I’ve never had that happen in years of buying various cables and accessories. I’m sure it’s happened but is this really a big problem for a passive component? I highly doubt it.
Wireless charging is coming. This will alleviate a lot of the butt hurt.
I’m really curious as to how you’ve avoided it because it’s happened to me a lot.
On anything other than chargers? Apple’s pretty picky about them sending the right voltage and obeying the stop/start signals, which a lot of the really cheap ones don’t. But I’ve bought maybe fifty third-party accessories over the years and have never had a non-charger one complain at me. Heck even the chargers usually work if you ignore the “this wasn’t designed for this iPhone” message.
I’ve had every other phone since the 3G. The components I’ve bought have mostly been cheapie power cables and a couple of ear bud head phones. They’ve broken from rough use but never suddenly become incompatible because of something that Apple has done.
No, not chargers. The cables themselves. The cheap ones that I’ve purchased usually work until the next iOS update.
There’s a certain irony to this - Apple has spent years cultivating sleek design. Aesthetics have always been one of their big selling points. This last release will create an aftermarket full of products that break up the iPhone’s smooth lines in order to restore functionality.
That’s true, but the vast majority of people (probably) won’t use them.
I mean, a USB DVD drive certainly looks much clunkier than a sleek DVD slot in the side of a laptop. But if only 5% of the users actually want it, then cutting that functionality so that the other 95% don’t have to carry around the extra weight (and pay the extra cost) is defensible. I’ve been happy to have a Macbook Air for years because i just don’t need the things that it’s missing (I do have an ethernet dongle for the rare times that I need faster network than Wifi).
I don’t think I’ve charged my phone and used headphones at the same time in years (once upon a time, I would have in the car, since I use the AUX input, but now my cars have Bluetooth), so I don’t need that dongle. I expect lots of people are in the same boat. But, even if we assume my 5/95% split is correct, 5% of iPhone owners is still a sizable market, so there will be products for them. And that’s ok.
I think the question is whether Apple correctly judged how people use their phones. If 40% of iPhone users regularly charge and use wired headphones, then this was a major mistake.
So when Apple sold 5 million iPods and 5 million people used the headphone jack it made sense to have one, but now that Apple sells 50 million iPhones and 5 million people use the headphone jack, somehow the needs of those 5 million are irrelevant?
(Numbers completely made up.)
What you’re missing is that there are engineering tradeoffs to the headphone jack. If removing a feature that the other 45 million people (numbers accepted for the sake of argument) don’t need makes the phone better for them because it can include a feature they do want (waterproofness, more battery, the smug satisfaction of having an closer-to-the-platonic-ideal electronic device with fewer ports (maybe?)), then it’s a reasonable tradeoff to make.
Obviously, removing a feature that 100% of your users want is probably misguided. Although there’s the apocryphal (but arguably sometimes true) line about how users don’t really know what they want, often attributed to Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”.
The fact that the absolute number of users is the same in your two examples isn’t particularly relevant.
My one big deal with the switch to wireless earphones is simply there now being yet another @&$*^%# battery to run out…
JRD - it’s not a switch to wireless headphones.
It is if I don’t want to end up having a different-plug wired headset or adapter dongle for every blasted device I may own.
Agreed. Apple have made their product worse so you have to buy other stuff to make up for it. Glad you’ve seen the light.
I don’t have to buy anything. I don’t use the headphone jack.
Agreed. Apple have made their product worse so one has to buy other stuff to make up for it. Glad you’ve seen the light.
But better battery life and water resistance in exchange for removing a feature that most people don’t use much if at all. There are a lot of people who will miss it but the savings more than make up for it. For me and many millions of others, it’s a better product.
It still has a jack. They just chose to use a proprietary jack.
If they had just wanted to make the product better they could have given you better battery life, better water resistance and kept me and others like me by leading the way with a non-proprietary jack for headphones.
This is the major hole in the argument of anyone supporting this move. Apple may claim merely to be moving toward the future, by streamlining the phoneandgetting rid of an old standard etc. But the way they have chosen to do it makes their actual motivation transparent.
I don’t get it. How does it make sense that if 5 million people want a product, then they can have it when nobody else wants that product, but they can’t have it if another 45 million people want another product?
Also the waterproofness and battery arguments are red herrings and even if they weren’t Apple shouldn’t use a proprietary connector.
Still waiting for my iP7, still don’t know how I will deal with the lack of the headphone jack. I may carry the adapter in my wallet so I will always have it, till lightning headphones are common and I can get one at the gas station.
Apple has also done this with the latest MacAir laptop, the only port on it at all is a single USB C connector, and that’s also how you charge it.
Not sure what Apple has against ports, but the push is towards wireless data connections. Perhaps wireless power, no ports will be in the future.
There’s also a cost to making too many different products. How many is too many? I don’t know, but if they have a with-headphone-jack and without-headphone-jack models, they’ve just doubled their product line for a fairly minor (and, in our hypothetical here) not really essential feature. How many engineers do we have to add to design 6 different cases instead of 3? What other changes have to be made to the internals to make them fit now that there’s additional hardware in there? Those are all real costs.
Design is about making choices. You can say the choice was wrong for those 5 million, but if it’s the right choice for the 45 million, then it might be the right choice overall.
Maybe. What’s not a red herring is that the headphone jack takes up space that can’t be used for something else. Here’s a teardown of the iPhone 7. Looks pretty crowded in there to me. Which hardware are you going to remove to keep the headphone jack? What about the 45 million people who don’t use the headphone jack and would rather have the thing you’re removing?