Another day, another rumor that Apple is going to ditch the headphone jack on the next iPhone in favor of sending out audio over Lightning. Or another phone beats Apple to the punch by ditching the headphone jack in favor of passing out audio over USB-C. What exciting times for phones! We’re so out of ideas that actively making them shittier and more user-hostile is the only innovation left.
Tell us how you really feel, Nilay.
Needless to say – fully agreed. Removing the headphone jack is dumb.
As long as it is replaced with a zero-royalty, no DRM, patent unencumbered, and reasonably simple digital connector, then I say good riddance to the stupid TRS connector.
All spring-loaded or springy-anything connectors must die. All analog connectors must also die. Whenever there’s the possibility for dust, wear and tear, or even partial insertion-related issues, I want digital encoding with lots of error correction. In fact I can’t wait for analog plugs to die, really.
I will never understand why I got called a dinosaur when I complained about the removal of the floppy disk and the CD/DVD reader, which meant I had to throw away tons of perfectly working media and copy a lot of data around.
Yet the stupid lil analog plug, whose removal means I may need to throw away a single pair of headphones, seems to attract the ire of everyone. And if you already have a pair of Bluetooth headphones then you don’t even need to throw anything away…
Edited 2016-06-21 22:46 UTC
You’re completely wrong about that jack.
I don’t think he is, personally. I’m don’t think it is the right time to replace it YET because we really don’t have a good standard to replace it with. But if we did, I say good riddance. Give me the ability to have nav controls on a wired set of headphones, pls.
Your ears are still analog. The only people benefited by a digital phone interface are the content owners/distributors.
Eyes are analog too, still the display is digital.
well, the signal into the monitor is digital…
USB as universal audio jack is basically a solution looking for a problem. “Audio to the headphone” was a problem solved long, long ago. But I can see how it would be attractive to a control-freak company like Apple to be able to control the entire experience of their devices.
that’s not really true. the display is showing analog colors or you wouldn’t see them with your analog eyes.
sound is vibration and we are very, very, very sensitive to it. our hearing is far more critical to our survival than our seeing.
some of us care about music enough to want to hear what the artist created, not a jumbled compressed 10% version of it. they remove a ton of vibration to get it into those compressed signals.
yes, ton. that’s an accurate measurement, i’ve tested it myself
of course the display with show analog colors, just the same as a headphone with digital jack will produce analog sounds.
and a display will lose a lot of info too, when it is able to display only 65K colors or even 16M.
By your logic, we should have never used the Internet (digital, packet switching, and error correcting) because “your ears are still analog” . See the problem here? A digital jack has a load of benefits — the least of which is no more noise cause by improperly plugged, or dusty, or simply weared out connectors.
Literally the same as replacing VGA with DVI. Do you still remember that “doubled” image that started appearing on most VGA monitors once the cable was more tham a few feet long?
Most people in America don’t give a flip about quality. The solution that is simplest & most convenient & cheapest wins.
Protip for Apple: create the $5000 “Audiophile” iPhone for the audiophiles, and rake it in.
Edited 2016-06-22 15:12 UTC
OMG you are so right.
it really comes down to if you care about quality, about music, about listening, or if you just play background music.
i think 20-50% do care about quality, they’ve just been lied to and sold crap for so long they don’t know, they give up. if you complain about something new being worse than what it’s replacing you are ridiculed.
That’s not my logic, that’s your own proactive attempt to miss the point.
The problem of transmitting analog audio through relative short distances (i.e. the length of your average headphone cord) was solved long, long ago.
Digital makes sense for some scenarios, this is not one of them. USB-C as universal audio connector is the very definition of a solution looking for a problem. In fact, if anything it complicates things for no benefit whatsoever to the consumer. It just increases overall cost, which may be a benefit to the vendor.
So if you want to make a mercantile justification, then I would agree with you; USB-C as an audio connector is great, for device and peripheral manufacturers. But I would not necessarily equate that with being good for consumers.
Honestly there are other more pressing problems to be solved, this is just another grab for cash in lieu of actual innovation.
Edited 2016-06-22 18:34 UTC
That, I do agree.
Who is talking about “losses?” Every process in electrical engineering basically involves loss (aka energy transformation). At this point, sending audio signals over a pair of short copper wires it’s a pretty well understood process with workable solutions from time immemorial (decades in technology = forever).
digital connectors will fail in audio far more than analog connectors will, IMHO.
the TRS jack has been perfected over 120+ years in use. nothing digital even comes close to 25% of that testing and refinement.
Could you please enumerate them?
I’ve done it already on many other posts, but in any case, I can summarize them in one word: error correction.
Indeed, and that is exaclty how it went down with the video interface: HDMI is DRM-encumbered (HDCP) but still accepted as the mainstream successor of the old analogue connections like D-SUB, Component and Composite.
The only problem is that because the 3,5mm (yes, it’s a comma in my country) jack has been the *only* standard for consumer audio hardware for the last gillion years, it will be harder for people to just accept a new digital standard.
How is that at all different from those of us complaining about the removal of a standard jack, which means we will have to throw away tons of perfectly working headphones and cables, and buy a bunch of proprietary units instead? You just completely contradicted yourself there.
Either you’re insane, or you’re trolling hard.
You won’t have to throw out anything. You’ll just get an adapter – which is tiny and costs very little – at least for android devices ( Apple will almost certainly charge a premium for the lightning version ).
If you don’t like the adapter you can buy another phone that keeps the plug, vote with your wallet!
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Yes, this is why I’d lose the dang thing a billion times and curse every idiot who thought it was a good idea. There is no benefit to me to have anything other than an analog jack.
Hell, I’m tempted to take motorola up on their dev kit offer for the Droid Z. I’d build… an add on that adds the 3.5 jack on, removing the need for a freaking dongle.
no you will probably need to buy a DAC + amp to act as that adapter.
you can’t just send digital audio to speakers – speakers are analog and will always be.
Or most probably, you failed to read the next paragraph of my message.
I have _one_ pair of headphones. I had a gazillion tons of CD media. Why should I care about having to throw away a single pair of headphones if a digital interface is a significant improvement? Why would I even need more than one pair of headphones? At most, I’d need an O(1) number of headphones per device. If this number is huge you have worse problems here…
Edited 2016-06-22 09:42 UTC
Price?
It is not that comfortable for most people to throw away a pair of high priced, high quality headphones because manufacturers are switching connector.
Are you arguing that a shitton of CD media is not “cheap”? That you spent more in a single pair of headphones than a decade of media?
There’s just no arguing with an audiophile. You’d happily daisy-chain 20 dongles if it improved audio quality.
So because you own only one pair of headphones, the same is true of every single person on earth? Get out of your little box, man.
I have five pairs of headphones, two mic/headsets, and several patch cables that all use 3.5mm TRS/TRRS (and a studio headset that uses 1/4″). Why? Because I fucking do. Why did you have all that physical media? You could have gotten by with one floppy diskette and one DVD-RW, amirite?
Use your noggin to hold more than pudding and you might catch on to the fact that your needs don’t match everyone else’s needs.
And I wonder, do you use them all with your smartphone?
And if you’re the type of person who does, do you actually care if you have to use an adapter? Or — most probably — you’re already using an adapter?
It’s funny to even mention the “everyone else’s needs” argument, since those are basically covered by the headphones that come with the iphone itself.
And by the way: no, you cannot do with one DVD-RW. Not legally, at least.
And please keep the personal insults down.
It wasn’t an insult, it was an observation, and given that you took offense I’d say it was spot on.
If you believe that “you’re either insane or trolling” or “use your noggin to hold more than pudding” aren’t personal insults, this website is far worse off than I thought, and it’s best I stop disgracing it with more of my comments.
Edited 2016-06-22 21:53 UTC
I have more than 200 CD’s and over 400 12in vinyl many of which were never released on CD.
I ripped the CD’s years ago
I did the same to my LP collection.
Do I miss the CD/DVD drive on my Macbook?
Not in the slightest. I have a ^Alb30 portable USB CD/DVD drive that I connect up when I need one.
How do often do I use it? Oh, about once a month.
On the removal of the headphone port. Don’t really care. Things evolve. I have a couple of 64Gb iPods that hold all my tunes + podcasts.
As for my phone, I very rarely use earbuds with the phone.
I have a nice pair of Stenhauser Noise Reducing Hearphones. So I’ll need a small adapter. Not really an issue.
DRM? Well, none of my music has any DRM so for me it does not really make much difference.
The problem with the headphone jack is that it isn’t standard. Sure, most of them will deliver sound, but will the cable remote work on all sources? No, it won’t. Ancient headphones will either work on this or that brand, newer ones will work on the iPhone, with limited support for everything else.
So it’s not exactly a standard, the way it’s used today.
Then there’s a question of quality, and the headphone jack doesn’t have it.
This is so stupid on so many levels, I’m shaking in disbelief.
1) You still can connect your digital headphones to the USB jack, so there’s no need to throw away perfectly working analogue headphones.
2) The current micro USB/USB C type jacks are freaking fragile and you propose to abuse them even more?
3) You cannot charge and listen to music at the same time obviously.
4) Digital headphones cost a LOT more than analogue ones, as they need to have their own DAC.
5) Unlike you say, I’ve never seen a broken 3.5″ connector.
I’m willing to bet the TRS socket on your current smartphone is already starting to wear out, even if it’s less than a year old. Rotate the plug a bit and see how long it goes.
Edited 2016-06-22 22:06 UTC
All my analogue 3.5″ ports are in a perfect condition even after 5 years of use. No crackling noise, no loose contact, nothing.
your first sentence is key. everything you say is accurate except the desire to kill all analog plugs. they still can’t be replaced for audio – audio starts and ends analog – and analog provides better SQ and is cheaper than a digital connector.
but the 3.5mm won’t be replaced by a “zero-royalty, no DRM, patent unencumbered, and reasonably simple digital connector”.
the DRM is coming back, the patents, and maybe even the royalty if apple quits the 3.5mm analog plug.
also – to think that your single pair of headphones is all that will need to be thrown away with this change is just silly. i bet even you have 3 more of those connectors. i personally have probably 10 or so things that plug in through the analog port.
A big part of this, I suspect, is that phones in general aren’t entirely made for users. Not directly. For most manufacturers, they are very expensive. They act as a demonstration platform of new technologies for companies like Samsung, LG, etc. They demonstrate new tech like higher density LCDs, battery tech, wireless and networking hardware, integration and new CPUs.
Ditching older ports makes the phone seem more futuristic, and so it will reflect better on the company as being high tech and cutting edge.
And what are you going to do about it? Not buy a new smartphone?
Edited 2016-06-21 22:49 UTC
Smartphones are for the mentally ill and the mentally impaired. so why not? Is there any reason a human with reasonable cognitivie capabilities “need” a appphone?
Any digital connection is bad since it is no longer compliant with the RCA standard unles they provide conversion. The 3.5 mm standard (small AUX) is going nowhere and this might be a push for digitalization, but people that are proposing such solloutions are just as wrong as they were in the 60s. People want sound, and a smaller connecot has lots of break points, the 3.5mm connector is the sweetspot of durability and longevity. No digital connector can boast that kind of longevity, and YES it can cover the entire audible spectrum.
Except that your typical 3.5mm jack is specified for 5,000 mating cycles (sometimes less), while e.g. USB Type-C is required to last at least 10,000 mating cycles.
5000/365 = 13.7
So you could plug in and out once a day for six years or so and still expect it to work flawlessly. How long do you expect to use your phone before upgrading it? I imagine 6 years is probably enough for most people.
Isn’t this extremely ironic in a thread where people argue about not wanting to upgrade their (much cheaper) headphones?
Besides, way before the analog connector breaks, the springs will wear out. You’ll start hearing one audio channel only, forcing you to fiddle with the connector every time you plug/unplug it — who hasn’t experienced this?. Or some dust will enter your connector and attenuate either of the channels, or worse, cause a faint echo between both channels.
That you might fail to realize until you suddenly switch to a digital interface.
Buy your Apple^a"c-authorised headphones with Apple^a"c-authorised Lightning^A(R) plug at an Apple^a"c-authorised store to listen to Apple^a"c-authorised music.
…and have people cheer them on all the way to the grave.
Isn’t that happening already?
I am going to launch the wild guess that the majority of users already use Apple-branded headphones (the ones that came with their iPhones), have a bought a device where the only way to sync or even charge it is via an “authorised Lightning plug” and listen exclusively to Apple-authorised music (it’s not like you can pirate music from an iphone).
Whether you have a digital or analog headphone plug isn’t going to change the picture much. Apple fanboys are still going to be Apple fanboys.
you are all over on this argument man.
no point in replacing the analog jack with digital unless you want
1 – DRM,
2 – to sell new headphones with DAC’s in them,
3 – smaller size jack
4 – more features through the jack
apple wants all of the above, which is why they will go first with the new audio port and take all the flack (ha)
also apple will be killing their download store and go to streaming only. they will probably offer 2 streams – the standard 256k one they have now, and their version of HD using MQA format, that will require this new jack and new DAC to decode.
Maybe they would have, or maybe not. We’ll never know, because Motorola beat them to it.
yeah moto isn’t getting enough crap for that. But at least with Moto, it will be usb c a standard that other phones and devices can use without any moto restrictions.
You don’t think they’ll take the chance to “extend” the functionality of certain devices when connected to certain phones? Really?
Not exactly sure what you’re suggesting they might do. But I suspect they won’t do it. On the same phone they already have a proprietary connection for those add on modules, I think they’ll be so busy focusing on those that they won’t mess with usb c headphones.
Also, a though just occured, what if Apple ditches lightning and just goes usb-c ? It would still suck, but less so.
Well, they’re obviously not completely averse to it given the new Macbook. At the same time, just four years after introducing Lightning to their mobile lineup and everyone finally settled with their replacement accessories, a connector switch in that market now would be met with quite the uproar. I wonder if there would be a way to allow for both connector types on one socket?
I’m not sure Apple gives a flying fart what people think of which ports to use or not.
This is now my guess: Apple shocks the world and switches to USB C for phones.
Well, I’m just curious where all these people with all these cheap heaphones are, because I haven’t had a cheap headphone since my first salary. I also don’t have a single pair.
However, you are really wrong when you try to make this all about the price of the headphones. But, those people are also wrong who envision the fast and sudden death of the 3.5 plug. It will take some time.
Technology changes, it’s unavoidable. However, in this case, it shouldn’t be some phone designers to decide. This is a much bigger issue than that.
Replacing a proven, well-working, easily accessible solution for digital rights managers’ envisioned extra profits and control shouldn’t be so easy as making it appear to come from popular device makers and only with the goal of making phones thinner. However, they mght just manage to shove it down enough people’s throats this way.
For me, its not about not wanting to “upgrade” my headphones, its about not wanting to lose the universal compatibility of my headphones or use a dongle.
I don’t want one pair for my moto-phone, another for my portable media player and a different one for my ipad. I also don’t want to search for dongles when I need them. Even if I buy separate pairs, I have to keep them all with me? I have to keep separate places for them all? Terrible.
I dare you to find a good USB cable + jack that will outlast a good RCA jack (non plastic)… in real life not the lab.
USB jacks wear out often much much faster than specified. The round analog RCA jacks are much more resilient to bumps and jostling.
Any USB jack will outlast any TRS jack.
Basically because the springs on the USB connector _are on the cable itself_. So when they eventually wear down you just replace the cable and be done with it.
That is one of the reasons I can’t wait to say goodbye to the TRS jack. The number of MOBOs I’ve handled where the headphone port was ruined (and therefore onboard audio was useless) is just too numerous to remember. Most of them had headphones plugged in 24/7 and so weared out the spring in the jack.
On the other hand I’m yet to see a single Type A USB socket broken. I would love to see even a single example. The only issue I’ve ever experienced (and many times at that) is the entire socket separating from the PCB because of poor soldier work.
Sure, because most headphones have replaceable cables…
My current pair of Sony MDR-XD200 has replaceable cable.
What about a digital connection over the RCA jack… it should be possible to detect digital vs analog headphones. And based on that provide either analog signal or DC power + digitally encoded audio on the same wire. Assuming no compression at 192kHz 24bit audio you’d only need a 10Mbit uplink to the headphones, and you’d want a downlink for a Mic also I imagine.
I like this idea a lot. It’s already partly implemented, lots of ports today are an analog+optical combo. Just need to add some logic to provide power instead of analog sound when a digital headphone is plugged in.
If the argument is that the connector adds too much bulk, 2.5 mm jacks have existed for quite a while. A simple passive adaptor is all that would be required(or a quick soldering job for that matter).
Like still relying on shoehorning a timesharing punchcard mainframe operating system onto a phone, we still rely on the same old analog tools to satisfy our listening needs. Hardware has progressed at an incredibly pace – we have watches tons more powerful than 100 Xerox Stars combined – but things, including jacks, has not kept up.
We should have better by now.
Sorry Thom, I had to do this
So aside from all the silly purity arguments (on both sides), the only real question is how do I charge this thing and listen through headphones at the same time?
Data and power on the same lines is pretty old tech… from the beginnings of the telephone era.
MVS on my phone? Please can we have this
Green screens rule ok!
we hear analog. sound is analog. instruments make analog sound (if you want to hear it).
this is not progress if the digital replacement is of worse quality than the analog original. in music this is usually the case.
Progress is good.
Change for the sake of change does not make any sense.
I do not find any feature that would make me want to have a digital audio jack.
Let’s accept it: Our ears can listen sounds in the 20Hz-20KHz frequency range that is a completely supported range in the analog cable. Creating digital stuff to replace this is just overengineering.
The wheels still exist, the knives are similar to knives one thousand years ago, and the RCA audio jack is equally “elementarily perfect” [as Thom told in other post] that does not need any change.
I used to be critical of this move, but then I realized that it won’t matter one iota whether the 3.5mm analog output will continue to exist on smartphones or not.
The hot topic is plugging the DRM analog hole. This can happen regardless of whether the 3.5mm jack exists or not. Hi-fi output only over Lightning or Bluetooth, lo-fi over analog. Whether one uses the phone’s analog output or an adapter is inconsequential.
There is nothing preventing vendor DRM from forcing quality degradation in the analog output, even in phones that have a 3.5mm jack.
Personally, I don’t give two shits if the 3.5mm jack gets dumped from cellphones. I’m not afraid of some magical DRM hammer coming down. The sky will not fall and all this DRM-panic will turn out to be for nothing just like it always has in the past.
It is funny to see people cling to the 3.5mm connector like the NRA clings to their guns however.
This does not compute. The staggering amount of distortion I get via Bluetooth threatens to damage my speakers long before I reach a volume level that’s too loud to comfortably listen to. The same audio file played from the same phone to the same receiver via that dirty old analog headphone jack sounds so much better, and has so little distortion that it’s difficult to detect.
What most people don’t know about Bluetooth audio is that the stream is tinkered with several times before reaching your speakers. The original, already compressed digital source is again compressed using either SBC or aptX, both of which are lossy and introduce extra background noise and distortion, then broadcast to the receiver. The receiver will, depending on its complexity and quality, either immediately decompress and send it to a digital-to-analog converter and ultimately the amplifier circuit (the best possible outcome for Bluetooth audio), or will more likely filter it through yet another lossy sound processor before finally converting the resulting garbage to analog and shunting it over to the amp.
Meanwhile, my phone will happily convert the digital stream to analog itself using a high quality D/A converter and porting to its own high quality amp circuit and on to my headphones, with no unnecessary compression and processing in the middle. The result: Nearly distortion-free audio that is as good as it’s going to get coming from a pocket computer.
Just a second, 44.1K Hz at 16 bits and stereo is 44100*16*2=1,411,200 bits per seconds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth says Bluetooth 2 and higher can do 3 MBits per second. So it seems the hardware can send the sound data okay, but why does the WIKI site say that an application can only send 80 KBits per second? Who came up with that dumb limit when the first main use of Bluetooth was to handle audio?
We need a better digital standard than Bluetooth, and considering how messed up USB is that is not the answer.
Exactly. Why use lossy compression on music that is already lossy compressed, when the hardware can handle a bit-for-bit OTA transfer?
As it stands, transferring music over Bluetooth is like taking an analog stereo cord, cutting it into hundreds of pieces, then splicing them back together into a piss-poor conductor before finally transferring the audio across it. The audio stream worked just fine as it was, but no, they had to tinker with it for absolutely no good reason, and the result is a muddy, distorted mess with dull highs, incomprehensible vocals, and sawtooth bass that can damage speakers.
The effective BT data rate for audio is around 400kbps, more than the bitrate at which most audio codecs reach transparency for most people. Not SBC, though, but that’s the reason e.g. Apple sends the raw AAC steam if the original is AAC.
Well, there is aptX Lossless that can do up to 96KHz 24-bits, so the functionality does already exist that would allow for reasonably high-quality sound over Bluetooth. Finding devices that support aptX Lossless, however, is the bigger issue…
bluetooth can render lossless 24/96? i really doubt that. 24/96 stereo audio pushes between 2.5Mbps and 4.5Mbps bandwidth – can bluetooth handle that along with perfect timing between L&R channels?
if so that’s amazing and should be rolled out everywhere.
You think your cellphone contains high quality converters and amps.. How cute..
Higher quality than any Bluetooth bullshit, yes indeed. Nowhere near my stereo (even my car stereo) though. As I said, “as good as it’s going to get coming from a pocket computer”.
Edited 2016-06-22 04:45 UTC
While both SBC and aptX are lossy, at the bandwidths used by Bluetooth 2.0/EDR upwards they’re pretty much transparent by any practical definition of the word (i.e. more than 95% of listeners will NOT be able to detect any artifacts without artifact amplification).
So I asume you’re actually the one that’s “either insane or trolling”, and a pretty bad troll at that (see, I can play that game too).
Have you done _any_ blind testing at all? I haven’t, but some people have: http://soundexpert.org/news/-/blogs/audio-quality-of-bluetooth-aptx
To sum it up: SE listening tests showed that SBC at the A2DP rates is not bad at all. All sound artifacts were beyond threshold of human perception.
Edited 2016-06-22 18:23 UTC
anyone defending “lossy” has to use grey area terms like “difficult to detect” and “pretty much transparent by any practical definition of the word”. yet those same people attack hi-res advocates for using similar terms in the opposite.
lossy is lossy. it’s perceptual coding, which means it’s developed to trick and fool the listener. it works like that. perfectly smart people say “hey, that degraded copy is the same, or at least almost, since i can’t fully describe what’s lost, at least not in agreeable terms”.
loss = degradation. how well you hide it is for you. music is art, i’m an artist, and i don’t appreciate the degradation for convenience. if you can’t bother to listen to 100% of your artist’s work, then why bother?
lossy music’s time has died. it has been making us crazy for years and it needs to go.
Edited 2016-06-23 13:05 UTC
Erm…
If you get staggering amounts of distortion, your equipment doesn’t support protocols like aptX or SBC.
It is definitely possible to transfer high-quality audio over bluetooth. aptX demonstrates this as others have pointed out in this thread.
That you can’t expect more than basic audio quality from a $20 Bluetooth device goes without saying.
if bluetooth can move 3.5Mbps-8Mbps reliably in perfect stereo sync i’d be impressed.
if it can’t then it can’t transfer high-quality *MUSIC*
buy a DAP.
then let the phone people do whatever stupid thing they want with their PHONES.
put your music where it belongs, where it can be rendered properly. that is not a phone.
Do you mean like Beat audio is doing sound comparison with “enhancements” activated and “deactivated”.
Most companies have lost the ability to make their products stand out when vendors in China can make 5 dollar phones that look and run the same as 400 dollar phones.
Also remember these platforms are really ad platforms. User friendly is a side affect.
The 2.5mm TRS jack has exists for years too. And it’s a whole mm smaller!
I still have the 2.5mm – 3.5mm adaptor at home from the time when Nokia tried to shift us to 2.5mm.
Might be a lesson for Apple.
Finally we were at the point where the 3.5mm plug was ubiquitous and you could use your earplugs everywhere. No need any more to hand out headphones on the plane because about everybody had his own pair in the pocket. The same is starting to happen on long distance buses.
The devices are so simple and cheap they are provided for one way use on hop-on/off tourist buses.
I do not see that happen for digitally connected earbuds. They will always be a multiple more complex and thus expensive. And for what benefit? A 1mm thinner phone?
Welcome to 20+ years ago…
I don’t think removing the headphone jack is a problem, because once you connect the adapter to your headphones you never need to think about it again.
I DO think making phones so thin that they can’t fit a headphone jack IS dumb. Thinner is not better anymore! Phones are thin enough!
There are a number of reasons to dump the 3.5mm connector and one of the most overlooked ones seems to be just how much of a premium real estate is in a cell phone, where slivers can be highly valuable. Everything inside a cellphone casing is a compromise so yes thinner can absolutely mean better. Battery life is probably the biggest complaint people have… What’s the single biggest component inside a cellphone? The battery.
The move away from 3.5mm connectors in cellphones isn’t a conspiracy to kill off an old technology and usher in a new wave of DRM’ed cellphone audio playback regardless of what some people would love you to believe. It’s almost always about space and internal design.
And speaking of DRM, this isn’t the first time there has been pants-shitting over DRM fears where your favorite songs are concerned… We’ve seen this movie before and it always ends the same. The freaking out, the hysteria .. it always turns out to be a total waste. The monster that people were so convinced was hiding in the closet, simply isn’t.
You probably don’t remember the days of suing the 1/4″ jack and having to find the stupid adapter from 1/4″ to 1/8″ for headphones.
An adapter is not a solution. The adapter will invariably get lost (guaranteed).
You know what else isn’t a solution? Being stuck in the past because you’re too scared of the future. At least an adapter offers you the option to use your existing crap longer and possibly indefinitely. Sounds like a pretty good compromise to me. If your adapter(s) always wind up lost, that’s not a problem with the adapter, you just need to learn to take better care of your stuff.
So digitizing headphones is not going to give any better audio quality.
This has nothing to do with being stuck in the past, or anything of that nature and the entire thing of it’s a solution in search of a problem to solve, and it really only solves one – the “analog hole” that the MPAA and RIAA have been trying to close in order to lock stuff down with DRM – e.g not a consumer problem, not one of audio quality, or anything else.
Further, it raises costs of head phones since now they must also contain a chipset of some sort – USB-C, DAC, etc – so that they can produce the sound that they previously just received. So that $10 headset will now cost you $50 once all the patent owners have been paid.
There is zero benefit to users in all of this.
Both sides of this debate have valid points, and a set of pros/cons. In my personal opinion, the side favoring dumping the 3.5mm connector makes a stronger case. One thing we know however is that it will happen whether you like it or not, and it certainly isn’t going to cause the sky to fall. All this fear over quality loss, or strangling DRM, or whatever else is all nonsense. Like I said, we’ve seen that movie before and its never ended the way the FUD-promoters insisted it would.
Sounds like a lot of fuss about nothing to me. I personally don’t care what port my head phones plug into. DRM protected media is nothing new either.
So Apple goes and designs something that’s objectively superior to something that’s decades old and fraught with all sorts of analog noise/distortion, and you hate it? I thought old legacy solutions should be jettisoned with abandon.
i don’t think you understand the tech here.
apple is not redesigning the analog output plug. they are avoiding it.
if they keep it digital it has DRM built in. you can’t plug into that jack and get that audio unless they let you. if you aren’t an authorized device with an authorized driver you don’t get any audio.
the analog 3.5mm port is just fine and capable of better sound quality than any phone could push through it.
If people had been reading Intel’s Press Releases they would have read about this last month.
Intel thinks offloading the audio processing onto the listening device will mean much better audio quality in your headphones.
Sure they’ll be more expensive, you’ll need a dongle for your existing phones and you’ll hate them as much as I will.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10273/intel-proposes-to-use-usb-typec…
John Gruber suggests “And as for battery life, surely removing the deep headphone socket can only leave more room for a larger battery.”
Lolz. Sure, John.
What we really need is a headset that can be drown in champagne. I believe Samsung is working on one.
beer and vomit-proof audio devices are made, they are called PA’s