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Headphone Jacks Are the New Power Plugs

• smt88 10y ago
  This does a great job at making a point (and concisely, too!) but I think this is the paragraph that stands out the most: "In the past, every time a prominent piece of technology was removed from my Apple hardware — most recently the CD drive and the Ethernet port — my response was ambivalent because I had already been happily using the alternative for a while. Wi-Fi, despite its flaws, offered countless advantages over Ethernet, leading to rapid adoption. Steam, iTunes, and Netflix had made me almost forget that CDs were still a thing by the time I got my Retina Macbook Pro. It almost goes without saying that these technologies were standard and universal — nobody would have accepted them otherwise. But there’s no Next Best Thing in headphones. This is an entirely artificial change." I despise Apple products because so many the decisions seem to be about Apple and not about me. Amazon has the opposite philosophy, and I'm a voracious consumer of Amazon products (even though I find their ethics to be suspect). Amazon gives me no choice because they are better than all their competitors. Apple makes me beg for a competitor and even accept compromises in order to get away from their anti-consumer decisions (like this one).