I’m on eight hour conference calls at least once per month. Having to worry about charging my headphones, being forced to use the speaker while my toddler sleeps a couple of rooms away, or not being able to charge the phone and use the headphone / mic combo simultaneously are all dealbreakers.
Like others have mentioned, I have a bunch of reasonably cheap but decent pairs of 3.5mm bud/mic combos stashed in a half dozen convenient locations. Replacing them with bluetooth and dealing with the inevitable pairing fuckups and charging brainfarts is a non-starter.
Actually, none of this matters to me, because I’m on Android and I’m never going to buy a phone that doesn’t have a 3.5mm jack or an equally elegant replacement.
This is a potential disaster for business iPhone users, though. If one of my on-call engineers has to drop from a crisis call because their Airpods are fucked up, I’m not going to have much sympathy for their choice of platform.
I can think of lots of situations where I’d want to use headphones for more than four consecutive (potentially but not necessarily continuous) hours without wanting to or without being able to charge my headphones back up. Going on a hike? Going on a plane? Long roadtrip? Going backpacking? The aforementioned headphones in a gym bag?
In most situations where I’m not going to have an outlet handy, of course I’m going to have a power pack with me, but I’m also not going to want to spend that juice charging a pair of headphones when I could using it to charge my actual phone. And don’t forget that a lot of bluetooth headphones can’t actually be charged while in use because the bit that the plug goes into isn’t accessible when they’re in your ear.
I actually didn’t notice that when I responded to your post.
In any case, it’s a tautology to say “eventually technology x will be replaced with something else,” but I think you’re overstating (at least implicitly) how imminent that replacement is in this case. BT technology is nowhere near approaching the 3.5mm jack in many important metrics.
Yes, the battery is 14% larger and gives ~2 hours extra charge. The phone is slightly thinner. The phone has dual forward facing speakers, which removing the jack likely helped. The water resistance required them to replace the moving home button with the “taptic” version that doesn’t move and that taptic engine probably consumed some of the space the headphone jack occupied.
There is more than 1 way to skin a cat. But engineering is all about tradeoffs. And eliminating one consideration (the jack) opens up a lot of possibilities. It’s rarely a simple 1-to-1 trade off, but instead a bunch of other small compromises can go away.
Not really. It’s the placement near the corner. Corner impacts rely on the rigidity of the frame to distribute the shock to protect the screen. On the corner where the jack is is a favorite spot to crack. The Lightning jack is in the middle, and less likely to have an impact, and it’s thinner so there’s more aluminum on each side to transfer force.
Yup, And lots of other people too. Doom I tell you!
I think there’s a grain of truth to Apple’s argument that the 3.5mm jack is holding us back. Sometimes you need a leap of faith to move things forward and maybe, just maybe, we’re on the cusp of that inflection point with new battery tech and Bluetooth 5.
My issue is that there little to gain and lots to lose to rushing the transition. There’s no need to use Cortes’ burn the boats tactic, and that’s exactly what they’ve done.
I’m sure Apple had these stats in mind when they made the push.
I agree with the various issues with wireless headphones, but the time may be ripe. The tactics are all wrong though.
This works nicely in the car. It plugs directly into the front AUX jack, gives full Bluetooth capability, and is low profile. It’s cheap, too, at $13.99 and holds a charge for about 10 hours. You can probably run it for a week’s worth of commutes between charges.
The 3.5mm jack is old-fashioned and obsolete. The only people who would use it these days are the sort of technophobic idiots who would cut their food by hacking at it with sharpened sliver of metal instead of doing it the proper way with a plasma cutter. These people also get their electricity by sticking a 19th-century “plug” into the wall instead of using a wireless Tesla death ray.
Seriously, there is no way in hell I will buy one of these. Carrying a dongle everywhere looks ridiculous if it’s attached, and it’ll get lost if it isn’t. Buying individual dongles for every pair of headphones and other equipment I have, plus an extra to keep in my wallet in case I want to hook up to someone else’s stereo, is a ridiculous waste of money.
Those Airpods are a variant of the EarPods which are earbuds. They’re one of the better earbuds on the market, but earbuds in general have lousy sound compared to fullsize headphones or in-ear phones (IEMs). The Apple In-Ear Headphones only cost $80 and they have vastly better sound quality. I wonder if they’ll do a Bluetooth version of those.
I have a pair of Sennheiser HD650 headphones, which are the standard when it comes to headphone sound quality and should last at least 20 years with occasional earpad replacements. To make a Bluetooth version of those, you would have to increase weight, increase cost, decrease reliability and require downtime for charging. That would mean you’d have batteries onboard which will wear out after a handful of years. You’d have a bunch of electronics built-in which will become obsolete in a few years and fail eventually.
Bluetooth only works for headphones that are basically disposable, unless perhaps they can come up with an external bluetooth receiver that is small and light enough to attach it to the headphones themselves without any penalty in comfort. Does anyone make such a thing? It ought to be possible if they can make Bluetooth earbuds. The best I can find is this but that still looks kind of klunky. And you’d need a powerful one to drive a lot of full-size headphones.
Has this involved any software/hardware change in respect of the lightning port to allow headphones to plug in, or has that functionality always been there? i.e., if I get headphones that plug into a lightning port, will they work with the lightning port on iPhone 6 and iPod nano?
The only argument that makes sense to me is that it lets them make the phones slimmer. That seems bogus to me though, because there’s only so thin you WANT the phone to be or it seems like it would become too fragile (then again, maybe that’s their thinking: you’ll have to buy a new one every 4 months because you sat on the old one).
To me, it smacks of “we’re gonna do it OUR way cuz we’re APPLE and we CAN, neener neener neener”, much like their refusal to use a standard USB connection.
I actually do use a bluetooth wireless headset - some of the time. The buds are a lot heavier than a wired headset, they don’t stay in the ear all that well because of the weight of the electronics, the battery life isn’t great (mostly I listen at bedtime and I’m lucky to get 2 nights between charges), and while this may be an artifact of the shape of mine, if it’s at ALL breezy when I’m walking outdoors, the turbulence makes it impossible to hear the music. I admit, it’s nice to have the phone in my pocket and not tugging on the wires of the headset.
And the headset requiring batteries means it’s one more way in which your “mobile” phone is really not all that mobile - if you’re out and not near power, and your headset dies, you’re out of luck. Yeah, you can charge the headset if you have a power bank or plug, but unless it’s an Apple brand headset you’ll have to have a different cable to charge it, right?
So even if I were to get the newer iPhone design, I’d still want a wired option, and it sounds like the only choices would be to pay Apple prices for their brand (or their crappy Beats headphones) that have a direct lightning plug, or a 3.5mm to lightning adapter to use my existing headphones.
All in all, I think it’s a solution in search of a problem.
Full disclosure: I actually don’t use an iPhone - I’m the sole Android holdout (my husband and kids all have iPhones). We just bought my son a new phone last month, intentinally doing so before the new ones came out.
Having to charge my earphones all the time is why I went back to wired earphones again. Re-charging is an extra hassle I don’t need and I hate hearing “battery low” when I’m in the middle of a hike.
OK. I wasn’t talking about taking headphones on a hike, though. I was talking about adding Bluetooth to a car stereo. One of these things is not like the other.
Apple should not capitulate, it’s a defining characteristic of the company. Every time they’ve dropped a port or drive or changed protocols, they’ve done it abruptly and without regret. Did you get a free firewire optical drive with your MacBook pro? Shit no you didn’t. Did you get a free 30-pin to lightning connector with your iPhone 6? El oh el, of course not.
But they’re giving away a free lightning to 3.5mm adapter. Weakness! Ghost-Jobs must be angry.
I’ve been using BT headphones for a while now (Android), so I’m okay with the move.
You can still use the adapter or lightning port for a wired connection, with the main downside being you can’t charge at the same time (which has never been an issue for me, personally, since my phone lasts long enough between charges).
One pair. Not a bunch of pairs for each place you might want to stash spare sets.
Buy more lightning-based headphones instead? Sure - at a higher cost. Buy a lightning-to-3.5mm adapter for all the stashes? Sure - at extra cost.
Really, I think the thing to do is start selling the iPhones with the lightning headsets AND the jack still in place for this iteration. But Apple didn’t ask my opinion.
One thing I wonder: the tab in the lightning cable is much shorter than a headphone jack. Will it stay in as well while undergoing the kind of bouncing around a regular headphone + phone undergoes or will it pull out if you look at it crossways. Will it risk damaging the port through normal use?
BTW - one of the supposed benefits of using the lightning port is better sound quality. Maybe (though I don’t know that I could tell the difference). If so, that’s more ammo for making that kind of headphone available now - but don’t remove the jack. Let people try both (new lightning phones, old jack phones) and figure it out.
Well, to be fair, the matter with the Lightning headphones is relatively minor and will just help drive people more quickly to BT.
I suppose someone will shortly come up with a Y-connector that lets you plug the Lightning port to both the charging source and audio out. And Apple will then set iOS11 to only play nice with Apple-chipped ones…
BTW oh yeah… one more rechargeable battery (or two, or five, between multiple headsets, speakerphone kits, car adapters, etc) to keep track of, that’s another bit of genius.