, which is even thicker. So the base phone needs to be thinner.
(They can't just make the phone a little thicker and put the extra battery inside it because reasons.)
Doesn't need to be a battery case if they design a phone with a replaceable battery, like every phone I've ever owned (after iPhone 3G, which was more or less the only option at the time).
I'd say bluetooth is good enough for using the device(s) as a phone - but a jack might be better for connecting a high-end stereo system. On the other hand, even for that, you would probably be even better off with a digital output, and a good DAC (either in the amplifier, or as a separate unit).
and I'm very happy (not for use with an Apple device though, I use it with a Sony Xpedia Z3+, my laptop and my desktop via a recent generation usb bluetooth dongle (for AptX support).
Point me to a nice BT sweatproof headset that also has decent enough mic to use for Siri and conf calls.
I've been through 10 BT headsets and the Apple EarPods are still the best and most flexible all-rounder. It's the equivalent of the inexpensive DSLR walkaround lens to me.
Can everything on the phone be rolled up into a taquito shape? Oh, 99% of all silicon chips are rigid, not flexible? Oh, bummer. I guess that'll take some serious semiconductor fab breakthroughs before it happens.
To use a 3.5mm jack headset you need to add power amplifiers inside the phone, do proper impedance matching and hope that noise in the path does not corrupt the data. But sending power and digital data solves all these problems, the wires don't need to be as well made either!
"If you look at the previous generation of phones, things like Nokia phones, you had to have an adapter," he reasons. "If you want to connect headphones to professional equipment, you also need a professional adapter."
No, this was (for the most part) an anomaly. (Sony loved this crap.)
And the "adapter" you need for professional gear costs all of .25, unless you want to plug your headphones into BNC, then it's maybe 1$ in parts and 15 minutes at your bench.
Funny thing. My old sony-ericcson phone was the first that came with a hands-free that had a separate minijack above the mic, so you could use any headset with the (wired) handsfree (and it also had a standard "long" minijack for control+mic+output).
Sony made a couple of brilliant mp3 players with proper line out for a while - until Sony Music got upset about "piracy", and apparently the ensuing battle within Sony killed a lot of great products. Which turned out to be a net loss, as was obvious to anyone - it happened that Apple took the marked with the iPod, but it was obvious someone would).
If they are moving to a paradigm where I can't listen and charge at the same time, the 6 will be my last iPhone.
I wish they would stop trying to shave millimeters off my phone thickness and address actual user needs like battery life. When was the last time any of you said, "Damn, I wish this phone was thinner!"? Probably never. But many of us regularly bemoan the battery life of our devices.
I think users would be happier day-to-day with a larger battery, but in the ATT showroom they are more likely to go for the thinner phone with a small battery and no headphone jack.
For me the only thing that would make eliminating the headphone jack worth it is if they put a lightning jack on both ends and made the phone perfectly symmetrical. With literally no top or bottom, no right or wrong way to hold it, and finally a way for my phone to sit in the cup holder with a charge cable coming out the top and maps showing in the right orientation!
The trick in making all this work of course is what you do with the rest of the buttons. If Apple could come up with something truly better than what we have had all along for lock, volume, silent, and home, that would be really neat.
In other words, I can see justifying removal of the jack as part of a holistic redesign which really evolves how we interface with the device. Removing it to make the phone just a bit thinner would be disappointing.
I agree that two ports would make me a lot less annoyed by the change, especially when you can keep an adapter around for one of the ports.
But from experience, designs where the charging and audio ports are on opposing ends are pretty annoying in practice, because the two cords restrict how you can move the phone when it is charging and headphones are in use. Apple stopped doing it that way several years ago.
Your only other choice is a single port on one side. There's no way you get two ports side-by-side on one side. So your point is well taken, but the existing setup of charge and audio together on the same side would be gone no matter what.
I think the choice is eliminate the port and don't allow simple charging while listening without a weird adapter, or else you need two lightning ports.
What will be funny is the power cords which have a 3.5mm jack embedded in them. Take the jack off the phone, move it a couple inches away. It can be made very streamlined, doesn't have to be bulky. The possibility of a good power/jack cable makes me think they won't actually pull off a radical redesign, but I'd be so glad to be proven wrong, just to see something different from Apple.
While working on mobile phones, I've found a number of problems with the TRS style jack.
One is they trap lint internally, which can often result in the internal switch that detects insertion permanently thinking there is a headphone in it (Google "phone thinks headphones are in"). The external speaker is usually muted when a jack is inserted, so when this happens, the phone doesn't make any sounds. Lint is very difficult to remove from the outside the connector.
The other problem--which the original inventors couldn't have anticipated--involves the hook switch (hangup button) on wired phone earbuds. The switch usually works by shorting the microphone to ground. The problem is that, because of the geometry of the plug, the microphone is also shorted to ground while the plug is inserted or removed. To avoid erroneously interpreting insertion/removal as a hangup, the software must wait for the button to be held for around a second. This precludes doing other interesting things with the button, like having double clicks, or clicks with different durations perform other functions. It also feels a bit awkward to have to hold it for so long.
I've owned my current phone for ~4 years, and the first port to stop working — due to lint — was the USB port, not the audio port.
> Lint is very difficult to remove from the outside the connector.
Removing lint from a 3.5mm audio port is going to be vastly easier than removing it from a USB port (which is completely possible). The entrance is much wider, and you don't have to worry about damaging the connector thing that USB has in the middle, as it doesn't exist. I've even removed a silica gel ball (which are apparently about 3.5mm wide …) from an audio port (and needed a paper clip to crush it first). I'd not want to try the same thing on a digital USB or lightning port …
Lightning wouldn't be any more difficult than an audio jack — I'm not sure why you think it would be. Agreed that USB would be a nightmare, but thankfully that's not really a plausible scenario for an iPhone.
I think Apple did this too late. If they had done this with an earlier release where smartphones were still "advancing" I think they would have gotten better conversion.
Now what can they possibly offer in the next iPhone that offsets the loss of the headphone jack? Wireless headphones are just not all the way there and I don't really want to have to think about charging another device and then get mad if I forget to charge it then have nothing to listen to for the day.
Unless they offer something substantial with the next iPhone and assuming the headphone thing is true, I probably won't buy another iPhone.
The BBC failed to mention that there is also a 2.5mm jack available. Quite a bit smaller, but I haven't seen one for a while (~5 years).
After replacing so many headphones because of cables breaking, I'm really happy Bluetooth headphones. Although when I want to enjoy music, you can't beat decent headphones with a half decent soundcard/ DAC.
It's not quite 19th c. technology. It was .25 inches, but it had only two conductors, the tip, and the ring, separated by an insulator. Hence the "tip" and "ring" nomenclature for analog telephone wiring. Analog phone technology is remarkably back-compatible. You can use an 80 year old phone today. Not many, if any technology products could claim that level of compatibility.
But, so what? Analog phones are going away. They just lasted longer than most other technologies. So should codecs and amps inside of mobile devices. Those things belong with the transducer, so they can be tuned to the characteristics of the transducer.
The original 1/4" phone plug for switchboard use had a ball tip, rather than a pointed one. It's almost compatible with modern 1/4" jacks, but the proper jack is a "long frame telephone jack". I use those with antique Teletype machines. Unlike 1/4" audio jacks, the ring is not a ground, and the shell is always insulated.
One of the most backwards compatible technology I know of is railway signaling infrastructure - altough it's not a consumer product like a telephone:
There are still fully mechanical control centres where you have to switch the switches by hand and turn a crank (to generate a bit of AC) to signal another control centre the current state of your tracks. Doesn't matter if the next station uses relais-logic or computers, it works.
Speaking of railways, and connectors, the railway couplings in the US are another thing that's withstood the dest of time. The Janney railway coupler is compatible with couplers built 100+ years ago, and of a design dating back to the 1860s, with the refinements pretty much all been making individual components more and more standardized.
> So should codecs and amps inside of mobile devices. Those things belong with the transducer, so they can be tuned to the characteristics of the transducer.
Amplifiers/DACs are not simple devices that can be crammed into a pair of headphones without significant compromises in audio quality. The DAC in an iPhone is acceptable for most uses but an amplifier requires a fairly large quantity of discretes and a large power source to drive many headphones. Here are some pictures of the inside of a minimalist audiophile headphone amplifier (Objective2), and with the DAC daughterboard added:
Furthermore, if the DAC/amp are internal to the headphones then the headphones themselves become significantly more expensive. For high-end usage most users will want to use their DAC/amp with multiple pairs of headphones, it's cost-ineffective to have a $200 DAC/amp unit built in to every single pair of headphones. Consumer gear is also cheaper, but you're still talking about the difference between a pair of headphones costing $30 and costing $50.
Also, there's not really any consensus on what "proper tuning" actually means with headphones. Some people like an absolutely flat "reference/analytical" sound, but this is only a small subset of high-end users, and consumer gear is not tuned anywhere near a flat response curve. And it's a highly perception-based area where different individuals hear totally different aspects of headphones, with a high degree of placebo effect.
The long-term fix for audiophile users is probably going to be to move to external DAC/amp units rather than integrating the DAC/amp into the headphones. This means yet another thing you have to carry around and keep charged (my Fiio X5ii lasts maybe 6-8h on a charge). I'm not currently aware of any that use Lightning, but if there's a market they will eventually exist. Consumer users probably won't care about the negative impacts on quality too much, but rather about how Lightning headsets are now going to be quite a bit more expensive.
Headphones have a lot more room for electronics and than do phones. Even a small volume-control module in line in an in-ear headphones would have a lot more room than is currently used by the audio circuitry in a phone.
> The long-term fix for audiophile users is probably going to be to move to external DAC/amp units
That's the current solution for audiophiles, and digital music connections, wired or wireless, will support this better.
Readit News
Yes, Apple retired Floppy disks and DVD readers, because those were replaced by something better. This is not the case here.
A Bluetooth headphone will give you an inferior experience. A lightning converter will give you a worse experience because I can bet it doesn't stay plugged as firmly as a headphone in a high vibration situation (e.g. people exercising) and you can't have the charger plugged while you listen to music
Just as a reminder it was the EU who ended the BS of every company having a stupid proprietary charger.
That said I've been told that the 3.5mm jack takes up a surprising amount of internal space, and that between freeing up that space and a few other tweaks, getting rid of the jack substantially boosts battery life. Still, I think it's not a great trade-off, now you have to babysit a new battery in your headphones, which probably won't last a full day of use.
On a personal note, anticipated lack of a standard headphone jack is one of the reasons I upgraded to a 6S recently, this way I'll have the best 3.5-mm phone Apple made for a while. If I do have to upgrade later on, I'll be strongly tempted to get an SE instead of a higher end phone, as long as it has a 3.5mm jack.
Yes, as you say, by moving the power draw for the DAC to another device, which must be charged separately. This isn't a real gain in battery life in any way.
Oh and it felt too damn thin as it is I was constantly wary I would accidentally bend it or scratch the metal casing so i got a rubberised cover. Now it feels a lot better to hold.
Did they? How did Apple get away with it?
[0]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24726077
You may think that the current iPhones are thin enough, but almost nobody actually uses the phone on its own. You need to take into account the thickness of the case, and now that people are playing Pokemon Go, it really needs to be a battery case, which is even thicker. So the base phone needs to be thinner.
(They can't just make the phone a little thicker and put the extra battery inside it because reasons.)
FWIW I recently got one of these:
http://us.creative.com/p/sound-blaster/sound-blaster-e3
and I'm very happy (not for use with an Apple device though, I use it with a Sony Xpedia Z3+, my laptop and my desktop via a recent generation usb bluetooth dongle (for AptX support).
Does it last the full day and them some, like my phone does?
- You have to recharge it
- If you forget them at home you can't get a replacement for cheap
- Setting up bluetooth is an extra hassle as opposed to just plugging the thing
I've been through 10 BT headsets and the Apple EarPods are still the best and most flexible all-rounder. It's the equivalent of the inexpensive DSLR walkaround lens to me.
No, this was (for the most part) an anomaly. (Sony loved this crap.)
And the "adapter" you need for professional gear costs all of .25, unless you want to plug your headphones into BNC, then it's maybe 1$ in parts and 15 minutes at your bench.
Sony made a couple of brilliant mp3 players with proper line out for a while - until Sony Music got upset about "piracy", and apparently the ensuing battle within Sony killed a lot of great products. Which turned out to be a net loss, as was obvious to anyone - it happened that Apple took the marked with the iPod, but it was obvious someone would).
I wish they would stop trying to shave millimeters off my phone thickness and address actual user needs like battery life. When was the last time any of you said, "Damn, I wish this phone was thinner!"? Probably never. But many of us regularly bemoan the battery life of our devices.
The trick in making all this work of course is what you do with the rest of the buttons. If Apple could come up with something truly better than what we have had all along for lock, volume, silent, and home, that would be really neat.
In other words, I can see justifying removal of the jack as part of a holistic redesign which really evolves how we interface with the device. Removing it to make the phone just a bit thinner would be disappointing.
But from experience, designs where the charging and audio ports are on opposing ends are pretty annoying in practice, because the two cords restrict how you can move the phone when it is charging and headphones are in use. Apple stopped doing it that way several years ago.
I think the choice is eliminate the port and don't allow simple charging while listening without a weird adapter, or else you need two lightning ports.
What will be funny is the power cords which have a 3.5mm jack embedded in them. Take the jack off the phone, move it a couple inches away. It can be made very streamlined, doesn't have to be bulky. The possibility of a good power/jack cable makes me think they won't actually pull off a radical redesign, but I'd be so glad to be proven wrong, just to see something different from Apple.
One is they trap lint internally, which can often result in the internal switch that detects insertion permanently thinking there is a headphone in it (Google "phone thinks headphones are in"). The external speaker is usually muted when a jack is inserted, so when this happens, the phone doesn't make any sounds. Lint is very difficult to remove from the outside the connector.
The other problem--which the original inventors couldn't have anticipated--involves the hook switch (hangup button) on wired phone earbuds. The switch usually works by shorting the microphone to ground. The problem is that, because of the geometry of the plug, the microphone is also shorted to ground while the plug is inserted or removed. To avoid erroneously interpreting insertion/removal as a hangup, the software must wait for the button to be held for around a second. This precludes doing other interesting things with the button, like having double clicks, or clicks with different durations perform other functions. It also feels a bit awkward to have to hold it for so long.
I've owned my current phone for ~4 years, and the first port to stop working — due to lint — was the USB port, not the audio port.
> Lint is very difficult to remove from the outside the connector.
Removing lint from a 3.5mm audio port is going to be vastly easier than removing it from a USB port (which is completely possible). The entrance is much wider, and you don't have to worry about damaging the connector thing that USB has in the middle, as it doesn't exist. I've even removed a silica gel ball (which are apparently about 3.5mm wide …) from an audio port (and needed a paper clip to crush it first). I'd not want to try the same thing on a digital USB or lightning port …
All one needs is a toothpick and a little patience.
Now what can they possibly offer in the next iPhone that offsets the loss of the headphone jack? Wireless headphones are just not all the way there and I don't really want to have to think about charging another device and then get mad if I forget to charge it then have nothing to listen to for the day.
Unless they offer something substantial with the next iPhone and assuming the headphone thing is true, I probably won't buy another iPhone.
After replacing so many headphones because of cables breaking, I'm really happy Bluetooth headphones. Although when I want to enjoy music, you can't beat decent headphones with a half decent soundcard/ DAC.
But, so what? Analog phones are going away. They just lasted longer than most other technologies. So should codecs and amps inside of mobile devices. Those things belong with the transducer, so they can be tuned to the characteristics of the transducer.
There are still fully mechanical control centres where you have to switch the switches by hand and turn a crank (to generate a bit of AC) to signal another control centre the current state of your tracks. Doesn't matter if the next station uses relais-logic or computers, it works.
I think it depends on where you are. A lot of lecs only take dtmf signalling these days.
Amplifiers/DACs are not simple devices that can be crammed into a pair of headphones without significant compromises in audio quality. The DAC in an iPhone is acceptable for most uses but an amplifier requires a fairly large quantity of discretes and a large power source to drive many headphones. Here are some pictures of the inside of a minimalist audiophile headphone amplifier (Objective2), and with the DAC daughterboard added:
http://teribil-audio.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/D300-766...
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9lKWLE_sO84/UDUDtC2ApHI/AAAAAAAABB...
Furthermore, if the DAC/amp are internal to the headphones then the headphones themselves become significantly more expensive. For high-end usage most users will want to use their DAC/amp with multiple pairs of headphones, it's cost-ineffective to have a $200 DAC/amp unit built in to every single pair of headphones. Consumer gear is also cheaper, but you're still talking about the difference between a pair of headphones costing $30 and costing $50.
Also, there's not really any consensus on what "proper tuning" actually means with headphones. Some people like an absolutely flat "reference/analytical" sound, but this is only a small subset of high-end users, and consumer gear is not tuned anywhere near a flat response curve. And it's a highly perception-based area where different individuals hear totally different aspects of headphones, with a high degree of placebo effect.
The long-term fix for audiophile users is probably going to be to move to external DAC/amp units rather than integrating the DAC/amp into the headphones. This means yet another thing you have to carry around and keep charged (my Fiio X5ii lasts maybe 6-8h on a charge). I'm not currently aware of any that use Lightning, but if there's a market they will eventually exist. Consumer users probably won't care about the negative impacts on quality too much, but rather about how Lightning headsets are now going to be quite a bit more expensive.
Headphones have a lot more room for electronics and than do phones. Even a small volume-control module in line in an in-ear headphones would have a lot more room than is currently used by the audio circuitry in a phone.
> The long-term fix for audiophile users is probably going to be to move to external DAC/amp units
That's the current solution for audiophiles, and digital music connections, wired or wireless, will support this better.