Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

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There's a major difference between the two. Floppy drives were of seriously limited utility by 1998 and it was only getting worse. 1.44MB was starting to be a pretty painful limit. Software was starting to come on CDs instead of floppies. Documents were starting to need Zip disks, USB drives, CD-Rs, or networks.

Can you imagine using floppies today? You wouldn't be able to fit anything on them. A single smartphone photo would already be too big. They were already doomed, Apple just happened to be the first one to stop shipping them.

Contrast this to the ubiquitous headphone jack. It still works great. It does exactly what we need it to. It does its job as well in 2016 as it did when it was created in 1964.

With floppies, Apple saw the writing on the wall and moved faster than other companies were willing to. If they kill the headphone jack, they will be trying to force a switch that otherwise wouldn't happen. Data keeps on growing seemingly without limit, but audio hasn't changed in decades.

Ok, but apple didn't just get rid of the floppy disk. At a time when everyone was getting ready to go from DVDs to either Blu-ray or HD-DVD Apple got rid of optical disks entirely in all of their machines and everyone gave them shit for it the same way. But in the end they were right. The battle between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray was won by downloads and streaming, and optical disks have gone the way of the floppy disk even though they worked perfectly fine.

Analog audio jacks are going in the same direction. Bluetooth audio works perfectly fine, and it's how I play music on my headphones, in my car and at home. The analog jack is a convenient fallback but it will definitely go away at some point.

Sure, it feels like it's a bit premature, but that's how it always feels when Apple does something like get rid of optical drives, or get rid of removable batteries, etc. Eventually everyone follows them. Someone needs to blaze the trail and Apple is one of the few major companies that is not afraid to do it even if it pisses off some people along the way.

When Apple dropped the optical drive, the internet was eating everything. The internet is a massive, global infrastructure project that was clearly not going to slow down. People were already downloading software, movies and music, and loved the ease of that experience. The writing was on the wall, they just jumped earlier.

So what's the up and coming thing that's just about to take over audio transmission, the "internet" that ate physical disk distribution? Is it Bluetooth?

> Bluetooth audio works perfectly fine, and it's how I play music on my headphones...

sample size of one. I can match that. I never use bluetooth and actively avoid it due to it's poor quality, connection fragility, and the time it takes to set up (repeatedly). Basically, the UX of bluetooth is terrible. The UX of a simple, universal, cheap, dependable, quick, robust and high fidelity cable and connector is great.

Whatever tech that will eventually replace the 3.5mm jack isn't here yet.

Yes, in hindsight both of the changes were inevitable. But plenty of people still complained about it. I see the dropping of the analog headphone jack the same way. The move to wireless is inevitable even if a few people still have problems with it it today. The adoption of Bluetooth music streaming in vehicles shows that Bluetooth audio can work perfectly fine. If you had connection and quality issues at some point, I urge you to try again with newer hardware.

Exactly. Add me, a UX driven person, to your list of 1 who avoids Bluetooth (using latest hardware). I don't want another device to have to charge either.

That's the thing, it doesn't feel premature, it just feels ridiculous.

When Apple ditched optical discs, it was because networks did it better. Maybe people were upset because not everything was covered yet, but that was clearly where it was going.

What's the equivalent for the headphone jack? There's no better place where things are heading. It's not obsolete or even moving towards eventually becoming obsolete.

The replacement is Bluetooth audio. This is definitely where things are heading even if not everyone sees it yet. And it's definitely a better place. If you can stream audio from the Internet to your phone there is no reason you can't stream audio from your phone to a speaker or headset.

If the rumor was that Apple plans to remove the headphone jack in favor of Bluetooth, then I might buy this.

But that's not the rumor. Everybody is saying that Apple plans to remove the headphone jack and replace it with audio through the Lightning port. If the long-term goal is to make everything wireless, why would they do this?

Even with Bluetooth as the replacement, the advantages are pretty small. Again, both floppy disks and optical discs were starting to become severely limited when Apple replaced them, and the trend was clearly that they would become more so. A floppy drive today would be almost completely useless even if media were plentiful and every computer could be counted on to have one, because it can't store enough. Optical discs are better but still heading that way. The headphone jack is as useful as it ever was and will be just as useful in 20 years as it is today.

> The replacement is Bluetooth audio.

You're assuming that the only source of audio is your smartphone

And not taking into account the quality of the audio and the fact that you need another device that must be charged

Apple get away with so much stuff that I truly believe they will be able to get away with it too.

When Apple does this kind of stuff people praise them so hard that it's difficult to think Apple can do any wrong.

The bias level is unbelievable. Gruber and others push this so hard, that Apple is almost perfect, Google is the Devil (usually) that is hard to believe that they are not receiving any benefits out of it.

I agree with you. The comparison is not the same and I believe this move is Apple, maybe, trying to innovate due to external pressure from the market.

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