Seems like this has been the talk of the internet over the last few weeks. So are you going to embrace the removal of the headphone jack or fight against it? Some analyst speculate that the phone will come with a lightning to 3.5mm jack, but with this solution you won’t be able to charge your phone and use the headphone jack at the same time.
I personally switched to blue-tooth ear buds about two years ago, so this is no biggie to me.
The 3.5mm is ubiquitous but also comically oversized for what it gets you, I think we’re better off without it in the long run even though it will be painful at first. My only remaining gripe is that they’re ditching it in favor of lightning, so I’ll need 2 cables in each of my cars. But griping about Apple using proprietary cables instead of being pro-social and using USB-C like everyone else is pointless.
All I know is that forcing folks to use a blue-tooth could be disastrous. I’m reminded of my friend, who’s Italian, who recently began taking an interest in Indian porn. He converted his garage to a man cave, which had its own bathroom. One day a couple of months ago, his family had a few friends and family over. He decided he needed a bathroom break and grabbed the iPad (which his wife had set up to play music during the party) and headed to his man cave bathroom. He decided to indulge in the aforementioned genre, but neglected to turn the blue-tooth off. The speakers inside the house were left on and at high volume. He ended up subjecting his entire family and friend circle to several minutes of the audio. Rumor has it that some children in the house actually ended up crying from the unfamiliar sounds.
I went shopping for TVs recently and several stores did not have any signs in front of each TV saying how many HDMI connections there were, USB, etc. One was on-line and did not say.
So perhaps this is a new thing from manufacturers, don’t even tell you what connections a gizmo has. Then start removing them too!
As for myself, I have, and will always, purchase my gizmos based on what and how many wired and wireless connections there are.
I don’t like it when a manufacturer decides for me that I no longer need something I use a lot! Might try asking your customers what they want rather than telling!
I love it because I hope that the move will finally convince certain diehards to ditch Apple, which would itself hopefully lead to cracks in their little walled garden.
I do use Android. That doesn’t mean I’m not pulling for Apple to change, since I think anti-consumerism is bad in a broad sense. Their vaunted lack of malware (much overstated these days) is only a single aspect of the garden.
No, it’s for the benefit of the planet by just the nicest, most customer-pleasing company on Earth. If you don’t like their wise decision to remove a cheap, open-source, universally supported connection type in favor of a technologically superior proprietary alternative over which they have complete control (for your benefit, of course)… well, fack. Go use an Annn-droid or something, ya lusr.
Doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I’ve been using Bluetooth headphones since I first got an iPhone in 2009. I have a small Bluetooth adapter that plugs into my car stereo, so I use Bluetooth there, too.
How long before Square starts putting out BT credit card magstripe readers? Ditching the headphone jack is going to be a deal breaker and sale killer or at the very least, a $50 irritation to thousands and thousands of mobile merchants as the current crop of Square readers are either magstripe readers that plug into the headphone jack, or BT readers that only read EMV or contactless cards.
I’m not delighted at the change, but this might be the impetus to drag me kicking and screaming towards a technology where I don’t yank the iPod off the treadmill every time I get tangled in the headphone cable. The only actual benefit to a headphone cord is that it prevents the earplugs from getting lost if they fall out. That might be a problem with a bluetooth device.
I am slightly annoyed at Apple’s constant abandonment of functionality in search of ever thinner and more evanescent products. I’d rather have a slightly chunkier product with a bigger battery or, in the case of a laptop, the ability to open it up and swap out hard drives.
I invested a good sum of money into my Bose Noise Cancelling headphones (which I love). I’m going to be pissed if I have to buy an adapter to use them. I also plug my phone in to charge at night and plug in the stereo jack into my clock radio and listen to a white noise app all night long. I’m going to be pissed if I can no longer do this.
As long distance hiker I appreciate both the simplicity, non-extra power required for bluetooth, and universally availability of regular lightweight headphones. The change is not welcome, the adaptor is a compromise I may have to make.
Gym machines are the only reason I switched to BT in the first place, and they’re awesome for that purpose (and many others), but 3.5mm headphones have lots of other advantages. Primarily, they’re one of the few absolutely universal pieces of technology available to consumers. They always work.
BT is good tech, but it can be annoying. Pairing sometimes doesn’t work. They’re not cheap. You can’t just leave a pair of BT headphones in your gym bag for “just in case” purposes. If you forget your BT headphones at home before a trip, you’re probably not going to pick up a pair at the airport. You have to **charge **them. Battery life on a pair of earbuds usually caps out at around eight hours of use.
There are lots of reasons to use BT, but there are even more reasons to retain the option to use 3.5mm.