Lot easier to take something from someone’s ear than their hand. Plus, what if it falls off in a crowded place.
I think that’s off-set by the difficulty of grabbing something tiny and buried in hair than something hand-sized and extended. The dropped and lost issue is much more troubling.
Maybe, but 3.5mm jacks still offer advantages that are unlikely to be superseded anytime soon.
Apple likes to make a big deal about getting rid of the optical drive before anybody else, but they did that long after broadband had drastically reduced their functionality for many customers. Nothing has happened to reduce functionality for 3.5mm jacks. They’re still the undisputed king at doing the things they do well. There is no existing wireless option that beats them out in terms of price, durability, power consumption, and convenience.
Wired earbuds are not buggy whips.
edit: It’s also worth pointing out that ethernet ports on laptops are hardly obsolete. Just within certain classes of laptops.
I have a iPhone 6, now two years old. I haven’t had much luck squeezing more than about three years of life out of phones (I’m not too hard on them either), so if Apple doesn’t manage to fix this disaster by their next upgrade cycle, chances are good my next phone is going to be Android. And I suspect once I’ve gone through the effort of switching, I’m never coming back.
So the question is how many iPhone users are like me. And I think this is where Apple’s don’t-give-a-fuck-what-their-customers-think attitude may end up killing them.
To be fair, it would be loads easier to snatch a standard pair of bluetooth earbuds from somebody’s head since you just have to grab the connecting cord and pull backwards.
Doesn’t mean folks won’t be losing these things left and right.
I see lots for $15 or so on Amazon.com.
I don’t think having your soon-to-be-nearly-ubiquitous BT earbuds stolen will be an epidemic.
Yeah, I believe each left and right piece of the AirPods are self contained and go in your ears without a wire connecting them together. If someone wants to steal them, he’s really going to have to get up close and personal and grab them both at the same time.
Headphone jack removal? Meh… Gives me a reason to pick up a pair of Bluetooth headphones, headphone cords were always annoying, getting in the way, pulling the headphones or earbuds out…
I’m more interested in the better weather resistance, the dual camera on the Plus, and how the home “button” implementation will work now
Other pros;
Stereo speakers built in
More memory (I’m looking at the 128MB midline model)
And I’m definitely considering the Slightly Darker Black finish, even though I’m going to end up putting it in an Otterbox Defender and put a ZAGG Luxe tempered glass screen protector on it
Bad link. This one works:
I use Android so I don’t have an opinion on the new iPhone. But, between two Android devices, one with a 3.5mm and one without, I’d lean strongly towards the former (rest being fairly equal). It just works, I have plenty of devices to make use of it and I don’t really give a shit if my phone is another couple millimeters thinner.
No, not particularly worried about someone snatching the $16 Bluetooth headphones I got on Prime Day.
Yeah, those are fine for entry-level bluetooth earbuds. They also get “up to” five hours of playtime on a 1-2 hour charge. So if you forget to charge them, you’re out of luck. If you want to take them on a trip where you’re going to want to listen to something for a long period of time (say on a long flight), you’re out of luck. If you want to keep a pair in your locker at the gym, you’re out of luck. And so on.
I’ve been using BT headphones for years - I really do love them. I would never say that BT headphones are bad tech. They’re awesome tech. But they are not ready to be the universal standard. Not by a long shot.
Not sure if you’re challenging me, but I did start out in this thread by bashing Apple and predicting a catastrophic downfall. Safe to say I agree with you.
I’m just making the case that a time will come when the 3.5mm jack will need to go away just like the optical drive and ethernet jack. Some people in the thread have implied that the 3.5mm jack is perfect in it’s simplicity and that it should never go away, that’s wrong.
Apple is going about ditching it in a very, very stupid way though. Hell, a smarter move would have been to include standard Lightning Earpods in the box with every iPhone 6/6S. Make those Lightning Earpods better than the 3.5mm ones and get people using them. Release the AirPods now and keep the 3.5mm jack for a couple more cycles. Start creating a critical mass of people who already view the 3.5mm jack as a worse option than the alternatives before you take it away.
Right now the only people who view the 3.5mm jack as useless are people who don’t use headphones…
How often do you listen to music/podcasts/etc. on your phone for more than 4 hours continuously? :dubious:
I use headphones and I view the 3.5mm jack as useless. I use BT headphones. Ya know, like a proper 21st Century-er. 
Looking around my office cubicle farm, I’d say 50%+ of people do that for 8 hours every day.
Right. This is another PITA for a LOT of people – my car has AUX inputs but not Bluetooth or USB. And if I hold on to iPhones for 5 years imagine how long I hold on to things that require a multi-year $20,000+ bank loan to acquire.
So now the majority of people will also need an aftermarket Lightning-to-3.5input wire for the car (if you have a more recent model with USB ports then you may be better off, every iPhone user’s first purchase is a half dozen extra Lightning-to-USB cables). And if your car is slightly older than that, you may need one of those FM-carrier-signal gizmos that were popular before AUX and USB plugs became common in cars.
Apple already did something like this with the switch to Lightning, leaving all those hotels who had put 30-pin i-Docks in the room clock radios stuck with serving only the guys like me who hold on to the gear. And before that they had the big switch in the MacOS where they simply said “sorry, gotta move on”. So it seems gradualism is not their thing, Omniscient.
Thanks for the answer. I guess I just disagree on most of these points. (Is the new iPhone giving users more battery and more sensors, in exchange for that space? It seems not; the claim I see is that the space is going to water-resistance, somehow, and for a haptic home button. I already have water-resistance and a physical home button, as well as a phone jack.)
I think the 3.5mm TRS/TRRS is just about the perfect size for mobile and mixed applications–just big enough to be easy, durable and reliable. I’ve seen several failures in various newer kinds of multi-pin connectors, but never one of these. I definitely don’t want my bezels to get smaller; my current case was selected in part to bulk my current phone up to a similar heft of the previous model I used without case. As for screen cracking–I’ve never had cracks on any of my screens, but it seems to me that flexing of the overall unit is an increasing risk, as devices get thinner. And until that zero-port ‘ideal’ is achieved, isn’t the Lightning jack itself equally a weak spot in the frame?
It’s not just headphones for me. I have a nice personal device “ecosystem” now, in which my phone, computer, stereo, TV, and car system all work together just the way I want them to. Losing easy analog audio connection on the phone would really screw with that.
I could have written this post.
I didn’t read into the second page, but one thing I haven’t seen is the ability for Apple to use the digital Lighting port to implement a Digital Rights Management protocol which could (will) control what you are actually able to hear through your device. This is a great way (for Apple) to charge for the music you are now getting for free, or at lower cost.
Bob