4 ms·

At the time it really did feel like they were jumping the gun with floppies and optical drives too.

• cm2187 10y ago
  I wasn't but I still was annoyed that many MacOS drivers were only available on floppies.
• mikeash 10y ago
  Maybe, but it wasn't at all to the same degree. Floppies were verging on uselessness in 1998. Capacities hadn't increased in a decade, while code and data sizes were growing exponentially. Floppies could barely fit anything useful anymore. A wide variety of replacements were available, with Zip, Jazz, Bernoulli, CD-RW, and others all competing. There was no standardization, so the replacements kind of sucked. Removable data storage was just a complete mess at the time, so eliminating the most standardized but vastly least capable option wasn't that big of a deal. With audio connectors, it's not like that at all. For wired connections, there's one universal standard that works great. There's no analogous situation to being unable to fit your massive bloated Word documents onto a 1.44MB floppy disk. Moving past the floppy disk solved a bunch of serious problems, while moving past the headphone jack isn't solving any problems.
  • an_account 10y ago
    Wireless headphones that just work are seriously really nice. Once you use them, you wonder why all headphones aren't wireless. Removing the headphone jack forces people to solve the wireless headphone problems: pairing, latency, and charging. I'm not convinced apple isn't timing this well, but I see what they're getting at and I think it may be more like these past example than people are saying.