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Floppy disks, optical disks, ethernet were all replaced by unencumbered standards and they all lead to a superior experience (well, maybe not ethernet, but there are definitly advantages to wireless). If you're old enough to have used a floppy disk drive you do not miss them.

Any time you introduce two way communication, you introduce the possibility of DRM, but that does not guarantee it. I can still use my HDMI with my linux PC. DRM is exclusive of the technology and I see no reason to hold back the technology because we are worried about DRM.

There are lots of compelling reasons to dislike this change. Among them the fact that I have a large investment in traditional headphones and devices that work well with them (my iPod, my HTC Phone, my stereo, TV, piano, guitar amp, etc etc etc), a decrease in quality, convenience and weight of wireless headsets (how long do they work? How much do they weigh? Can I swim or workout with them?). But DRM is not automatic.

>If you're old enough to have used a floppy disk drive you do not miss them.

I am, and I do. Floppies were ubiquitous, durable, reusable, and cheap enough to give away. There's no replacement today - flash drives are the closest thing but when was the last time someone handed you one with no expectation of getting it back? Or bought a box of 50?

Sneakernet became much less vibrant with the death of the floppy.

I'll give you 3 of those points, but definitely not durable. Some of them lasted a long time, and some of them stopped working before I could finish writing to them. And since writing to them was painfully slow, something frequently went wrong.

Of course with flash drives we can wait the short time it typically takes someone to copy the contents off to get it back. And since they can hold significantly more data, they are also far more reusable.

> flash drives are ...

Much more dangerous than an infected boot sector. See the BlackHat talk on a malware program can replace the firmware on a USB device.

Flash drives cost almost nothing. I'm not going to lose any sleep over a $4 flash drive being given to someone and never getting it back. In terms of inflation that's cheaper than giving someone a floppy that cost $1.

Floppy disks were always terrible. Slow, unreliable, prone to failure at the worst possible time. A simple magnet could trash them beyond repair. A bit of water could render them unreadable. Leave it loose in your bag and it gets bent? The thing was toast.

In the dying days of the floppy disk, around the time Apple introduced the iMac with no floppy drive, they were already obsolete. 1.44MB could barely hold anything useful at that time, most people doing any serious exchange had already moved on to Zip drives because they held a more reasonable 100MB, or CD-R since you could burn six times more than that onto them. If you had tiny WordPerfect files then floppies were adequate, barely, but what kind of a market is that?

So long floppy. You won't be missed.

You can buy USB flash drives for $2. People don't refrain from handing over flash drives because they're expensive, they do it because they have a reasonable expectation that you're able to immediately copy the data, or that you can receive it over a network.

The death of the floppy didn't kill sneakernet, the rise of portable networked computing did.

Floppies were NOT durable, and I just bought a box of 10 8GB USB sticks for under $20 - that's similar to the cost of the 1.44MB floppies we used to buy.

I don't miss the slowness, low capacity, or durability of floppy disks but they had features I do miss, like:

Physical write protect switches

Large space for writing a label

Small enough to fit in your pocket but large enough not to get lost from your pocket

Cheap enough not to care about

Disk could be ejected but still sitting in the drive not sticking out far enough to be a bother

You're really reaching for advantages there...

I'll give you the write protect one, but...

> Small enough to fit in your pocket but large enough not to get lost from your pocket

You can get keyring flash drives, I'd rather that than something larger. Anyway a floppy barely fit in a pocket.

> Cheap enough not to care about

Flash drives are cheap enough not to care about... but my data isnt!

I would definitely give a flash drive to someone if they needed it. They're like $4 each or something. And on a $/Gb comparison they obviously blow away a floppy.

> Disk could be ejected but still sitting in the drive not sticking out far enough to be a bother

You can safely remove a flash drive and leave it plugged in if you like.

> How many times will it take you forgetting your dongle to just pony up and buy the apple approved headphones?

Or do like I would do, which is buy an Android phone. I mean they only have 88% market share, how long will _they_ be around?

When Apple removed the floppy drive, CD drive, and ports older than USB, everyone else followed.

What do you think is going to happen to Android phones' headphone jacks?

Probably not become lightning connectors...

While my laptop doesn't have a floppy drive anymore. It does have a DVD drive and USB ports. Who is this 'everyone'?

"ports older than USB" meant serial and, later, ethernet.

My new-issue Dell work laptop lacks an optical drive and Ethernet. My dad just bought an even beefier Dell laptop and the first thing he asked was "where's the DVD drive?" Dell offered to send him a free external USB optical drive, but told him that internal optical drives were simply not an option on that make of laptop.

Did Apple ever offer a laptop with a serial port?

Every Apple laptop prior to the Powerbook G3 Lombard, released in 1998, had serial port(s).

Yes, in the form of ADB at least.

Nothing.

The question is, who is going to win: the legion of teenagers and young adults who listen to audio via the headphone jack, or device makers?

(It's the legion.)

If you had a replacement that was better - cheaper, less of an annoyance than $5 headphones plugged into a cheap phone - then you might win. But the proposed replacement is superexpensive, battery-powered wireless headphones. When the no-strain-relief Apple cables break, probably within weeks, you're supposed to buy another superexpensive set. That's not going anywhere with the horde of teenagers. It's a non-starter.

I would happily buy a phone with two type c ports which could detect and use analog headphones using pins on the type c plug for their analog signal.

The headphone jack was already destined to be replaced by USB type-c on many (not all) portable devices. Apple's move may change the time line, but does not change this fact.

Some Android phones will have 3.5mm jacks, and some won't. At least there will be choice.

> we're still waiting on the ethernet port to go away but give it time

You have it precisely backwards.

Far from going away, everything became Ethernet.

Take a look at the modern interconnection standards: HDMI, USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, etc. They are all packetized transfer across an impedance controlled double pair of wires.

I think parent was probably implying wireless would take over.

I don't agree however, call me a luddite but I'm partial to the simplicity and speed of wires. Not for my phone of course, but for my main desktop PC, I'm happy it's not wireless.

> we're still waiting on the ethernet port to go away but give it time

From some consumer devices, sure. It's not going anywhere in commercial and industrial applications, where wireless networking is often verboten.

Nor for gaming. Wireless doesn't compare to wired for low latency, high bandwidth, reliable connections.

> How many times will it take you forgetting your dongle to just pony up and buy the apple approved headphones?

Perhaps I missed something in the announcement, but won't any Bluetooth headphones work with iPhone 7?

> Long-term, we are giving up a universal and open protocol that all devices work with for a proprietary one.

Does Bluetooth count as a proprietary protocol? It's not exclusive to Apple, but I don't think it's a totally open standard either.

How long will it take me to buy the clunky charging dongle - one for my bag, one for the car, and just leave them there? I'm an outlier - I don't use the headphone jack to listen to music but rarely - I use it to make phone calls - because both the audio quality and the volume offered is much superior to any reasonably priced wireless solution I've seen - with the added advantage of me not needing to charge it.

I suspect that Apple has enough usage data reported from customers to indicate how many of its customers use bluetooth (which is a universal and open protocol) to justify this from a business perspective - while it'll be inconvenient for me - I understand that in many ways, I'm not the typical Apple customer.

The EFF article? its FUD, pure and simple. A couple of the early android devices had no headphone jack - there was no great outcry about the encroaching DRMed world, some minor grousing about the annoyance of not having a headphone jack was all. Apple will likely support the adapter as long as most everyone else does - as in the past they were never the first to get there, just the most notable.

  > How many times will it take you forgetting your dongle
  > to just pony up and buy the apple approved headphones?

Uhm, Apple headphones are right there in the box. You get them with your iPhone.

How many times will it take you forgetting your apple approved headphone to just pony up and buy another apple approved headphone?

I didn't know that, but that actually makes my case stronger.

I thought you needed a bumper to make your case stronger?

:)

Oh yeah, ethernet port will go away. Fat chance.