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Comment by rplst8 | Hacker News Reader

Comparing the 3.5 mm audio jack to the floppy drive is ridiculous. The jack has become far, far, more ubiquitous than the floppy drive. Additionally, the things that use the jack are often of higher quality and not disposible like a floppy disk was. And this ignores the fact that the floppy disk/drive was technologically usurped by other removable storage formats.

The 3.5 mm jack still delivers the absolute best sound quality compared to the other options available on a smart phone.

Most, if not all, of the other solutions will be a step backward.

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Yeah, this is amazing apologism, even for Gruber. "And in five years we’ll look at analog headphone jacks the way we look at all the other legacy ports we’ve abandoned." In five years, there are going to a lot of crappy Lightning earbuds in drawers and landfills.

> look at all the other legacy ports we’ve abandoned

I miss a lot of those ports. A lot of people do. Fumbling around the office for an Apple-compatible video cable is a relatively frequent event, in my experience.

I still have an old fashioned parallel port (via PCI card) on my PC, because there's no other option for convenient and low-latency GPIO.

And I don't remember old fashioned serial ports needing special drivers that would brick unapproved hardware, like some modern FTDI USB serial adaptors did.

"Legacy" ports are simple and reliable. Let's not abandon the simple and reliable 3.5mm headphone port.

This is a great point. I am gearing up to use a Raspberry Pi in a project for GPIO. It doesn't have to be low-powered necessarily, but the abandonment of the parallel port means that getting GPIO on a PC is more difficult.

> Maybe now is the wrong time, and Apple is making a mistake. I don’t know.
> Patel misses the bigger problem. It’s not enforcement of DRM on audio playback. It’s enforcement of the MFi Program for certifying hardware that uses the Lightning port. Right now any headphone maker in the world can make any headphones they want for the standard jack. Not so with the Lightning port.
> Presumably Apple’s Lightning earbuds will work on iPads, too. But it’s going to suck having to use different headphones (or a dongle) for the Mac than you use with your iOS devices.

> Will MacBooks ship with a Lightning port in lieu of a headphone jack? If so, will they ship with headphones? (Probably not, I say. Cough up the extra $29 for a new pair of Apple EarPods.)

I'm increasingly irritated by Gruber's increasingly cozy relationship with Apple pitch-people (sometimes even using language only they use, like "with iPhone" or "on iPad").

But this is neither amazing nor apologism. He's ambivalent, at least in the text of this article. He is not defending the decision, extolling it's brilliance, saying Apple's doing the right thing.

(To the commenter who's about to say, "Cherry picking!": Please consider the likelihood that your brain is cherry-picking when you see the name "John Gruber.")

I don't know what I need John Gruber is. But I'd say those quotes you pulled are pretty intentionally characterizing the potential (and legitimate) issues somehow acceptable. Why would I want Apple to regulate the third party headphones available to me? The headphone market might be a bit too large to track, but having that many choices isn't a problem in my mind. I'm free to research and select from the myriad options at any price point. Those who prefer to buy Apple endorsed products can go to their store and find Beats or whomever on the shelf. Tell me what advantage is gained by eliminating the other options in be market?

And I see no significant advantage to the change in technology itself. Optical ports provide a measurable advantage in sound fidelity over analog, but you haven't seen them eliminate composite or component ports from home receivers, because there are also significant disadvantages in cost and length of optical cables. I don't even follow that there's such gains to be made from switching to lightning...

Which leaves me at the obvious conclusion that this is just a ploy to sell more adapters and reap licensing fees from vendors at the expense of their customer.

And remarks he makes like "Cough up the extra $29 for a new pair" convey exactly the tone that is bothering us all.

"Maybe Apple is making a mistake"? "It's going to suck having to use different headphones"? "Will they ship with headphones -- probably not ... Cough up the extra $29"?

I don't know how anyone could see those comments as favoring Apple, diminishing the problems, or somehow seeing them as acceptable.

I guess if you start out with the assumption that Gruber is an Apple partisan and nothing more, it's easy to read anything you want into his words.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7013002

[EDIT: The link above gives a few quick examples of particularly biting criticism against Apple by John Gruber. Not sure what I've said here that's so objectionable -- perhaps one of you could post a reply?]

>Why would I want Apple to regulate the third party headphones available to me? ... having that many choices isn't a problem in my mind. ... Tell me what advantage is gained by eliminating the other options in be market?

Is it really not obvious what the advantage is? It's a huge advantage: to listen to music on headphones with your shiny new iPhone, you'll have to either buy some shiny new Beats headphones from Apple for $300, or to use non-Apple headphones you'll have to buy some kind of dongle adapter for $29.95. This is a giant advantage for Apple because it'll improve their profits.

The advantage to you is that you can feel warm and fuzzy about being a mindless Apple consumer and having a shiny new iDevice that costs a fortune and only works with other iDevices and forces you to buy new headphones. People like to feel like they're part of an elite in-group.

It's very simple: if you don't like the way Apple does business and treats you as a customer, then don't buy their product. The only reason they're able to get away with this kind of thing (using non-standard connectors is something they've been doing a long time) is because people line up like lemmings to buy their iDevices. If you buy an iPhone with no headphone jack, you really have no right to complain about it being missing; it isn't a surprise at this point.

Gruber practically begs the question by assuming that 3.5mm is a legacy port in need of replacement, lumping it together with other short-lived artifacts of the PC era like VGA, ADB, and the 30-pin dock connector.

As for quotes, cherry picked or otherwise, here are some that jump out:

> But I say at some point [3.5mm] will go away

> Apple has proven to be very good at timing the removal of established legacy ports.

> If it weren’t for Apple we’d probably still be using computers with VGA and serial ports.

> surely removing the deep headphone socket can only leave more room for a larger battery

> in five years we’ll look at analog headphone jacks the way we look at all the other legacy ports we’ve abandoned.

You called Gruber's article "amazing apologism," and I'm responding to that alone. We're pushing things a bit far if we characterize any of the things you've listed here as either amazing or apologism.

Gruber is not just arguing pro-Apple and saying this is the right decision. Indeed, he even says maybe "Apple is making a mistake," and goes on to include several serious problems with it.

Gruber's post is a reaction to Patel's characterization of Apple's move as user-hostile and "stupid." His reply is not, "Here's why I say Apple is right to make this move." Rather it is, "Right or wrong, and like it or not, here's some sober perspective on why Apple would/could do such a thing."

"Ports we've abandoned"

Yeah like 1/4" and XLR, which are used on most studio and enthusiast equipment. Why don't manufacturers ditch that in favor of USB or full fiber, the poor fools?

Some people live in a fairy land with heads up their ass...

> The 3.5 mm jack still delivers the absolute best sound quality compared to the other options available on a smart phone.

That's only true because the only headphones that exist for smartphones are headphone jack or Bluetooth.

You can build a USB-C or Lightning headset with much higher impedance and use a digital signal to a higher quality DAC than the one built into the phone.

You can do that with USB2 as well, but hardly anyone does, because they aren't forced to do so.

Most people don't want a higher quality DAC than the one built into the phone. High quality DACs are cheap. If the one in your phone isn't good enough for you, in two years you will get a new phone -- pick one with a better DAC, since now you know that's important to you. In the meantime, your $1000 headphones from four years ago will still work on all the phones with 3.5mm jacks, and so will the $6 pair you picked up on the boardwalk when you realized that there was no way in heck you wanted to wear the good headphones out on the beach.

> You can do that with USB2 as well, but hardly anyone does, because they aren't forced to do so.

You can plug a USB2 DAC into your phone?

A ton of people who own good headphones for their computer use a USB sound device instead of the motherboard's built-in audio. But today, similarly good headphones for mobile phones do not exist because phones can't drive them. This may not be a priority for a lot of people yet, but Apple is in a position to hugely increase the size of the market.

I'm not thrilled that it would create headphone lock-in on iOS vs Android, but you have to at least admit that it opens up opportunities for better headphones for phones than what's out there now.

If you'd tried to do this 10 years ago it would have been pointless because people's music libraries were all a bunch of MP3s ripped at 128 kbps. Now that Apple Music exists, Apple has direct control over the quality of the music they're streaming. If they want to make better headphones workable they can push out media in a format that makes them actually worth using.

Using an adapter to 3.5mm headphones doesn't feel like that big a deal to me. I would guess that Apple can output an analog signal over the lightning connector to allow a small passive cable (like DVI-I to VGA).

Going the other direction, someone (guessing Apple won't) could build a 3.5mm device that converts to a Lightning signal, but I'd expect it to also have to plug into a phone's accessory port to get enough power.

Is it not possible to have a DAC that plugs into the lightning port, while keeping 3.5 mm audio for the masses who don't want/need a separate DAC?

99% of listeners aren't using headphones that are good enough to notice a difference in quality from an offboard DAC.

Yes, you can plug a USB DAC into your phone with most modern Android devices, and I believe the same is true with iPhones. They even support the standard USB audio device class used by many common DACs. People just don't generally do this.

Yes, you can plug a USB2 DAC into your phone. There's a list of working configs here:

http://www.head-fi.org/t/595071/android-phones-and-usb-dacs/...

and of course lots of discussion.

Huh, I hadn't seen that before. Still, I have to imagine if you made better audio hardware a built-in feature instead of something that requires dangling a big USB2 device off of your phone, you're going to get a lot more interest from users.

Unlikely. The DACs in most of the available chipsets in phones are far superior to something you could put in a pair of headphones or as a bump in a cable - and would need batteries to run it.

I use a Lightning camera adapter (USB port) to an external DAC and headphone amplifier. It gives me the best possible sound quality, since the audio is pure digital until it hits my DAC, which, I can assure you, is much better quality than any internal DAC included in a smartphone.

Personally, I don't really care about the headphone jack because I never use it. I will admit, I'm different than 99.99% of other users.

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