You’re of course right. Forgot that. But I blame Apple, they pitched it like it was the greatest invention since sliced bread today.
That fact probably make my argument even stronger, if you have a 6S+ you really have no reason to upgrade unless you’re desperate for water resistance or dual speakers…crickets.
Ummm… just put in in upside-down.
Macs aren’t in the “walled garden”.
This is a use case that I overlooked in my diatribe, I’ve always wondered why Square and similar companies used the 3.5mm jack instead of the Lightning port for this function. Unless it’s a licensing issue, it seems like they’d get much more robust functionality out of that.
But, it’s another established segment of the market they are alienating.
I know Apple spokespeople will eventually backpedal and say that they are taking the arrows for everyone else to move technology forward, but in the short term this is going to be super painful.
I actually think Apple is probably right that a future without a 3.5mm jack is a better one, and Apple is definitely the only company with the strength to force the move, but they have gone about it in a really bad way.
Another thing that has me curious, what is the story with this W1 chip? As per usual, Apple has hand-waved away all the details and pretends it’s inventing things out of whole cloth.
It seems like these AirPods use Bluetooth technology, but they’ve created this “W1 chip” thing on top of it in order to somehow improve the experience while further locking in their customers. The AirPods are only compatible with “iCloud-connected” devices which under normal circumstances, would enrage the nerderati. Remember when Microsoft wanted to require an internet connection (to Xbox Live presumably) to game? This should be way, way worse. Why in gods name should you need to be connected to the internet to listen to your wireless ear buds?
Speculation has it that Apple has “solved” the pairing problem by somehow federating the MAC address of the AirPods across your devices so that they basically get pre-paired. Which is clever if true, but doesn’t really explain why you’d not be able to use BT the old fashioned way with non-iCloud devices as well.
Apple has apparently baked in a lot of unique features, Siri support(?), proximity sensors, infrared sensors and accelerometers to presumably manage the on-off state automatically and independant use which is all positive, but apart from Siri shouldn’t need to be proprietary.
Bluetooth 4LE is pretty good, but also limited and finicky. Bluetooth 5 is right around the corner and will dramatically improve range, bandwidth and speed without increasing energy use. One might expect that BT5 will become a new standard for wireless audio and solve many of the usability problems that BT has today apart from charging. If that’s true in practice and BT5 is actually a game changer, I’ll be curious to see if these AirPods, the iPhone 7 and these W1 chips are future proofed in any way. Odds are they aren’t since the spec isn’t done yet.
So in addition to adding another new proprietary technology, this iteration of Apple’s (and Beats) wireless technology could end up as a deficient branch on the BT tree that will be replaced with the iPhone 8.
Yeah, that’s not really a solution. The magstripe reader needs to be stable to swipe a card one handed while you’re holding the phone. The floppy adapter will make this a 3 handed exercise.
It sounds like many businesses will be moving onto wireless chip-based hardware, so that group is fine, but there’s still going to be a subset that are still on the old card reader who won’t want to upgrade to the iPhone 7.
Plus there’s dozens of other vendors in this space, Intuit (which my Tile guy used just yesterday at my house), PayPal, SparkPay, PayAnywhere and Innerfence to name a few, that may not transition as fast as Square.
Ultimately it’s not about Square though, it’s about the number of typical iPhone upgraders who will choose to or be forced to skip this generation. There’s a shitload. And for a company like Apple whose revenue is almost entirely loaded up into one product, iPhone, that can be catastrophic. Grow or die.
In case you haven’t noticed, swipe cards are dead.
They are still being used, but that window is closing very, very rapidly.
After some thought, you can use all of Siri’s features via BT wireless headphones today. Absolutely no need for that to be proprietary either. Sounds like this chip simply has an always-listening mode to support “Hey Siri” completely free handed. I wonder if any other vendors support that use case with regular BT.
You keep missing the point. Swipe cards will still be a thing for the next 12 months, and the people using 3.5mm jack reliant readers is not insignificant. If the iPhone 7 doesn’t improve on the 6S’s sales numbers Apple is in deep, deep trouble.
**In technology being early is just as bad as being wrong. **
Whether you like the change or not, you have to respect the reason behind it:
That’s right, folks. If you want to know what courage is, just ask Apple vice president Phil Schiller. He’ll set you straight.
What a fucking knob. There aren’t enough rolleye smileys in the world for that shit.
Why?
Apple is not alone in the practice of replacing a simple piece of plain idiotproof dumb gear with a complicated hi-tech “smart” solution, even if sometimes it feels like they are doing it because they’re convinced they know better than us what it is we need. Pretty sure we’ve all seen that as well in other electronics, appliances, automobiles, etc. we’ve had to deal with in recent years. (personally, a lot of the stuff in my home is still hardwired just for the sake of NOT having to network-configure).
I’m cool with this since I am the sort of person who held on to an iPhone 3GS for five years before upgrading so it’s gonna be a couple years yet to get my next mobile, by which time the Hand Of The Marketplace had better whipped out some attractive alternatives (to both the phones AND the headset interfaces) at reasonable prices.
Apple’s apparent ideal of eventually having a device with no physical ports or buttons at all is peeving, but that’s just because I like being able to perform some functions by touch without looking at the device OR speaking to it. Surely there’ll be a satisfactory choice of some other design doctrine available before it gets to that.
OTOH their attitude about being these great world-changing “visionaries” has always elicited an amused :rolleyes: ever since the 1984 ad. The Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, it’s a great product that influences the market segment, it’s not the *&^%$ Rapture.
The 3.5mm jack is comparatively big, bulky and it’s basically a unitasker. It takes up space that could be used for more battery or more sensors/transmitters. It’s remote control functions are really limited. It’s part of the reason why the bezels are as big as they are and it compromises the structural integrity of the frame which contributes to screen cracks.
It does create some legitimate issues. You can argue that these issues are less important today than universal compatibility and simplicity and I wouldn’t disagree with you.
But someday, we’ll view 3.5mm jacks in the same way we view RJ45 connectors on laptops. Thankfully laptop makers largely waited until WiFi was ubiquitous before dumping them en masse.
That’s my thought.
I don’t listen to music on my phone, so it isn’t a concern.
The miniature phone jack has been around for quite a while, an industry standard for connecting audio equipment. If making the iphone thinner is that important, so be it.
I wonder how close one must be to one’s phone to use airpods? Will you hear rap from the guy sitting next to you on the bus? 
I’m all for it. It’ll make my phone smaller and more durable, which is important for me, and it doesn’t hurt me to slowly replace my wired earbuds with wireless ones.
So, you are not worried that someone will snatch the earbud from you while walking down the street. They cost something like $150.
That is an issue I had not considered.
AirPods, yeah, they’re $150. Generic types of wireless earbuds that work with any Bluetooth enabled phone run for about $35 or less.
I don’t see this threat as particularly more severe than iPhone theft in general. People will snatch things that you have out in the open. Probably easier to grab and snatch a over-the-ear wireless Beats or Bose. I also suspect that Apple will bake in some form of loss-prevention here with the iCloud-connection requirement.