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Comparing the 3.5 mm audio jack to the floppy drive is ridiculous. The jack has become far, far, more ubiquitous than the floppy drive. Additionally, the thin

by rplst8 10y ago

Comparing the 3.5 mm audio jack to the floppy drive is ridiculous. The jack has become far, far, more ubiquitous than the floppy drive. Additionally, the things that use the jack are often of higher quality and not disposible like a floppy disk was. And this ignores the fact that the floppy disk/drive was technologically usurped by other removable storage formats. The 3.5 mm jack still delivers the absolute best sound quality compared to the other options available on a smart phone. Most, if not all, of the other solutions will be a step backward.

SloopJon 10y ago
Yeah, this is amazing apologism, even for Gruber. "And in five years we’ll look at analog headphone jacks the way we look at all the other legacy ports we’ve abandoned." In five years, there are going to a lot of crappy Lightning earbuds in drawers and landfills.
- smt88 10y ago
  > look at all the other legacy ports we’ve abandoned I miss a lot of those ports. A lot of people do. Fumbling around the office for an Apple-compatible video cable is a relatively frequent event, in my experience.
  - mrob 10y ago
    I still have an old fashioned parallel port (via PCI card) on my PC, because there's no other option for convenient and low-latency GPIO. And I don't remember old fashioned serial ports needing special drivers that would brick unapproved hardware, like some modern FTDI USB serial adaptors did. "Legacy" ports are simple and reliable. Let's not abandon the simple and reliable 3.5mm headphone port.
    - kale 10y ago
      This is a great point. I am gearing up to use a Raspberry Pi in a project for GPIO. It doesn't have to be low-powered necessarily, but the abandonment of the parallel port means that getting GPIO on a PC is more difficult.
- jccc 10y ago
  > Maybe now is the wrong time, and Apple is making a mistake. I don’t know. > Patel misses the bigger problem. It’s not enforcement of DRM on audio playback. It’s enforcement of the MFi Program for certifying hardware that uses the Lightning port. Right now any headphone maker in the world can make any headphones they want for the standard jack. Not so with the Lightning port. > Presumably Apple’s Lightning earbuds will work on iPads, too. But it’s going to suck having to use different headphones (or a dongle) for the Mac than you use with your iOS devices. > Will MacBooks ship with a Lightning port in lieu of a headphone jack? If so, will they ship with headphones? (Probably not, I say. Cough up the extra $29 for a new pair of Apple EarPods.) I'm increasingly irritated by Gruber's increasingly cozy relationship with Apple pitch-people (sometimes even using language only they use, like "with iPhone" or "on iPad"). But this is neither amazing nor apologism. He's ambivalent, at least in the text of this article. He is not defending the decision, extolling it's brilliance, saying Apple's doing the right thing. (To the commenter who's about to say, "Cherry picking!": Please consider the likelihood that your brain is cherry-picking when you see the name "John Gruber.")
  - diamondtrim 10y ago
    I don't know what I need John Gruber is. But I'd say those quotes you pulled are pretty intentionally characterizing the potential (and legitimate) issues somehow acceptable. Why would I want Apple to regulate the third party headphones available to me? The headphone market might be a bit too large to track, but having that many choices isn't a problem in my mind. I'm free to research and select from the myriad options at any price point. Those who prefer to buy Apple endorsed products can go to their store and find Beats or whomever on the shelf. Tell me what advantage is gained by eliminating the other options in be market? And I see no significant advantage to the change in technology itself. Optical ports provide a measurable advantage in sound fidelity over analog, but you haven't seen them eliminate composite or component ports from home receivers, because there are also significant disadvantages in cost and length of optical cables. I don't even follow that there's such gains to be made from switching to lightning... Which leaves me at the obvious conclusion that this is just a ploy to sell more adapters and reap licensing fees from vendors at the expense of their customer. And remarks he makes like "Cough up the extra $29 for a new pair" convey exactly the tone that is bothering us all.
- prodmerc 10y ago
  "Ports we've abandoned" Yeah like 1/4" and XLR, which are used on most studio and enthusiast equipment. Why don't manufacturers ditch that in favor of USB or full fiber, the poor fools? Some people live in a fairy land with heads up their ass...
wlesieutre 10y ago
> The 3.5 mm jack still delivers the absolute best sound quality compared to the other options available on a smart phone. That's only true because the only headphones that exist for smartphones are headphone jack or Bluetooth. You can build a USB-C or Lightning headset with much higher impedance and use a digital signal to a higher quality DAC than the one built into the phone.
- dsr_ 10y ago
  You can do that with USB2 as well, but hardly anyone does, because they aren't forced to do so. Most people don't want a higher quality DAC than the one built into the phone. High quality DACs are cheap. If the one in your phone isn't good enough for you, in two years you will get a new phone -- pick one with a better DAC, since now you know that's important to you. In the meantime, your $1000 headphones from four years ago will still work on all the phones with 3.5mm jacks, and so will the $6 pair you picked up on the boardwalk when you realized that there was no way in heck you wanted to wear the good headphones out on the beach.
  - wlesieutre 10y ago
    > You can do that with USB2 as well, but hardly anyone does, because they aren't forced to do so. You can plug a USB2 DAC into your phone? A ton of people who own good headphones for their computer use a USB sound device instead of the motherboard's built-in audio. But today, similarly good headphones for mobile phones do not exist because phones can't drive them. This may not be a priority for a lot of people yet, but Apple is in a position to hugely increase the size of the market. I'm not thrilled that it would create headphone lock-in on iOS vs Android, but you have to at least admit that it opens up opportunities for better headphones for phones than what's out there now. If you'd tried to do this 10 years ago it would have been pointless because people's music libraries were all a bunch of MP3s ripped at 128 kbps. Now that Apple Music exists, Apple has direct control over the quality of the music they're streaming. If they want to make better headphones workable they can push out media in a format that makes them actually worth using. Using an adapter to 3.5mm headphones doesn't feel like that big a deal to me. I would guess that Apple can output an analog signal over the lightning connector to allow a small passive cable (like DVI-I to VGA). Going the other direction, someone (guessing Apple won't) could build a 3.5mm device that converts to a Lightning signal, but I'd expect it to also have to plug into a phone's accessory port to get enough power.

by rplst8 10y ago

SloopJon 10y ago

Yeah, this is amazing apologism, even for Gruber. "And in five years we’ll look at analog headphone jacks the way we look at all the other legacy ports we’ve abandoned." In five years, there are going to a lot of crappy Lightning earbuds in drawers and landfills.

smt88 10y ago
> look at all the other legacy ports we’ve abandoned I miss a lot of those ports. A lot of people do. Fumbling around the office for an Apple-compatible video cable is a relatively frequent event, in my experience.
- mrob 10y ago
  I still have an old fashioned parallel port (via PCI card) on my PC, because there's no other option for convenient and low-latency GPIO. And I don't remember old fashioned serial ports needing special drivers that would brick unapproved hardware, like some modern FTDI USB serial adaptors did. "Legacy" ports are simple and reliable. Let's not abandon the simple and reliable 3.5mm headphone port.
  - kale 10y ago
    This is a great point. I am gearing up to use a Raspberry Pi in a project for GPIO. It doesn't have to be low-powered necessarily, but the abandonment of the parallel port means that getting GPIO on a PC is more difficult.
jccc 10y ago
> Maybe now is the wrong time, and Apple is making a mistake. I don’t know. > Patel misses the bigger problem. It’s not enforcement of DRM on audio playback. It’s enforcement of the MFi Program for certifying hardware that uses the Lightning port. Right now any headphone maker in the world can make any headphones they want for the standard jack. Not so with the Lightning port. > Presumably Apple’s Lightning earbuds will work on iPads, too. But it’s going to suck having to use different headphones (or a dongle) for the Mac than you use with your iOS devices. > Will MacBooks ship with a Lightning port in lieu of a headphone jack? If so, will they ship with headphones? (Probably not, I say. Cough up the extra $29 for a new pair of Apple EarPods.) I'm increasingly irritated by Gruber's increasingly cozy relationship with Apple pitch-people (sometimes even using language only they use, like "with iPhone" or "on iPad"). But this is neither amazing nor apologism. He's ambivalent, at least in the text of this article. He is not defending the decision, extolling it's brilliance, saying Apple's doing the right thing. (To the commenter who's about to say, "Cherry picking!": Please consider the likelihood that your brain is cherry-picking when you see the name "John Gruber.")
- diamondtrim 10y ago
  I don't know what I need John Gruber is. But I'd say those quotes you pulled are pretty intentionally characterizing the potential (and legitimate) issues somehow acceptable. Why would I want Apple to regulate the third party headphones available to me? The headphone market might be a bit too large to track, but having that many choices isn't a problem in my mind. I'm free to research and select from the myriad options at any price point. Those who prefer to buy Apple endorsed products can go to their store and find Beats or whomever on the shelf. Tell me what advantage is gained by eliminating the other options in be market? And I see no significant advantage to the change in technology itself. Optical ports provide a measurable advantage in sound fidelity over analog, but you haven't seen them eliminate composite or component ports from home receivers, because there are also significant disadvantages in cost and length of optical cables. I don't even follow that there's such gains to be made from switching to lightning... Which leaves me at the obvious conclusion that this is just a ploy to sell more adapters and reap licensing fees from vendors at the expense of their customer. And remarks he makes like "Cough up the extra $29 for a new pair" convey exactly the tone that is bothering us all.
prodmerc 10y ago
"Ports we've abandoned" Yeah like 1/4" and XLR, which are used on most studio and enthusiast equipment. Why don't manufacturers ditch that in favor of USB or full fiber, the poor fools? Some people live in a fairy land with heads up their ass...

wlesieutre 10y ago

> The 3.5 mm jack still delivers the absolute best sound quality compared to the other options available on a smart phone. That's only true because the only headphones that exist for smartphones are headphone jack or Bluetooth. You can build a USB-C or Lightning headset with much higher impedance and use a digital signal to a higher quality DAC than the one built into the phone.

dsr_ 10y ago
You can do that with USB2 as well, but hardly anyone does, because they aren't forced to do so. Most people don't want a higher quality DAC than the one built into the phone. High quality DACs are cheap. If the one in your phone isn't good enough for you, in two years you will get a new phone -- pick one with a better DAC, since now you know that's important to you. In the meantime, your $1000 headphones from four years ago will still work on all the phones with 3.5mm jacks, and so will the $6 pair you picked up on the boardwalk when you realized that there was no way in heck you wanted to wear the good headphones out on the beach.
- wlesieutre 10y ago
  > You can do that with USB2 as well, but hardly anyone does, because they aren't forced to do so. You can plug a USB2 DAC into your phone? A ton of people who own good headphones for their computer use a USB sound device instead of the motherboard's built-in audio. But today, similarly good headphones for mobile phones do not exist because phones can't drive them. This may not be a priority for a lot of people yet, but Apple is in a position to hugely increase the size of the market. I'm not thrilled that it would create headphone lock-in on iOS vs Android, but you have to at least admit that it opens up opportunities for better headphones for phones than what's out there now. If you'd tried to do this 10 years ago it would have been pointless because people's music libraries were all a bunch of MP3s ripped at 128 kbps. Now that Apple Music exists, Apple has direct control over the quality of the music they're streaming. If they want to make better headphones workable they can push out media in a format that makes them actually worth using. Using an adapter to 3.5mm headphones doesn't feel like that big a deal to me. I would guess that Apple can output an analog signal over the lightning connector to allow a small passive cable (like DVI-I to VGA). Going the other direction, someone (guessing Apple won't) could build a 3.5mm device that converts to a Lightning signal, but I'd expect it to also have to plug into a phone's accessory port to get enough power.