My wife got her 7 plus yesterday. I took identical photos with it and my 6 plus. If the camera is supposed to be better, I certainly couldn’t tell a difference
The difference is mostly in gamut. Try a very brightly lit scene with a lot of yellows or bright greens. And of course you have to look at both photos on the 7 (which can display the gamut differences), assuming you’re not printing them. (The 7+ also has a little optical zoom, which the 6+ doesn’t).
But yes, we’re talking incremental changes at the this point.
Well, you don’t really have to remove anything; just make the case a tiny fraction bigger to fit in all you want. Isn’t the prevailing trend for smartphone form factors going bigger, anyway?
As I said upthread, as far as I can tell, my two-year-old phone has the advantages that Apple is supposedly ‘buying’ in this trade-off, and it has a 3.5mm port for headphones (or a Square reader, or whatever), too.
If you make the phone bigger, then the screen gets bigger. And if you use the extra space to put a headphone jack in rather than more battery, then you get worse battery life.
Look, there are tradeoffs in every design. There’s no magic way to have a headphone jack and everything the iPhone 7 has. You can argue the the headphone jack is more important than whatever features Apple decided to put in, but arguing that they could have everything they did and a headphone jack with no other tradeoff is silly.
They put this huge (and probably pretty heavy) vibration motor in it that’s completely unnecessary because I already receive all the vibration I need from my Apple watch.
What it comes down to is that Apple solved their problem (not enough space) by making it our problem (carry an extra adapter). That’s not what I want from the company that I pay lots of money to.
And even if somehow the pretty large iPhone 7 doesn’t have room for the headphone jack that all these much smaller devices such as iPods do have, then that argument doesn’t apply to the much larger iPhone 7+.
Apple is removing the headphone jack because they’re arrogant and believe their own press to the detriment of their customer’s needs, not because there’s any real reason to do so.
Your problem. Many of us don’t use head phones, and others will simply use headphones that fit the jack.
Sure. Walked down a street lately?
I have. Many people have head phones but far from most. Nearly all of those people without headphones have a smartphone in their pocket or purse.
This is hilarious to me. Can you imagine the uproar if they removed the vibration motor and said people could just buy a watch if they wanted to get better vibration alerts? 
I don’t mean to say that your needs aren’t valid. Just that there’s no possible way that Apple could make design decisions that would 100% please every single person. Everything they leave it is something that somebody wants, and (almost) everything they include is something that somebody doesn’t care about.
What is it that makes the headphone jack a thing that’s so totally necessary that not including it is “arrogant”, but a vibration motor a thing that could be dispensed with?
Framing the decision as not enough space being “Apple’s problem” and carrying a dongle “our problem” is facile. The problem is that phones are physical objects and cannot include an infinite number of features. So some of them got cut.
In the iPhone 6s they used a new type of vibration motor or “taptic engine” in Apple’s marketing speak. It seems that this is the reason the 6s is a good deal heavier than the 6. In the 7 they further improved the vibration motor, and it seems it’s now even larger than last year’s, which was larger than the old ones with the very audible hum. The iPhone 7 is a bit lighter than the 6s but still heavier than the 6, though.
I didn’t use the vibration before I got the watch because I found the sound annoying. Now with the watch I get vibration alerts on my wrist so I really don’t need this feature.
If Apple can make something like 48 models (two sizes, four colors, three storage sizes, two types of cellular connectivity) then surely they could make different models for people who found the old vibration style sufficient (or don’t use that feature at all) but value a headphone port as well ones that cater to those whose preferences go the other way.
Of they could make the phone all of a millimeter taller.
But no, Apple knows what’s good for us and that’s that. I can’t stand that attitude. They really need some decent competition.
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Not necessarily. You could make the unit a tiny bit thicker (I would prefer this, and it would help durability). Or you could have a slightly larger segment of off-screen face.
Two things. Firstly the tiny incremental improvements in other features permitted by removing the headphone jack weren’t anything that anyone was asking for or would have missed. So the removal wasn’t motivated by that. It was motivated by design purism and a fuck you attitude.
Secondly the phrase you are missing is non-proprietary. If Apple were actually motivated by concern for maximising function and minimising bloat they would have used a non-propriety all in one jack.
Agree to disagree. I’m sure that design purism had something to do with it, but I don’t think hostility did.
Bluetooth is non-proprietary. I think Apple considers a physical jack for headphones of any kind to be a mostly legacy application at this point.
You think waterproofing the iPhone was merely a tiny incremental improvement? Ok.
Everything looks incremental when it’s just catching up with what competitors have been doing.
It’s not a matter of hostility. It’s a matter of knowing that their strong position in the phone market gives them a position to make more money in the headphone market via their non-proprietary lightning port, with no concern for what people want.
Bluetooth is shit. It’s fussy, the sound is poor and it means one more thing to charge. That’s why Apple are going to clean up on their lightning port headphones.
This is a non sequitur. They could have waterproofed it with the 3.5mm jack.
Nonsense. Bluetooth is a digital connection. The ones and zeros don’t know they were flying through the air. The sound is exactly, precisely what you’d get through any other connection, barring actual communication failures.
Nonsense yourself. Ones and zeroes don’t know they are flying through the air, but there are rather fewer of them when many have been summarily executed by a lossy compression algorithm. Early Bluetooth was famous for very harsh sound due to heavy compression. The aptx codex is good but my understanding is that Apple isn’t using it. I don’t know if they have released what they are using but as I understand it their caginess on the subject doesn’t inspire confidence.
As to fussy, your experience of pairing may be different, but you’d be unusual. Most people I know and sources I read agree that Bluetooth has a very strong tendency to be a PITA.
Perhaps a larger sampling size is in order, then.
Thus far, none of your rants, personal anecdotes or opinions-as-facts match up with any of my own experiences, nor with most people I know or most sources I read.