6 ms·

They're often the ones holding the gun. Example: if they didn't remove the 3.5mm headphone jack, almost nobody else would have.

gopalv 4y ago
> They're often the ones holding the gun. Apple customers historically are often the most accepting of new things, even if that means change that involves spending more money, because Apple will cover the other end of change well (& expand a little that way). The 3.5mm jack loss is tolerated because of airpods. I'm old enough to remember the furor caused by Apple taking the 3.5 floppy drive when every publisher used Apple hardware for QuarkExpress & everything Adobe, replaced with this new-fangled usb thing. The crucial thing over there was that Apple didn't bring in their own USB drive thing, but instead let IOMega try to deliver it & it went poorly for Apple customers who had big data swaps between them & others (DTP shops, magazine layouts, Photoshop artwork etc).
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  You have to remember that this was pre-iPod — Apple did not have infinite money at that time; it had been not quite two years since it was nearly bankrupt. They really had to be careful with resources. Having third parties provide all of the interesting external peripherals might have been a simple necessity.
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    Nah, Steve was smarter than that. First, removing the floppy bought Apple millions of dollars worth of publicity - it seemed scandalous and people still remember it 25 years later just like he somehow got away with using public domain images of Ghandi and Martin Luther King to hawk consumer electronics. It was as if Albert Einstein personally thought you should really buy an iPod. Second, as with all of Apple products, aesthetics concerns were more important than functionality. If you've ever dealt with that original iMac, it's a tight fit. The design ratios would be off with a floppy so it had to go. Now I wish it didn't also have a bios battery that would freaking explode at about the 10 year mark, splattering battery acid everywhere and destroying the hardware but that's part of the long tradition of Apple's occasional exploding devices.
- laurencerowe 4y ago
  1.44 MB 3.5" floppy drives were becoming problematically small in the early 1990s, long before apple dropped the floppy drive from the iMac in 1998. Iomega's Zip and Jaz drives came out in the 1994 and 1995 and were pretty popular for a while until CD-R and CD-RW drives became cheap and reliable enough in the late 1990s. Perhaps the DTP shops were complaining about the iMac dropping the SCSI port which all Macs had had up to that point for USB, obsoleting their existing external SCSI peripherals - scanners as well as various external drives.
- toastal 4y ago
  Bluetooth earbuds are just not a substitute for wired heaphones. They could have supported both without compromising either but instead they started a trend of “we too have expensive-for-the-sound-quality branded earbuds” trend who’s two-year lifespan with little-to-no repairability will just be e-waste in the landfill. Thanks Apple.
  - toastal 4y ago
    Hilariously, this includes the everyone's favorite Fairphone 4 which did away with the 3.5mm jack marketed with sustainability despite the waste these earbuds produce compared to a good pair of wired IEMs with detachable cable that can last a decade. Likely users had a pair of fine headphones and felt compelled to consume and buy a new pair of earbuds just to overcome the hassle of losing dongles or having to choose between charging or audio.
  - avianlyric 4y ago
    > They could have supported both without compromising either I find this a little hard to believe. If there really are no compromises to continuing to support the 3.5mm jack, then I would expect other phone manufacturers to continue support on their flagship devices, and hammer Apple for removing it. I think in reality, mobile devices are so small, that having a single purpose port just doesn’t make sense. The 3.5mm port is larger in volume than a USB-C port, and USB-C is quite capable of carrying analog audio. I don’t see why any manufacturer would continue paying the cost of a 3.5mm port, when it’s so trivially rolled into other existing ports on the device. I also suspect that the current domination of wireless headphone would have occurred even if the 3.5mm jack had stayed. After all it’s trivially easy to adapt a pair of wired headphones for a USB-C port or lightning port, and yet people still choose wireless headphones.
    - enragedcacti 4y ago
      I don't disagree with your arguments but its hard not to point out the obvious conflict of interest with companies dropping the headphone jack while selling their own wireless headphones as the solution, both to the lack of headphone jack and to the fear of technical issues that BT headphones had at the time. I don't think we can really use the removal as evidence on its own when Apple, Samsung, Google, Xiaomi, Oppo, etc. all got a jump on a multi-billion dollar market because of their position as a device OEM. The only real exceptions are Asus and Sony who are both targeting niche buyers with most of their phone offerings.
tshaddox 4y ago
That seems like the exact opposite of “holding the gun.” Like they literally didn’t force anyone to do anything and as far as I know didn’t even try to use their influence to persuade any other company to remove the jack from their devices.
- kristopolous 4y ago
  So it's all been a purely stochastic random coincidence of cosmic entropy and Apple has been some prescient fortuneteller? The removal of physical keyboards from phones, lack of a serviceable battery, notch, death of the floppy, removal of ports from laptops, 3.5mm jack, these all would have completely happened, exactly like they did, exactly in the way they did, without Apple? Instead I believe we live in a dysfunctional era of "designer as absolute dictator" and it turns out copying Apple is a safer choice then wandering through the wilderness and claiming your own path. Investors, the board, senior management, very few have that courage and the path of Apple knockoff feels less risky. I hate the monoculture through risk aversion, especially spearheaded by a company that seems hell-bent on turning everything into a locked down consumer-grade appliance but I get why it's that. Why low contrast hairline grey fonts on grey backgrounds was the design trend until Apple stopped and why flat design where you can't tell if something was interactive or not was extremely popular until Apple decided it wasn't.
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    > So it's all been a purely stochastic random coincidence of cosmic entropy and Apple has been some prescient fortuneteller? No, the options are not limited to “being a fortune teller” and “holding a gun.”
  - illiarian 4y ago
    > Instead I believe we live in a dysfunctional era of "designer as absolute dictator" and it turns out copying Apple is a safer choice then wandering through the wilderness and claiming your own path. Ironically you try to refute "Apple is prescient" and "Apple is holding the gun" with... "Apple is omnipotent, and all their decisions turn out right and are slavishly copied by others". > I hate the monoculture through risk aversion, especially spearheaded by a company that seems hell-bent on turning everything into a locked down consumer-grade appliance but I get why it's that. It's amazing that you call Apple risk-averse when they, to quote you, did all these things, often against considerable backlash: "The removal of physical keyboards from phones, lack of a serviceable battery, notch, death of the floppy, removal of ports from laptops, 3.5mm jack" Don't forget that also it wasn't just "removal of physical keyboards from phones". It was launching a completely new product for a company that never made such a product in a highly competitive market with lost of entrenched players. Risk-averse my ass.
geraldhh 4y ago
btw, what was the rationale behind that? i mean, there's clearly enough space for it, so was it really just to make way for the (very profitable) earbud trend?
- illiarian 4y ago
  Apple bet on the wireless future across the board, and has been betting on it for a while. The results are a mixed bag to say the least. As for headphones/earphones, IIRC there was a marked trend in adoption of bluetooth headphones, so Apple bet on that. Funnily enough, the competitors that derided Apple for removing the jack, and building some of their marketing campaigns around that, would remove the jack a year later.
- dontlaugh 4y ago
  There is no longer enough space for it on recent iPhones, it has been used for other things. Personally I think you could still make a small phone with a jack, but ultimately it doesn't matter much either way. Adapters work fine and bluetooth works even better.
  - derbOac 4y ago
    FWIW, I disagree. The best Bluetooth earbuds don't compare to 3.5mm in sound quality, and wireless just adds another charging dilemma, which is usually fine but can become an issue in certain situations. The adapters are fine in theory but often are clunky or incompatible across platforms. USBC would probably be fine but almost no one uses them and when they increasingly double as charging ports, you have the charging problem again. 3.5mm is a standard that just works and works everywhere. I hate the pressure to get rid of it. It seemed nothing but self serving on the part of phone manufacturers to do so and driven partly by DRM concerns and a desire to either sell accessories (airpods) or ride a minimalism trend to shave design and manufacturing costs.
    - geraldhh 4y ago
      > 3.5mm is a standard that just works and works everywhere absolutely everywhere, anytime!

gopalv 4y ago

> They're often the ones holding the gun. Apple customers historically are often the most accepting of new things, even if that means change that involves spending more money, because Apple will cover the other end of change well (& expand a little that way). The 3.5mm jack loss is tolerated because of airpods. I'm old enough to remember the furor caused by Apple taking the 3.5 floppy drive when every publisher used Apple hardware for QuarkExpress & everything Adobe, replaced with this new-fangled usb thing. The crucial thing over there was that Apple didn't bring in their own USB drive thing, but instead let IOMega try to deliver it & it went poorly for Apple customers who had big data swaps between them & others (DTP shops, magazine layouts, Photoshop artwork etc).

KerrAvon 4y ago
You have to remember that this was pre-iPod — Apple did not have infinite money at that time; it had been not quite two years since it was nearly bankrupt. They really had to be careful with resources. Having third parties provide all of the interesting external peripherals might have been a simple necessity.
- kristopolous 4y ago
  Nah, Steve was smarter than that. First, removing the floppy bought Apple millions of dollars worth of publicity - it seemed scandalous and people still remember it 25 years later just like he somehow got away with using public domain images of Ghandi and Martin Luther King to hawk consumer electronics. It was as if Albert Einstein personally thought you should really buy an iPod. Second, as with all of Apple products, aesthetics concerns were more important than functionality. If you've ever dealt with that original iMac, it's a tight fit. The design ratios would be off with a floppy so it had to go. Now I wish it didn't also have a bios battery that would freaking explode at about the 10 year mark, splattering battery acid everywhere and destroying the hardware but that's part of the long tradition of Apple's occasional exploding devices.
laurencerowe 4y ago
1.44 MB 3.5" floppy drives were becoming problematically small in the early 1990s, long before apple dropped the floppy drive from the iMac in 1998. Iomega's Zip and Jaz drives came out in the 1994 and 1995 and were pretty popular for a while until CD-R and CD-RW drives became cheap and reliable enough in the late 1990s. Perhaps the DTP shops were complaining about the iMac dropping the SCSI port which all Macs had had up to that point for USB, obsoleting their existing external SCSI peripherals - scanners as well as various external drives.
toastal 4y ago
Bluetooth earbuds are just not a substitute for wired heaphones. They could have supported both without compromising either but instead they started a trend of “we too have expensive-for-the-sound-quality branded earbuds” trend who’s two-year lifespan with little-to-no repairability will just be e-waste in the landfill. Thanks Apple.
- toastal 4y ago
  Hilariously, this includes the everyone's favorite Fairphone 4 which did away with the 3.5mm jack marketed with sustainability despite the waste these earbuds produce compared to a good pair of wired IEMs with detachable cable that can last a decade. Likely users had a pair of fine headphones and felt compelled to consume and buy a new pair of earbuds just to overcome the hassle of losing dongles or having to choose between charging or audio.
- avianlyric 4y ago
  > They could have supported both without compromising either I find this a little hard to believe. If there really are no compromises to continuing to support the 3.5mm jack, then I would expect other phone manufacturers to continue support on their flagship devices, and hammer Apple for removing it. I think in reality, mobile devices are so small, that having a single purpose port just doesn’t make sense. The 3.5mm port is larger in volume than a USB-C port, and USB-C is quite capable of carrying analog audio. I don’t see why any manufacturer would continue paying the cost of a 3.5mm port, when it’s so trivially rolled into other existing ports on the device. I also suspect that the current domination of wireless headphone would have occurred even if the 3.5mm jack had stayed. After all it’s trivially easy to adapt a pair of wired headphones for a USB-C port or lightning port, and yet people still choose wireless headphones.
  - enragedcacti 4y ago
    I don't disagree with your arguments but its hard not to point out the obvious conflict of interest with companies dropping the headphone jack while selling their own wireless headphones as the solution, both to the lack of headphone jack and to the fear of technical issues that BT headphones had at the time. I don't think we can really use the removal as evidence on its own when Apple, Samsung, Google, Xiaomi, Oppo, etc. all got a jump on a multi-billion dollar market because of their position as a device OEM. The only real exceptions are Asus and Sony who are both targeting niche buyers with most of their phone offerings.

tshaddox 4y ago

That seems like the exact opposite of “holding the gun.” Like they literally didn’t force anyone to do anything and as far as I know didn’t even try to use their influence to persuade any other company to remove the jack from their devices.

kristopolous 4y ago
So it's all been a purely stochastic random coincidence of cosmic entropy and Apple has been some prescient fortuneteller? The removal of physical keyboards from phones, lack of a serviceable battery, notch, death of the floppy, removal of ports from laptops, 3.5mm jack, these all would have completely happened, exactly like they did, exactly in the way they did, without Apple? Instead I believe we live in a dysfunctional era of "designer as absolute dictator" and it turns out copying Apple is a safer choice then wandering through the wilderness and claiming your own path. Investors, the board, senior management, very few have that courage and the path of Apple knockoff feels less risky. I hate the monoculture through risk aversion, especially spearheaded by a company that seems hell-bent on turning everything into a locked down consumer-grade appliance but I get why it's that. Why low contrast hairline grey fonts on grey backgrounds was the design trend until Apple stopped and why flat design where you can't tell if something was interactive or not was extremely popular until Apple decided it wasn't.
- tshaddox 4y ago
  > So it's all been a purely stochastic random coincidence of cosmic entropy and Apple has been some prescient fortuneteller? No, the options are not limited to “being a fortune teller” and “holding a gun.”
- illiarian 4y ago
  > Instead I believe we live in a dysfunctional era of "designer as absolute dictator" and it turns out copying Apple is a safer choice then wandering through the wilderness and claiming your own path. Ironically you try to refute "Apple is prescient" and "Apple is holding the gun" with... "Apple is omnipotent, and all their decisions turn out right and are slavishly copied by others". > I hate the monoculture through risk aversion, especially spearheaded by a company that seems hell-bent on turning everything into a locked down consumer-grade appliance but I get why it's that. It's amazing that you call Apple risk-averse when they, to quote you, did all these things, often against considerable backlash: "The removal of physical keyboards from phones, lack of a serviceable battery, notch, death of the floppy, removal of ports from laptops, 3.5mm jack" Don't forget that also it wasn't just "removal of physical keyboards from phones". It was launching a completely new product for a company that never made such a product in a highly competitive market with lost of entrenched players. Risk-averse my ass.

geraldhh 4y ago

btw, what was the rationale behind that? i mean, there's clearly enough space for it, so was it really just to make way for the (very profitable) earbud trend?

illiarian 4y ago
Apple bet on the wireless future across the board, and has been betting on it for a while. The results are a mixed bag to say the least. As for headphones/earphones, IIRC there was a marked trend in adoption of bluetooth headphones, so Apple bet on that. Funnily enough, the competitors that derided Apple for removing the jack, and building some of their marketing campaigns around that, would remove the jack a year later.
dontlaugh 4y ago
There is no longer enough space for it on recent iPhones, it has been used for other things. Personally I think you could still make a small phone with a jack, but ultimately it doesn't matter much either way. Adapters work fine and bluetooth works even better.
- derbOac 4y ago
  FWIW, I disagree. The best Bluetooth earbuds don't compare to 3.5mm in sound quality, and wireless just adds another charging dilemma, which is usually fine but can become an issue in certain situations. The adapters are fine in theory but often are clunky or incompatible across platforms. USBC would probably be fine but almost no one uses them and when they increasingly double as charging ports, you have the charging problem again. 3.5mm is a standard that just works and works everywhere. I hate the pressure to get rid of it. It seemed nothing but self serving on the part of phone manufacturers to do so and driven partly by DRM concerns and a desire to either sell accessories (airpods) or ride a minimalism trend to shave design and manufacturing costs.
  - geraldhh 4y ago
    > 3.5mm is a standard that just works and works everywhere absolutely everywhere, anytime!