“I think we’ve reached peak iPhone,”
September 5, 2016 1:22 PM Subscribe

Will the New Apple iPhone Have a Headphone Jack? Rumormongers Say It Won’t [The New York Times] “When the latest iPhone is unveiled here on Wednesday in a 7,000-seat auditorium, it probably will instead be more like Christmas for a sneaky 10-year-old who long ago peeked at his present. Thanks. That’s it? Anyone who cares enough about the iPhone to know that a new model is being released this month already knows what it is supposed to be like: a little thinner, a little faster and equipped with superior cameras on the Plus model. By far the most controversial feature, however, is the one that will be missing: a headphone jack. A standard element of technology that can be traced back to 1878 and the invention of the manual telephone exchange, the jack is apparently going the way of the floppy disk and the folding map. The future will be wireless.”

- Does Apple really think we're ready to ditch the headphone jack? [The Guardian]

“The sad thing is, the headphone jack – that 3.5mm analogue three or four pole plug – is a very good connector. It’s a universal connector: it can plug into your smartphone, your tablet and computer, your TV, hi-fi, radio, Game Boy or console. And it has been used widely for decades, more or less replacing the larger 1/4-inch jacks (which dated from the 1870s) since the 1960s for all but specialist applications, such as electric guitars and some more powerful amps. As smartphones have become the primary music device for a whole generation and more, most headphones spend the majority of their time plugged into these pocket computers. But now the jack’s dominance is being contested.”

- Steve Wozniak Warns Apple Against Removing iPhone 7’s Headphone Jack [Fortune]

Still, that’s not enough for Woz. In his interview, the Apple co-founder said that transmitting audio over Bluetooth isn’t good enough for those, like him, who want better fidelity. “I would not use Bluetooth … I don’t like wireless,” he said. “I have cars where you can plug in the music, or go through Bluetooth, and Bluetooth just sounds so flat for the same music.”

- Noted Apple Analyst Drops Yet More iPhone 7 Details [The Verge]

• No headphone jack, as you may or may not have come to terms with by now. Kuo says Apple will put EarPod headphones with a Lightning connector in the box alongside a Lightning to 3.5mm headphone jack adapter. As for what Apple will do with the space formerly occupied by the jack? It'll be taken up by a new sensor to improve the iPhone's 3D Touch experience.
• Five color options. The current rose gold, gold, and silver models will remain, but space gray will be replaced by a "dark black" option and a separate "piano black" model with a glossy finish. Kuo says that supply may be limited on the piano black iPhone, with Apple possibly restricting it to higher storage tiers at first.
• Apple's new A10 processor could be clocked at up to 2.4 or 2.45GHz, a major jump over the A9's 1.85GHz, though power concerns could drive the final clock down a little. It will be manufactured by TSMC.

posted by Fizz (397 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite

Don't bluetooth headphones have to be charged? I don't care about fidelity, but I'm going to be annoyed if I have to remember to charge another thing/ bring another charger on trips, etc.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 1:26 PM on September 5, 2016 [58 favorites]

going the way of the floppy disk

Going the way of the compact disc and digital versatile disc.
posted by little onion at 1:26 PM on September 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

No headphone jack, no upgrade for me. Bluetooth quality just isn't there yet.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:26 PM on September 5, 2016 [14 favorites]

I use a Square reader that plugs in to a headphone jack for sales at art markets. No jack, no upgrade.

I also play Pokemon and want to charge my phone while listening to my headphones. No jack, no upgrade.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 1:29 PM on September 5, 2016 [13 favorites]

How are we supposed to plug the new iPhones into our car audio systems?
posted by Dr. Zira at 1:31 PM on September 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

But will it be submersible? The only reason I can see to eliminate plugs is to make the device waterproof.
posted by heatherlogan at 1:31 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

I still buy CDs and DVDs, actually. Owning the physical product means that Netflix can't take it out of circulation or that some streaming company can't lose a contract with a record label, etc.

I'm a big fan of the headphone jack, and this seems like a major debacle for Apple. You can't listen and charge at the same time without going wireless? Pffft. Plus, a lot of vehicles have headphone jack inputs for their stereos. It's nice that Apple is going to give away the adapter, but that still seems like a bit of a foolish move that goes against the grain for how the world has developed.
posted by hippybear at 1:32 PM on September 5, 2016 [24 favorites]

How are we supposed to plug the new iPhones into our car audio systems?

Don't worry, they'll be an official adapter that you can easily purchase through the Apple Store for a exorbitant price.
posted by Fizz at 1:32 PM on September 5, 2016 [28 favorites]

If Bluetooth were as simple and reliable as plugging my phone into the aux port with a $2 cord I wouldn't mind it so much. Unfortunately every car I've ever driven has had painfully awkward bluetooth interfaces that never want to sync up to my phone when I get in and lose their connection during the momentary lapse of starting the engine. So, unless Apple comes up with something that makes no headphones worth it I'll stick with my iPhone 6, or switch to Android.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 1:33 PM on September 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

The other thing for me is that you can get really cheap wired headphones if you don't care that much about sound quality, which means that I can keep a pair in my gym locker, a pair in my purse, and a pair in my messenger bag. Bluetooth headphones are more expensive, so I'll have to get a single pair and remember to bring it everywhere, which I suspect I will not do reliably. Add to that remembering to keep it charged, and it's going to be a pain in the ass.

I was actually thinking about upgrading, but my current phone still works fine, and I think this may be a deal-breaker for me.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 1:34 PM on September 5, 2016 [14 favorites]

Our car's Bluetooth interface only seems capable of telling us, in French for some reason, that Bluetooth was unable to connect. No jack for listening to music in the car, no upgrade.
posted by teponaztli at 1:35 PM on September 5, 2016 [7 favorites]

The people I see online (Daring Fireball, cough cough) who are trying to draw a parallel between the removal of the headphone jack and the removal of the optical drive in the iMac are so deeply wrong it's not even funny.

This isn't the rapid obsolescence of a doomed storage medium, this immediately renders useless every single set of headphones everyone owns. In my case, everything from my $20 whatever-whenever headphones to my $150-$300 studio headphones.

In addition to trying to shrink the size of their device by offloading the D/A and amplifiers, I suspect this is also about closing the analog hole.

I've used iPhones since the 3G, and am pretty deeply invested in the ecosystem.

On the day that I need a new phone and there is no iOS device with a 3.5mm headphone jack, I'm going to go to Android.
posted by tclark at 1:35 PM on September 5, 2016 [52 favorites]

I'm not buying a phone without a headphone jack. If that means going back to android, so be it.
posted by pmurray63 at 1:37 PM on September 5, 2016 [9 favorites]

Later Apple will release the iPhone 7c, which is really just an iPhone 6 in a new case, complete with headphone jack. The new case will be distinctive enough that phone snobs will be able to spot those cheapskate 7c owners a mile away, and the snobs, afraid of looking like children or other varieties of plebe, will just pony up for the 7 and all the new accessories necessary.

That's market segmentation.
posted by Western Infidels at 1:37 PM on September 5, 2016 [10 favorites]

You realize you can still use your wired headphones with it, right, or your aux cable? You just plug it into a small converter.
posted by Static Vagabond at 1:39 PM on September 5, 2016 [5 favorites]

mebbe Apple's going with wifi direct instead of BT . . .

as usual Apple will lead the industry kicking and screaming into the obvious future

recharging wireless headphones will no doubt just require connecting them via some sort of white cable to the iphone's plug port

~~the horror~~
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 1:40 PM on September 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

Oh sure you can claim to not like it, but once they are ready for market, they just press the big red button in Apple HQ and all of a sudden it makes perfect sense to all Apple customers.
posted by Stonestock Relentless at 1:42 PM on September 5, 2016 [31 favorites]

Yeah, but those small BT converters are also kind of crap, and need to be charged separately every few days -- as do your BT headphones -- and can't be left lying about the car, desk, backpack/purse, and bedroom.

Whether the money grab is for closing the analog hole or for selling new gear, it still sucks for the consumer. *sigh*

I got my first BT earbuds a few months ago; I am not happy about it. The fact that my phone and BT earbuds are fussy enough that I need to wear them on the same side of my body not to get static is just the first of a series of annoyances that I haven't yet found the end of. Grrrr.
posted by wenestvedt at 1:43 PM on September 5, 2016 [7 favorites]

That's market segmentation.

I've already been "segmented" down to their low-rent ghetto because I hate their stupid huge phones (and I'm not talking about the plus). I have the cash, the interest, and the willingness to pay for a flagship phone -- I'm even willing to pay MORE than the existing premium-pricing for a killer tiny phone if I can get more storage, but I can't. Instead, I've gone from being with the latest integral-number generation every 2 years to now being 1.5 generations behind with the iPhone SE.

I want a flagship phone that's in the same 5-generation chassis as the SE and keeps the headphone jack. If they don't want to give me that kind of product any more, I'll find someone who will.
posted by tclark at 1:44 PM on September 5, 2016 [6 favorites]

The iPhone 7 will not have a headphone jack for the same reason that passenger airplanes do not have windows: because they are a structural weakness and the structural engineers have taken over the product team.
posted by indubitable at 1:45 PM on September 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

how goddamn thin do things have to become?
posted by thelonius at 1:45 PM on September 5, 2016 [15 favorites]

[obligatory]

Only wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
posted by ejs at 1:45 PM on September 5, 2016 [21 favorites]

They'll just sell an adapter that goes in the charging port and cost $49.97.
posted by bonobothegreat at 1:46 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

The iPhone 7 will not have a headphone jack for the same reason that passenger airplanes do not have windows

Maybe this went over my head, but... what kind of airplanes do you fly on? 'Cause mine have all had windows.

In other news, I love the stability and user-friendliness of my iPhone, but I am not giving up my (non-BT) headphones. Nor am I giving up my USB ports, which is why I'm clinging onto my Macbook Air until it sputters and wheezes into total obsolescence.
posted by mylittlepoppet at 1:48 PM on September 5, 2016 [7 favorites]

recharging wireless headphones will no doubt just require connecting them via some sort of white cable to the iphone's plug port

Ok, so here's the thing. Maybe about once a week, I get a "where the hell are you, I've been trying to call you?" email from someone and realize that I've been missing phone calls because I forgot to charge my phone and am now incommunicado. Or I realize that I left my phone charging by the side of my bed, and it's all charged up but nowhere near where I am. Charging is a bit of a challenge for me, because I have executive function issues, and remembering stuff is a challenge for me. I don't want to have to remember to charge another thing, especially when the old, no-charge-necessary version was working fine for me. And I don't need an excuse not to go to the gym, which is what "oops! forgot to charge the headphones!" will be for me.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 1:48 PM on September 5, 2016 [8 favorites]

I'm suspicious the 7 will have a jack, but all these rumors are just getting everyone ready for iPhone 8, when the headphone jack really will go away.
posted by TedW at 1:48 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

It's gonna be annoying, but Bluetooth really isn't as bad as it used to be. It's so, so, soooo convenient not to deal with cables, whether I'm exercising, just going for a walk, or even sitting at my desk. And there's probably going to be passive Lightning-to-3.5mm plug adapters, possibly even in the box. (Replacements will inevitably cost $20, knowing Apple, but there will almost immediately be $5 ones from Amazon, so enh.)

I know that I see a lot of people on the subway these days with some kind of Bluetooth headphones, from the kind with the earbuds and the U-shaped dingus around the neck, to giant-ass Beats cans.
posted by SansPoint at 1:49 PM on September 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

Yeah, but those small BT converters are also kind of crap, and need to be charged separately every few days

No, they'll just be lighting port to 3.5 mm adapters that don't require charging and can stay on the end of your wired headphones at all times.
posted by ejs at 1:49 PM on September 5, 2016 [8 favorites]

This is insane, and I know a headphone jack is a stupid thing to feel physically angry about but I do.

8 hours a day I have bud earphones plugged into my phone, while it charges, while I sleep listening to music which I need to get to sleep.

2 hours a day it's plugged in, through the headphone jack, into my 2005 Ford Focus's stereo. Often also while charging.

Most of the work day I've got a different set of headphone plugged in. I have an iRig guitar adaptor that plugs into it. Something is plugged into the headphone socket 80% of the time and they are all important bits of my life.

Apple can get well fucked. I hope this iPhone 6 lasts until they go back on this decision.
posted by Jimbob at 1:50 PM on September 5, 2016 [9 favorites]

Looks like there will be quite a bit of angry yelling when these jack-less phones start appearing on lawns everywhere this fall.
posted by snofoam at 1:50 PM on September 5, 2016 [10 favorites]

For once, I can't be smug about this latest diktat from Apple, because I'm already happily on Bluetooth headphones and don't really want to go back. Between broken headphone cords and at least one busted headphone jack, cutting the cord has been mostly fantastic (if only someone could solve the cross-body problem though).

That said: yeah, this is a shitty move on Apple's part. It also reflects badly on the current state of smartphone technology that this is also the only thing the iPhone 7 apparently has that's gotten people riled up in any way. Nothing is exciting about a little bit faster, a little bit thinner, a new colour, a new name.
posted by chrominance at 1:51 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Nor am I giving up my USB ports, which is why I'm clinging onto my Macbook Air until it sputters and wheezes into total obsolescence

Yes this too.
posted by Jimbob at 1:52 PM on September 5, 2016 [6 favorites]

chrominance Between broken headphone cords and at least one busted headphone jack, cutting the cord has been mostly fantastic

Oh, yeah. Forgot about that. I've broken so many headphones, usually because the solder connection at the plug breaks from fatigue after six month. This happens with Apple Earbuds, but with other brands too. I went through a couple pairs of Sennheiser HD202s thanks to that.
posted by SansPoint at 1:53 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

It's almost as if everyone posting doesn't realize that apple still sells its previous phones for a couple of years after the new ones come out
posted by ejs at 1:55 PM on September 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

It's less about the availability of other Apple phone versions, but it's more that the past has shown that "whither goest Apple, hence follows the industry" in a lot of things. If Apple does go this route, then either non-Apple phones will start using their continuing to have a headphone jack as a selling point to place them strongly against Apple, or phones in general will start to lose the headphone jack as they pursue increased thin design and waterproofing by having no holes in the case at all.
posted by hippybear at 1:58 PM on September 5, 2016 [5 favorites]

So *that's* why Apple bought Beats. Hmmph.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 1:59 PM on September 5, 2016

hippybear: After losing a phone to water damage, I'll give up a headphone port for waterproofing. (Though I'm not upgrading this year anyway.)
posted by SansPoint at 1:59 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

keep making proprietary stuff apple!

keep reducing user choice !

keep making stuff un-upgradable, un-repairable, with inbuilt obsolescence!

keep screwing developers !

keep avoiding taxes!

keep filling those landfills. !

"think different" my ass

no longer a computing company. hasn't been for many years

when I see an apple logo, i see a vast orchard turned into giant landfill, full of plastic shit, surrounded by people sleepwalking into the dump, looking at their phones
posted by lalochezia at 2:01 PM on September 5, 2016 [45 favorites]

.... hunting Pokemon
posted by hippybear at 2:02 PM on September 5, 2016 [8 favorites]

"If you can't fix it, you don't own it"
posted by lalochezia at 2:05 PM on September 5, 2016 [10 favorites]

If I didn't have a serious monetary investment in apps I'd switch to Android in a heartbeat.
posted by Splunge at 2:05 PM on September 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

Going to be a whole lot more people on public transit listening to music or videos or the sound of their freemium app games over their phone speakers if this happens.
posted by chimpsonfilm at 2:05 PM on September 5, 2016 [32 favorites]

MetaFilter: I know a headphone jack is a stupid thing to feel physically angry about but I do
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 2:10 PM on September 5, 2016 [21 favorites]

I wouldn't mind this so much if Apple's included earbuds weren't so astonishingly bad. Maybe I have weird ear canals, but I find them literally unusable.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 2:12 PM on September 5, 2016 [13 favorites]

First they take away the headphone jack. Then they take away the dongle. Then you can kiss non-DRM music goodbye. Thanks Apple. Hopefully Google won't stand for this crap and keeps putting out solid phones with headphone jacks instead of kowtowing to Big Media.
posted by gizzmo at 2:15 PM on September 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

Where would the adapter plug in, on the charging port? So I couldn't listen to music in my car and charge my phone at the same time? Those will be some fun road trips: hours of music followed by dead silence while we wait for the phone to recharge.

Do a critical mass of cars even have Bluetooth capabilities? I know mine sure doesn't.

I usually buy my iPhones several versions in the past (I've still got a 4 right now), but if this is the way of the future, it seems premature considering that the rest of the infrastructure isn't quite ready yet.
posted by chainsofreedom at 2:16 PM on September 5, 2016

Horace Rumpole: "I wouldn't mind this so much if Apple's included earbuds weren't so astonishingly bad. Maybe I have weird ear canals, but I find them literally unusable."

I'm the same. The original Apple earbuds would not stay in my ears. The new ones were slightly better, but still. I had to seat them with uncomfortable force for good sound. I much prefer earbuds with multiple sizes of rubber tips.
posted by Splunge at 2:19 PM on September 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

I only ever use the earbuds that come with the phone and I don’t care whether they plug into the lightning port or the headphone jack. It’s annoying that my accumulated old pairs won’t work as spares anymore, but it’s not a big deal to me.

But I am curious to see how they try to sell it. Because it’s clearly going to inconvenience a lot of people and it’s really not obvious how you argue that this is a Good Thing For Customers.
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 2:21 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

I sure hope Apple makes sells some over-engineered unapologetically supple tabs of tape designed to affix the adaptor to the end of my headphones or to the end if my car's cassette (yes, it's old) adaptor so I don't go losing or forgetting it daily.
posted by sourwookie at 2:21 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

I don't like the idea of another thing to charge but otherwise Bluetooth has been working well for me. I use it at home and in the car to connect without any issues. If the headphones work equally well I am ok with this, but not if they aren't ready for prime time.
posted by Dip Flash at 2:21 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Kuo says Apple will put EarPod headphones with a Lightning connector in the box alongside a Lightning to 3.5mm headphone jack adapter.

You can tell the rumors are fake because Tim Cook's Apple would never, ever include in the box that which it could sell separately for ~$39.99
posted by entropicamericana at 2:22 PM on September 5, 2016 [15 favorites]

Ugh. I use my phone for music, podcasts, texting, and calls. I wear my headphones with noise to block out ambient sound and people annoying me. I KNEW I should have just gone back to a Droid the last time I got a phone, but this is a line in the sand. Screw apple.
posted by syncope at 2:23 PM on September 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

chainsofreedom: "Where would the adapter plug in, on the charging port? So I couldn't listen to music in my car and charge my phone at the same time? Those will be some fun road trips: hours of music followed by dead silence while we wait for the phone to recharge.

Do a critical mass of cars even have Bluetooth capabilities? I know mine sure doesn't.

I usually buy my iPhones several versions in the past (I've still got a 4 right now), but if this is the way of the future, it seems premature considering that the rest of the infrastructure isn't quite ready yet."

Yet again, same here. I still have a 5. Not a 5S, just five. I'm on the cusp of upgrading to a 6 or so. Even though I love my 5. It's a 64GB. And it's my preferred jet black. I actually love the size. If I wanted a small tablet form factor I'd buy one. The 6 is really too big.

My lawn. You should not be upon it.
posted by Splunge at 2:23 PM on September 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

According to the rumors it isn't Bluetooth only, you can also use lighting cable based headphones. Ideally these headphones would also have added battery.
posted by humanfont at 2:24 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

humanfont: "According to the rumors it isn't Bluetooth only, you can also use lighting cable based headphones. Ideally these headphones would also have added battery."

Another battery is not what I would consider ideal.
posted by Splunge at 2:25 PM on September 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

people who were going to get the next iPhone anyway will get the next iPhone, and people who weren't, won't.

I was going to continue getting iPhones indefinitely. If I can't plug my $300 headphones into a $600 phone, I'll find another phone to plug them into. So count me among the (perhaps insignificant) people for whom this is a dealbreaker.
posted by tclark at 2:27 PM on September 5, 2016 [14 favorites]

According to the rumors it isn't Bluetooth only, you can also use lighting cable based headphones.

Which people are saying you won't be able to use while charging. That, in itself, counters all the Apple-can-do-no-wrong sycophants. That is shit engineering. Ridiculously bad. Imagine if you had to remove the spare tire from your car in order to fill it up with gas. Imagine if your laptop's wifi didn't work while it was charging. Utterly awful.
posted by Jimbob at 2:29 PM on September 5, 2016 [13 favorites]

I was going to continue getting iPhones indefinitely. If I can't plug my $300 headphones into a $600 phone, I'll find another phone to plug them into. So count me among the (perhaps insignificant) people for whom this is a dealbreaker.

Yep. I've had every iPhone since like 2, maybe. I have a 6S Plus right now. If I can't plug headphones in, I'll get a Samsung.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 2:29 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

I actually love the size. If I wanted a small tablet form factor I'd buy one. The 6 is really too big.

Get the SE. I'm so happy I got rid of my 6 as soon as it came out. However, consider if the analog jack goes away that you might be further entrenching yourself in the ecosystem.
posted by tclark at 2:29 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Chances are someone will come out with an expensive dongle that allows headphone use while charging, if that is technically possible. Would have some sort of splitter so there is a power cable connector next to a headphone jack. I can visualize this, although it's ugly and seemingly unnecessary.
posted by hippybear at 2:33 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

How long 'til someone is calling it "jackgate"?
posted by bobloblaw at 2:37 PM on September 5, 2016

That is shit engineering.

From post-Steve Apple? Impossible!
posted by entropicamericana at 2:38 PM on September 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

I think "jackgate" is a popular search term on PornHub.
posted by hippybear at 2:39 PM on September 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

Apple has invented the perfect revenue stream: forcing people to replace these f**king fragile lightning cables, over, and over, and over again.
posted by Yowser at 2:41 PM on September 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

Chances are someone will come out with an expensive dongle that allows headphone use while charging

Apple already sells one of these: Lightning Digital AV Adapter. It can be used while charging (and yes, it's expensive).

Perhaps the new phone comes with something like this and all this angst is unnecessary.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 2:46 PM on September 5, 2016

Anyone who is considering going android: do NOT get a Samsung.

Their Android skin is a horror of UI/UX; stock android is great, or go Moto or HTC. But LG and Samsung are terrible to those who know better.

Also, their implementation of AOSP (stock, opensource android) is bad and buggy. Developers hate it due to us always having to write workarounds for the stuff which crashes on their devices.

And that 'edge' thing? It really sucks and gets in the way of your phone usage. You will, very often, misclick that edge.

Source: I'm a longtime android dev with a by now pathalogical hatred for Samsung's implementation of android. And whilst they have been getting better, they still suk. And many, many devs agree with me.

Get HTC/Moto/Blu/Huawei/Honor/whatever instead. You can thank me later.
posted by MacD at 2:53 PM on September 5, 2016 [13 favorites]

Apple already sells one of these: Lightning Digital AV Adapter. It can be used while charging (and yes, it's expensive).

That would certainly only be moderately irritating to mess about with - on a laptop.
posted by Artw at 2:54 PM on September 5, 2016

I barely use my smartphone as anything other than a texting and phone call making device. What is so terrible about LG, which is what I got for cheap through TracFone?
posted by hippybear at 2:56 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

(and yes, it's expensive)

It's expensive because it's basically a streaming MPEG decoder on a SoC.

Apple's vision is that Lightning is basically a high speed serial bus. The smarts is in the thing that's connected to the port.
posted by Talez at 2:57 PM on September 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

What is so terrible about LG, which is what I got for cheap through TracFone?

If it's Android, the long list of vulnerabilities that don't get patched on old Android versions running on non-flagship phones. If you're buying an Android get a Google handset. They're the only ones that get timely iOS style updates for security.
posted by Talez at 2:59 PM on September 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

I have a Rocketfish adapter for an ipod (the old, longer jack) that splits into a USB connector for charging, two RCA cables for audio output, and a single RCA for video output. It seems likely that you could have one that turns a lightning connector into a 1/8" jack and a USB connector. You could even put an volume control inline with the cable. I don't think the output will be as powerful as it would be out of the nonexistent headphone jack, and the equalizer probably won't adjust it, but at least you'd have a headphone jack.
posted by Slinga at 3:01 PM on September 5, 2016

From what I've learned from my non-iOS friends is that if you go android, you may as well forget updates. Getting a new version of iOS each year with new abilities and features, and knowing it will work on your hardware is pretty awesome, but it looks like to most android users the easiest way to get the newest version is to buy a new phone. That alone is one of the biggest reasons I would be loathe to leave iOS.

Meh, just buy a Nexus and you get stock Android, updates when they do happen, happen within the hour. The reason there's so much fragmentation with regards to the various Android updates (and why so many people are on older versions such as KitKat, Lollipop, etc.) has more to do with the various cellular carriers and manufacturers and their wanting to put their own imprint on Android with each subsequent update. They delay the update for their own users because they want to add their own Samsung proprietary apps. It is definitely a downside, but if you stick with Stock Android phones, you won't ever have this issue.
posted by Fizz at 3:10 PM on September 5, 2016 [10 favorites]

> hours of music followed by dead silence while we wait for the phone to recharge.

Is there any reason to assume the adapter won't let you charge the phone and plug in an audio cable at the same time? Seems like the adapter could just have both a power jack and an audio jack. I'm sure Apple has thought of this.

I mean, it will still be pretty annoying, because I lose stuff constantly and I am definitely going to lose the adapter.
posted by a mirror and an encyclopedia at 3:11 PM on September 5, 2016

bluetooth is the space shuttle of computer interface standards. it's something which should "just work" by now, but it's so overloaded with features that every implementation is a shitshow, but for different reasons.
posted by ennui.bz at 3:12 PM on September 5, 2016 [10 favorites]

... But I also spill drinks constantly and drop things constantly so improved waterproofing is a huge plus for me. Maybe it evens out.
posted by a mirror and an encyclopedia at 3:12 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

One comment deleted. This is already a thread about Apple, please don't just randomly pick fights about other hot-button issues in here.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 3:14 PM on September 5, 2016

Apple: "we're removing a port, but adapters will be available and probably inexpensively because they won't include any electronic components" —> cue Outrage Machine, because everything Apple does makes some folks lose their minds

Samsung: "Our flagship phone shipped with numerous batteries that have literally exploded" —> I have literally seen at least one outlet refer to this as an opportunity for Samsung to build consumer trust

At least we know what this year's Made-Up iPhone Controversy will be in advance!
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:15 PM on September 5, 2016 [9 favorites]

I never found a good way to make Bluetooth headsets quieter, so a device that won't let me use my high-impedance wired headphones is right out.
posted by asperity at 3:16 PM on September 5, 2016

Android already has two phones available without a headphone jack (two links with two points of view).

I get the $5 Monoprice earbuds in bulk because they have decent sound and my kids are constantly losing or breaking them (I sometimes lose them too). My older son bought more expensive Audio Technica over-the-ears with his saved up allowance, and I bought some over-the-ears for blocking out sound at the gym.

All these would become obsolete or require an even easier-to-lose and more expensive adaptor without the 3/8" jack.

Phones already do waterproofing and are just as thin with the jack. I'm guessing this has more to do with them owning Beats than anything else.
posted by eye of newt at 3:17 PM on September 5, 2016

I have executive function issues, and remembering stuff is a challenge for me.

There's an app for that. In fact, there are about a zillion apps for that, and some of them come with the phone.

I don't know what it is about Apple that makes people so crazy, but damn.

IKR? Every time Apple even hints at getting rid of an old standard, or introduce a new one, people just lose their shit. I'm always reminded of the guy who insisted that mice would never make it as a standard accessory because he'd learned never to take his hands off the home keys and damnit, that was the only way to use a computer. I tell you what, folks, I've seen a shitload more Bluetooth headsets than I've seen people with $300 cans and some sort of allergy to adapters. Apple must hate its users because they got rid of ADB and went USB-only; it hasn't been twenty years quite yet, there's gotta be some ADB diehards out there, right? Sheesh.
posted by Halloween Jack at 3:18 PM on September 5, 2016 [11 favorites]

I already chose not to buy a Macbook because of its lack of ports (well, and the too-thin keyboard), and went for the Macbook Pro though it's kinda overkill for my needs.

I see no reason why I wouldn't do the same for the iPhone. I've had three or four iPhones at this point, but if Apple really removes the headphone jack I guess it's time to go to Android. I'm pretty invested in the iOS ecosystem, as they say, but my brother has an S7 and it looks fine.
posted by crazy with stars at 3:18 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

I mean, it will still be pretty annoying, because I lose stuff constantly and I am definitely going to lose the adapter.

Right, that's my issue. Even if they come up with relatively-inexpensive adapters, it's another thing to keep track of, which I don't want.

I do, however, totally see the appeal of having a waterproof iPhone. I think there are a lot of people for whom that would be worth the tradeoff.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 3:19 PM on September 5, 2016

Waterproof phones will remove the plot device in television and movies of throwing the phone in the beer or the toilet to cause it to malfunction. Won't someone think of the screenwriters???
posted by hippybear at 3:22 PM on September 5, 2016 [6 favorites]

Is it not slightly weird that we have 75 comments and counting about whether this product has or does not have a certain feature, but we don't have a post about Apple's tax issues with the EU and Ireland?
posted by wilful at 3:23 PM on September 5, 2016 [6 favorites]

You're welcome to make that post, really.
posted by hippybear at 3:24 PM on September 5, 2016 [10 favorites]

I do, however, totally see the appeal of having a waterproof iPhone. I think there are a lot of people for whom that would be worth the tradeoff.

You can have waterproofing with the headphone jack. The 6S is mostly waterproof already. They're supposedly putting a second amp in its place to turn the upper speaker into a fully driven speaker allowing stereo sound using only the bottom speaker and the earpiece.
posted by Talez at 3:25 PM on September 5, 2016

did I say 3/8" jack? Where did that come from? That's pretty big! the standard is 3.5mm
posted by eye of newt at 3:26 PM on September 5, 2016

Yeah, the EU thing actually involves nuance and sublety, with Ireland wanting to retain its status as "the Delaware of Europe" and the EU demanding they collect more taxes, so the EU would get a cut. That's admittedly a gross oversimplification.

It's also only tangentially Apple-related. It's more every-tech-company-operating-in-Europe-related.
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:28 PM on September 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

adapters will be available and probably inexpensively because they won't include any electronic components

Nope, Lightning to 3.5 mm adapters will need to have a lightning controller chip in them (part of why Lightning cables are more expensive than USB), as well as a DAC converter.
posted by JiBB at 3:30 PM on September 5, 2016 [5 favorites]

Every time Apple even hints at getting rid of an old standard, or introduce a new one, people just lose their shit. I'm always reminded of the guy who insisted that mice would never make it as a standard accessory because he'd learned never to take his hands off the home keys and damnit, that was the only way to use a computer.

And how many people were using computers before the advent of mice? How many people afterwards? And how many people use iPhones now and DON'T have any sort of Bluetooth functionality?

It would be one thing if this was just one extra functionality that new users would have to start with and old farts would have to keep up with, but this is a functionality that isn't commonly used like the iPhone itself is, and would necessitate purchasing new cars, stereo systems, classroom technology, headphones, etc. etc. This will impact hundreds of thousands of users who have an iPhone but no Bluetooth in their car, or an iPhone and specialized headphones.
posted by chainsofreedom at 3:32 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

This will impact hundreds of thousands of users who have an iPhone but no Bluetooth in their car, or an iPhone and specialized headphones.

Oh come on this is a tad melodramatic. The adapter will be in the box and the wholesale price of a Bluetooth IC is like a buck. You can buy a BT-to-aux converter for the car for twenty bucks just like the tape adapter people got when they bought that brand new Discman and wanted to play their fancy new CDs in the car.
posted by Talez at 3:37 PM on September 5, 2016 [7 favorites]

I'm always reminded of the guy who insisted that mice would never make it as a standard accessory because he'd learned never to take his hands off the home keys and damnit, that was the only way to use a computer.

You can still use a computer without a mouse.

Adding a USB external optical drive to a desktop computer only occupies a small amount more desk space.

Adding an external dongle to a phone kind of undermines the purpose of a device that you carry around in your pocket, especially if it doesn't support simultaneous use of the port while charging.

I honestly fail to see why the skeptics in this thread don't see that this is qualitatively different from any other thing Apple has done in their pursuit of the platonic ideal of a millimeter-thick plate of glass computing device, except for the equally stupid one-port laptops.
posted by tclark at 3:40 PM on September 5, 2016

I honestly fail to see why the skeptics in this thread don't see that this is qualitatively different from any other thing Apple has done in their pursuit of the platonic ideal of a millimeter-thick plate of glass computing device, except for the equally stupid one-port laptops.

I hate to break it to you but phones without a 3.5mm jack are already here and they're not Apple. Moto Z has no 3.5mm jack having only a USB-C connector. Intel has made it their mission to have every phone use only a single USB-C and headphone makers are ready to jump on the bandwagon with the premium features that the smarter ports offer.
posted by Talez at 3:45 PM on September 5, 2016 [7 favorites]

I have to admit people put up with the loss in sound quality from those tape adapters, so many people will probably put up with the loss is sound quality from Bluetooth adapters.

I do sometimes listen to some music over Bluetooth now on a powered speaker. But the lack of fidelity factors into the selection of music.
posted by mountmccabe at 3:45 PM on September 5, 2016

I hate to break it to you but phones without a 3.5mm jack are already here and they're not Apple. Moto Z has no 3.5mm jack having only a USB-C connector.

Yes, and when I can just switch manufacturers to get the feature I want in an iOS device, gimme a call.
posted by tclark at 3:49 PM on September 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

I misunderstood what the lightening connector was and my objections/comments are withdrawn as only related in a limited way. And now I understand the complaints about wanting to listen to music (not via BT) and charge the phone at the same time.
posted by mountmccabe at 3:55 PM on September 5, 2016

Anecdotally, when my iPhone 6 fell into a dirty lagoon the headphone jack was the last thing to dry out, and it took weeks to function properly.

Still, the Walkman Sports solved this problem years ago...
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 3:56 PM on September 5, 2016

The biggest thing with moving to Lightning/USB-C is that you have power and you're working with data instead of channels. So you can make things like an inline headset with a DAC and advanced noise cancellation for both the headset and the mic. I expect this to be rapidly commoditized over the next decade. You can also bring true multi-channel surround sound to market as well.
posted by Talez at 4:00 PM on September 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

The biggest thing with moving to Lightning/USB-C is that you have power and you're working with data instead of channels. So you can make things like an inline headset with a DAC and advanced noise cancellation for both the headset and the mic. I expect this to be rapidly commoditized over the next decade. You can also bring true multi-channel surround sound to market as well.

There's no reason for an iPhone not to have this as an option while still retaining the massively standardized headphone jack.
posted by hippybear at 4:04 PM on September 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
posted by killdevil at 4:28 PM on September 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

I went further back in history to find that the first Android phone, the HTC G1 (Dream), didn't have a headphone jack. The same article mentions that Apple did something similar with the first iPhone with a custom headphone jack.

So it appears that we repeating history. I wonder if they'll get away with it this time.
posted by eye of newt at 4:36 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Prediction: It will have only a Lightning plug, but it will include headphones that can either be used as cabled headphones or wirelessly. If you forget to charge them, just plug them into the phone and use them like standard headphones, and they'll charge while you're listening. If you're on an airplane, just plug them in and you can put your phone in airplane mode. You can completely forget about the wireless functionality if you want to, and just use them like wired headphones. But when you want to go wireless, just unplug them, and they'll switch automatically -- no manual pairing process or anything.

Spare headphones will be $50 now, but in a year there will be $10 clones.

Yeah, it seems pretty goofy right now. But we all thought that about the iPad, and they've sold like $100 billion of them (literally).
posted by miyabo at 4:43 PM on September 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

Oh, and I had a G1. It wasn't that annoying to not have a headphone jack, because you couldn't listen to much on the phone because it had no space and crashed every 10 minutes or so. I do recall having about 10 of the little ExtUSB to headphone adapters.
posted by miyabo at 4:48 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

For your amusement and/or outrage: all 25 of the adapter dongles Apple has released so far.
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:56 PM on September 5, 2016 [10 favorites]

Yeah, the reason for outrage is that people bought $1000 Thunderbolt Displays that are now expensive doorstops because Apple is discontinuing Thunderbolt, and never bothered to make an adapter. If Apple can do that, it can do anything.
posted by miyabo at 4:59 PM on September 5, 2016 [5 favorites]

How are we supposed to plug the new iPhones into our car audio systems?

If you can afford both car with an audio system and an iPhone upgrade your manservant can sort it out.
posted by srboisvert at 5:07 PM on September 5, 2016 [5 favorites]

If you can afford both car with an audio system

Even the 1975 Duster I drove in high school in the 80s had an audio system. AM/FM and I think Cassette Player.
posted by hippybear at 5:13 PM on September 5, 2016

How is it not more of an issue that this essentially gets rid of the analog loophole? Everyone does realize that any method for connecting headphones using direct digital connection gives Apple (and their media industry partners) full control over what can be listened to on an iPhone. Isn't that the big takeaway here? They will have full control of what you listen to, just like the TV industry (and THEIR media partners) control what you can watch. The issue isn't inconvenience, the issue is Big Brother can control your listening habits.
posted by gizzmo at 5:31 PM on September 5, 2016

Just my $0.02 over here from Nowheretown, but I purchased a Bluetooth in-ear earphones a few months ago at it was the best. purchase. ever. About $20 or so for the cheapo model (because I'm cheap) and it works fantastically well. Not perfect; of course it needs to be charged every few days, and with my recent switch to Android, support for the headphones is a bit more finicky. But overall wireless headphones beat the wired version by a country mile. In short, no more fucking TANGLES to deal with, and that's worth any downside times a thousand.

I cannot even imagine going back to wired headphones (TANGLES!), no way. Wireless is the future, and if Apple is going to speed that process, then we all win with cheaper and better wireless headphones in the near future.
posted by zardoz at 5:34 PM on September 5, 2016 [9 favorites]

Everyone does realize that any method for connecting headphones using direct digital connection gives Apple (and their media industry partners) full control over what can be listened to on an iPhone.

I don't own an iPhone but I do use iTunes regularly and as far as I have experienced, any media that I have that is on CD can be ripped and put into my iTunes library and synced to my iPad or my iPod Touch. If they start actually denying me the right to take media that I have purchased and own in physical form and create a digital form for me to use with it (or if they take material from non-label artists that I buy that comes either in digital form or in physical + digital form) and tell me I can't listen to it for some reason, I will call the ACLU and contact a zillion lawyers until someone will take the case and chase it all the way up to the SCOTUS.

There's a lot more media out in the world than what the 5 major labels who have contracts with Apple can control, and I'm not pirating things. I own things.
posted by hippybear at 5:40 PM on September 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

Just imagine the thread if Samsung or some Android smartphone manufacturer did this. Oh wait, there wouldn't be one because nobody would care. Who would be falling over themselves to announce their switch to iOS? Nobody.

Why? Nobody cares what anyone but Apple does. And depsite a pretty solid track record of deciding what's right for their users, somehow Apple has totally screwed up this, as yet unofficial, new product.

5 years from now, no major Android handset will have a headphone jack either. Why? They copy Apple.
posted by paulcole at 5:48 PM on September 5, 2016 [5 favorites]

Well Apple is still the top SmartPhone manufacturer even though Android phones combined are a larger percentage.
posted by Mitheral at 5:57 PM on September 5, 2016

overall wireless headphones beat the wired version by a country mile

indeed, who needs fidelity or a listening time beyond three hours
posted by entropicamericana at 6:02 PM on September 5, 2016 [10 favorites]

"… a headphone jack. A standard element of technology that can be traced back to 1878 and the invention of the manual telephone exchange …"

"The sad thing is, the headphone jack – that 3.5mm analogue three or four pole plug – is a very good connector … [that] … has been used widely for decades, more or less replacing the larger 1/4-inch jacks (which dated from the 1870s)"

The amusing thing, to anyone with experience of the different historical types, is that the current "headphone" plug/jack is the shitty bastard child of the bastard child of the very good original.

The original BPO plug / jack (later formalised & patented as BPO 316) was an amazing piece of careful engineering, designed so that it had a large contact area (for high current capacity), good wiping (for low resistance & low noise at low currents), and was inherently difficult (though not impossible) to short when plugging in.

Unfortunately, back in the mid-late 19th C there was one thing America hated more than the British - and that was British IP law (c.f. Gilbert & Sullivan). So, when it came to telephone connectors, American manufacturers decided came up with a variety of 'one-way compatible' versions (US plugs would work in BPO sockets, but not visa-versa) rather than using or licencing the BPO design. The end result, once all the differences settled down and manufacturers standardised on a single type, was the 1/4" 'phone' plug. The forefather of the modern 3.5mm (& 2.5mm) headphone plug, it neatly sidesteps all the BPO patents by making the very mistakes that the engineers at Her Majesty's Post Office designed out of the BPO original…

(In practice there's later US milspec equivalents - MIL-P-642/* - which copy the patented BPO design, and at least one size - MIL-P-642/2 - is more or less compatible with BPO 316 equipment.

There's also an Ericsson-standard plug - which I can't find a picture of - that's like a cross between the BPO & MIL-P-642/* designs, incorporates the best features of each, and is frankly impressive for its ability to come in a TRRRRRRRS variant…)
posted by Pinback at 6:05 PM on September 5, 2016 [32 favorites]

This'll be fine. There will be a cheap dongle which I'll leave permanently on the end of my earbuds. These will be available third party in Amazon within six months of the release of the phone, and Apple will give you one with the new phone. Until Bluetooth/whatever NFC technology comes along with audio technology as good as wired phones. Then I'll switch to that and ditch the dongle and wired phones.
posted by persona au gratin at 6:07 PM on September 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

It'll be like leaving my 1/4"-1/8" adaptor permanently on my old bulky headphones. No biggie.
posted by persona au gratin at 6:08 PM on September 5, 2016 [6 favorites]

I've had my headphone cable get caught on my knee, my shirt buttons, my bag, my jacket, my pants pocket, my door handle, a bathroom drawer pull, my umbrella, my bike, and the limbs of my fellow commuters.

Bluetooth headphones are a total revelation. If you've been using wired headphones on the go, you've been moving a certain cautious way perhaps even without realizing it, and making the switch will give you a surprising sense of freedom. You'll dart your head from side to side with confidence, you won't be constantly plugging the headphones back into the phone when they inevitably detach, you won't need to adjust the fit in your ears because there's nothing pulling them loose, and you most certainly won't be accidentally pulling your phone out of your pocket when you lift your head, and swinging it on a precarious headphone cable pendulum until it clatters onto the escalator.

With wireless headphones you have way more flexibility in where you keep your phone, you can more easily perform physical activities, you have more situational awareness, and you won't be hearing the wind and the rustling of your own movement through the cable -- so you can actually hear your music.

In terms of audio quality, most people can't tell the difference. The entire history of electronics is a story of "good enough" beating superior quality. And batteries are getting better all the time at a ridiculous rate. Kill the headphone jack, it's time.
posted by hyperbolic at 6:11 PM on September 5, 2016 [7 favorites]

Why does the audio quality even need to be worse? Just put the DAC in the earbuds and it's no different than listening to an (already kinda bad) MP3 over a wired headset.

I hate wires. I want all wires gone. I want a magic future of Tesla-derived wireless power even, but I can certainly put up with one wire per device to power them.
posted by Xyanthilous P. Harrierstick at 6:22 PM on September 5, 2016

It certainly seems like this is a bad time for this. You have the rumored minor iPhone 7 upgrade where the flagship feature (better cameras) is likely limited to the Plus model. At the same time, more and more people are on plans where they will save serious money by not upgrading their iPhone 6 until next year. Removing the headphone jack is just additional friction.
posted by smackfu at 6:26 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Various people have tried to do away with the headphone jack at various times - a pal at Motorola spent about half an hour explaining that it was too darn big and you could never make a properly thin phone with it.

Hasn't worked.

The thought of not being able to use headphones because I've mislaid an adaptor is just not bearable. I have a pretty bad time with various sorts of noise, especially in public spaces and transport, and my phone/earbuds are a major link to sanity. I lose headphones all the time, so I have spares stashed hither and thither, and I know where to buy them in a hurry at the stations I go to a lot. If I had a phone with no earphone jack, I'd have to carry a second phone that did.

Plus, my 3.5mm ecosystem is enormous. I have microphones, synthesisers, radios, computers, all of which can and frequently are hooked together, all with 3.5mm, and outside my collection of vintage wirelesses I don't think I have a single device that creates or consumes audio without one. I can and doadd a 3.5mm jack to equipment (ghetto engineering involves melting a hole through a plastic case with just the right size of soldering iron bit), and wire up stuff to a 3.5mm plug, quickly and without specialist tools or any mucking about.

Bluetooth audio just isn't very nice. It's OK in an environment where you don't or can't listen to the music too closely, but that's not mondo headpho. I have some reasonably good Sony over-the-ear closed headphones that I bought precisely because I wanted a good Bluetooth experience. They revewed well, had great battery life, reasonable controls and yes, great audio - when you used them with a wired connection (via the headphones' 3.5mm jack.). They just sound worse on Bluetooth - significantly worse, not can-I-hear-it-or-not worse. I no longer use them as Bluetooth devices. Oh, and they came with a 3.5mm-3.5mm plug-to-plug lead, which I lost in no time. Doesn't matter, I have plenty of others.

My last phone was fully waterproof. It had a 3.5mm jack.

What advantage does losing an earphone jack get me? None
What disadvantages does it get me? Potentially, lots.
Why would I want to abandon a standard that I use multiple times a day, have used for 40+ years, which does its job perfectly and without fus? Beats me.

Whoever takes this out of my life is not doing it for my benefit, no matter what they claim.

So no, not here, not now, not ever.
posted by Devonian at 6:33 PM on September 5, 2016 [9 favorites]

In three years, no smart phone will have a headphone jack.
posted by LoveHam at 6:33 PM on September 5, 2016 [10 favorites]

The notion that going wireless is the wave of the (near) future, and we might as well get on that train now has slight echoes of the people who saw the new NASA crewed spacecraft and complained that they were all capsules, and that we were going back to re-tread a bygone era. But design that parsimoniously accommodates function persists because it's good design. A capsule is good design.

I'm no luddite, but good, functional, reliable design is good, functional, reliable design. The 3.5mm jack is cheap, ubiquitous, simple, high quality, and requires power, storage, and signal processing at only one end of the signal chain, not at both ends.

You know that the D/A converter AND amplifier are sticking around on the iPhone because getting rid of the internal speaker really would kill demand, right? The only upside to this is that they can shave off a tiny portion of interior volume and thickness.
posted by tclark at 6:58 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

The only upside to this is that they can shave off a tiny portion of interior volume and thickness.

which is pretty necessary since the current iphone is so darn thick and also the iphone 6 was entirely too strong.
posted by entropicamericana at 7:04 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

"They don't make 'em like they used to. I remember when you could actually hold the damn thing in your hand. Now that they've started uploadin' 'em to my neural interface I forget whether I'm on the damn vPhone 19 or vPhone 20! Don't even get me started with the security updates. The other day I had to take a two hour nap, just to let 'em finish up!"
posted by destructive cactus at 7:30 PM on September 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

when I see an apple logo, i see a vast orchard turned into giant landfill, full of plastic shit...

... and full of shit wrapped in glass and aluminum, heavily marketed as the best thing in the world

(I attribute this thought to the late University of Michigan professor Robert Frost, who uttered in a lecture something to the point that Apple could smack some glass on poop and profitably sell it)
posted by JoeXIII007 at 8:07 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

My 5s is slowly dying, and I will need a new phone. If the 7 has no headphone jack, I won't get it. I'll probably get a 6s and start looking to Android, saying this as an Apple user going back to clickwheel iPods, the iPod Touch, and having only used iPhones once I moved to smartphones.

While supposedly the headphone adapter dongle will be included, that doesn't help when, as mentioned upthread, I want to play Pokemon, but I need a battery pack because it drains battery power. I play with one earphone in, so I can walk without staring at my phone. The one earphone alerts me to events in the game. The open ear is so I can hear the world around me. No headphones while charging means staring at my phone.

One of the reasons I need to get a new phone? My lightning port is dying. If you bump my phone while it's connected to a charger, it will stop, then start, then stop, then start charging ad nauseum. If it's on a desk, it means an annoying repeated buzzing (if it's particularly aggressive, I'll get the note that maybe my device, an actual by god Apple lighting cable, is not compatible with my phone. God help me, though, if I'm listening to music through headphones, though, where the constantly shrill "your phone has been plugged in/unplugged" sound won't stop going off. I'm not interested in dealing with that while trying to listen to music a year or so down the line when the lightning port starts to fall apart.

I'm not looking forward to learning a new OS, navigating a new app store, or repurchasing all of my apps. I'm the sort of person who outright loathes that sort of thing, but Apple seems to have found the exact thing that will make me run screaming from their product. Congrats.
posted by Ghidorah at 8:30 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

You know, I never really understood the "Apple fans as mindless sheep" myth. What's the superior alternative that the Told-You-Soers would suggest? Android, with its vast unpatched security holes and minimal OS support beyond release (when it's often already multiple major versions out of date) unless you buy the smartphone equivalent of a Linux desktop? Windows Phone 7, named for the number of developers who supported it? BlackBerry, already a dead platform? A flip phone, the 2010s version of I Don't Even Own a TV?

Wouldn't it be more appropriate to apply the marketing-sheep stereotype to Samsung's customers, given that the company outspends its competitors literally ten-to-one on advertising (with the remarkably un-self-aware message of "don't be a sheep so easily swayed by marketing!" chief among their vast marketing)?

Is it really entirely unthinkable that maybe, just maybe, what is now the world's largest company (by some measures) succeeded on the merits of their products when compared to the alternatives?

I mean, if Apple didn't make products that were at least pretty good, why would multiple industries be filled with companies slavishly mimicking their designs? It's not like it was somehow inevitable that every laptop would have an aluminum case and a black "chicklet" keyboard. Android began life as a copy of BlackBerry OS. Windows began life as a copy of the Macintosh (which was itself based on Jobs' misremembered experiences at Xerox PARC, except that he remembered PARC being far more advanced than it actually was). The Innovative New Icon-Based Taskbar in Windows 7 was just the Mac OS/NextStep dock. I'm certainly not suggesting that Apple is the only company innovating in its industries, but they certainly do seem to be a good indicator of what everyone else will be doing in two or three years, and the only ones ever bothering to try to do something other than big beige rectangles on your desk and cheap black plastic laptops.

And of course, this is leaving aside stuff like recycling efforts; how many of the alternatives that you'd have people purchase are made by companies that have even considered stuff like that, much less built an entire facility dedicated to reclaiming nearly all of the materials used to build their older products?

I mean, it's clear enough that it's an industry where, for whatever reason, most of the players don't get held to any standards. Maybe it's the "serves you right for trying to pretend you're better than us" principle (also known as the "so you're saying my boy's too GOOD to work in the mines? principle") at work here, the one that led the Prius recalls making the nightly news even when they were based on something that wasn't even real, and yet GM/Ford/Chrysler recalls rarely even even register a blip.

It's like how Donald Trump gets a free pass for having five kids by three different partners, yet Hillary Clinton is haunted by the ghosts of accusations past that weren't even sort of real. The whole tribalism phenomenon is just so profoundly stupid. America so loves an underdog, because people hope that they can watch them succeed so they can wait eagerly for them to fail.
posted by DoctorFedora at 8:31 PM on September 5, 2016 [20 favorites]

Yeah, the reason for outrage is that people bought $1000 Thunderbolt Displays that are now expensive doorstops because Apple is discontinuing Thunderbolt…

Apologies to the OP for picking their comment, but this captures most of the problem with this thread — a lot of emotion, some critical gaps in knowledge.

The Thunderbolt ecosystem is healthier than ever. Thunderbolt 3 merely ditches Mini DisplayPort connectors in favor of USB-C connectors, which support both USB 3.1 and Thunderbolt 3, as well as power, HDMI and other stuff. Thunderbolt is also gaining traction on PCs.

Bluetooth audio quality can be as good as you care for it to be. iOS can already send AAC audio directly to Bluetooth devices which support them (avoiding any sort of transcode operation), and there are lossless Bluetooth standards that Apple is sure to support, and require support for on Bluetooth devices that get MFi licensing.
posted by ArmandoAkimbo at 8:33 PM on September 5, 2016 [9 favorites]

using direct digital connection gives Apple (and their media industry partners) full control over what can be listened to on an iPhone

This has come up a couple of times. Why would the company who convinced the music industry to give up DRM be interested in controlling what you listen to?
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:48 PM on September 5, 2016 [9 favorites]

At work, we stand around a 60" TV driven by a Macbook to do our daily scrum. It's connected with an Apple Lightning-to-HDMI adapter. The adapter itself introduces compression artifacts all over the screen---impossible not to notice when standing right next to a 60" TV. At first I thought I was going nuts---how could this little cable be causing compression artifacts??---but a quick search confirmed that there's a little fucking chip in there that manages to wreck everything with lossy compression.

So.. Apple is now moving towards a wireless digital solution as their only option? Can't say I really trust them with that.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 9:14 PM on September 5, 2016

Where would the adapter plug in, on the charging port? So I couldn't listen to music in my car and charge my phone at the same time? Those will be some fun road trips: hours of music followed by dead silence while we wait for the phone to recharge.

Im not super pro-this-change, but my dads 90s Subaru with an early 2000s(like, pre iPods having a color screen even I think) "iPod ready!" stereo is capable of charging my iPhone 6S while playing audio over USB. That stereo cost maybe $100 in like 2004.

I haven't rented, driven, or rode in a car made in the past ten years that didn't support audio over usb from Apple stuff. Even like, the crappiest stripper model US cars or hyundais. A 3 door Yaris will have it.

Like, my 15 year old beater doesn't... But it's basically a universal feature now. It's an apple-y thing to assume most cars on the road will work fine with the cable that comes in the phones box plugged into the dashboard.
posted by emptythought at 9:37 PM on September 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

This has come up a couple of times. Why would the company who convinced the music industry to give up DRM be interested in controlling what you listen to?

If I may add another nail, plugging the analogue hole for audio simply is not possible.

Human ears are analogue devices. Speakers are analogue devices. The information must be converted to the analogue domain at some point.

So far that is similar to the human visual system, except that while humans generally have two ears, we demand more than two pixels.

Even if there were an encrypted pathway from the storage device to the speakers, any kid with rock could smash the earbuds open and wire them to a pair of analogue‐to‐digital converters.

For video, the equivalent would involve digitising several million channels in parallel. Have fun wiring that up.

(No television yet made would require quite that level of work, but the barrier is still much, much higher for video than it is for audio.)
posted by Fongotskilernie at 9:46 PM on September 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

I like my iPhone.

I think this should be the new election thread.
posted by mazola at 9:52 PM on September 5, 2016 [6 favorites]

I was confused and horrified that the iMac didn't have a SCSI port, or a floppy drive. It turned out ok.

Really now? If you use the Jack, you're using the included earbuds or a cheap replacement for such. TJ Max will have off brand lightning jack buds for ten bucks a week after the jackless phone hits. I have a few external speakers, a couple waterproof BT exercise 'phones, and a pair of Koss Porta Pros. If I gave a tiny bit of a shit more, I'd have a Bluetooth adapter for the Koss cans, or just get a lightning adapter that lives on them full time. I don't!
posted by Slap*Happy at 10:10 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

I was confused and horrified that the iMac didn't have a SCSI port, or a floppy drive.

You were confused and horrified quite a long time ago! The iMac only just gave up its optical drive in the past maybe 5 years, and it gave up the floppy drive so long ago I can't even remember. I had a Graphite bubble iMac from 1998 or so and it didn't have a floppy drive.
posted by hippybear at 10:16 PM on September 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

I hope the new iWatch has 6 PCI ports. </fingers crossed>
posted by mazola at 10:32 PM on September 5, 2016 [5 favorites]

Thunderbolt 3 merely ditches Mini DisplayPort connectors in favor of USB-C connectors

I don't think this is true. It may be theoretically possible, but no actual adapters currently exist.
posted by miyabo at 10:46 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

The hoops people will jump through and the contortions they will go to in order to support Apple is pretty funny. Just makes me SMH.

What happens when/if Apple decides they won't playback podcasts not available on iTunes? What happens when local bands can't send you their music DRM free because, again, not on iTunes.

It's easy to say "they'll never do that" or "I will sue them" but this stuff is already happening with HDTV connections like HDMI.

I hate to break it to the Cult of Apple people, but they aren't perfect, they are a corporation just as profit driven as any other, and they truly don't care about you, the end user. In fact, the argument could be made that they care LESS than the average company, because many companies don't enjoy the utility of a userbase that is fanatical to the point of justifying bad or mediocre products because of the brand name. Maybe Bose. Not many. And Apple has had this same advantage for decades.

Apple will do whatever is good for Apple, their shareholders, and their corporate partners. You, as the user, come very far down the list. And the sad fact is that many people will take it and say "thank you sir, may I have another?"
posted by gizzmo at 11:07 PM on September 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

This has come up a couple of times. Why would the company who convinced the music industry to give up DRM be interested in controlling what you listen to?

Why wouldn't they? Control over the ecosystem? Investment by corporate partners with media interests? Increased market pressure from Amazon and Google? The point is, why support them if this is even an option? Their phones really *aren't* that much better then alternatives from other companies. Their computers haven't been better in years. Why happily cede them this control?

Y'all have fun with your iTunes-only phones that not long from now will have a built-in "go dark" switch on the camera when the cops are around. I'll be happily standing by with my Android phone, happily hacking away at any parts of the OS I don't like or agree with. While playing whatever I want on my "classic" analog headphones.
posted by gizzmo at 11:17 PM on September 5, 2016

"You know, I never really understood the "Apple fans as mindless sheep" myth."

It is mostly myth these days (although it has some minimal historical roots). At this stage there's far more people whining about "mindless Apple sheep" and ragging on "rabid Apple fanboys" than there are actual annoying Apple fanboys.

But, y'know, you can't feel like part of a superior [Windows | Linux | Android | 3.5mm headphone-owning] clique without at least a little bit of Othering. And there's a fair bit of that in this thread…
posted by Pinback at 11:20 PM on September 5, 2016 [5 favorites]

If I may add another nail, plugging the analogue hole for audio simply is not possible.

Human ears are analogue devices. Speakers are analogue devices. The information must be converted to the analogue domain at some point.

Obviously, conversion to analog has to happen somewhere. But what stops Apple from forcing the D/A conversion into the headphones themselves? What stops Apple from breaking the dongles, so now you have to buy "iPhone Licensed" headphones? What stops them from disapproving certain audio sources from playback? Or demanding exorbitant licensing fees for compatible headphones?

Again, every user who defends this simply legitimizes whatever play Apple chooses to make, because many people will happily put their own best interests aside because they like the phones. They are NICE phones. But at what price?
posted by gizzmo at 11:27 PM on September 5, 2016

You know that the D/A converter AND amplifier are sticking around on the iPhone because getting rid of the internal speaker really would kill demand, right? --tclark

Getting rid of the speaker/amplifier would make telephone calls rather difficult (unless you are like my sister who is never without the Bluetooth speaker/mike in her ear).
posted by eye of newt at 11:32 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

But, y'know, you can't feel like part of a superior [Windows | Linux | Android | 3.5mm headphone-owning] clique without at least a little bit of Othering. And there's a fair bit of that in this thread…

Supporting relatively open technologies over closed technologies, especially when in most respects they are equal (price, capability, performance, etc.) isn't othering. And if people vote with their wallets to support closed technologies, that's their own deal. Those of us with a preference for open tech aren't in it to feel superior, but we can't help but feel justified and also sad if we are proven right about a technology that fails the users.

Wondering why people buy products presumably against their own interest (a flexible open system) is a lot like wondering why people vote Republican against their own interest. Either we are misjudging people, or we are misjudging what they perceive to be their interest, in comparison to what we perceive it to be.

As an non-Apple fan (I don't love or hate them, have owned their products, don't miss them, nothing special) I would expect people's own interest to be in open systems, flexibility, competition. Just like I would expect people not to vote for a party who is out to take advantage of them. But I may not be perceiving other users' interests correctly. I'm always happy to learn. But honestly, I've used both types of devices and I really don't see where the love for Apple products comes from, unless it is just a "style" thing. From a technical standpoint they just rally aren't anything special. For me, certainly not anything worth buying and losing technical control in order to own.
posted by gizzmo at 11:42 PM on September 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

I get why people are talking about how people like to make a big deal about anything Apple does, but they are kind of a major company. Make all the comparisons you like to people being resistant to change in the past - "oh yeah and people made a huge deal about USB" - but I get the sense that most of the people complaining about this are current Apple customers. I'm writing this on my first smartphone, an iPhone SE.

For me this is not just about getting new headphones, it's about having a totally new standard introduced without an indication that there will be any way to use the stuff I already own. And I own more than one audio I/O device that plugs into the existing jack. I would like to get more than a couple years of use out of that stuff.

I mean, make all the comparisons you want with USB and people who insisted on only using the keyboard - but every computer I've owned has been at least somewhat operable without the mouse. The first computer I had with USB ports still had serial ports in the back. You didn't have to replace all your peripherals right away.

If Apple releases an adapter that lets you plug your old stuff into the new phone, then at least I can keep using the stuff I own. It may be a hassle to charge the phone, or it may not. An adapter may cost a lot, or it may not. But until I have any sense of what my options are going to be, I'm going to be concerned about what my options are when it comes time to upgrade my phone. Painting people like me as behind-the-times whiners is kind of an unfair characterization, and it doesn't address my concerns now to say "ah, when the time comes you'll buy the next iPhone and you know it."
posted by teponaztli at 11:53 PM on September 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

Shrug. "Open" is one of those meaningless buzzwords nowadays. A "flexible open system" is only in one's own interest if one considers the time spent securing their system and compiling your software from source or whatever else to be of effectively zero value. For instance, I strongly prefer the "closed, inflexible" PS4 for playing video games over doing so on a computer, because the developers get significant optimization advantages for having a single set of hardware specs to work with, and I get the significant advantages of everything just working out of the box without having to troubleshoot drivers or what have you. A "flexible open system" is in people's own interest in much the same way that a manual transmission pickup truck might be, from the perspective of farmers or construction workers. It turns out, though, that a lot of people prefer a small, efficient sedan for relatively low-impact tasks like commuting to work, even if they'd never be able to pop open the hood and diagnose the engine noises at a glance.

What is "open"? Apple's Swift programming language is open-source and their WebKit is at the heart of virtually every modern web browser. Google, the champion of the "open web," keep anything that gives them a competitive advantage close to their chest. Mac OS is a closed-source operating system built on the Mach kernel, running UNIX behind the curtains, which means it's more closely related to Linux than not. Etc. etc. etc. It's complicated.

On the other hand, Apple is hardly the only company to have "a technology that fails the users." Leaving aside the way that Apple's released products tend to get put up for comparison with other companies' prototypes and pipe dreams that never seem to come to fruition, what do we make of the ecosystem-crushing decisions Google alone has made by shuttering their RSS feeder? Or the failures of Google Wave or Google Glass or that modular smartphone project or pretty much any World-Changing Product Google makes a big fuss about?

It's complicated.
posted by DoctorFedora at 11:56 PM on September 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

Incidentally, it'd be cool if people waited until Apple actually announced the product that is presumably dropping the headphone jack before deciding that everything is going to be the worst-case scenario, forever. Maybe, just maybe, someone at Apple has noticed that some people use wired headphones, and would like to continue doing so. They might even have taken those folks into consideration in some way whatsoever.

Worst-case scenario is basically that you just have to put an adapter on the plug, like those old ¼" jack headphones. The way some people are talking about all of this, you'd think that Obama is coming around to forcibly collect everyone's headphones, forever.

It's a very silly thing to get really upset about! Especially before anything has even happened or been announced.
posted by DoctorFedora at 11:59 PM on September 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

As someone who has a pair of noise cancelling earbuds, I'd welcome a solid lightning port based solution that doesn't include carrying around a battery pack hard wired to said earbuds.

If it's plug in earbuds with an offloaded noise canceling processor on my phone I'd be ecstatic. Let me pinpoint sounds I want canceled out, etc. I spend a not insignificant time flying and they are a sanity preserving device.
posted by mrzarquon at 12:10 AM on September 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

What happens when/if Apple decides they won't playback podcasts not available on iTunes? What happens when local bands can't send you their music DRM free because, again, not on iTunes.

Dunno. What happened when Microsoft shut down their PlaysForSure™ store and servers, making all the music people had purchased from them useless? What happens to Windows RT tablet users now MS has washed their hands of them? What happens to 90+% of Android tablet/handset users when a new one comes out & updates & new software stop? What happened when Sony shut down Sony Connect? What happens when some games studio folds &/or closes their multiplayer servers?

What happens if the studios behind Ultraviolet, or Amazon, suddenly decide you need to buy all your streaming movies again?

I hate to break it to the Cult of Apple people, but they aren't perfect, they are a corporation just as profit driven as any other, and they truly don't care about you, the end user.

Given that between my partner & I we own 3 Apple laptops, 1 Apple desktop, 2 iPhones, 1 iPad, an Apple TV, a collection of Airport Extremes and Expresses, and I personally haven't owned a PC since about 2009, I probably qualify as one of your "Cult of Apple" people.

And, really, I don't think they're perfect, I know they're just as profit-driven as any other corp, and I know that they truly don't care about me, the end-user. That's pretty much my opinion of any corporation, large or small, public or private.

But I prefer using their stuff because I got sick of pissfarting around with Windows & Linux on a daily basis, and am happy to pay the minimal (if any) premium over equivalent-quality hardware from elsewhere. FWIW, I'm no luddite or refugee from technology - I have a couple of SBCs running Linux & OpenBSD for various things, in my spare time I repair vintage radios & design some pretty complicated RF / microcontroller / general electronics gear (one of the few times I do use Windows, in VirtualBox - some of the programming, FPGA, & DSP tools simply aren't available otherwise), etc. But in general I use Apple stuff because, as the old slogan went, It Just Works.

In fact, the argument could be made that they care LESS than the average company, because many companies don't enjoy the utility of a userbase that is fanatical to the point of justifying bad or mediocre products because of the brand name. Maybe Bose. Not many. And Apple has had this same advantage for decades.

See, that's where our opinions diverge. I don't look around and see too many Apple fanatics giving shit to users of other hardware. But I do hear & see - or at least hear of - plenty of rabidly anti-Apple folks getting right up in the face of people quietly using Apple gear and excoriating and belittling them for being "Apple fanboys" and "sheeple", on average at least once a day. As I said, there's more than a little bit of it in this thread.

And it all seems to be based on hatred of - or, at the very least, Othering of - an Apple stereotype that hasn't existed for at least 10 years, and probably more like 15 or 20…

(As for the headphone thing that's the reason for this post: I think they'd be a little crazy if they did ditch it right now, but it's getting to be about bloody time the world was rid of the damn thing. It might be ubiquitous but it's a shitty connector that, at least in its smaller 3.5 & 2.5mm forms, deserves to DIAFF…)
posted by Pinback at 12:35 AM on September 6, 2016 [8 favorites]

But I prefer using their stuff because I got sick of pissfarting around with Windows & Linux on a daily basis, and am happy to pay the minimal (if any) premium over equivalent-quality hardware from elsewhere. FWIW, I'm no luddite or refugee from technology

I swear, the number of times I've described Mac OS as "UNIX, except that it can dress itself in the morning"…
posted by DoctorFedora at 12:44 AM on September 6, 2016 [9 favorites]

Man I love the SE - it's a weird product for Apple because it actually caters to popular demand! Just reuses the best compact design they ever had (the 5s obvs, though all iPhones are compact compared to some of the beasts I see in Android land) with the only meaningful thing missing compared to the Sixes being LTE Advanced - well, 3D Touch is a fun idea I guess. Anyway I hope they keep doing stuff like that - though I will also be mightily annoyed if there is no 3.5mm jack.
posted by atoxyl at 12:45 AM on September 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

it occurs to me at times that the idea of Apple as this trendy company that it's Cool to Love still feels really incongruous to me, because I grew up in the '90s, when Windows 95 was a legitimately better operating system in most ways and when Apple was basically floundering and just generally not doing super well. It's like watching people get just soooooo angry about Volvos.
posted by DoctorFedora at 12:52 AM on September 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

Obviously, conversion to analog has to happen somewhere. But what stops Apple from forcing the D/A conversion into the headphones themselves? What stops Apple from breaking the dongles, so now you have to buy "iPhone Licensed" headphones? What stops them from disapproving certain audio sources from playback? Or demanding exorbitant licensing fees for compatible headphones?

This isn’t “the analogue hole” at all, but technologically, there’s nothing stopping them from trying that.

There would be a game of cat‐and‐mouse between Apple and outsiders attempting to reverse engineer Apple’s chips (or get the required specifications directly via corporate espionage), but assuming Apple maintains the upper hand (and doesn’t let their licensees be a weak point), the best a non‐licensing manufacturer could do would be to cannibalise the real chips and hack their product onto the analogue end of that.

Presumably Apple would include a pair of iBuds with every iDevice, which would put a ceiling on the price of the security components. The expense of procuring used iBuds and the labour costs of handling them would give Apple and their licensees control of the the low end of the market, while the high end would be hampered by the limitations imposed on their designs by their hacked‐together architecture.

That’s just the technical side of this hypothetical, though. The legal and social hurdles Apple would face are likely more significant, but let’s open that can of worms when we come to it, if we come to it.
posted by Fongotskilernie at 12:56 AM on September 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

it occurs to me at times that the idea of Apple as this trendy company that it's Cool to Love still feels really incongruous to me, because I grew up in the '90s, when Windows 95 was a legitimately better operating system in most ways and when Apple was basically floundering and just generally not doing super well. It's like watching people get just soooooo angry about Volvos.

Ehhhhh in hindsight Windows 9x/ME vs. MacOS Classic is a contest between... two things that are

that are...

that are both

not very good.
posted by atoxyl at 1:14 AM on September 6, 2016 [8 favorites]

Like - Windows should have been a ways ahead on merit of real multitasking support alone, so the fact that it managed not to feel more stable in practice is kind of impressively dismal. (Apple's big mistake back then was their apparent hatred of anyone trying to develop software for their machines, something they have even now not let go of entirely despite the shiny Project Builders and Swifts and such.)
posted by atoxyl at 1:26 AM on September 6, 2016

indeed, who needs fidelity or a listening time beyond three hours

You should shop around. The sound quality of my wireless earbuds is just as good as the wired version. (Though admittedly both are the cheapo versions). Three hours? I listen to music and podcasts for at least two hours a day and only have to charge the headphones every four or five days. So far far more than three hours.
posted by zardoz at 1:29 AM on September 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

But I prefer using their stuff because I got sick of pissfarting around with Windows & Linux on a daily basis, and am happy to pay the minimal (if any) premium over equivalent-quality hardware from elsewhere.

Microsoft gets a bad rap (not completely undeserved though...Windows ME *shudder*) but since Windows 7, every PC I have owned has been able to run for literally months between reboots (unless I chose to load updates) with total stability. This on a machine that does all my web stuff, graphics stuff, work stuff, gaming, etc.

The caveat of course being that every one of those machines I built, instead of buying a brand-name system, based on race-to-the-bottom-of-price components. What many people bitch about when they say "Microsoft" is really "shitty PC vendor who built a sub-standard machine running Microsoft Windows"

It's great if Apple stuff "just works" but as an IT person, I can unequivocally state that it isn't always, or even usually, the case anymore. Except maybe for the home user that surfs the web, listens to some tunes, and dabbles in photo editing and document creation. In a business environment, Apple doesn't "just work" a LOT of the time.

So it's all fine and dandy if people buy what they like, but let's just say I won't be shocked when Apple does something the users very much DON'T LIKE, but become victims of a type to lock-in based on their chosen ecosystem and walled-garden approach. It just annoys me when Apple does that to their users and the same users then turn around and talk about how great it is, because Apple always does the very best stuff! And even those who scoff at the idea of Apple "fanboys" are probably the self-same people who defended Apple when their phones were bending in half, or you couldn't hold it a certain way without losing the call, etc.
posted by gizzmo at 2:36 AM on September 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

I've been in the Apple ecosystem for 35 years now. Windows 10 and the Windows phone both look amazing. If Apple didn't have my entire life, I might change both.
posted by persona au gratin at 2:42 AM on September 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

probably the self-same people who defended Apple when their phones were bending in half, or you couldn't hold it a certain way without losing the call, etc.

Funny that you should pick two examples that were made-up controversies, both quickly shown to have afflicted basically all other phones just as much, if not more.
posted by DoctorFedora at 2:51 AM on September 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

Evidently I've fallen into a cunning rhetorical trap : P
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:05 AM on September 6, 2016 [5 favorites]

You can have waterproofing with the headphone jack. The 6S is mostly waterproof already.

'Mostly waterproof' is like 'kind of pregnant'. Either you are or you aren't.
posted by newdaddy at 4:20 AM on September 6, 2016

I'd never buy a iPhone in any case as I'm too invested in the Android/Google ecosystem but Bluetooth only headphones would be a serious deal breaker for me. I've never been impressed with the Bluetooth and have struggled many times to get devices to pair and then connect. Also as was said above, I really don't need one more battery powered thing to keep charged.
posted by octothorpe at 4:24 AM on September 6, 2016

Nor am I giving up my USB ports, which is why I'm clinging onto my Macbook Air until it sputters and wheezes into total obsolescence

...And I have a like-2007-era MacBook Pro that I am saving for its FireWire 400 port, until I can convert the last of my Super8 digital video camera tapes!

But while I bitch and moan about this stupid change, I am not surprised, and I know I will have to go along when my phone next gets replaced (about a year) by $WORK. But don't expect me to like it....
posted by wenestvedt at 5:53 AM on September 6, 2016

No-one's suggesting Bluetooth only headphones, as long as they have a lightning port, you'll be able to keep using your 3.5mm headphones— though if Apple is changing the market to where Bluetooth headphones are the preferred option, you can bet that we'll finally see a better range of headsets available as everyone wants the big bite of that market.

If alongside the iPhone release, Apple/Beats also release a pair of BT in-ear headphones that deliver on the software experience Apple is known for and also includes fast-charging from the phone directly (like the Pencil where a 15s charge will keep you going for an hour) then that might finally get me to migrate from my current, loved, Shure monitors.

With Handoff, it'd be cool if I were listening to a playlist on my phone, that as I sat down at my computer, iTunes would already show that, and I'd just start getting the computer sounds via the earbuds. Perhaps if there were a tiny light sensor in the earphones, taking them off would signal the computer to start using it's own speakers/headphones, sort of like when you pull up in your car to a open-air place that's listening to the same radio station— seamless like that.
posted by Static Vagabond at 6:02 AM on September 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

What stops Apple from breaking the dongles, so now you have to buy "iPhone Licensed" headphones?

I own an OBDII reader (it plugs into your car and reads engine data) that connects to your phone via Bluetooth. Well, your not-Apple phone, anyway. The manufacturer did not want to pay Apple's licensing fee or whatever to specially certify their Bluetooth hardware as Apple Approved. So that is a thing, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are perfectly fine Bluetooth headphones that will not work with iPhones.
posted by indubitable at 6:02 AM on September 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

Just for balance, I started this thread being horrified at the idea of removing a decent, standard port from phones (I'm still annoyed at lightning connectors and think the EU should have banned iPhones for breaking the law, which is there for a very good reason rant rant rant) but by the end I've been converted to the idea and have a couple or pairs of bluetooth headphones in my internet shopping basket.

So, there you go, sometimes minds are changed on the internet.
(I still don't want an iPhone though)
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 6:20 AM on September 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

I use Bluetooth headphones with my iphone. Mostly to listen to podcasts while walking to work. But when I do listen to music with them I find that they seem to skip forwards slightly in any quiet bits in songs and it often skips the first 3rd of a second of tracks.

Anybody know what's happening there?
posted by gnuhavenpier at 6:31 AM on September 6, 2016

Yet another salvo in Apple's bid to avoid iPhones becoming commodities.
posted by ZeusHumms at 6:46 AM on September 6, 2016

There are plenty of valid criticisms of Apple without having to resort to paranoid fantasies of Apple plotting to reinstate DRM on your MP3s like the Simpsons' gag of the USSR hiding invasion forces in Russian parade floats. You might as well be accusing them of some conspiracy to put Flash on your iPhone.
posted by entropicamericana at 6:59 AM on September 6, 2016 [5 favorites]

'Mostly waterproof' is like 'kind of pregnant'. Either you are or you aren't.

You should let the IP Code people know they're full of shit then. The 6S survives under water for quite some time already compared to the iPhone 6.
posted by Talez at 7:01 AM on September 6, 2016 [5 favorites]

How about fixing the goddamned strain relief on these lightning cables before you make everything single thing dependent on them?

My family has chewed through a half dozen of these things in the last year because of how they fall apart once you bend the wire past 45 degrees more than a few times.

Sorry. Just shouting into the wind here because that's just not how Apple designs their cables. We're all stuck with this for a long long time.
posted by JoeZydeco at 7:05 AM on September 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

'Mostly waterproof' is like 'kind of pregnant'. Either you are or you aren't.

That explains all the "Pregnant to 30m" stickers.
posted by Etrigan at 7:14 AM on September 6, 2016 [20 favorites]

I wear earbuds constantly, which means I wear out earbuds constantly, going through a pair every two months or so. I've tried probably fifteen to twenty brands over the years, from cheap to expensive. They always fail at the same spot: the connection between the plug and the cord.

The headphone jack is garbage technology and I say good riddance. I've long wanted decent cordless earbuds, but they're all too bulky and uncomfortable to sleep in. If this prompts manufacturers to actually make earbuds that meet my needs, I'm all for it.
posted by painquale at 7:19 AM on September 6, 2016 [5 favorites]

One of the reasons I need to get a new phone? My lightning port is dying.

Ghidorah, judging from your symptoms, it sounds like you just have pocket lint in the port. I had the same problem, took it to the Apple store, and the Genius gingerly removed a giant piece of fuzz from the port with a tiny screwdriver. Give that a shot. (I'd probably turn off the phone first.)
posted by entropicamericana at 7:27 AM on September 6, 2016 [4 favorites]

Nothing more embarrassing to see an Apple Genius and have them take gunk out of your lightning port.

Beware of static discharge if you do this yourself. The store does.
posted by Yowser at 7:31 AM on September 6, 2016

It's like watching people get just soooooo angry about Volvos.

As a 15 year+ Volvo owner I gotta know: This happens?
posted by sourwookie at 7:34 AM on September 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

Ghidorah, judging from your symptoms, it sounds like you just have pocket lint in the port. I had the same problem, took it to the Apple store, and the Genius gingerly removed a giant piece of fuzz from the port with a tiny screwdriver. Give that a shot. (I'd probably turn off the phone first.)

I use one of those rubber-coated paper clips with enough bend on the end to get into the corners and lift it out.
posted by sourwookie at 7:35 AM on September 6, 2016

I've done it with a toothpick (whittled down with scissors). So satisfying to get that gunk out of there!
posted by R a c h e l at 8:03 AM on September 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

My Swiss Army Knife has a little plastic toothpick that's perfect for cleaning pocket gunk out of ports.
posted by SansPoint at 8:10 AM on September 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'll probably be buying one of the new phones - though I'm waiting for the official release and pricing changes to do a cost/benefit analysis between the 7 and older models. I'm pretty pragmatic about these things and want to keep my phone for a while (the only reason I'm even upgrading is that my 5S has a 2-hour battery life and replacing the battery didn't do a lick).

Honestly, I don't care at all about the missing headphone jack. The way I see it, apple products are dominant enough that initially I may need to deal with a dongle or two (call it part of the purchase price) but soon enough everything will migrate to the new standard and the cheap skullcandy headphones I favor will be easy to buy in lightning form as well. I was a longtime nexus android user before I was an iPhone user, and one of the most frustrating things about that was seeing how fast manufacturers adapted to iPhone changes compared to those on other phone models (look at how few cool Qi charger options there are). After a year we'll forget we even worried about it.

I understand how much more frustrating it would be if I were an audiophile with $$$ headphones that I didn't regularly lose or break - but at that price point, I fail to see why buying an appropriate adapter is so bad really. Especially for a change that does provide other benefits to the phone's form factor, waterproofing, etc.
posted by R a c h e l at 8:13 AM on September 6, 2016

How are we supposed to plug the new iPhones into our car audio systems?

Lightning to HDMI cable, I would think. I don't have an iPhone, but when I bought my new Honda they mentioned many times that I could plug one into an HDMI port in the console to control music, gps, and telephone functions through the car's console video screen and steering wheel controls.
posted by aught at 8:27 AM on September 6, 2016

But what stops Apple from forcing the D/A conversion into the headphones themselves? What stops Apple from breaking the dongles, so now you have to buy "iPhone Licensed" headphones? What stops them from disapproving certain audio sources from playback? Or demanding exorbitant licensing fees for compatible headphones?

I am not a huge fan of unfettered capitalism, but one thing is it usually pretty good at is keeping companies from making too many choices that will annoy and inconvenience consumers when there are eight other similar companies making similar products. What keeps Apple from doing this stuff (assuming they even want to) is Samsung, Google, LG, Windows, etc, all ready to throw big advertising dollars into reminding you that they also have nice phones that don't do that annoying crap.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 8:30 AM on September 6, 2016

While everyone is agonizing over the possibility of ditching the headphone jack, maybe give Piano Black a listen. I've forgotten the incredible the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack and am happy to be reminded of its existence!
posted by one teak forest at 10:00 AM on September 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

Apple has always been about the bold choice for hardware and pushing the future: why don't they just make the phone entirely wireless and make that stick?

Reinvent bluetooth to make it actually work and easy to configure and program or make an ab initio wireless usb/thunderbolt to replace it.

Pick a wireless charging standard and make it stick. Do a deal with starbucks to put some in every store.

Make wireless thunderbolt and wireless charging common between the new ear bud, the phone and the iWatch 2. That solves many of the problems with Macbooks having no ports either. Refresh them to wireless thunderbolt (or whatever) too in a couple of months.

And make it 10-m waterproof (and then advertise it as an underwater camera for christ's sakes), not just immersion proof like the Samsung.

Push the phone where it needs to be in other words.

That's the design and engineering I'd expect from Apple.
posted by bonehead at 10:02 AM on September 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

What happens when/if Apple decides they won't playback podcasts not available on iTunes? What happens when local bands can't send you their music DRM free because, again, not on iTunes.

Is this complaint from an Apple thread from 15 years ago? Because it has nothing to do with headphone jacks and also is not remotely like anything Apple has ever done since it launched iTunes.
posted by ejs at 10:36 AM on September 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

indeed, who needs fidelity or a listening time beyond three hours

My Jabra Revos can be used for several days without recharging and sound better than any Apple headphones I've ever had. And when the battery winds down (has only happened to me a couple of times) you can plug them into the phone and use them as wired headphones.
posted by ejs at 10:40 AM on September 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

bonehead: That's the design and engineering I'd expect from Apple.

Who's to say that's not where they're going? Apple's design process, particularly for iOS devices, is iterative. It's possible the next iPhone will have wireless charging, or be 10 meters waterproof. You can't just jump there, though, you have to build up to them. It's all about the adjacent possible, not giant leaps.
posted by SansPoint at 10:54 AM on September 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

if the iphone 7 also has wireless charging, and comes with a usb-c to 3.5mm adapter, then I guess this is fine. Using an adapter is kind of meh, but acceptable. If you can't play music while charging, then it's all over. Say goodbye to podcasts on road trips in my bluetoothless Civic. And voice navigation. I'd never get a headphoneless phone for that reason alone.

Like most others, I really don't understand the motivation behind this decision. The headphone jack is a perfectly good interface with decades of ubiquity. It's probably the most successful plug format in history. It's everywhere, compatible with everything, and could easily stay the same format for 100 more years. It just works. Why Apple? Why?
posted by dis_integration at 10:54 AM on September 6, 2016

How about fixing the goddamned strain relief on these lightning cables before you make everything single thing dependent on them?

This is a cat declawing level fight, by the way. Either you've had like ten inexplicably fall apart, or you're a stupid rube who can't treat anything with care and destroys everything by being a slob because i haven't seen a single one fail. I've seen threads about this on other sites get locked.

I can pinpoint the exact time when those cables became garbage. It was right around the first multicolored ipod nano, when they went from having thick corrugated strain relief(see here) to the thin modern design(example).

Somewhere in my house, i have some of the old style cables i got in i want to say 2003 with my first ipod. I used them with my second ipod in high school, and with probably four generations of iphones and they're still fine. These went traveling all over the place, were jammed in pockets, stepped on, run over with chairs, stuffed in filthy bags and crushed, etc. One of them the freaking plastic housing shattered off but the cord was perfectly fine and the plug still worked(it just looks like robocop).

I haven't had one of the new style ones last more than 6 months unless it just sat in a drawer unused. The one that just sits on my desk at work and never goes anywhere is splitting in like 3 places.

And yes, i unplug the things with the plug and not the cord. I've worked in IT for like a decade. Leave me alone.

Forever mad at the cable moralism truthers.
posted by emptythought at 11:40 AM on September 6, 2016 [6 favorites]

I've long since given up on apple-branded lightning and 30-pin cables. You can get three generic ten footers from a random reseller on Amazon, with proper strain relief, metal plugs and braided cover, for the price of one Apple cable.

I hope to god all of the new MacBooks use USB C, because the magsafe cable adapters are crummy as well, I've had three of them go dead in the past five years.
posted by Slap*Happy at 12:09 PM on September 6, 2016

It's all about the adjacent possible, not giant leaps.

That's the half-assing problem. People above have been illustrating why removing the plug makes a bunch of stuff a little worse. But where's the benefit for what they're giving up? It's a neither fish-nor-fowl "solution" that pisses off people without offering a compelling benefit.

What great new head-turning feature is Cook going to offer in it's place? Jobs had the sense to know that if you take away one feature, you make the replacement better. Wireless, wireless that works great, is better. A new plug for the earphones that mean you can't charge at the same time? That's the opposite of better.

When you make a change like this, it has to be better than what's gone before. You can't do it half-way. This is half-way.
posted by bonehead at 1:04 PM on September 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

I'm typing this on a 4 year old Macbook Air that hasn't even had a single minor issue, let alone a problem that would justify my upgrading to a better laptop. Sitting next to me is my iPhone 6S, which has been nothing but a delight. So I'm going to have to mark this bit:

> Apple is not in the business of selling well-engineered devices. They are in the business of selling expensive, breakable devices that require you to buy proprietary, exclusive, expensive accessories in order to make everything work as well as a similar device of another brand that costs half as much money.

... as [Citation Needed]. My anecdata is at least as good as your anecdata, and that's before I bring up my Thinkpad and Linux kernels that wouldn't handle sound and WiFi at the same time.

> Apple makes overpriced crap. Stop buying it. Vote with your dollars.

I think the market is voting with their dollars. So far, the dollars are saying that people ("iSheep" in some people's parlance, maybe?) are willing to pay more for things that are well thought out and pleasant to use, because apparently their time and mental effort have significant value to them. Or maybe it's like jewelry, or buying a show-off BMW when a beater Civic would get you there just as fast, given the speed limits.

I owned a Civic, and I'd never buy a BMW, but I don't go around being offended by people who choose to buy them. And the iPhone or the Macbook laptops are the single best-selling products in their categories - the Civic in volume, while being pitched at the BMW price point. They must be doing something right, no?

If Apple's sales collapse over the transition to wireless headphones, the market will have spoken in a way that Apple won't be able to ignore. Just like they wouldn't have ignored market signals that told them removing floppy drives was a bad idea. Or removing VGA ports. Or removing Ethernet from laptops. Or removing optical drives.

I'm not sure why you think your value judgements ("overpriced crap") are right for everyone else too ("it was all a marketing ploy that you fell for"). Treating customers as idiots is really not how Apple got to where it is.
posted by RedOrGreen at 1:37 PM on September 6, 2016 [8 favorites]

I've been in the Apple ecosystem for 35 years now. Windows 10 and the Windows phone both look amazing. If Apple didn't have my entire life, I might change both.

I'd have to say that the combo of 10 and 10 mobile - now both have evolved, with satisfyingly regular builds - is weirdly satisfying: there's a slightly homebrew-with-a-dash-of-corporate caution to the wind that I've been legitimately enjoying since last autumn. My company iPad is something I only pull out with extreme reluctance and I just sag in the face of its impossibly dated, walled-garden interface.

I nail my Windows colours to the mast.
posted by specialbrew at 1:51 PM on September 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

Apple is not in the business of selling well-engineered devices. They are in the business of selling expensive, breakable devices that require you to buy proprietary, exclusive, expensive accessories in order to make everything work as well as a similar device of another brand that costs half as much money.

I mean, look at how people are spinning Apple's decision as "where technology is going", when the fact of the matter is that you will now have to spend hundreds of dollars on new accessories to get the same capability as the stuff you can do today. That's not an improvement. It's not even an advancement. It's a step back. Just like getting rid of multiple ports was a step back, just Iike being the only phone without Gorilla glass was a step back, just like getting rid of the optical drive was a step back. Every single iteration, Apple charges you more money to do less with your device. And if you've already sunk your electronics investment into the Apple ecosystem, then pretty soon you won't HAVE a choice but to upgrade to Apple's latest piece of shit because you won't be able to find cables anymore, or get the battery replaced, or some other easily rectified item that Apple refuses to do because they'd rather you be forced to spend more money on their devices and accessories.

Mehhhh.

Firstly, i fix devices. Not as much as i used to, but i've been repairing everything i could open with a screwdriver since i was a preteen. Every single iphone has gotten easier to repair. The first 3 generations were HORRIBLE. The 4 and 4s were really hard to replace the screen on. All the ones since the 5 come apart like a lego set, and can be repaired in less than ten minutes for all the basic issues(broken screen, battery, even a motherboard swap or bad camera). Most other phones are really terrible to take apart. Notably, basically everything by HTC and samsung are just gluefests. The reason most repair shops predominantly advertise iphone repairs isn't because people buy more iphones, it's because they're the easiest to do quickly and turn a profit on therein. The parts aren't even really more expensive(go look at how much a galaxy s7 display costs vs an iphone 6s...)

Second, i've priced and checked out my fair share of replacements from all the big OEMs every time i've needed a new laptop. Once you pick out similar specs of the nicer macs(the air is an abject ripoff, i'll admit) it becomes a tossup within $100 or so. The competitors also almost universally have sealed in batteries, stupid screws, glued together bits, etc. Go look at something like a dell XPS compared to the macbook pro, or the similar lenovo models, or the HPs, or... And the actual casing, trackpad, and general chassis always feels a little bit more solid on the macs. Others have caught up, but not completely.

The whole industry is at about the same place right now, honestly. Basically everything you buy you'll have to unscrew something to get the battery out. Are there sort of "legacy" designs like the chunkier thinkpads that give you optical drives and pop out batteries and expansion bays and such? Yes, but you basically always sacrifice specs and start paying well... Apple or worse prices to get it. You can spend $2000 on a thinkpad with a slightly lower res screen, and crappier CPU and GPU than the basic 15in macbook pro that costs the same.

Will some people want this? Yea, but it's a niche model... and it has limitations.

I will make utterly no defense of imacs or apple desktops in general though, fuck that shit. A $1500 computer shouldn't have a spinning hard drive in 2016. Hell, a $500 one shouldn't. And they downgraded the mac mini in the latest generation(over a model introduced in 2012, 2012!!!), and the mac pro is at least partially stupid as hell, etc.

But i will absolutely defend iphones, ipads, and the macbooks bar the air as being a different color of processed cheese product everyone else is selling for about the same prices. And in some ways, especially with the phones, they do better. Shit, basically every brand that had a removable battery phone in their main lineup has dumped it over the past two years. It's just not really that salient of an argument anymore.
posted by emptythought at 1:54 PM on September 6, 2016 [6 favorites]

I haven't had one of the new style ones last more than 6 months unless it just sat in a drawer unused. The one that just sits on my desk at work and never goes anywhere is splitting in like 3 places.

I have a lot of issues with my iPhone 6 but the cord isn't one. Still on the same cord that came with it, and I plug in it everyday. Anecdata!
posted by entropicamericana at 2:27 PM on September 6, 2016

A new stack would certainly make the most sense from an Apple culture and history point of view, but it would make CarPlay a little more complicated. I'd give even odds on either that or BT.
posted by bonehead at 3:14 PM on September 6, 2016

Why not both?
posted by Yowser at 3:16 PM on September 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

Everyone is assuming it will be bluetooth, but what if they announce a whole new wireless stack, one that actually has decent sound quality.
Then they could sell 'Apple wireless' equipped Beats headphones as a pricey accessory.

This is exactly what Business Insider thinks will happen. That said, this sounds like an even worse idea, if for no other reason than it's very likely going to be a proprietary spec, and it'll just erode Bluetooth acceptance and cause confusion (especially if Beats headphones start using that spec).
posted by chrominance at 3:44 PM on September 6, 2016

I'm willing to bet that even if the new iPhone has a proprietary wireless spec, it will still work with regular Bluetooth headphones.
posted by ejs at 4:02 PM on September 6, 2016

That's an interesting thought — AirPlay-branded wireless headphones? Maybe as a more robust standard than "it'll be great in 18 months" Bluetooth? I could see it being treated as a companion to Bluetooth in said headphones, for graceful fallback, especially if it involves new phone-side hardware.
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:50 PM on September 6, 2016

I would bet strong money on something equivalent to aptx, but apple-y.

As in, it will ride on either bluetooth or wifi direct(like airplay), and not be its own standard entirely. Normal bluetooth audio and wifi direct/wifi streaming will work normally. This will just be another silly codec standard... but probably the one that suddenly every manufacturer is adding.

(I'm still bitter, btw, i own i think 3 bluetooth audio devices with apt-x i've never gotten to use it on because not all android devices support it, and no apple devices do. it really does work great, i've tried it on other stuff!... it's just totally proprietary).

Also as an anecdata item: i bought super duper awesome mega good H/K bluetooth headphones, mostly on the premise that they worked wired or wireless. But they take a stupid USB>headphone jack charging cable like the ipod shuffle... which H/K wont sell me now that i lost it. I've been trying to figure out the pinout to make one... but god dammit. I also had another pair of wireless headphones where the charging port imploded.

I mean i've broke a ton of headphone cords over the years, and many of them were overpriced proprietary crap... but just ugh. USB or gtfo.(i would also accept lightning, from an apple branded/cobranded "made for iphone!" product)
posted by emptythought at 5:04 PM on September 6, 2016

Funny that you should pick two examples that were made-up controversies, both quickly shown to have afflicted basically all other phones just as much, if not more. Citation needed.
posted by gizzmo at 6:10 PM on September 6, 2016

Sorry, that should have read (objective) Citation Needed.
posted by gizzmo at 6:17 PM on September 6, 2016

Without headphone wires visibly protruding from my head, how will I signal to creepers that I want to be left alone?
posted by batbat at 6:43 PM on September 6, 2016 [5 favorites]

go look at something like a dell XPS compared to the macbook pro, or the similar lenovo models, or the HPs, or... And the actual casing, trackpad, and general chassis always feels a little bit more solid on the macs. Others have caught up, but not completely.

eh, I've never spent more than $500 for a laptop and all of mine are fixable with just about any component (beside the mobo and other soldered on pieces) that fits into the chassis. dropping in RAM/an SSD/a wifi adapter is pretty simple and you don't have to match component specifications like you do with driver limited Apple products. unless, of course, you're booting Windows on it then I dunno if $100 is a premium worth paying for a slightly nicer feeling unibody that has a middle-of-the-pack hardware failure rate
posted by runt at 6:47 PM on September 6, 2016

Jason Snell: What to look for at Wednesday’s Apple event
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:04 PM on September 6, 2016

There exist Bluetooth headsets that last for 8-12 hours on a charge. Despite having such a set, I still use wired earbuds. And despite my phone having a gaping hole for the 3.5mm jack, it will still operate normally when dunked in a bathtub (conformal nanocoatig and short circuit protection on the exposed connectors for the win, I guess?)

The proble with any wireless audio (or video) is that uncompressed audio and video are simply too large to send over Bluetooth or even wifi or any other standard that uses a reasonable amount of spectrum. It has to be compressed. That means recompressing audio that was decoded from a compressed source. There is always some loss inherent in that process. Original BT stereo (A2DP) used a compression algorithm called SBS. It kinda sucked. aptX is the new one, but it kinda sucks too, just less. Plus, there is an unavoidable battery life hit from doing the work of compression and decompression. Sadly, it's more energy intensive than the amplifier for the wired headphones is, so you get worse battery life also.

Sometimes the trade-off is worth it, but sometimes it isn't. Having a choice is nice, especially when it doesn't involve proprietary shit that is almost always overpriced. You can get decent (branded, not generic) wired earbuds for $13 that have a microphone and call control buttons. There is no way in hell you could sell a set with a lightning cable for that. Licensing fees alone would eat up a large part of the retail price.
posted by wierdo at 7:24 PM on September 6, 2016

The proble with any wireless audio (or video) is that uncompressed audio and video are simply too large to send over Bluetooth or even wifi or any other standard that uses a reasonable amount of spectrum. It has to be compressed. That means recompressing audio that was decoded from a compressed source. There is always some loss inherent in that process.

This isn't true if you have the right bluetooth stack in your phone and a car head unit that supports mp3/aac over bluetooth like my Pioneer does. I don't know of any headphones that have the ability to bitstream mp3/aac but they may exist.

Personally I can't tell the difference between APTX and flac so I've never really cared.
posted by zymil at 7:40 PM on September 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

"The proble with any wireless audio (or video) is that uncompressed audio and video are simply too large to send over Bluetooth or even wifi or any other standard that uses a reasonable amount of spectrum. It has to be compressed. That means recompressing audio that was decoded from a compressed source."

Huh? Bluetooth 1.2 only supports 721kbps - but Bluetooth 2.0 supports 3Mbps. Bluetooth 3.0 and up fudge it a bit by using the Bluetooth bit ("Classic") to set up an ad-hoc low-power point-to-point WiFi connection ("AMP") for the "High-speed" part, but even ignoring that there's still more than enough bandwidth for 2 channel uncompressed audio (~1.5Mbps) + framing/packet/bursting/etc overheads.

"Original BT stereo (A2DP) used a compression algorithm called SBS. It kinda sucked. aptX is the new one, but it kinda sucks too, just less."

Not quite. Those are just the mandatory audio codecs in the Bluetooth specs; part of what needs to be implemented to call yourself "Bluetooth". Vendor-specific stuff - like compressed audio (e.g. MP3/AAC/HE-AAC/FLAC/ALC), or even uncompressed audio - has always been allowed.

That said, if they do go all Bluetooth headsetty they'll most likely use that high speed AMP connection I glossed over above - which gives them 25-55Mbps to play with. Because the Classic bits of Bluetooth are shit ("No fast reconnect? Really? C'mon!"), while the LE & HS bits are quite nice…
posted by Pinback at 8:20 PM on September 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

Nonstandard "foo over Bluetooth" is useless to me and anyone else who gives a shit about interoperability. And I suppose that technically recent Bluetooth versions have the bandwidth for uncompressed audio, but the more bandwidth actually used the less likely it will work in the real world where you and everyone around you are all competing for radio time. It will end up like 2.4GHz WiFi in an apartment complex: completely unreliable shit.
posted by wierdo at 8:53 PM on September 6, 2016

Can you imagine being in a subway car along with 30 other people all using uncompressed BT audio.
posted by Mitheral at 9:07 PM on September 6, 2016

Funny that you should pick two examples that were made-up controversies, both quickly shown to have afflicted basically all other phones just as much, if not more.

[Objective] Citation needed.
posted by gizzmo

Well, here's one to start, and another, if you're interested in the non-story that was Bendghazi, or if you're more of an Antennagate sort, there's always this collection of excerpts from other smartphones' manuals suggesting that a diminished signal caused by covering the antenna with your hand might be something caused by the science of radio transmissions, and not simply because Apple buries fake dinosaur fossils in order to trick us all into straying from the path of righteousness.

Incidentally, in the case of the latter, Apple went on to design later phones with a dual-antenna setup that is almost impossible to hold in such a manner unless you're really trying to in order to, I guess, prove a point.
posted by DoctorFedora at 9:36 PM on September 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

I mean, it's not especially hard to track this stuff down, though I suppose there's that whole phenomenon of "confirmation bias" going on when it comes to hearing stuff that reinforces the narratives we tell ourselves.

It mostly just gets annoying, because I enjoy using Apple's products overall (and tend to prefer them to the alternatives), and yet every time they come up it's like 30% of the population just suddenly turns into the pumpkin spice guy
posted by DoctorFedora at 9:47 PM on September 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

"Nonstandard "foo over Bluetooth" is useless to me and anyone else who gives a shit about interoperability."

Cool. Umm … don't buy one, I guess?

I mean, no-one's forcing you to buy one, or accept that it's the best thing ever, or even asking you to agree that it's a great idea. You are free to choose whatever you want, at least until President Trump is elected (and we all hope he isn't…).
posted by Pinback at 10:13 PM on September 6, 2016

I don't know of any headphones that have the ability to bitstream mp3/aac but they may exist.

Anecdata, but I've had h/k ones since... 2013? 2012? That do both, and apt-x, and...

Some bog standard Swiss Army knife chipset will likely become common in even the cheapest headphones if this takes off a bit more. I already see apt-x+mp3 ones at the tjmaxx type bargain stores for like $25 now...
posted by emptythought at 10:17 PM on September 6, 2016

Yeah, plenty of them do. I mean, it might be hidden away under a generic "A2DP support" statement - but that's just the transport protocol. The actual codec can be anything, and MP3 & AAC support are very common.
posted by Pinback at 10:28 PM on September 6, 2016

Anecdata, but I've had h/k ones since... 2013? 2012? That do both, and apt-x, and...

Good to hear. Its really odd at how bad non-chinese manufacturers are at listing codec support. I dug around a few years ago and had to give up.
posted by zymil at 1:11 AM on September 7, 2016

Oops. Yeah, dual camera, no headphone jack.
posted by maudlin at 9:52 AM on September 7, 2016

The event has started, but right now it's just Apple Music so nothing of interest.
posted by Artw at 10:09 AM on September 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

Wait.

MARIO and Nintendo.
posted by Artw at 10:10 AM on September 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

Livestream coverage of the presentation, which seems to be the most up to date.
posted by ZeusHumms at 10:10 AM on September 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

Well that's one way of having something to talk about other than the headphones bullshit, have Shigeru Miyamoto up on stage.

My prime interest in this event remains discovering how awful the dongle experience will be though.
posted by Artw at 10:13 AM on September 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

Miyamoto is a great coup
posted by dis_integration at 10:14 AM on September 7, 2016

Walt Mossberg: So is this the first Nintendo player that costs $800?
posted by bonehead at 10:15 AM on September 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

iPhone 7 announced with water resistance
posted by Artw at 10:19 AM on September 7, 2016

Heh. Apparently they just invented Google Docs.
posted by Artw at 10:24 AM on September 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

Ha! Apple had an official Twitter up for a little bit, with a picture of the iPhone 7/7+. The first comment lamented the fact that Harambe didn't live to see Apple's official Twitter.
posted by rp at 10:24 AM on September 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

Apple Watch 2 is not only water resistant, they are claiming you can swim with it.
posted by Artw at 10:39 AM on September 7, 2016

Hah! Hermes apple watches. Soon to be appearing on richkidsofinstagram
posted by dis_integration at 10:45 AM on September 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

it's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none.
posted by entropicamericana at 11:02 AM on September 7, 2016 [7 favorites]

NONE MORE BLACK.
posted by Artw at 11:03 AM on September 7, 2016 [5 favorites]

And yet, they also added ... black.
posted by ZeusHumms at 11:04 AM on September 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

jonny ive is actually hotblack desiato you heard it here first
posted by entropicamericana at 11:04 AM on September 7, 2016 [4 favorites]

Fortunately the entirely back seemless surface will have great haptic feedback.
posted by Artw at 11:05 AM on September 7, 2016

So I heard you like cameras... /xzibit-apple
posted by dis_integration at 11:13 AM on September 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

Oooooh. Bokeh. They know their market segment.
posted by bonehead at 11:18 AM on September 7, 2016

Dongle is included in the box!

Lets hope there's a $3 knockoff on amazon/ebay soon, because holy shit am i going to lose that thing in less than a week.
posted by emptythought at 11:26 AM on September 7, 2016

The adapter is nice and small. But no usb-c passthrough!

Also, don't call yourself courageous for selling a thing.
posted by dis_integration at 11:26 AM on September 7, 2016 [3 favorites]

Lmao they're selling it as this jack is like super old amirite?
posted by emptythought at 11:26 AM on September 7, 2016

AirPods ad is super sexual. Or maybe that's just me.
posted by dis_integration at 11:29 AM on September 7, 2016

i called it i called it, they're totally doing some apt-x type wireless standard, and they totally cloned earin, although i doubt with that level of quality. They're also sort of dorky looking and big?
posted by emptythought at 11:30 AM on September 7, 2016

ok i will admit the shared auto-pairing among your other devices is pretty cool if you own an ipad/mac laptop
posted by emptythought at 11:31 AM on September 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm deeply skeptical of AirPods, because so far no Apple earbuds have stayed in my ear while I walk. But that auto-pairing wireless feature looks great. Maybe the "affordable" Beats-X...
posted by RedOrGreen at 11:36 AM on September 7, 2016 [4 favorites]

Lmao i'll shut up now, but Casey Newton at the verge: "AirPods: experience the style of Google Glass, but on your ears"
posted by emptythought at 11:38 AM on September 7, 2016 [7 favorites]

5 hours battery life, so that's about 3, right? Sigh.
posted by Artw at 11:46 AM on September 7, 2016 [3 favorites]

Thinking more about it, it really doesn't matter if the implementation of backwards compatibility is bad or not. Most people who currently have an iPhone will buy a new iPhone at some point simply because of the app ecosystem. Ain't nobody out there who want to rebuy all their shit. Even if they lose the pack-in adapter and have to buy another they'll be money ahead. Same reason there's no way in hell I'll switch to an iPhone even now that they have decent size screens for those of us not afflicted with Trump hands.
posted by wierdo at 11:51 AM on September 7, 2016

Should have nicknamed the A10 cpu the 'brrrrrrrt'
posted by ZeusHumms at 11:54 AM on September 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

Airpods will be $159. That’s just over $4500 per year, conservatively assuming a family loss rate 230% greater than our wired earphones.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 11:55 AM on September 7, 2016 [10 favorites]

$159 on those wireless airpods. That's more than what my next android phone will probably cost.
posted by KHAAAN! at 11:56 AM on September 7, 2016 [8 favorites]

So, with the new adapter, can someone charge their phone while listening to wired headphones?
posted by I-baLL at 11:58 AM on September 7, 2016

Well, I think we will remember this presentation for the metric by which all future graphics advances will be judged: how many flying monkeys can you render simultaneously?

This generation comes in at 400 SRFMs.
posted by RedOrGreen at 11:58 AM on September 7, 2016 [5 favorites]

Man this company sure presses its luck on how much $$ consumers are willing to throw away on the ever-growing list of soon-obselete or easily-losable items that also require charging.
posted by sylvanshine at 12:00 PM on September 7, 2016

Courage, people. Courage.

*facepalm*
posted by gwint at 12:01 PM on September 7, 2016 [4 favorites]

Wait. That's it? No macOS Sierra? No new Macbook Pro? I think they need more courage. Magical courage.
posted by dis_integration at 12:01 PM on September 7, 2016

Also i'm really irked by both apple and a bunch of other sites heralding these as the "first truly wireless earbuds". Earin existed for like, a year at least. Ownphones, earols, a few others i've seen bumping around most of which are SMALLER.
posted by emptythought at 12:02 PM on September 7, 2016

5 hours battery life, so that's about 3, right? Sigh.

Don't worry, you'll lose them before that matters.
posted by kmz at 12:02 PM on September 7, 2016 [8 favorites]

I assume then that the headphone tech is proprietary and that no one can manufacture wireless headphones for Apple shit without their consent?
posted by sylvanshine at 12:05 PM on September 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

They look eminently losable if my experience with bluetooth headphones is anything to go by.

I'm surprised they don't have a connecting mitten string at least. Or maybe they view that as an aftermarket opportunity.
posted by bonehead at 12:07 PM on September 7, 2016

sylvanshine: Bluetooth still exists.
posted by SansPoint at 12:08 PM on September 7, 2016

I seriously doubt they are going to remove Bluetooth headset support.
posted by wierdo at 12:08 PM on September 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

If the airpods have BT and tons of smarts, couldn't an app be created to help find them?
posted by ZeusHumms at 12:08 PM on September 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

> I assume then that the headphone tech is proprietary and that no one can manufacture wireless headphones for Apple shit without their consent?

You can buy wireless headphones for iPhones today, starting around $20 for something with decent reviews, apparently.
posted by RedOrGreen at 12:09 PM on September 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

Guess my next phone is the iPhone SE or an Android.
posted by Yowser at 12:12 PM on September 7, 2016

(Re bluetooth: Makes sense, momentary lapse on my part. I'm not an owner.)
posted by sylvanshine at 12:12 PM on September 7, 2016

Also, anyone remember these? They'll just quietly discontinue the airpods in like 6 months or a year when no one buys them.

Or they'll become a packin cheapo item that's only $29-39 and comes with the phones.
posted by emptythought at 12:13 PM on September 7, 2016

Hah! Hermes apple watches. Soon to be appearing on richkidsofinstagram

nothing new actually, just seems like they only sold like four so everyone forgot.
posted by emptythought at 12:15 PM on September 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

That battery life is really, really, amazingly bad.

They'll sell a billion of them.
posted by Yowser at 12:27 PM on September 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

emptythought I had a pair until the cable broke when someone tried to mug me for my iPhone on the subway. They were awesome.
posted by SansPoint at 12:33 PM on September 7, 2016

Hah! Hermes apple watches. Soon to be appearing on richkidsofinstagram

nothing new actually, just seems like they only sold like four so everyone forgot.

Only four? Well at least they made a profit.
posted by dis_integration at 12:38 PM on September 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

So, with the new adapter, can someone charge their phone while listening to wired headphones?

The adapter shown only converts a standard headphone plug to lightning port. I also have serious concerns about the charging/listening to music stuff. When I was working I often charged my phone while using headphones. I really hope there's a way to charge and listen that isn't wireless. I also hate the idea of yet another thing that needs charging or can get lost easily. Plus I'm a person with tiny ears so many earbuds aren't comfortable or don't want to stay in - the Apple buds are fine. And I wear glasses so anything that hooks behind the ear may also be uncomfortable. Uhhhg.

Plus, at night I have sleep headphones and having to do some wireless option that might get lost in my bed seems super annoying - does anyone have any recommendations for comfortable wireless sleep headphones?

I love Apple, and I'll be honest when I say that I'll probably get the 7. I was possibly going for the SE since it's the same size as my 5s and I have super tiny baby hands - but there's just too much more that the 7 can do compared to the SE. In addition the camera specs are better - especially for the front facing camera.

But it's super frustrating. I'm Apple stuff all the way. I've grown up with it. I hate using my husband's Android phone because it feels all.. weird and not intuitive. Plus I love how easily all my stuff is synced up. But there better be a solution for charing+listening that isn't wireless.

And I totally agree - wireless just isn't there yet. Not to mention the drain on battery life for the device AND the headphones. It's like trying to include hologram technology or something. In the future I could see it as the "norm" but at this exact moment it time it seems like more hassle and has huge downfalls to tried to be rolled out as the baseline.

Signed - a 26 yr "old"
posted by Crystalinne at 12:42 PM on September 7, 2016 [3 favorites]

Much more space than a NOMAD, wireless, no gold LAMÉ.
posted by blue_beetle at 12:44 PM on September 7, 2016 [3 favorites]

I really hope there's a way to charge and listen that isn't wireless.

Apple sells a $50 lightning dock with audio out.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 12:47 PM on September 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

Apple will sell replacement iPhone 7 headphone adapters for $9 each
posted by 1970s Antihero at 1:15 PM on September 7, 2016 [6 favorites]

That is...surprisingly reasonable. Huh.
posted by R a c h e l at 1:19 PM on September 7, 2016 [3 favorites]

Maybe it's all my fault.

A year ago I got fed up with all my broken Apple cables and taped them up with electrical tape. Then I took a picture and emailed it to tcook@apple.com along with a rant about something was rotten in the house of Apple, that their cables are total shit. I told him I don't care that their aspirational products look like garbage when I have to resort to electrical tape and sugru to keep their them working for longer than a year, but maybe he cared enough to do something about it. I guess I should have explicitly asked for better cables instead of baby steps towards a cable-free product line.
posted by peeedro at 1:44 PM on September 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

ZeusHumms: "If the airpods have BT and tons of smarts, couldn't an app be created to help find them?"

Sure, but it'll only work as long as the battery last. Better discover you lost them fast.
posted by Mitheral at 1:53 PM on September 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

Looking forward to the Find My AirPods app, and its cousin, Find My Other AirPod.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 2:33 PM on September 7, 2016 [8 favorites]

Pretty sure those things join up in the middle them turn you into a cyberman.*

* or I guess cyberwoman, but that is a truly terrible episode.
posted by Artw at 2:37 PM on September 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

"I hate using my husband's Android phone because it feels all.. weird and not intuitive. "

Heh, Apple is deep into this realm now. How are people supposed to realize that you need to double click on the home button and swipe up to close apps? Or that rebooting the phone doesn't actually close or reset applications?
posted by I-baLL at 2:46 PM on September 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

From CNET coverage:

"The reason to move on. I'm going to give you three of them. Comes down to one word. Courage."

Wow, don't get hurt patting yourselves on the back.

Schiller said that the three reasons were firstly that the company had shown it could adapt Lightning to other uses beyond charging and data transfer

So? Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Oh wait, it's another opportunity to push your proprietary standard (for easily broken cables that frequently need to be replaced, from what I read).

secondly that there were other technologies competing for space and "maintaining an ancient connector doesn't make sense"

Other technologies are always competing for space. Too bad the iPhone is so absurdly large that you had no alternative but to remove a longtime standard component that you made no money from. And why aren't you addressing that boring old two-slot connector for alternating current in North America? "Ancient" doesn't always mean "bad."

and thirdly that the company wanted to explore wireless delivery.

Which already exists, thanks. Bluetooth is fine for connecting to my car. Although recompressing the data reduces the sound quality ... which is why I want the headphone jack for music. Go ahead and add your fancy Airpod capability, but leave my headphone jack alone.

Got my first iPhone last year. As nice as it is, I'll eventually go back to Android over this rather than buy a 7. I'm serious. Maybe the entire industry will eventually follow you on this one, but not with my help. I'm under no delusion that my one lost sale will make a difference to you, but I want you to know that. I'm not paying that much money for a product that you just broke, as far I'm concerned.

I don't want wireless for listening to classical music, I don't want an adapter, I don't want yet another thing to recharge, I don't want unnecessary battery drain, I don't want small individual parts that can get easily lost and are expensive to replace, and I don't need waterproofing. Don't make me use your product the way you want. Let me use it the way I want.
posted by pmurray63 at 2:49 PM on September 7, 2016 [3 favorites]

Ughhhhh.

There is no way I'm giving up my Grados for.....Beats.

What about square/paypal readers? I need to use them sometimes for craft fairs. There are people I know who rely on them constantly.

I have weird ears. iPhone earbuds already popped out without warning (a fan of urbanears medis) so now if they pop out I get to crawl around the floor of the train or bus looking for them.

Of course I'll lose 'em before I can reach the train.

And and and and all the other reasons I guess for the first time EVER I'm considering shifting to Android.
posted by Windigo at 3:00 PM on September 7, 2016

pmurray63,
Well, it sounds like you 100% don't want an iPhone 7 then, but will be happy with your new Android phone.
posted by blueberry at 3:01 PM on September 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

Heh, Apple is deep into this realm now. How are people supposed to realize that you need to double click on the home button and swipe up to close apps?

I kept inadvertently doing this when I switched recently and had to ask someone else who had owned one for a while how to reliably activate it. This eventually led me to finding their "manual" posted somewhere online, since the $0.25 to include a printed one in the box would've totally killed their margins.
posted by indubitable at 3:23 PM on September 7, 2016

Here is how I suspect this will go. People will just leave the adapter attached to their headphones. Some people will go wireless, some will need to buy another adapter or two. And mostly it will be fine. Every now and then you'll want to charge your phone while you listen to music, and you'll sigh and charge in silence. Or you'll forget your headphones and borrow some off a co-worker, but you don't have your adapter, like that time someone gave you a USB drive to get some files off but you didn't have the adapter for your macbook. So mostly it will be okay and every now and then it will be a little bit shit.

Then a year from now everyone will be like "See, apple was right, it was great" and you'll be like, "um, I guess? It's still a bit annoying sometimes".
posted by markr at 4:04 PM on September 7, 2016 [4 favorites]

blueberry: Oh, I have frustrations with the Android world, too, believe me. But here I was coming around to the idea that maybe the iPhone really is better and worth the extra cost -- and now Apple has made this obviously terrible decision, and bragged about how smart it is and their courage in doing so. Nuts.

While some individuals may not consider it a big deal -- which I get, not everyone uses their phone the same way -- does anybody think that this is an affirmatively good idea? (Besides David Pogue.) Was any user saying, "This iPhone could be really great if it wasn't for this headphone jack"? Was its presence bothering anyone who didn't use it? Eliminating it isn't necessary for waterproofing. And we're well beyond the point of diminishing returns when it comes to reducing thickness and weight, I'd argue.

This eventually led me to finding their "manual" posted somewhere online, since the $0.25 to include a printed one in the box would've totally killed their margins.

Instructions are so 20th century. And everything is so intuitive these days. (/sarcasm aimed at a lot of businesses, not just Apple)
posted by pmurray63 at 4:13 PM on September 7, 2016

My main fear is that Android manufacturers are going to follow suit and take the headphone ports of their phones too. They all did that with removable batteries and SD cards over the past five years making Android phones are just as sucky as iPhone in those respects.
posted by octothorpe at 4:30 PM on September 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

* or I guess cyberwoman, but that is a truly terrible episode.

She was a cyber queen!
posted by ActingTheGoat at 4:47 PM on September 7, 2016

My main fear is that Android manufacturers are going to follow suit and take the headphone ports of their phones too.

June 10, 2016: The Moto Z has no headphone jack
The first major new flagship to launch in the US without one

...Most likely, Lenovo's motivation for ditching the headphone jack is the same as that of Chinese rival LeEco, which already made the change with its 2016 lineup. LeEco's president of R&D Liang Jun explained to The Verge that his company was driven by the desire to promote the greater clarity and quality of digital audio via the USB-C port.

Why did LeEco ditch the headphone jack?

...What prompted you to remove the standard headphone jack? What's the benefit?

Liang Jun: We chose to discontinue the 3.5mm audio jack in our second-gen phones to create a better quality audio experience for everyone to enjoy. With the 3.5mm audio jack, the stereo sound was compromised due to poor sound channel separation and the sound quality was compromised due to a mismatch between phone and headphones. By replacing the 3.5 mm jack with a Type-C port, it introduces a new approach to mobile audio transcoding and transmission and delivers what we believe is a much better overall audio experience for consumers.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 4:58 PM on September 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

What a shock. The headphone jack thing turned out to be a non-story.

Who could have ever imagined it.
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:21 PM on September 7, 2016

Sure, mate.
posted by Artw at 5:36 PM on September 7, 2016

Well, what more do you want than an included adaptor and replacements for ten bucks?

Six months from now, everyone will have forgotten everyone got their collective hackles up over it.
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:42 PM on September 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

Probably the ability to charge while using a 3.5mm cable. It's pretty much essential for use in the car, especially given the way that lithium batteries work (Running them down too much degrades their capacity far more quickly than if you keep them topped off. My SO's battery turned to shit inside of a year because she couldn't be arsed to charge it)
posted by wierdo at 5:46 PM on September 7, 2016

Actually you're supposed to keep lithium batteries at 40%

I know no one does it, but there you go.
posted by Yowser at 6:05 PM on September 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

For long-term (> a week or 2) storage, yeah.

For general* day-to-day use, repeatedly charging them to 100% before using them normally until they hit their nominal end-point (e.g. 0% on the battery-meter) is one of the best ways to maximise life. Basically they don't like floating, they don't like self-discharging from full, and they don't like sitting flat.

(* i.e. not high-discharge rates as used in some applications like R/C gear, which are frankly nutjob-bordering-on-insane)
posted by Pinback at 6:49 PM on September 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

No, NiMH and NiCd batteries like to be fully discharged from time to time, but for lithium, it's the deep discharges that kill them (it messes up the anode much the same way as lead acid plates get sulfated, but to a lesser degree). Not topping them off is slightly better (which is why a nornal charge on a Tesla pack is to 90 or 95% and they discourage discharge below 20% or so), but the difference on that end is minimal.

What you shouldn't do with lithium chemistries is keep them at 100% for long periods of time, but charging it to full nightly or even twice a day and taking it off the charger and using only the first 60-70% of the charge is good enough for longevity on a device that will likely be replaced in 5 years or less. Any deep discharge is bad for the cell. Not as bad as it is for a lead acid, but it's still best to avoid it if possible. And especially don't leave it at/near zero for any length of time, as that is when the most damage is done. Heat is the other big enemy of lithium cells, so fast charging is worse than normal speed charging, although the algorithms in the Quick Charge chips that slow down the charge rate once the cell hits 80% mitigate that enough that you'll still get a good 3 years of reasonable battery life even if you only use quick charge. It is bad if you're planning to keep the device for 5 years or longer, though.

Auto manufacturers are more conservative because their packs have to last 8-10 years. The easiest way to think of it is in terms of cycles, where a cycle is 100% to 0% and back and 100% to 80% and back counts as a fifth of a cycle.

There is much confusion about this, even in some owner's manuals, because there is a lot of outdated advice out there that was good for other chemistries but is not good for lithium cells. The only reason to discharge a lithium cell to zero is if your device's battery meter gets confused and is telling you there is charge when there really isn't or its estimate of time remaining is way off. (You're not actually going to zero when you do that, but it's as close as you can get without pulling the cell out of the device, disabling the protection circuit and discharging it without the protection circuit in the battery itself in line, which you should never do if you don't like venting with flame)
posted by wierdo at 8:38 PM on September 7, 2016 [5 favorites]

Point is that on any competently designed phone, it will charge the battery to 100%ish and then run the phone from the charger, not the battery, while it remains plugged in, which is precisely what you want if you're in the car for an hour or two a day listening to music or podcasts from it. It's leaving it plugged in and at 100% for days or weeks on end that outweighs the benefit of reducing the cycle count on the battery.

And yes, for long term storage, 40-60% and in the freezer is the way to go, at least for a bare pack. I'm not sure how much a phone's display would care to be held at 0F for long periods of time, but the battery loves it. ;)
posted by wierdo at 8:45 PM on September 7, 2016

Not to pick on this comment or anything - I agree that everyone has different needs and expectations, and no one should buy something they are deeply unhappy with - but:

> Was any user saying, "This iPhone could be really great if it wasn't for this headphone jack"? Was its presence bothering anyone who didn't use it? ... We're well beyond the point of diminishing returns when it comes to reducing thickness and weight, I'd argue.

- people made this exact comment about the floppy drive and the optical drive and the VGA port and the ethernet port for Mac laptops. And while I would happily trade an extra mm or two of thickness on my phone for an extra half hour of battery, I can't argue that I do like the thinner laptop form factor, and my back thanks me every day for the weight reduction. Yes, I have to carry two annoying dongles in my travel kit, just in case I need Ethernet or VGA/DVI projection. And a USB stick. But that seems like a fair trade in retrospect.

Again, I'm not saying that removing the audio jack was overdue, or that it was bothering me. But based on Apple's track record, I'm not ready to write this off as a huge blunder.
posted by RedOrGreen at 8:57 PM on September 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

Also, not sure about veracity, but this sounds plausible:

Removal of iPhone 7 Headphone Jack Was Essential for Water Resistance, New Camera System

In a nutshell, the "driver ledge" for the display and backlight, traditionally placed near the camera, was interfering with the new camera systems in the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7 Plus, leading Apple to explore other placement options. It was moved near the audio jack, but it also caused interference with various components, including the audio jack itself, so Apple engineers toyed with the elimination of the jack altogether. When the headphone jack was removed, Apple realized it was easier to install the new Taptic Engine for the pressure-sensitive Home button, implement a bigger battery, and reach an IP7 water resistance rating, so the elimination of the headphone jack became essential for all of the other features in the iPhone 7.
posted by RedOrGreen at 9:21 PM on September 7, 2016 [6 favorites]

 Watch Series 2 is a whopping 0.9 mm thicker & 4.2 g heavier than Series 1, this is an unmitigated outrage. Why aren’t more people covering this?! /s
posted by entropicamericana at 5:48 AM on September 8, 2016

On the topic of that camera: I understand that the 7S has some extra room to play with and adding extra features to it was only a matter of time, but as someone with small hands and small pockets it's incredibly annoying to have to pass up that dual-lens camera. Yet again, companies are doing a terrible job of courting the high-end small-phone users.
posted by R a c h e l at 5:48 AM on September 8, 2016

I'm sure a lot of that has to do with the fact a lot of the small-handed, small-pocketed users aren't male, and as we all know women don't need tech and don't get tech. It's not as if we have money to spend or the ability to make purchasing decisions for ourselves or anything.
posted by sardonyx at 7:24 AM on September 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yet again, companies are doing a terrible job of courting the high-end small-phone users.

Some of the problem is space within the unit - you need to wait a generation or two for improvements in packaging to shrink down to a manageable size. The big slabs can simply handle more tech crammed inside.

The iPhone SE is a very nice unit for small phone fans - I have one for work, and it's as smooth and responsive as my everyday 6 Plus. I'm looking forward to the next iteration.

(Calling it now - iPhone SE/30! Followed by the iPhone Classic, the iPhone Classic II and the iPhone Color Classic. Then they'll completely lose the plot with the iPhone LC 520, until the Steve Jobs engram has been imprinted on an Apple iPerson - not an android, thank you very much - and the company rights itself.)
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:39 AM on September 8, 2016 [3 favorites]

pretty sure the numbers show phablets are more popular with women than men but whatevs
posted by entropicamericana at 7:40 AM on September 8, 2016

Cite? But hey, if you can't, whatevs.

Seriously, most of the women overwhelmingly use smaller phones. The reason I bought the phone I did was because of its small form factor. It actually fits in my hand and I can (just barely) squeeze it into the so-called phone pockets in most purses. As much as I would have loved better specs, usability was the driving force in my purchasing decision, and if I can't comfortably handle or carry a so-called mobile device, it fails on the usability front.
posted by sardonyx at 7:50 AM on September 8, 2016

I'm also Apple all the way down and I have a 2-year-old iPhone 6, but there's no fucking way I'm buying ANY phone without a headphone jack I can use while it's charging. Bluetooth is pants for audio.

The 6 still works fine, so I'll let it ride for a while, but I suspect I'll get a 6S just out of "obsolescence defense" at some point in the new year. I hope Apple does the right thing and backtracks on this, sorta like how they did with the SE, but if they don't I know know what the fuck I'll do. I *hate* Android aesthetically, and am really not into running a Google-phone given the privacy implications.

Fuck this.
posted by uberchet at 8:00 AM on September 8, 2016

Oh, also, under almost no circumstances will people like Gruber at Daring Fireball ever come down against a choice made by Apple. "Good" for them is defined as "what Apple does," it seems.

There's a big overlap, to be sure, but shit like this points out their fundamental shill-ness.
posted by uberchet at 8:18 AM on September 8, 2016 [3 favorites]

I don'g have small hands, but when TracFone recently discontinued 2G service for my flip phone, I took advantage of their upgrade offers to get an LG phone that I thought was neat, partly because it had halfway decent front and back cameras and partially because it was large and I like having screen real estate.

Boy, was THAT a mistake! It doesn't fit in any pockets of any pants I wear, I find it to be more of a burden to carry than I expected, and while I mostly use my phone as a device to make calls and send texts (even now that it's a smartphone with supposedly infinite possibilities), I basically just leave it in the glove compartment of my car when I actually go anywhere because the form factor is too large.

I really wish I'd gotten a smaller phone.

How do guys who own larger phones (this isn't even a phablet, just a large phone) deal with having to carry such monsters?
posted by hippybear at 8:36 AM on September 8, 2016

Some of the problem is space within the unit - you need to wait a generation or two for improvements in packaging to shrink down to a manageable size. The big slabs can simply handle more tech crammed inside.

Sorry, yeah, I meant to say that the 7S Plus has extra room to play with. Whoops. I understand the underlying reason, but it's still frustrating, yaknow?

It's a gender thing but it's also more than that - to my knowledge, Asian women in particular were early phablet adopters because drawing characters with a stylus was far easier than typing for various forms of Kanji. Some women do seem to prefer taking the big screen and keeping it in their purse (and using a stylus, maybe) - large phones do have their benefits after all. On the other hand, my boyfriend can fit his Galaxy Note and previously his iPhone 6S Plus in his front jeans pocket and there's just something upsetting about that. Team better-pockets-for-all.
posted by R a c h e l at 8:37 AM on September 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

Cite? But hey, if you can't, whatevs.

Can't find studies showing preference by gender, I can only say the overwhelming majority of the phablets I see belong to women. For example, 3/4 of the women in my office have phablet-sized phones.
posted by entropicamericana at 8:39 AM on September 8, 2016

Well it appears that you and I know very different groups of women with very different technological preferences. So we're both dealing with personal bias based conclusions and not "numbers."

I can understand why phablets would be popular if you needed to write Kanji. I can also see why they're better as an e-reader than my crappy, poor quality (seriously you can feel the plastic case coming away from the body of the device, and the phone has never been dropped or abused--not to mention the fact that halfway through phone calls it tends to drop the ability to carry my voice to the person on the other end) 5c, but that doesn't mean I haven't read hundreds of thousands of words on the tiny screen (likely to the detriment of my eyesight). I'm able to read that much precisely because I'm able to carry it with me, whereas I would find it much more difficult to carry a larger device.

Count me in as another person who wouldn't buy a phone without a headphone jack. I don't use headphones to listen to music, but I have a device which I need to plug into my phone's headphone jack as part of my working life. I can't do my job properly without it.
posted by sardonyx at 8:49 AM on September 8, 2016

How do guys who own larger phones (this isn't even a phablet, just a large phone) deal with having to carry such monsters?

I have a 6 Plus, and it alternates between shirt pocket and back pocket, and sometimes a pocket in my messenger bag. Winter, and it's easy, as I just tuck it in a jacket pocket, and they're huge.

If you're the shirt-tucked-in type, cases with swiveling belt-clips or holsters are pretty common. If you're not, belt clip at the corner of a front pocket is likewise popular. You will look like a doofus or regional service rep for a manufacturer of vaguely industrial purpose.

My wife just sticks it in her purse, but she's one of the bring-the-purse-everywhere types.
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:25 AM on September 8, 2016

Oh, also, under almost no circumstances will people like Gruber at Daring Fireball ever come down against a choice made by Apple.

If you think that Gruber is never critical of anything that Apple does, you don't really read him.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:19 AM on September 8, 2016 [8 favorites]

What about square/paypal readers? I need to use them sometimes for craft fairs. There are people I know who rely on them constantly.

Square is trying to push everyone to this wireless pod thing. The little headphone jack readers already work like shit half the time, i don't blame them. I used to use square kind of a lot(mostly for the purpose people now use venmo for with friends/roommates) and holy crap do i not blame them.

Watch Series 2 is a whopping 0.9 mm thicker & 4.2 g heavier than Series 1, this is an unmitigated outrage. Why aren’t more people covering this?! /s

No, not /s. The original watch is already too freaking thick and has crappy battery life despite that. It's thick compared to my chunky 70s diving watch. They didn't mention the battery life at all, so i'd bet it's still not great. I was really hoping for some kind of big improvement on thickness, or a BIG improvement on battery life. It seems like we got neither.

If i leave mine unplugged and don't even wake it up it's dead in less than two days. If i wear it, it basically makes it barely more than one day of use and is nearly depleted. And it's so thick some of my sleeves wont smoothly slide over it. The original pebble was a lump too, but everyone else seems to have figured this out. It looks like a total chunker compared to say, a pebble time. Wtf apple?

pretty sure the numbers show phablets are more popular with women than men but whatevs

I've had several discussions with a bunch of nerdy men and women i know about this and i have a theory.

I have HUGE Michael Jordan hands. Like, i've met one person in my entire life with bigger hands than me. Most laptops are smaller front to back than my hand-span.

All older iphones were hilarious hand-cramping small for me, and other guys i know with large hands. When the 6 came out, i bought the normal size. I tried out the 6+, and decided to go for it... But it was slightly too big to really use with one hand, but silly-feeling to use with one. It was an awkward tweener size. I ended up switching back to the smaller 6 because i couldn't get used to it. I tried the Nexus 6 to see if even bigger would work... and just found it silly.

Meanwhile, the women i talked to would need to two-hand either device. So if they're going there anyways, why not go all the way and get the bigger battery/extra space/nicer camera/etc?

Almost everyone i see using a 6+ is a woman, or someone will small hands. I mean, this is totally anecdotal, but i think it's a thing. Everyone with HUGE hands seems to have a 4.7-5.3in phone, for one handed usage reasons mostly.
posted by emptythought at 11:47 AM on September 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

Also: women (often) have purses, which are big enough to carry quite a large phone! Men don't have a broadly socially accepted accessory that fulfills the same purpose.
posted by miyabo at 11:53 AM on September 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

One thing I've noticed is that apparently no one in the world has average-sized hands. (Having paid attention to such proclamations since I started playing guitar decades ago)

(Most men be all "I can't even get my huge hands in this toolbox/glove compartment/toaster oven WTF")
posted by sylvanshine at 12:14 PM on September 8, 2016

How do people with small hands and big phones make phone calls? Mic + earbuds?
posted by indubitable at 12:17 PM on September 8, 2016

This $40 adapter (from Belkin, not Apple) can charge the iPhone 7 with your headphones plugged in.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 12:22 PM on September 8, 2016

Men don't have a broadly socially accepted accessory that fulfills the same purpose.

A blazer works fine in cool weather. In hot weather, cargo shorts work.

Wait, you said "socially accepted."
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 1:46 PM on September 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

I have a feeling that this year was a year where Apple was holding back. The 10 year anniversary of the iPhone is next year and I suspect that they're saving anything really special for next year. Though, I'm not sure what Apple will be doing with regards to innovation. Since the passing of Mr. Steve Jobs, not much has been done to really revolutionize their product line. Guess we'll have to wait and see.
posted by Fizz at 1:58 PM on September 8, 2016

I think the thing about the watch is that nobody actually cares about it except people whobhavevalreadt accepted its constraints. FWIW the 2 being waterproof makes it seem much cooler and more useful to me (though I doubt I'll be springing for one).
posted by Artw at 2:12 PM on September 8, 2016

> I think the thing about the watch is that nobody actually cares about it except people [who have already] accepted its constraints.

Yeah, I need to charge it every night, without fail. If I forget, 30+ minutes on the charger gets to the point that I can maybe scrape through the day. I've only ever gone into low power mode twice or maybe three times, and I've worn it daily - without a single break - since April 2015.

The notifications are very useful - no more dings or beeps anywhere, just taps on the wrist. Podcast controls while walking outdoors in winter are a plus - don't have to fish around for the phone. Wrist taps for turns while navigating is a nice touch. I've used the camera remote viewfinder for group photos (exactly twice). I ping my phone from my watch so that I can find where I put it down (the phone makes a piercing sound, even if it is silent mode) a few times a week. And I couldn't live without Due buzzing me repeatedly and persistently about to-do items that I've put off.

But it's those fitness circles that I find addictive, and the more history I have, the more useful it seems. Apparently I'm not alone in this usage pattern - the presentation pretty much went all in on fitness.

Sorry, that got into testimonial territory. But I really love this first gen thing. I wish it had better battery life, I wish it was faster, and I wish it was thinner (I know!). Series 2 is not for me, but Series 3, probably yes.
posted by RedOrGreen at 2:40 PM on September 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

Those folks who have "slippery ears" might benefit from earskinz. The rubber keeps them in better and also improves sound isolation.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:18 PM on September 8, 2016

I had trouble with the redesigned "EarPods" headphones for a little while at first, until one day, for some reason, I tried putting them in upside-down and got earplug-like perfect fits. It looks a little silly, but they're now basically my favorite headphones ever
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:00 PM on September 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

This $40 adapter (from Belkin, not Apple) can charge the iPhone 7 with your [lightning connector, NOT 3.5mm] headphones plugged in.
posted by tclark at 5:48 PM on September 8, 2016

"No, NiMH and NiCd batteries like to be fully discharged from time to time, but for lithium, it's the deep discharges that kill them (it messes up the anode much the same way as lead acid plates get sulfated, but to a lesser degree)."

Sorry, I should have been perfectly clear that I was referring to properly managed LiIon (& "LiPo") cells/batteries which include a decent charge controller / battery gauge (i.e. most laptop / quality consumer goods these days). Hence "until they hit their nominal end-point (e.g. 0% on the battery-meter)". At that point they're not deeply discharged; there's still just under ~20% or so of the cell/battery's electrochemical capacity left unused, and there's no/minimal loss of capacity or lifespan due to excessive discharge.

Likewise at the top end; no sane charge controller / fuel gauge made in the last ~15 years or so keeps them charged at the cell/battery maximum (like LA/SLA chargers do) - the usual method is to taper down the charging current once cell/battery's peak charge V until the terminal V drops to nominal O/C V, then go into a no-charge monitoring mode. At that point, the cell/battery holds about 95% of its potential electrochemical capacity, and again there's no/minimal loss of capacity or lifespan due to overcharging.

All that's a pretty simplified explanation, but it conveys the gist of what happens at either extreme of a properly implemented fuel gauge / charge controller's loop. I think the difference in our opinions / understanding is mostly down to what constitutes "fully charged" & empty - the electrochemical capacity & endpoint voltages, or the battery gauge reading. My earlier comment referenced the latter.

FWIW, for a few years I was involved in research & evaluation of LiIon cells & controllers as potential replacement for LA & SLA in standby & cyclic discharge uses. What I see people do with unmanaged cells/batteries these days is just insane…
posted by Pinback at 6:28 PM on September 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

Om Malik:With the iPhone 7, Apple Changed the Camera Industry Forever

tl;dr--all this obsessing over the putative obsolescence of your favorite set of headphones is burying the lede
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:24 PM on September 8, 2016 [5 favorites]

Pinback, I wish Samsung implemented their charging algorithms that way on their phones, but they don't. Running a Galaxy Swhatever flat repeatedly murders it's longevity. They will let you run the cell down below 3v (IIRC, most protection circuits kick in at 2.7 or 2.8, no?), which I consider somewhat insane and they cut off at 4.2-4.22 V, which is pretty freaking close to as full as full can be, as I understand it. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on that.

I haven't specifically tested other phones since I don't have the problem on mine and God knows I'd never use as Samsung Android phone myself. ;) (My SO has no choice, as she has to choose from a very limited list of employer approved devices, but it's been that way on four she's had so far)

Laptops, on the other hand, I have seen with much more conservative implementations, at least at the bottom of the discharge curve.

Regardless, I can't think of any good reason to discharge one's lithium cell to even a software reported zero rather than topping it off as convenient since they don't have memory issues.
posted by wierdo at 10:54 PM on September 8, 2016 [2 favorites]

DoctorFedora:Well, here's one to start, and another, if you're interested in the non-story that was Bendghazi, or if you're more of an Antennagate sort, there's always this collection of excerpts from other smartphones' manuals suggesting that a diminished signal caused by covering the antenna with your hand might be something caused by the science of radio transmissions,

You posted one review from a business magazine (surely no conflicts of interest with investment darling Apple) that cites Samsung as a comparison point. I wouldn't necessarily use it to defend my case though since the last Samsung I owned was a Galaxy S2 and I haven't owned another since, because they use WAY too much plastic in their phones. I don't appreciate phones that don't feel solid. Your next citation is from Consumer Reports, who is fairly reputable, and their test was better. But it failed to address videos from users shown bending their phones by hand, so I guess the assumption is what? They all lied or used video trickery? So we are into conspiracy territory here?

RE the antenna issue, your link failed to show any serious scientific investigation of the issue. Your link simply pointed out that some phone makers recommend not blocking the antenna. What isn't addressed at all was the effective change to the antenna's electrical properties by bridging two antenna sections using a conductive material (such as a sweaty hand). Not a single phone I've owned since the days of the black and white Blackberry has had this issue. Yet there is demonstrable evidence (including Apples free case giveaway for iPhone 4 users) that this was a unique problem.

Your effort to defend Apple comes across as a little desperate. You don't see Samsung or LG zealots running around throwing up links from random websites about how this or that issue about their preferred phone isn't really all that big of a deal. Why is that? Is it that nobody cares about those brands the way some people almost religiously follow and care about Apple? Is it that those brands have fewer problems? Or is it your sub-textual assertion that people just hate on poor, oppressed Apple SO MUCH that they just make up mean things to say about them for....what reason exactly? Not liking really nice boxes? Having some weird hate for glossy plastic/metal things?
posted by gizzmo at 12:28 AM on September 9, 2016

On a recent linguistics project I managed, I hired 40+ subcontractors. While not terribly technically demanding, it required installing and learning to use Aegisub, a video converter or two, and an online translation memory platform.

About a third of the people I employed did their work on Apple machines. I kept logs, and they required the vast majority of the tech support, and turned in most of the work I needed to send back for redos. We're talking fundamental grammar issues. Sixth-grade reading level stuff. Not using spellcheck, then complaining because I didn't make it clear that...spelling...was a job requirement. The Windows and [Other] people were, by comparison, pretty much issue-free.

I used to be live-and-let-live about Apple. Now? I'm so happy to hear they're taking away the headphone jack. Serves their customers right. You wanted it to "just work", didn't you? You were sick of taming your tech, weren't you? You thought it would be all magic and ponies and brushed aluminum, right? THIS IS WHAT YOU GET.

...No, I don't really mean that, but I'm in the middle of mopping up one of the messes an Apple person made. I guess what i'm saying is that if you're used to having to bend computers and smartphones to your will anyway, you're more likely to have the skillset to handle other kinds of problems too, and probably more likely to look askance at claims of "it just works", and probably the type of person who appreciates the real "it just works" of a headphone jack. My mom just got an iPhone and doesn't even know what Bluetooth is, fer chrissake. There are 24 hours in a day and I'm mortal. O Singularity, come rapture me away from these people.
posted by saysthis at 12:35 AM on September 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

gizzmo, just let me know where those goalposts are ultimately going to wind up and I'll get back to you sooner or later ￣\＿(ツ)＿/￣
posted by DoctorFedora at 12:54 AM on September 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

LOL at the post-iPhone 7 announcement rush of privileged people without families to support or mortgages to pay talking about how *gosh*, if you want to listen and charge at the same time, that's only $40. And if you want totally wireless (and totally easy to lose) ear buds, that's only $160, etc. Like, some of us have other shit to spend money on besides baubles to hook up to our overpriced and ultra-slim selfie cams.

I'll be happy over here with my cut-rate HTC that works with any $5+ set of headphones, any car with an aux input, any stereo with an aux input, any guitar/bass amp with an aux input, etc. And I won't need to run down my battery or buy some overpriced dock/adapter to do it.

For the upper-percenters that can afford to suckle at the the Apple-teat of accessory bloat, good luck with that.
posted by gizzmo at 12:55 AM on September 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

Gracious, for someone who claims not to care much about Apple's stuff, you really, really seem to care strongly about this stuff, dude. Maybe consider just not hunting down people talking about this topic that apparently makes you really angry? It turns out that, on the internet, there are in fact people who aren't talking about stuff you hate.
posted by DoctorFedora at 12:57 AM on September 9, 2016 [3 favorites]

Sorry, boss, but I don't hate Apple. They make some cool stuff. What is really dislike though is the fawning praise that Apple receives when they put out a phone. A normal, basic, similar to everyone else's, phone. Commodity hardware with some interesting bits attached. And every year, the week they do it is like World Cup or Super Bowl fever...what will they change this time!?! And every year, it's a phone. Nothing life changing or earth shattering.

Meanwhile, they'll charge a price premium for this phone, and everyone who buys one (a HUGE share of phone users) will happily pay this price premium for this magical phone that is 5% more magical than every other phone. And when they lock people into weird accessory upgrades, everyone praises Apple for how wise they are to anticipate that the users NEED this change, and Apple is amazing for figuring this out so far ahead of everyone else.

And at the end of the day, the user has a phone. Pretty similar to the other phones, even the good ones. Sure, they might be out $100-300 more for the phone, accessories, etc. But man, what a phone. The selfies are 10% sharper!

But at the end of the day, it's still just a phone. But when you stop to think about all the good that might have been done in the world with that extra $100-300 besides lining Apple's shareholders' pockets, what a thing that would be. If everyone took that money that goes to ONE company, or them and a handful of partners, and instead used it for other things, given to other companies, or hell, even given it to someone needy, what a different world we would live in.

So yeah, have fun sneering at us sitting around talking on our JC Penney phones, while you play and polish your shiny Nordstrom phones. But at the end of the day, I'm pretty happy about who I sent my dollars to. How about you? I guess you could say I Think Different.
posted by gizzmo at 1:33 AM on September 9, 2016

So yeah, have fun sneering at us sitting around talking on our JC Penney phones, while you play and polish your shiny Nordstrom phones.

I haven't seen any sneering about various levels, quality, price, or possibly class-level of phone ownership going on in this thread. I expect this comment will result in a large cut-and-paste job of quotes resulting from a very close reading of the 300+ comments which somehow can be construed to be taken in such a way. But overall, the discussion hasn't been about whether owning one phone or another is better or worse than owning any other. It's been about how this one phone maker has done a thing, and how other people might like another phone maker better because $REASONS or advice on various things about phones that are different and more-or-less useful to different demographics.

It's possible that the maxim to avoid threads that result in typing "your favorite band sucks" is something which can also be applied to cell phones.
posted by hippybear at 1:50 AM on September 9, 2016 [4 favorites]

Whether or not it can be boiled down to a class issue, this thread can easily be boiled down in other ways to reveal a lot of nonsensical brand loyalty:

Apricot is going to make your phone worse by taking away this thing that all phones have had for 20 years.
No, Apricot just knows what is best for the users and the market. It will result in better phones.
Hello, Apricot is taking you all for rubes. Feature X is a must have because Y, and Z.
I for one, praise Apricot for their forward thinking.
Apricot always makes the best stuff. If you don't like it, then you're obviously a bumpkin.
But Apricot is just taking more control over your user experience. How is that good?
Apricot knows what we need. How is that bad?
But in the past, Apricot has done these things that have not been good for users.
Yeah, whatever. That was all disproved as a Watermelon conspiracy, assisted by Apricot haters.
If Apricot drops feature X, then I won't get one .
If Apricot doesn't drop feature X to add feature U, then I won't get one.
But it costs $$$ to use feature U.
I'll just stick with Tangerine phones, they're plenty good.
You just don't like Apricot phones because of blah, rube.
Apricot phones are easy. Watermelon phones are hard.
I just don't like Apricot phones because I hate being screwed.
Um, watermelon phones do blah, which Apricot is just now getting around to.
Apricot phones and Watermelon/Tangerine phones are all good...pick what you want. Let's not have conflict.
But Apricot is junk, because blah.
Sorry, toots, your opinion matters like, not.
Yeah, well Apricot will be happy to take your money, just don't expect blah...
And so on.
posted by gizzmo at 2:23 AM on September 9, 2016

Anyway, to each his/her own. They're just phones. They will do cool stuff. They will crap out when you least expect it. They will break seemingly at the drop of a hat, but other times take a surprising beating and still work.

Personally, I will support the so-called underdogs for my phone needs. Competition is good for everyone. And the bleeding edge hurts on a budget. Plus, I'd rather use the money I save versus buying Apple products to use on other things. If you like Apple, great. Just don't treat it like you are leading a revolution, because it is just a phone.
posted by gizzmo at 2:32 AM on September 9, 2016

Not that I want to waste in to a bullshit doesn't wear (and I'm not accusing anyone here of thar, it just often devolves into it) "antennagate" was a legitimate issue relative to the way other phones have typically worked.

Apple had a pretty good idea to get the antenna in a better position for reception but fucked it up a bit by making it easy for users to bridge the antenna with other metal parts of the phone, making it not so great of an antenna while that was happening. Other manufacturers (andd apple previously) have generally used fully internal antennas that could be blocked by the bag of water that is the human body. That also has an effect on reception, but to a much lesser degree, and is a literally unavoidable side effect of not having an external antenna like phones had in the olden days.

So yeah, they fucked up, but it was one damn model out of how many? It's sort of ridiculous to still be talking about it in any context other than the few people who tried to say it literally wasn't a problem at the time. In the pre-smartphone era Samsung and LG couldn't make an antenna that got decent reception to save their life on literally any of their flip phones, but nobody was denying that Nokia and Motorola did a better job in that respect and nobody is talking about it today.

Thankfully, there is a lot less of that blind adulation these days, so get the fuck over it, maybe? It was what, 4 or 5 years ago now? Unless you're using it as evidence that Gruber may as well be Mr. Magoo when it comes to Apple, there seems to be little point any more. (I seem to recall him leading the charge on the "not a problem" brigade, never mind that bridging the 4's antenna caused somewhere near 10 times the signal attenuation that holding your hand over other phone's antennas caused)

Android gets plenty of press these days, even if Samsung gets most of it, so it seems like sour grapes to still be talking about it, except to laugh at certain people who had their heads up their asses half a decade ago.
posted by wierdo at 3:00 AM on September 9, 2016

Halloween Jack: "Om Malik:With the iPhone 7, Apple Changed the Camera Industry Forever

tl;dr--all this obsessing over the putative obsolescence of your favorite set of headphones is burying the lede"

The camera is the only reason that I'd want an iPhone; even the 6's is better than any android phone's camera. I'd still want my android phone for everything else but I'd love to have an iPhone for use as a camera.
posted by octothorpe at 4:56 AM on September 9, 2016

Apple is trying to tell me that taking away something that has worked just fine for years and years and replacing it with something else, of dubious merit, propietary in nature, and way more expensive to boot, is 'courage'.

I think the word they're looking for is hubris, or perhaps chutzpah.

That sums up Apple's behavior from the get-go, really. They get away with it because their products are generally pretty solid, and reality-distortion field salesmanship. You can make a good product and still sell it in a disingenuous way. Steve Jobs was a master of that kind of huckstering, and Tim Cook and Jonathon Ive et al are just carrying on that tradition, albeit with lesser skill, and none of Jobs's charisma.

Apple has always made a point of suggesting that, if you buy their products, you are just plain better than other people who don't. It's a common selling point marketers use, but boy, have they made it work for them.

I will never, ever forget something Tim Cook said in an interview, in response to why Apple doesn't make items that those with more modest means could afford. He said there are 'customers that Apple chooses not to serve', which has always struck me as corporate newspeak for 'fuck poor people and their pathetic little money'.

I appreciated that honesty, however veiled it was. It's always good to know where you stand with someone.
posted by KHAAAN! at 7:30 AM on September 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

gizzmo, you have very strong feelings about what phones people buy. Do your feelings extend to other product categories? Cars? Breakfast cereal? Soap? Soda? Why so much concern about how others spend money?

There is no "analog loophole" with digital music on a smart phone. That ship has sailed. The analog loophole was gone as soon as music went digital. Digital music has to go through a DAC to exit through an analog port. There's nothing to stop manufactures from implement DRM in the DAC if they so choose.
posted by LoveHam at 8:42 AM on September 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

There is no "analog loophole" with digital music on a smart phone. That ship has sailed. The analog loophole was gone as soon as music went digital. Digital music has to go through a DAC to exit through an analog port. There's nothing to stop manufactures from implement DRM in the DAC if they so choose.

I don't think you understand what the analog loophole means. It goes like this:

DRM is removed -> digital signal is converted to an analog one -> analog signal is recorded and digitized without DRM

The fact that the DRM is removed at the DAC rather than earlier in the process has no effect on the loophole. Once the signal is analog, the game is over. Even if the DRM removal were pushed all the way to the speakers, in theory one could use high quality speakers and microphones in a good acoustic environment to recapture the audio without DRM.
posted by jedicus at 11:58 AM on September 9, 2016

At some point, for audio anyways, you have to send a wave to a electromagnetic driver. Regardless of how one locks down the chain with DRM I can unsolder the driver and install a transformer feeding an audio in.
posted by Mitheral at 12:13 PM on September 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

Mossberg: Apple, the king of tech taste and daring, takes a breather

I think this is it. It's a 10% phone, 10% better, but mostly the same. Which, as Mossberg says, is a risk, particularly 2 years in a row. Is it worth getting a 7, a bit better, a bit faster, now if your 5 is perfectly functional, or could you wait a year?
posted by bonehead at 2:23 PM on September 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

T-Mobile is going to let me trade in my 5 for a 7 for $250 ($350 for a 128GB 7). That's less than an SE would cost me, so I think it's time to pick out a color...
posted by Huffy Puffy at 3:35 PM on September 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

My iPhone 5 is still blacker than black.

Always bet on black.

Hey remember when iOS 6 on the iPhone 5 was fast? Not even the newest iPhones are as fast as that.

Sigh.
posted by Yowser at 3:42 PM on September 9, 2016

beware if you buy the unlocked version: "consumers who buy the AT&T and T-Mobile version of the new phone are getting a version that doesn’t fully work with Sprint or Verizon." model/carrier compatibility page
posted by morganw at 3:57 PM on September 9, 2016

I think this is it. It's a 10% phone, 10% better, but mostly the same. Which, as Mossberg says, is a risk, particularly 2 years in a row.

I think there have been plenty of improvements to the inside of the phones over the past two years.

It feels like people complaining about how the "design" hasn't changed are missing the point. What are you looking for? It's a hunk of glass and metal that runs software. The exterior is largely irrelevant. No one cares that the current Porsche 911 looks like the one from 50 years ago. Or, actually, that's part of the appeal — each is instantly recognizable as a 911. The improvements have largely been under the hood. And I'm sure they don't feel the same to use despite having the "same design." If you have a distinctive external design that works well, there's no reason to change it for the sake of change. I'd be happy if Apple hadn't changed the "design" since the iPhone 4, if they had made the same improvements inside (screen enlargements aside).
posted by stopgap at 4:46 PM on September 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

> I'd be happy if Apple hadn't changed the "design" since the iPhone 4, if they had made the same improvements inside (screen enlargements aside)
Change 4 to 5, and I'm with you on this. To me the 5 / 5S was the perfect size and shape and hand feel. The 6, 6S, and now 7 - eh.

The improvements in the camera alone, at each annual bump, are pretty astonishing. They are limited by physics - and the stupid quest to make the phone ever thinner - but what they are packing into the camera unit (hardware + software) is really something. I bet the dual lens setup with optical image stabilization and multi-plane focus shows up on every flagship smartphone in a couple of years.

And the tech specs people seem pretty impressed by the high power / high efficiency 2/2 core setup in this generation.
posted by RedOrGreen at 5:36 PM on September 9, 2016

I don't think you understand what the analog loophole means.

I understand. I was responding to gizzmo's assertion that removing the headphone jack removes the analog loophole. I'm saying that music being in digital form gives the manufactures the ability to arbitrarily block the conversion to analog output, via the DAC, before it reaches the headphone jack, if they so wanted. So the headphone jack is only a tool in analog loophole if the phone and/or DAC manufacturer lets it be one.
posted by LoveHam at 5:56 PM on September 9, 2016

Hey remember when iOS 6 on the iPhone 5 was fast? Not even the newest iPhones are as fast as that.

I remember switching from my second Nexus phone because it broke (the first one, too!) to an iPhone 6Plus because Straight Talk abandoned unlimited, and Sprint offered it for dirt cheap, provided you buy an iPhone. ($50/month legit unlimited. Grandfathered in forever!)

It. Was. So. Fast. It's like suddenly discovering you could fly.

The first Nexus, a Samsung Galaxy Nexus, replaced my old school Motorola Droid, that I am sure I could fire up right now, put Cyanogen on it, and keep on trucking. The Galaxy Nexus died after a year and a half. The Nexus 4 with the glass front and back lasted about as long.

We're coming up on two and more than a half years. The 6 Plus is still that fast... but my work-related iPhone SE is faster.

I really like a lot of features Android phones have, I like jailbreaking and side-loading, and their usability is keen. But, man, Apple kit is sweeeet...

My current favorite word is doofus. Wearing the new wireless buds makes you look like a doofus. Jonny Ive doesn't fail often, but when he does, he fails hard. Get a bluetooth DAC and plug in a pair of Koss Porta Pros. I can guarantee you that you will lose neither the bluetooth DAC nor the Porta Pros if you shake your head too hard, and it will sound better than if your cans were plugged straight into the iPhone. If you are a jogger, look at it as an opportunity for another elastic arm-band to match.
posted by Slap*Happy at 6:27 PM on September 9, 2016

Jony giveth and Jony taketh away.
posted by metaplectic at 11:54 PM on September 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

Slammed In The Butt By My Smartphone's Missing Headphone Jack, by Chuck Tingle.

As a marketer for Pear Computers, Relm loves his job, but when you’re the leading innovators of smartphones and computers, the stress can sometimes be overwhelming. This year, however, Relm finds himself in the pickle of a lifetime when it’s announced that the new mePhone 7 does not support a headphone input.

Struggling to understand this bizzare choice, Relm follows a trail of clues deep into the world of living smartphones, ending up at an isolated cabin with a debatably obsolete sentient headphone jack named Bortel.

Now Relm is questioning the relevance of everything, including himself, and coming to terms with his own worth by way of a hardcore gay auxiliary port encounter.

posted by Nelson at 10:09 AM on September 10, 2016 [9 favorites]

My current favorite word is doofus. Wearing the new wireless buds makes you look like a doofus.

Doofus / Not Doofus
posted by fairmettle at 1:12 AM on September 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

AppleInsider's pleasantly snarky editorial debriefing media coverage of Apple's products launch.
posted by fairmettle at 1:33 AM on September 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

I bet the dual lens setup with optical image stabilization and multi-plane focus shows up on every flagship smartphone in a couple of years.

I haven't been paying much attention to phones lately, but optical image stabilization has been a thing in Android land since at least the LG G2 in 2013. Google claims the iphone 6 plus had it too.
posted by markr at 2:28 AM on September 12, 2016

Can confirm, the optical image stabilization works great on my 6+. I've shot photos of my 4 year old son that I was sure would turn out blurry, but they looked great.

I decided to spring for the 7 because the camera is attractive to me. I don't often use headphones, and when I do I use the ones that came with it, so the switch to the lightning connector is sort of a non-issue for me. I mean, I understand why people are annoyed with it, but it's not a deal breaker for me personally.
posted by Fleebnork at 8:21 AM on September 12, 2016 [1 favorite]

They're not done: Apple's next iPhone probably won't have a home button
posted by bonehead at 8:56 AM on September 13, 2016

Current one doesn't, either - it's a dummy sensor tied into the screen haptics. You can't actually push a button that depresses, just a spot on the phone that feels like a button depressing. Next iteration will show a virtual button on a bezeless, edge-to-edge screen when it senses your fingertip is near, and will use the haptics to mimic your finger finding a button for no-look operation. Pretty spiffy.
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:18 AM on September 13, 2016

Daring Fireball posted his review (spoiler: he likes it!). There's a really nice section on the new Home button technology, the one thing he doesn't quite like

The home button on both iPhones 7 no longer physically clicks. Instead, it’s a force touch sensor, and it uses the improved Taptic Engine to provide simulated click feedback.

While I'm here, Gruber goes on to a condescending thing about how Asian folks have a "superstition" about not using the home button, because it might wear out. But as he explains himself that concern is well founded: home buttons regularly wear out. I had to replace an iPad myself because the stupid button broke. Supposedly Apple has fixed this in more recent designs.
posted by Nelson at 9:22 AM on September 13, 2016

i have owned the iPhone 3G, the iPhone 4, the iPhone 5, and now the iPhone 6 and I have literally never had a problem with my home button.
posted by entropicamericana at 9:31 AM on September 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

I've had home buttons go a little soft after two years or so, and a screen replacement (by a third party) on my 5something completely killed the fingerprint sensor.
posted by Etrigan at 9:35 AM on September 13, 2016

From Ars Technica's review of the 7 and 7+:

Wired headphones are there for people who want a low-cost option or for people concerned about audio fidelity, but Apple’s intent is clearly to push more people toward wireless headphones. Another important piece of that puzzle is the W1 chip, an Apple-developed piece of hardware that will show up first in Apple’s AirPods and in a few pairs of Beats headphones.

To clarify, the W1 is not intended as a competitor or a replacement for Bluetooth—according to Apple, it is in fact a Bluetooth controller chip with some other Apple-developed proprietary additions. It’s designed to speed up and simplify pairing (it does) and stabilize Bluetooth’s sometimes inconsistent and shaky audio streams (it does). But it’s not meant to replace standard Bluetooth, and AirPods and any other W1 headphones will work just fine with anything that supports Bluetooth, including Android phones.

[...]

As much as I like the W1, it’s still not a slam-dunk wireless replacement for the 3.5mm jack. Apple has total control over the chip, and unlike Lightning, Apple tells us that it will not be licensing the chip out to third-party headphone makers. That could always change, of course, but for the foreseeable future it means that getting the best possible wireless audio experience on iOS means buying headphones from Apple. It puts Apple in exclusive control of the kinds of headphones you can buy and how much those headphones cost to buy, and so far they cost a lot more than most normal people are going to want to pay for headphones.

Anyone who wants something different has plenty of Bluetooth options to choose from, but you also have to put up with the same old Bluetooth pairing wonkiness and audio skipping issues. Likewise, you’ll have those problems if you pair AirPods with any non-Apple Bluetooth device.

So yeah, looks like an Apple play to make you buy more of their expensive accessories.
posted by indubitable at 11:14 AM on September 13, 2016 [2 favorites]

"So yeah, looks like an Apple play to make you buy more of their expensive accessories."

I hate the loss of the jack, but I think that's an oversimplification.

They ditched the jack for ivory-tower design reasons, and with little regard to folks who need it.

In a completely separate decision tree, they created this W1 thing that they are now declining to license for reasons that I can understand.

But as long as regular Bluetooth works with the iPhone, then there's no lock-in here. They're offering to sell you fancier headphones with proprietary extensions to Bluetooth, but that sounds like a bog standard "make it better" competitive innovation situation, not a play for lockin per se.
posted by uberchet at 11:31 AM on September 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

And should the rest of the industry see fit to make their own equipment work as slick as the new W1 enabled cans, Apple will rush to adopt it alongside their own.

In Japan, these small-market oddballs are known as "Galapagos tech" - tech that, isolated from the rest of the field, evolves in its own weird and cool way. Apple does Galapagos tech, it can chose to adopt, adapt or reject prevailing tech in common use, industry consensus be damned. It's always driven a certain segment of the tech-buying public right up a wall, but it's a prime selling point for me.
posted by Slap*Happy at 11:54 AM on September 13, 2016

"Apple does Galapagos tech, it can chose to adopt, adapt or reject prevailing tech in common use, industry consensus be damned."

I don't think that's true, either.

I mean, people SAY Apple is super hostile to standards and prevailing norms, but what they really mean is that they chose a proprietary connector for the iPod and initial iPhone, and then replaced that proprietary connector with a newer, better proprietary connector instead of just using mini- or micro-USB.

Nothing else about the Apple ecosystem that *could* be broadly compatible isn't, but obviously both OSX and iOS are replete with features and functions that may not work with, or be available in, other operating environments.

That's not "Galapagos tech." That's "building features."
posted by uberchet at 12:40 PM on September 13, 2016

So yeah, looks like an Apple play to make you buy more of their expensive accessories.

This is sarcasm, right?
posted by entropicamericana at 12:49 PM on September 13, 2016

I mean, I only ask because the text you yourself pasted pointed out that 1) wired headphones come with the phone, 2) any old Bluetooth headphones will work with the iPhone (the only caveat being that they are just as wonky as they would be on any other non-Apple phone).
posted by entropicamericana at 12:51 PM on September 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

No, I'm serious.

Here were the options on the 6S: You could plug into the 3.5mm port directly with any standard set of headphones or other audio sink (such as a car stereo) without having to get Apple's permission; you could use Lightning headphones but why bother when you have a 3.5mm port; you could use a Bluetooth sink that may work well or totally suck independent of whether it sounds good when the connection's working. So in terms of good experience, I would rank that: 3.5mm/BT/specialized Lightning peripheral, maybe giving BT a little more weight if you really don't like wires.

Here are the options on the 7: You could use your 3.5mm gear, but now you have to carry an extra piece of equipment around (dongle) to make it work; you could do away with the dongle but pay the Apple tax to get headphones that plug directly into the Lightning port; you could use general BT gear that sucks as much as it always has; you could upgrade your Bluetooth but pay the Apple tax to get Apple's special headphones. I would rank experience as: Apple BT/BT/Lightning/3.5mm+dongle (ignoring the obnoxious issue of having to keep your headphones charged).

So to me, it looks like Apple has reconfigured its design to ensure that whether you prefer a wired or a wireless solution, you need to pay them more to get the best implementation available. They did this on the Bluetooth end by inventing better but proprietary extensions (not hard to do when Bluetooth is a messy, complex standard that was designed by committee); they did this on the wired end by kneecapping support for the open standard.
posted by indubitable at 1:43 PM on September 13, 2016 [2 favorites]

"it looks like Apple has reconfigured its design to ensure that whether you prefer a wired or a wireless solution, you need to pay them more to get the best implementation available."

That's still not clear.

By all means, you can keep plugging your Grados in via the adapter. That's gonna sound better, I'll wager, than any Lightning headphone, because the set of companies that make truly great headphones is probably not going to overlap much with the set of companies that are willing to make headphones that work natively with the newest version of a minority player in the portable audio market.

Bluetooth is trouble, for sure, but there are genuinely decent BT 'phones out there, and they'll still work just fine.

Apple finding a proprietary way to make Bluetooth work better isn't lock-in behavior. It's just innovation.

You'll still get better sound with real headphones and a 3.5mm adapter.
posted by uberchet at 1:59 PM on September 13, 2016

So to me, it looks like Apple has reconfigured its design to ensure that whether you prefer a wired or a wireless solution, you need to pay them more to get the best implementation available.

The Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter is included with the phone, as are the Lightning earbuds. Nothing has really changed except for the inability to listen while charging without an additional purchase.
posted by entropicamericana at 2:59 PM on September 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

entropicamericana: "i have owned the iPhone 3G, the iPhone 4, the iPhone 5, and now the iPhone 6 and I have literally never had a problem with my home button."

Your update cycle can easily mean you aren't hitting the MTBF point. People skipping every second generation are going to put twice as much wear on the button.

indubitable: "So yeah, looks like an Apple play to make you buy more of their expensive accessories."

It's typical Embrace, Extend, Extinguish behaviour.
posted by Mitheral at 5:42 PM on September 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

Here are the options on the 7: You could use your 3.5mm gear, but now you have to carry an extra piece of equipment around (dongle) to make it work;

I'm going to stop you right there. I have had to order a lot of cables to make my kit work. USB-MicroUSB. Also external battery packs charged with a microUSB cable, but dispensing charge with either the USB-MicroUSB cable, or the USB-Lightning cable once I switched.

You have already dumped north of a quarter grand down the Apple Hole, and unlike Samsung's similarly-shaped Hole in your wallet, this smartphone won't explode.

O Noes. I may need to spend $45 on a goddamn Belkin accessory that allows charging and listening, one I can get direct from Amazon from an actual Apple Partner imported on the sly, 3-for-the-price-of-one, ten bucks, Prime ships Free.
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:45 PM on September 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

uh yeah that's great buddy, but i'm talking about the inconvenience of having to carry another accessory around with your phone everywhere to get it to work. they've deliberately degraded that experience to push you into buying their approved solutions.
posted by indubitable at 8:04 PM on September 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

Pal, anyone who's done any sort of serious work with these phones, i, A or W, has had to tote about a lot of miscellaneous stuff to get stuff done, from chargers to stylii.

OK. Let's take a step back. You care about your cans. You you know your shit from shinola. You have a lightning-enabled, DAC perfected headphone amp... wait. You don't?

Please excuse yourself from the discussion.

Otherwise, yeah, you'll need to shell out a coupla bux for the special connector cable to hook up the iPhone 7 to your Aux-In headset to charge while it spits out the hot beats, unless you want to take a few moments to figure out your head unit's crappy BlooToof. But who has that time?
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:21 PM on September 13, 2016

everyone knows that the switch to solid-state memory was a mistake for the industry — you just don't get the warm sound of a spinning hard disk anymore
posted by DoctorFedora at 10:48 PM on September 13, 2016 [5 favorites]

Slap*Happy: "Pal, anyone who's done any sort of serious work with these phones, i, A or W, has had to tote about a lot of miscellaneous stuff to get stuff done, from chargers to stylii. "

If you are even half way paying attention nowadays this isn't true. Every thing I own (Nook ebook reader, Android Phone, P&S Camera) interfaces/charges via MicroUSB. As does my last two phones, my spouse's tablet and ebook reader, two little portable speakers and my little remote control helicopter. I have half a dozen chargers/cables spread around for convenience but I pretty much use the single cable plugged into my laptop, the charger in my shop and the charger in my car. My car, shop and work radio all have a standard audio in jack. Last non microUSB device I owned* was my rage inducing Nano five years ago.

*Technically my dSLR has a miniUSB port but it doesn't charge via USB and the built in SD reader in my laptop is way faster than USB transfers so I'm never tempted to plug it in.
posted by Mitheral at 12:00 AM on September 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

So iOS 10 seems to be a bit of amused nag with some very irritating changes too. Music has gone all tinker-toy and I'm still habitually unlocking the wrong way and ending up in a mostly empty dashboard.
posted by Artw at 6:21 AM on September 14, 2016

They have not fucked up podcasts further though.
posted by Artw at 6:21 AM on September 14, 2016

"If you are even half way paying attention nowadays this isn't true. Every thing I own (Nook ebook reader, Android Phone, P&S Camera) interfaces/charges via MicroUSB."

That's absolutely not true for me. I've got a healthy mix of MicroUSB and MiniUSB. I think that's more the norm.
posted by uberchet at 6:40 AM on September 14, 2016

Micro-USB has been the European Union standard for charging cell phones since 2009. Most cell phone companies complied except, of course, Apple. They made an adapter back in 2011; the Lightning version is $19. This whole situation is being re-visited now with stricter EU rules coming in 2017, but it may be Apple can work around it all by including an adapter in the box.

I had a frustrating experience with Apple's insistence on their own weirdo technology while trying to watch the most recent infomercial live. Their stream did not work on Chrome, because Apple has its own streaming video protocol that's not widely supported. I love the passive-aggressive phrasing "Your browser doesn't support live streaming of the event". It's Apple's servers that don't support the standards or the most common browser in usage. Happily my browser supports live streaming of pretty much every other video service on the Internet.
posted by Nelson at 7:16 AM on September 14, 2016

Your own link to the Wikipedia article about HLS shows that it's pretty widely supported; it's just that Chrome itself -- Google's browser -- doesn't fully support it.

Why this might be is left as an exercise to the reader.
posted by uberchet at 8:20 AM on September 14, 2016

That big table of green squares is mostly bizarro mobile players no one has heard of. Among the big desktop browsers, HLS only works in Safari and Microsoft Edge. It does not work in Chrome or Firefox. A big problem here is the lack of a proper standards doc. I haven't followed this process, but Wikipedia says Apple has only submitted a draft and isn't doing the work to make it a proper IETF standard.

Video streams over plain HTTP work everywhere and are standard. DASH is a standard that solves the same transport problem that HLS does and works in every desktop browser. (It helps that you can shim it in with just some Javascript.) DASH doesn't work in iOS though; why this might be is left as an exercise to the reader.
posted by Nelson at 9:00 AM on September 14, 2016

This whole situation is being re-visited now with stricter EU rules coming in 2017, but it may be Apple can work around it all by including an adapter in the box.

This was one reason I was wondering if Apple would have pulled the trigger and gone utterly wireless, including for charging. I guess the iPhone still depends too on iTunes tethers for some high security upgrades and recovery, so there's at least one additional reason a cord is still necessary. But that seems like it should be solvable too, not an impossible obstacle.

I gather charging speed is the real problem.
posted by bonehead at 10:32 AM on September 14, 2016

I don't care at all about the headphone connection, but I care a lot at the ways that messaging in iOS 10 appears to have been designed by a drunk twelve year old. If this reflects apple's new design direction, my time with apple may be coming to a close.
posted by Dip Flash at 11:45 AM on September 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think messaging in iOS 10 largely resembles how users actually seem to want messaging to behave, given the immense popularity of third-party messaging apps and (especially in Asia) stickers
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:45 PM on September 14, 2016

I think messaging in iOS 10 largely resembles how users actually seem to want messaging to behave, given the immense popularity of third-party messaging apps and (especially in Asia) stickers

I am sure you are right; it is one thing where my needs and those of the majority are clearly in variance.
posted by Dip Flash at 4:57 PM on September 14, 2016

The nice thing is that if you don't want to use said features, it's easy to just… not use them.
posted by DoctorFedora at 10:11 PM on September 14, 2016

I'm obviously an Old, because I tried to use stickers, but just wound up sending my wife a bunch of pictures of Cookie Monster. No idea what I'm supposed to do with those. Which is fine. Because at least I can send pictures of Cookie Monster whenever I want.
posted by uncleozzy at 7:25 AM on September 16, 2016

Unintended cookiemonster is a feature, not a bug.
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:57 AM on September 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

Perhaps the Cookie Monster pictures were an homage to the 1970 malware.

cookie
posted by Nelson at 3:30 PM on September 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

Guys, it looks like this has all been a tempest in a teapot.

Secret Hack To Get Headphone Jack on the iPhone 7
posted by ActingTheGoat at 11:01 PM on September 18, 2016

Another solution that nobody is talking about: If you have an iPhone 7, use the iOS Camera Connection Kit and a class compliant USB sound card. These sound cards are like $5.
If you are a performer that relies on a iPhone to interface with MIDI and such, you probably already have a Camera Connection Kit.

It's a shame that this isn't in the news. The Belkin splitter doesn't solve this problem - you can daisy chain USB but not necessarily lightning. Get a Camera Connection Kit, get a USB hub, and boom - smallest, most powerful computer out there.

The USB 3 Camera Connection Kit even lets you charge while you use it! Forget about that unreleased Belkin stuff, you can buy this yesterday!
posted by oceanjesse at 6:37 AM on September 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

From the front page of reddit untimely ripp'd: Every iPhone Keynote.
posted by bonehead at 11:54 AM on September 19, 2016

« Older Single life is hard | What's that got to do with the price of paper in... Newer »

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