Oh, for Og’s sake. Depending on who’s study you believe, 97 to 99 percent of all mobile malware is on Android. Here’s one of a half dozen places that come to the same conclusion.. That’s from 2014, the numbers are worse for Android now.
I know it’s trendy to hate Apple, but the “walled garden” being protection against malware isn’t anywhere close to a myth. If you’re going to criticize them, at least do it for something real.
If you have an older iPhone, but want to keep up with the latest innovations, you can upgrade your current phone with the Apple Plug.
I’m seriously considering the 7 for a few reasons;
I’m close to the upgrade point in the AT&T Next program and my current 6 has a couple minor issues
1; I’m sure the battery has lost a decent amount of capacity as I use the phone pretty heavily
2; even with 64MB memory, I’m running low on free space
3; most annoyingly, the speakerphone speaker had an annoying buzz/click at certain frequencies, it was intermittent, and I’ve already had the speaker replaced once under warranty, the phone is now out of warranty, and the click/buzz is returning…
This was apparently a known issue on the 6 and 6s series, as they used the same speaker module, so moving to a 6s (or 6s+) puts me at risk for buzzy speaker issue again, not sure if the 7 uses the same speaker modules, if so, then I have even more chance of BSI, I’ll wait for reports from early adopters before making the move
I do like the water resistance and the solid state Home button does intrigue me, if the speakers used are not the same problematic units in the 6 series, even better…
If the Iphone has no headphone Jack then the phone is useless
I will stick with my Andriod:)
As I posted on the previous page, BT earbuds are available for about $15; that’s cheap IMO. And I’m sure that the price will come down as more and more people make them, which I’m sure will happen because there will now be increased demand.
Maybe it’s just the cynic in me but I can easily see Apple deciding that you have to use officially licensed BT earbuds for safety, security or some other BS reason.
That’s a pretty ridiculous conspiracy theory, and would mean that no Bluetooth decides at all would work.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
All your examples involve going to a new non-proprietary standard, or from one proprietary standard to another, or dropping outdated technology early in favour of something better and non-proprietary. They are in short, changes that were at worst temporarily irritating.
[6800 to PPC to Intel doesn’t fit this pattern, but non-geeks wouldn’t even know this was a thing].
None of your examples involve moving away from a very widely used non-proprietary standard to a proprietary standard with no clear advantage, when good non-proprietary standards are available.
To me it is a major downgrade with nothing better (in terms of functionality or being non-proprietal) on the horizon.
I’m not quite sure why you think the latter. Apple could quite easily require licenced listening devices to use some form of additional handshake to work. No, wait. They’d never do something like that. That would be totally ridiculous. The next thing you know I’ll be suggesting that’s exactly what they do with lightning cables. How silly.
Hey, it took courage to lock out unlicensed third-party lightning cables from syncing with or charging iPhones. It’s going to take even MORE courage to lock out unlicensed third-party BT headphones. Does Apple have enough courage to go through with such a courageous move?
I imagine that, yes, they do. They’re just full of the stuff.
In a way, it’s already a thing.
There’s a good chance all of the AV equipment in your house is HDCP compliant, and therefore has a built-in Intel tax. I’m not sure if typical bluetooth headphones are HDCP compliant, but I’m guessing not, especially if they’re the $15 variety. It’s no stretch of the imagination at all for Apple to flip a switch and require HDCP for bluetooth audio*, and then be the only ones selling HDCP compliant headphones (at least initially).
To be fair, it’s unlikely that Apple would make such a move for a protocol that they don’t control and wouldn’t stand to profit from, but there’s nothing stopping them from creating a competing standard for audio (since they control such a large chunk of the digital audio market) and then require officially licensed headphones, much in the same way that your TV is officially licensed by Intel. All in the name of protecting digital content from copyright infringement (oh, and if it happens to net Apple a few billion dollars in the process, oh well).
*I don’t know if this is technically feasible, as I don’t think it’s in the spec, but they may be able to emulate one of the supported protocols over bluetooth and then require headphones to use that.
I’ve never used the headphone jack on any of my mobile phones. I have a wireless headset for my PC too.
For true audiophiles how do you play vinyl through your phone?
I use little (Sansa) MP3 players, which don’t even support BT. The headphones stay in my workout bag as they don’t need to be pulled out to be recharged. The rare time I use headphones in my phone is to do something like listen to a youtube clip that was sent to me (or linked here). Plug in phones, listen, unlpug & leave 'em where they were; car, desk, home, etc. I don’t need to worry about charging them, ever.
As others have said, you’re adding weight, cost, complexity & a downside (running out of charge) to something that works great now. BIG fail.
So let’s discuss this aspect of things…
How long should we (the Dopers posting in this thread) wait until we declare whether or not this new policy of Apple’s has failed or not? And what exactly will be the criteria?
IMO if Apple has not returned to the 3.5mm jack within 2 years, their initiative has not failed.
Also, if any other manufacturer drops the 3.5mm jack within 3 years, their initiative has not failed.
Does anyone think that is an unfair or inappropriate criteria for assessing the success or failure of Apple’s actions? If so, what would you suggest?
For me, there are a few different issues here: my own preferences for a particular outcome; whether it’s a good decision in terms of consumer convenience; and whether it will significantly affect the sales of the iPhone. These are all connected in some way, especially the last two.
Of course, from the perspective of an Apple shareholder, and presumably also the Apple executives who run the company, the only really important question is the last one. If people continue to buy the device, and if evidence suggests that the removal of the audio jack does not have any appreciable negative impact on sales, then the policy can’t really be called a failure.
In the aggregate, the issue of consumer convenience will be connected, at least in some measure, to the issue of sales. That is, sales will suffer if enough people decide that the absence of the jack is sufficiently inconvenient to stop them from purchasing an iPhone 7. And there are multiple groups in play here: people who have older iPhones who are deciding whether (or when) to upgrade, or maybe switch to Android instead; people who have non-Apple phones who might be thinking about changing to Apple; and people who might be moving to smartphones for the first time (yes, these people still exist).
One issue for Apple is that their global iPhone sales seemed to be leveling out this year, for the first time, after years of solid growth. On the one hand, if you’re having trouble maintaining your growth rate, it might not be especially smart to introduce a new phone that, in many ways, is not much of an upgrade over the previous model, and that also eliminates a long-term, universally-adopted, and expected bit of functionality.
On the other hand, though, they might have decided that, if overall purchasing numbers are leveling off, then the best step might be to try and extract as much money as possible from the people who buy the phones. If you can get your loyal customers to fork over extra money for proprietary technology like the new wireless earbuds, the income might offset the impact of declining handset sales.
Basically, this is, like so many business decisions, one that we can’t really evaluate until we look at its impact in the short, middle, and longer run.
As for my own personal preference, i see no need to move away from the audio jack. But i completely acknowledge that this is a personal and somewhat subjective opinion. I don’t have an iPhone anyway, i’m perfectly happy with my Android phone, and i probably wasn’t going to get an iPhone 7 whether it had an audio jack or not.
I should add, by the way, that this whole debate might not have even registered on my consciousness if it weren’t for the furor over the Apple executive’s “courage” comment. And I would have mocked that type of tone-deaf corporate hubris no matter which company it came from.
I fully expect this to, in the end, be a victory for Apple. They consistently rank at or near the top of companies with the strongest brand loyalty.
In the end, this is a blow to consumers. Any time an influential company makes a move to limit consumer agency and choice, we lose out. As a non-Apple user, I can only hope that other manufacturers don’t follow. Luckily, there’s no single “Android” phone developer, so I feel pretty safe.
I’m cool if you’re an Apple user who doesn’t mind the change. The only thing that strikes me as silly is making believe that the 3.5mm jack is anywhere close to obsolete or anachronistic.
For only fifty bucks, Apple will sell you a dock with a 3.5mm jack in it so that you can charge your phone and listen to music at the same time.
You record the vinyl into a lossless audio file.
Not that I would consider you a true audiophile if you actually prefer vinyl. That’s more of a hipster thing. Or at least, an anachonistic thing. Sure, it can be fun to have vinyl, and you might like an old song on vinyl, but vinyl is objectively of much lower sound quality.
That doesn’t matter, because, unless you intentionally opt out, Android is also a walled garden. Yes, more malware exists for Android. But you only get it by intentionally leaving the walled garden and enabling software from other locations.