So I've tried using several bluetooth headphones before Airpods were around. They all sucked. Things like audio stuttering while inches away from the transmitter and short battery life is what made them suck. I gave up on bluetooth headphones for good; I hated them. Oh and the convenience of wireless wasn't even that important to me (or so I thought).
Now I have a pair of airpods and I love them. The improvement is marginal, but it's an improvement that touches many aspects of my life (commuting, cooking, sleeping, working). I love, love, love them.
> Does anyone truly believe they removed the headphone jack for any reason other than to sell more dongles and more wireless headphones?
I think Apple believes that wireless headphones are the future and they decided to prove that it can be done right. IMO they succeeded with airpods.
Removing the headphone jack was a forcing function. It's only an issue if you don't buy into the Apple ecosystem. Obviously that's a risk, but it's a risk that Apple has taken before.
Assuming it's some kind of cockameme plan to sell more dongles doesn't really fit the profile of Apple as a company, IMO.
I used a 15gbp bluetooth headphone 6 years ago without any problems on both linux and android; battery life was fine, even sound quality was acceptable. Colleagues have been using Bose ones for years. Apple didn't fix anything.
Bluetooth headphones are only really good since Bluetooth 4 and its Low Energy standard. Everything before used too much power and connections were to fragile, as you noticed.
If you tried other Bluetooth headphones than the Airpods now, you would also notice the better battery life. My work headphones (over-ear) only need to be charged on the weekend after over 40h of use and they are very light, too.
Yes. I've worked on phones in the past (Amazon's ill-fated Fire Phone) and there was no pressure that I perceived to sell more third-party accessories. There was, however, a very tangible pressure to make the phone thinner and lighter, and at the same time to pack it full of more shiny-seeming software features.
It's entirely conceivable, based on my experience, that removal of the headphone jack is attributable to ignorance and not to malice.
Does anyone actually want it thinner and lighter or is that just an assumption we have had and never questioned? I mean most people end up putting their device in a case anyway to protect it already. They are to structurally flimsy and fragile. Hell otterbox is valued at 2.5 billion and all they sell are thick bulky phone cases. A inch thick phone would be fine and have more room for battery, storage, etc, etc, etc... and still have room to have a sturdy case and most people wouldn't care.
Yes. I think this a “people want a faster horse” situation. The people who don’t want phones to go thinner and wireless everything aren’t thinking it through fully. I miss the head phone jack on my phone right now, I’d like longer battery life... but there is a future where a smartphone is the size of a credit card, is waterPROOF, and never plugs into anything ever. If you think it’s not possible, consider that the chips in each AirPod are more powerful than the one in the first iPhone.
I am temporarily annoyed with the audio jack removal, but I get it. It’s a “burn the boats” type strategy of pushing for the wireless, portless future.
Ignorance of what? I’m sure they knew some people would be upset about the decision, but they must have predicted that it would be worth it for their bottom line and aggregate customer satisfaction. And I have seen no data suggesting that their prediction was incorrect.
What reason is there to chase more thinness? Phones are thin and light enough as is. I'd rather my phone not blow away in the wind if I set it down outside.
Yes. I believe they did it for several reasons, and while selling more accessories is probably one reason, I suspect it’s a fairly insignificant one. I can’t imagine that dongle sales affect their bottom line much, and while AirPods are a big hit, that probably would have been the case regardless of the headphone jack removal.
I suspect the two most significant reasons were to reduce manufacturing cost/complexity and to improve reliability (one less physical port to get dirty and break, one less entry point for water damage).
Anyone who believes this needs to sit down and think it through.
Apple's success depends on the iPhone. Without it their services businesses become useless, their retail presence becomes an albatross, peripheral devices like Apple Watch, AppleTV start to look a lot less useful and forget about future growth in AR/VR. And so the idea that Apple would compromise all of that just to make a comparatively tiny hundred million or so is just crazy. And Tim Cook is anything but crazy.
The fact is that the market is moving towards wireless for everything. Audio included. And 99.999% of the world aren't audiophiles who can tell the difference (or even care if they can) between BT and non BT audio. So why waste valuable phone space for an insignificant number of people when you can improve battery life by say 5% ?
There is marginally more volume for the battery and camera/sensor array to take up. I'd rather have a thicker phone, especially one where the cameras don't protrude out the back, but I don't get to design these things.
Speakers are purely analog devices. The work on digital speakers has begun a century ago in 1920 and still hasn't yielded any usable consumer products. Moving the digital to analog converter into the speaker doesn't change anything. We will have analog speakers for at least another century.
Now if you were talking purely about the connector itself.
Whatever wireless technology was forced upon the population is not actually capable of replacing a wired connection.
* Bluetooth doesn't work in crowded environments.
* Standard Bluetooth sound quality is inferior without proprietary extensions to the protocol.
* Latency between device and headphone can be massive (500ms to 100ms),
* You have to recharge it.
* Devices have to be paired and sometimes "unpair" for no reason.
Bluetooth just sucks for audio. I'm sure there are hundreds of wireless technologies that are better than bluetooth, otherwise these proprietary extensions wouldn't exist.
You can in theory get <32ms latency with a special obscure subvariant of a proprietary standard of bluetooth (aka aptX LL) that no one has ever heard of for which you need a certain dongle and your headphone must support it. (hint your phone and headphones don't support it)
>Does anyone truly believe they removed the headphone jack for any reason other than to sell more dongles and more wireless headphones?
There are attributes to wireless beyond it being more expensive. Wireless isn't some gimmik to increase revenue. It genuinely is better in some ways and an acceptable complete replacement. If you're sold on wireless you don't need a headphone jack.
> It genuinely is better in some ways and an acceptable complete replacement.
And worse is some ways. It is not absolutely better; and, for plenty of people, not "an acceptable complete replacement".
Your claim in your original comment ("Anyone who has felt a tug at their head from headphones getting snagged by something accidently[sic] is quickly sold to the merits of wireless.") is also far from convincing that wireless is "an acceptable complete replacement", or even better than wired in more than one minor way.
> If you're sold on wireless you don't need a headphone jack.
In which case, I repeat, you keep using wireless. A headphone jack does not hurt those who want to use wireless. Removing the jack actively denies them a feature, while doing little for those who want to use wireless. Not to mention, removing the jack does not sell people on wireless, it forces them to choose between a dongle and wireless; or worse, a different platform.
