10 ms·

Apple has been very good at predicting (or perhaps directly causing) the demise of certain technologies: the disk drive, the CD drive, the ethernet port. They r

by wfo 10y ago

Apple has been very good at predicting (or perhaps directly causing) the demise of certain technologies: the disk drive, the CD drive, the ethernet port. They removed them much to the chagrin of many a loyal customer, and a few years later they nearly ceased to exist across the entire industry (we're still waiting on the ethernet port to go away but give it time). How many times will it take you forgetting your dongle to just pony up and buy the apple approved headphones? How long will it take you using the non-default, non-apple, non-sleek, clunky dongle as you show off your fancy new iPhone 7 to your friends before you decide it's got to go? What if they're using it the apple-intended way? How long will it take before nobody buys headphones anymore? A few generations until they deprecate the dongle since nobody is using it? Where you can no longer buy a $10 set of headphones at a drugstore and plug them in? Where 'every audio device must provide analog audio output in a universal format that every device has been able to read since audio was invented or it is functionally useless' is no longer a maxim? Long-term, we are giving up a universal and open protocol that all devices work with for a proprietary one. If you don't expect companies to abuse this to make money and to stop you from doing what you want with your equipment, well, I've got a bridge to sell you.

stinkytaco 10y ago
Floppy disks, optical disks, ethernet were all replaced by unencumbered standards and they all lead to a superior experience (well, maybe not ethernet, but there are definitly advantages to wireless). If you're old enough to have used a floppy disk drive you do not miss them. Any time you introduce two way communication, you introduce the possibility of DRM, but that does not guarantee it. I can still use my HDMI with my linux PC. DRM is exclusive of the technology and I see no reason to hold back the technology because we are worried about DRM. There are lots of compelling reasons to dislike this change. Among them the fact that I have a large investment in traditional headphones and devices that work well with them (my iPod, my HTC Phone, my stereo, TV, piano, guitar amp, etc etc etc), a decrease in quality, convenience and weight of wireless headsets (how long do they work? How much do they weigh? Can I swim or workout with them?). But DRM is not automatic.
- dTal 10y ago
  >If you're old enough to have used a floppy disk drive you do not miss them. I am, and I do. Floppies were ubiquitous, durable, reusable, and cheap enough to give away. There's no replacement today - flash drives are the closest thing but when was the last time someone handed you one with no expectation of getting it back? Or bought a box of 50? Sneakernet became much less vibrant with the death of the floppy.
  - thomnottom 10y ago
    I'll give you 3 of those points, but definitely not durable. Some of them lasted a long time, and some of them stopped working before I could finish writing to them. And since writing to them was painfully slow, something frequently went wrong. Of course with flash drives we can wait the short time it typically takes someone to copy the contents off to get it back. And since they can hold significantly more data, they are also far more reusable.
  - jsymolon 10y ago
    > flash drives are ... Much more dangerous than an infected boot sector. See the BlackHat talk on a malware program can replace the firmware on a USB device.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    Flash drives cost almost nothing. I'm not going to lose any sleep over a $4 flash drive being given to someone and never getting it back. In terms of inflation that's cheaper than giving someone a floppy that cost $1. Floppy disks were always terrible. Slow, unreliable, prone to failure at the worst possible time. A simple magnet could trash them beyond repair. A bit of water could render them unreadable. Leave it loose in your bag and it gets bent? The thing was toast. In the dying days of the floppy disk, around the time Apple introduced the iMac with no floppy drive, they were already obsolete. 1.44MB could barely hold anything useful at that time, most people doing any serious exchange had already moved on to Zip drives because they held a more reasonable 100MB, or CD-R since you could burn six times more than that onto them. If you had tiny WordPerfect files then floppies were adequate, barely, but what kind of a market is that? So long floppy. You won't be missed.
frandroid 10y ago
> How many times will it take you forgetting your dongle to just pony up and buy the apple approved headphones? Or do like I would do, which is buy an Android phone. I mean they only have 88% market share, how long will _they_ be around?
- bitwize 10y ago
  When Apple removed the floppy drive, CD drive, and ports older than USB, everyone else followed. What do you think is going to happen to Android phones' headphone jacks?
  - mead5432 10y ago
    Probably not become lightning connectors...
  - cmdrfred 10y ago
    While my laptop doesn't have a floppy drive anymore. It does have a DVD drive and USB ports. Who is this 'everyone'?
    - bitwize 10y ago
      "ports older than USB" meant serial and, later, ethernet. My new-issue Dell work laptop lacks an optical drive and Ethernet. My dad just bought an even beefier Dell laptop and the first thing he asked was "where's the DVD drive?" Dell offered to send him a free external USB optical drive, but told him that internal optical drives were simply not an option on that make of laptop.
      - cmdrfred 10y ago
        Did Apple ever offer a laptop with a serial port?
        ChickeNES 10y ago
        Every Apple laptop prior to the Powerbook G3 Lombard, released in 1998, had serial port(s).
Aloha 10y ago
How long will it take me to buy the clunky charging dongle - one for my bag, one for the car, and just leave them there? I'm an outlier - I don't use the headphone jack to listen to music but rarely - I use it to make phone calls - because both the audio quality and the volume offered is much superior to any reasonably priced wireless solution I've seen - with the added advantage of me not needing to charge it. I suspect that Apple has enough usage data reported from customers to indicate how many of its customers use bluetooth (which is a universal and open protocol) to justify this from a business perspective - while it'll be inconvenient for me - I understand that in many ways, I'm not the typical Apple customer. The EFF article? its FUD, pure and simple. A couple of the early android devices had no headphone jack - there was no great outcry about the encroaching DRMed world, some minor grousing about the annoyance of not having a headphone jack was all. Apple will likely support the adapter as long as most everyone else does - as in the past they were never the first to get there, just the most notable.
rimantas 10y ago
> How many times will it take you forgetting your dongle > to just pony up and buy the apple approved headphones? Uhm, Apple headphones are right there in the box. You get them with your iPhone.
- em3rgent0rdr 10y ago
  How many times will it take you forgetting your apple approved headphone to just pony up and buy another apple approved headphone?
- wfo 10y ago
  I didn't know that, but that actually makes my case stronger.
  - vacri 10y ago
    I thought you needed a bumper to make your case stronger? :)
snerbles 10y ago
> we're still waiting on the ethernet port to go away but give it time From some consumer devices, sure. It's not going anywhere in commercial and industrial applications, where wireless networking is often verboten.
- jakebasile 10y ago
  Nor for gaming. Wireless doesn't compare to wired for low latency, high bandwidth, reliable connections.
bsder 10y ago
> we're still waiting on the ethernet port to go away but give it time You have it precisely backwards. Far from going away, everything became Ethernet. Take a look at the modern interconnection standards: HDMI, USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, etc. They are all packetized transfer across an impedance controlled double pair of wires.
- brokenmachine 10y ago
  I think parent was probably implying wireless would take over. I don't agree however, call me a luddite but I'm partial to the simplicity and speed of wires. Not for my phone of course, but for my main desktop PC, I'm happy it's not wireless.
snowwrestler 10y ago
> How many times will it take you forgetting your dongle to just pony up and buy the apple approved headphones? Perhaps I missed something in the announcement, but won't any Bluetooth headphones work with iPhone 7? > Long-term, we are giving up a universal and open protocol that all devices work with for a proprietary one. Does Bluetooth count as a proprietary protocol? It's not exclusive to Apple, but I don't think it's a totally open standard either.
arpa 10y ago
Oh yeah, ethernet port will go away. Fat chance.

by wfo 10y ago

stinkytaco 10y ago

Floppy disks, optical disks, ethernet were all replaced by unencumbered standards and they all lead to a superior experience (well, maybe not ethernet, but there are definitly advantages to wireless). If you're old enough to have used a floppy disk drive you do not miss them. Any time you introduce two way communication, you introduce the possibility of DRM, but that does not guarantee it. I can still use my HDMI with my linux PC. DRM is exclusive of the technology and I see no reason to hold back the technology because we are worried about DRM. There are lots of compelling reasons to dislike this change. Among them the fact that I have a large investment in traditional headphones and devices that work well with them (my iPod, my HTC Phone, my stereo, TV, piano, guitar amp, etc etc etc), a decrease in quality, convenience and weight of wireless headsets (how long do they work? How much do they weigh? Can I swim or workout with them?). But DRM is not automatic.

dTal 10y ago
>If you're old enough to have used a floppy disk drive you do not miss them. I am, and I do. Floppies were ubiquitous, durable, reusable, and cheap enough to give away. There's no replacement today - flash drives are the closest thing but when was the last time someone handed you one with no expectation of getting it back? Or bought a box of 50? Sneakernet became much less vibrant with the death of the floppy.
- thomnottom 10y ago
  I'll give you 3 of those points, but definitely not durable. Some of them lasted a long time, and some of them stopped working before I could finish writing to them. And since writing to them was painfully slow, something frequently went wrong. Of course with flash drives we can wait the short time it typically takes someone to copy the contents off to get it back. And since they can hold significantly more data, they are also far more reusable.
- jsymolon 10y ago
  > flash drives are ... Much more dangerous than an infected boot sector. See the BlackHat talk on a malware program can replace the firmware on a USB device.
- astrodust 10y ago
  Flash drives cost almost nothing. I'm not going to lose any sleep over a $4 flash drive being given to someone and never getting it back. In terms of inflation that's cheaper than giving someone a floppy that cost $1. Floppy disks were always terrible. Slow, unreliable, prone to failure at the worst possible time. A simple magnet could trash them beyond repair. A bit of water could render them unreadable. Leave it loose in your bag and it gets bent? The thing was toast. In the dying days of the floppy disk, around the time Apple introduced the iMac with no floppy drive, they were already obsolete. 1.44MB could barely hold anything useful at that time, most people doing any serious exchange had already moved on to Zip drives because they held a more reasonable 100MB, or CD-R since you could burn six times more than that onto them. If you had tiny WordPerfect files then floppies were adequate, barely, but what kind of a market is that? So long floppy. You won't be missed.

frandroid 10y ago

> How many times will it take you forgetting your dongle to just pony up and buy the apple approved headphones? Or do like I would do, which is buy an Android phone. I mean they only have 88% market share, how long will _they_ be around?

bitwize 10y ago
When Apple removed the floppy drive, CD drive, and ports older than USB, everyone else followed. What do you think is going to happen to Android phones' headphone jacks?
- mead5432 10y ago
  Probably not become lightning connectors...
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  While my laptop doesn't have a floppy drive anymore. It does have a DVD drive and USB ports. Who is this 'everyone'?
  - bitwize 10y ago
    "ports older than USB" meant serial and, later, ethernet. My new-issue Dell work laptop lacks an optical drive and Ethernet. My dad just bought an even beefier Dell laptop and the first thing he asked was "where's the DVD drive?" Dell offered to send him a free external USB optical drive, but told him that internal optical drives were simply not an option on that make of laptop.
    - cmdrfred 10y ago
      Did Apple ever offer a laptop with a serial port?
      - ChickeNES 10y ago
        Every Apple laptop prior to the Powerbook G3 Lombard, released in 1998, had serial port(s).

Aloha 10y ago

How long will it take me to buy the clunky charging dongle - one for my bag, one for the car, and just leave them there? I'm an outlier - I don't use the headphone jack to listen to music but rarely - I use it to make phone calls - because both the audio quality and the volume offered is much superior to any reasonably priced wireless solution I've seen - with the added advantage of me not needing to charge it. I suspect that Apple has enough usage data reported from customers to indicate how many of its customers use bluetooth (which is a universal and open protocol) to justify this from a business perspective - while it'll be inconvenient for me - I understand that in many ways, I'm not the typical Apple customer. The EFF article? its FUD, pure and simple. A couple of the early android devices had no headphone jack - there was no great outcry about the encroaching DRMed world, some minor grousing about the annoyance of not having a headphone jack was all. Apple will likely support the adapter as long as most everyone else does - as in the past they were never the first to get there, just the most notable.

rimantas 10y ago

> How many times will it take you forgetting your dongle > to just pony up and buy the apple approved headphones? Uhm, Apple headphones are right there in the box. You get them with your iPhone.

em3rgent0rdr 10y ago
How many times will it take you forgetting your apple approved headphone to just pony up and buy another apple approved headphone?
wfo 10y ago
I didn't know that, but that actually makes my case stronger.
- vacri 10y ago
  I thought you needed a bumper to make your case stronger? :)

snerbles 10y ago

> we're still waiting on the ethernet port to go away but give it time From some consumer devices, sure. It's not going anywhere in commercial and industrial applications, where wireless networking is often verboten.

jakebasile 10y ago
Nor for gaming. Wireless doesn't compare to wired for low latency, high bandwidth, reliable connections.

bsder 10y ago

> we're still waiting on the ethernet port to go away but give it time You have it precisely backwards. Far from going away, everything became Ethernet. Take a look at the modern interconnection standards: HDMI, USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, etc. They are all packetized transfer across an impedance controlled double pair of wires.

brokenmachine 10y ago
I think parent was probably implying wireless would take over. I don't agree however, call me a luddite but I'm partial to the simplicity and speed of wires. Not for my phone of course, but for my main desktop PC, I'm happy it's not wireless.

snowwrestler 10y ago

> How many times will it take you forgetting your dongle to just pony up and buy the apple approved headphones? Perhaps I missed something in the announcement, but won't any Bluetooth headphones work with iPhone 7? > Long-term, we are giving up a universal and open protocol that all devices work with for a proprietary one. Does Bluetooth count as a proprietary protocol? It's not exclusive to Apple, but I don't think it's a totally open standard either.

arpa 10y ago

Oh yeah, ethernet port will go away. Fat chance.