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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

It's not really that hard:

* Headphone jack * De-nerf NFC * Switch to usb-c * Send high res mms to non iPhones (this will also avoid regulatory trouble)

I'm fed up with Google and Facebook and am ready to move, but the fact they can't get these simple things right is mind blowing.

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Most users don't care about any of those things.

- You can use the included adapter instead of a headphone jack. I do this every day to plug my phone into the car and it's no big deal. If I had a newer car stereo it'd be bluetooth anyway, and wireless headphones are pretty cheap now.

- What would a normal user use NFC for other than Apple Pay?

- Most people couldn't care less if the port is Lightning, USB-C, or micro USB so long as it charges their phone.

- iMessage works flawlessly, and the standard (at least here in the UK) is WhatsApp rather than MMS now to communicate across the iOS/Android void.

Not to mention that NFC payments are not nearly as secure or privacy preserving as Apple Pay.

Yes, for each of these, many people do not care about them. And yes, there are people who don't care about all of these things at the same time. But that might be a smaller group.

For anecdata, I want a headphone jack and wireless charging. USB-C is nice-to-have. I switched from Google devices to S8 for that reason.

> - You can use the included adapter instead of a headphone jack. I do this every day to plug my phone into the car and it's no big deal. If I had a newer car stereo it'd be bluetooth anyway, and wireless headphones are pretty cheap now.

Bad wireless headphones are pretty cheap. Even the expensive Apple AirPods can barely keep up with a $20 wired pair of Xiaomi or VSonic IEMs on the quality front.

I can go through a pair every 6 months and still come out ahead before the batteries fail in the AirPods.

Not to mention it's yet another thing to forget to charge.

I want smart devices that reduce my cognitive load, not increase it.

Yeah, that is honestly my main reason, I often forget to charge my watch even, having to go through a bus ride with nothing to stick in my ears would be rather brutal.

> having to go through a bus ride with nothing to stick in my ears

For my commuting experience this is nearly a health & safety requirement, like wearing a hard hat on a building site. Not taking any chances.

I have an old-school analog watch for similar reasons!

It's hard for me to imagine a person who has used Apple's AirPods preferring anything else. They are game-changing. They're the Apple product that's most delighted and surprised me since I first got an iPhone. I've owned and used other Bluetooth headphones. There's no comparison.

I hear ya bud ... but it would be great if they didn't result in such an inconvenience for everybody else.

I looked at the objective sound quality data on them and well, it's less than positive, I'm used to Sennheiser HD650s at home, which score quite well on such metrics, so I'm quite doubtful I'd like them much.

My first and only experience with Apple products was not a good one and I don't intend to repeat it. Macbook - ran extremely hot, many of the supposedly amazing Apple UIs were trash (Alt+O to open a file? Why can't I maximize a window like a normal person? How about the need to use 3rd party tools to do Super+Left/Super+Right that works out of the box on Windows and KDE), battery is glued in with some of the strongest glue I've ever seen so when I had to replace it after 2 years it was not a fun experience. I did learn lipo cells can take far more abuse than I expected though. I wound up running Windows on it and eventually just deleting the OS X partition.

You've provided no reasons except "There's no comparison", "They are game-changing" - shit like that is why I don't buy much Apple stuff. It's hype that fails to deliver.

The reason is that they've completely fixed Bluetooth. They just work. My Bluetooth mouse sometimes fails to connect. The Bluetooth in my old car was always flaky. The Bluetooth in my non-Apple headphones sometimes connects and sometimes refuses. I don't own a Bluetooth device that works like the Airpods do.

The Airpods always just work.

They've completely integrated it. You open the case and you see that they've connected with a nice image right on screen. You want to switch them from your phone to your iPad? You select them on the iPad and they just connect. Every single time. Without exception.

No other Bluetooth device even enters into the conversation for me until they just work like the Airpods do. Nothing outweighs that for me. Sound quality doesn't. Shape or comfort in-ear doesn't outweigh it. The price of entry is that you have to make the Bluetooth just work.

The reason Apple gets the kind of praise that you seem to despise is that they figure out how to make things just work. And for a certain type of customer, that outweighs literally any other concern. You can respond all day about this spec or that spec or this or that performance test or "objective sound quality data."

But it has to just work.

You know what else "just works"? Wired headphones. We're talking wired vs wireless not wireless vs non-apple wireless here, so this is a pretty silly angle to discuss.

That's great for you! But it is a real phenomenon in the world that people have a lot of trouble with Bluetooth. And the Airpods don't have those problems. That's why they're "game-changing."

Edit: the comment I’m responding to here has been edited to make my response appear like a non sequitur. I’m sorry I responded again below before noticing such a blatant act of bad faith.

Wired: no pairing issues, no battery issues, great audio quality for less money. How "game-changing" is that?

Why buy AirPods again? Because Apple decided you don't get a 3.5mm jack anymore. Nothing else. They've scammed you into it and convinced you they did you a service.

I preferred wireless headphones when iPhones still had a headphone jack, so you might be right, in general, that I’m a pea-brained sucker, but this particular hypothesis is easily falsified.

C’mon, just because people can live with things doesn’t mean they don’t care about them.

- Dongles are annoying, 3.5mm is delightfully simple and universally supported across the audio industry. It's not hard to implement and can carry a fairly high quality signal if your DAC is good enough. If you want digital, a normal 3.5mm jack plus cable should be able to carry enough bandwidth and still remain backwards compatible. I would see that as an improvement over simply-analog-3.5.

- The normal end user wouldn't care about the difference in NFC but banks would be thankful for not having to pay Apple for the privilege of having their customer use an iPhone.

- True but people care about not having to care and a universal charging port is good for that. Then people can just plug chargers into things and it works. No thinking required. And less waste too because vendors might not have to package chargers with every device and people won't have to buy new chargers every new iPhone release.

> banks would be thankful for not having to pay Apple for the privilege of having their customer use an iPhone.

Could you expand on this? I’m not aware of banks having to pay Apple.

Apple takes a cut of every ApplePay transaction.

Even physical point of sale transactions?

I could see Apple Pay on the Web.

Source?

The source I found [0] indicates otherwise:

> Are there additional fees to accept Apple Pay?

> Apple does not charge users, merchants or developers to use Apple Pay for payments.

[0] - https://developer.apple.com/apple-pay/get-started/

Edit:

Looks like they charge banks and payment networks for the transaction. I suppose it's possible that the networks pass that fee back to the retailer at some point. Can't find great sources for any of that though.

Parent: > Could you expand on this? I’m not aware of banks having to pay Apple

Me: > Apple takes a cut of every ApplePay transaction.

Your comment: > Looks like they charge banks and payment networks for the transaction.

Details: https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/apple-pay/

Apple demands transaction fees from the card-issuing banks. From media reports, that's one of the reasons Apple Pay took so long to get to e.g. Germany.

They no longer include the adapter in the box

consumer use cases of NFC:

- travel cards/apps (afaik Apple supports at least emulating some cards through iPhones)

- quickly connecting consumer devices to the phone (be it to establish a data transfer, connect an app to a device, ...). NFC can skip most of the discovery/network join dance you otherwise have to do.

- games

It may also be a warning sign of the slowdown in the chinese economy.

Over here I still miss my Galaxy 4 that still had removable batteries...

I thought carriers are in charge of (and the cause of) low res MMS.

headphone jack isn't coming back

If there was a real demand, there would be a roaring trade in cases that reintroduce the jack without having to use a dongle.

Agreed.

To be honest, the disappearing headphone jack might be what finally helps me convince my wife to let me upgrade our car stereo to something with bluetooth support.

You'll be disappointed when you notice the degradation in sound quality. Anecdata: My Kenwood car stereo has both and the difference is immediately noticeable.

Not having a headphone jack isn't enough reason for someone to stop using their preferred device, but it seems overwhelmingly the userbase would prefer it.

Trying to argue about demand when we're boiling frogs is pointless.

John Gruber thinks Apple probably refuses to allow those cases:

"But Apple wields its MFI control in other ways too. In a Twitter thread Wednesday, Nilay Patel pointed out there has never been an MFI-certified battery case with a headphone jack. This almost certainly is not because no one thought to make one, but rather that Apple will not approve them. Apple clearly thinks external battery packs (connected to iPhones via a cable) are a better solution than cases with integrated batteries. With Lightning, they can effectively control this. If the iPhone were to switch to USB-C, I don’t think they could stop anyone from making USB-C battery cases. I do not think Apple will cede this control."

https://daringfireball.net/2018/11/third_party_usb-c_to_ligh...

How could you do that with a case without hugely increasing the size of the device?

Maybe it's because most people still use phones with 3.5mm therefore no "roaring trade"? Plus, how would a phone case reintroduce 3.5mm without bulging out like crazy...

You can do it if you open the phone and insert enough chinesium guts, there is a youtuber that did it but it's certainly nothing covered by warranty.

You'd need something no more than 8mm (an iphone SE has a jack and is 7.6mm thick - thinner than an X). It would add 8mm to the length of the case too (you'd insert sideways)

All iphones are 7-8mm thick, so any case is going to be thick enough to support a jack, which means adding 8mm to the length, and the mophie cases I've seen do just that.

However if apple refuse to allow it, that's obviously a problem, but it's not a technical problem.

You don't even need that, there are people who retrofit 3.5mm jacks into jack-less iPhones. Ie, the iPhones that were designed to be without audio jack still have enough space to accommodate a hub to switch the lightning port and a DAC for audio output AND a 3.5mm port.

There is this thing called wireless headphones. You should try it someday - it's pretty convenient.

Why do you want a headphone jack instead of embracing the future? Do you want to go back to PS/2 ports as well?

I wonder if this is the false equivalence behind the thinking of whatever soulless product drone came up with this idea?

That's the thing - to me at least it's not a given that the 3.5mm jack will disappear. There have been various failed attempts in the place to replace existing standards which have failed - things like Firewire and HD-DVD come to mind.

But it's not replaced with something new, it's replaced with USB-C and bluetooth. It's just consolidated like it should be.

I have a motherboard from 2016 that has USB 3.0 ports and get this, PS/2 ports. It's nice having choice. I use the PS/2 port for my keyboard, leaving 1 extra USB slot free.

In my phone I have Bluetooth and a headphone jack. I love the choice there too.

Point being, it doesn't have to be one or the other. You can have both. And 3.5 headphone jack is not even comparable to PS/2

> leaving 1 extra USB slot free

You would also get that with an extra USB slot instead of the PS/2.

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