Comment by tooFastFuckYou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tooFastFuckYou | Hacker News Reader

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Or stupid, anti-customer decisions that have already crippled the product to the point of embarrassment.

Like removing the headphone jack on a MUSIC-CENTRIC PHONE.

Or removing most of the battery capacity from a mobile device that you want users to employ for location-based (GPS-using, battery-hogging) applications. Or for pairing with an Apple Watch (via battery-consuming Bluetooth). Or for pairing with cheeseball headphones, again via Bluetooth. Oh, and since you now need a clunky adapter to NOT use Bluetooth for audio, you're blocking the charging port... so again you need MORE battery.

Oh, and why is Apple deleting battery? Well its excuse is making the phone needlessly "thinner," which makes its ergonomics WORSE and is a fraud anyway because of course the camera sticks out. But instead of making the back of the phone flush with the camera's extremity and using the extra space for battery, Apple chooses to ignore the pitiful sight of people carrying power bricks and wads of wire around with their "elegant" iPhones, begging bartenders to plug them in or crawling under pool tables to do so.

What will kill Apple? Jony Ive, making Apple devices so useless that even the ever-more-spineless public finally rejects them.

Um. Just buy a different phone if you don't think the tradeoffs Apple have made suit your particular use case.

Chill. It's all going to be okay.

Not quite as simple if you're locked in to the apple eco system.

You can only blame yourself for getting locked in though.

How exactly are you "locked"?

By DRM-free music files? By the Photos app that you can export anytime you want? By the iCloud storage which you can trivially replace with Google Drive or Dropbox? By the Contacts app that makes it trivial to export all your contacts?

What exactly will be the lock there? At worst you'd have bought some Mac/iOS apps from the App Stores that you'd need to rebuy. But that's always the case (App Store or not) for any platform transition since one platform's apps would not run at the other platform.

And for the big apps (MS Office, Adobe Creative Suite etc), their subscriptions allow you to migrate to one or the other platform...

What are talking about? I have Apple's latest phone and it has a headphone jack. Surely you're not getting all foamy around the mouth and basing your entire point on rumors?

As for what one can buy today, have you tested the battery hit when using BTLE? My experience and light testing says the draw is minimal. I'd guess driving the amp to play your music in the first place takes more power than running the BT radio (though jump in and correct me, HW folk).

I get that people have a handful of reasons why they would prefer that the headphone jack sticks around.

But do you think that in 10 years, and if not that, in 100 years, that the headphone jack will still be the primary interface?

And if the answer is no, that will not be the case, and we are ready to move on today, what's wrong for a company to move on? There will always be tradeoffs in the short term, but the vector of this movement is clearly down the path of no headphone jack.

Yes, just like I expect our electrical wires and plugs to be largely the same in 100 years.

Given the quality of today's wireless audio devices, and the slowdown in Moore's law, I don't see any replacement for the venerable headphone jack. Like TCP, it's a solved problem.

Headphone jack is analog and large in size. It's definitely due for replacement.

1) You need an analogue stage somewhere to produce audio; 2) Is it really that large? On my Lumia 950, the battery is virtually as wide as the headphone jack, and the camera lens protrudes from the main body of the phone already.

For those reasons, I'm not convinced a smaller headphone jack is particularly necessary.

Phones don't need to be any thinner.

One might say the same about ethernet and wifi.

Hell, Apple was first to ditch floppy drives, CD drives (some models), ethernet ports (some models), and Flash. They've got a pretty good track record of "we don't need this shit" lately.

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