John Gruber Misses the Point About Lightning Headphones | Hacker News Reader

John Gruber Misses the Point About Lightning Headphones

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36 pointsAnsibull3722 comments

The headphone port is inherently analog - more like power than VGA.

With VGA, it made sense to switch to digital ports once the displays went all digital (flatscreens). With VGA, you were converting a digital signal to an analog signal just to send it over the wire, where it got converted back to digital to drive the display.

But speakers or headphones are analog devices, they need analog voltage to make membranes move back and forth. The analog headphone port directly drives the speakers, whereas any digital port needs a chip inside the speakers to convert the digital signal to analog. It makes much more sense to have a single DAC (digital-to-analog converter, or "soundcard") inside the phone, than to have a separate one in every single pair of headphones.

Granted, you could argue that a digital signal travels better over the wire, or that the user could choose to use headphones with better quality DACs. But for all practical purposes, the analog headphone port works fine, and when it comes to standards, open and universal wins over the highest quality any time.

Very good points. Digital audio links will open market for deported DACs. Even maybe tiny generic CPU/DSP hybrids for [en]coding evolution purposes. Since nowadays this class of chips is hitting commodity production costs ..

Apple controls the Lightning port and cables completely. They could easily detect when headphones are plugged in (which would take a tiny passive chip), and then serve an analog audio signal over designated pins in the Lightning cable. This would obviate all the discussion about putting DACs and other intelligence in the headphones themselves. It would be the exact same headphone with a different plug on the end.

The cable isn't the point, anyway. Apple is planning for a world in which all headphone connections are Bluetooth. Which, by the way, like the 3.5mm jack, is an open standard that anyone can build to. That's how accessory companies get around the Lightning port and MFi program in the future.

Wireless is what Apple thinks will be the best user headphone experience, so they will provide a platform incentive to go that way. That is why it's like the iMac shifting to USB and removing the floppy. Doing that gave the entire Mac ecosystem a shove toward building more USB peripherals, and doing more data management on the network. Getting rid of the 3.5mm jack will give everyone a shove toward Bluetooth headphones.

You're never going to plug a cable into your Apple Watch. So if the Apple Watch is going to start doing more audio stuff, cannibalizing the iPhone, Apple needs their user base to switch over to Bluetooth headphones.

I really don't understand how Bluetooth headphones can be a passable user experience, to say nothing of better.

- I need to charge them, which means toting around yet another charge - two chargers, actually if I want to charge in parallel, one for each ear!

- They probably weigh more, because now they include a battery.

- They're no longer plug-and-play, I need to manually pair them, then forget them to use them with another device.

- I probably have to manually turn them on and off.

The only improvement is that there isn't a cable.

Maybe switching to Bluetooth will be more profitable, but I can't see it providing a better user experience.

I’d like to add connection timeouts and device restarts to your list. It is hard to keep the Bluetooth gods happy.

If Apple does this (to be clear, I'm speculating), I think they would be betting that those are problems which can be solved or improved by spending enough time and money on engineering. They have made similar bets before.

The Internet was pretty bad at moving data around, and USB drives were big and expensive, when they killed the floppy drive. But once the floppy was gone, it was a race among vendors to sell the most USB stuff and improved bandwidth. It created a market opportunity, which drove innovation.

The iPhone attacked a bunch of these restrictions. RIM thought the fact that the Blackberry sipped data and lasted a week on battery was a competitive advantage. Turns out users will charge daily, and cell companies will invest heavily, if given enough incentive.

The Macbook Air shipped without an Ethernet port. It hasn't slowed it down--WiFi just got good enough.

Of course, my thinking about the headphones is all speculation, but to me at least it seems in line with how Apple tries to shift things around.

I mean look at it this way--if all those problems you list could go away, wouldn't it be nice to not deal with a cord? Phones and computers exploded in popularity once the cord was gone. Why not headphones?

Not really, the cord is a feature sometimes. I can undo one earbud and let it hang there if someone wants to talk to me quickly. Since they're essentially on a string, I don't need to worry about them falling out and getting smashed on the ground or touching a gross subway floor.

Because you're still left juggling two batteries and now two chargers, unless you fit a lightning port on the earbuds too. I have decent bt earbuds and the batteries last less than 8 hours, probably because of size. Nothing will piss me off like my earbuds running out of juice and sitting there with a phone that can't play audio until I get to a wall...

Especially with the usual half-hearted QA efforts most vendors, including Apple, make on Bluetooth quality. The last time I had to reboot a system to get a headphone jack working was an old 286, whereas I still have to turn bluetooth off/on, kill blued, restart a speaker, etc. at least once a week to get sound to work again, not to mention an open bug report with Apple about the way iTunes opens on my laptop every time my iPhone grabs the speaker to play a sound. Every time I rent a car, it's obvious how little QA has gone into the Bluetooth stack from pairing on.

I have no reason to believe that the headphone industry will invest more in QA than the manufacturers of items costing thousands of dollars.

> That's how accessory companies get around the Lightning port and MFi program in the future.

Classic Bluetooth devices need an authentication co-processor to support the encrypted iAP protocol, and you can only buy those co-processors through Apple-approved vendors once you've been MFi certified. There's really no "getting around" MFi for Classic Bluetooth on Apple devices.

Bluetooth LE devices can bypass MFi licensing, but do not have the bandwidth to support high fidelity audio.

Would that change with Bluetooth 5, coming this fall?

iAP is/was only needed for accessories that communicate with an app. The iPhone supports standard A2DP (stereo audio profile) Bluetooth speakers and headphones.

My bad, you're right. A2DP, and I think HID also, don't need MFi.

My issue with Lightning as the new audio connector is that it's not going to be a "Standard."

Yes, headphone makers are making lightning cable headphones, but I doubt any device company outside of Apple will use it as audio out. Not only phone and computer makers but makers of AV receivers, amps, mixing boards, etc.

If the 3.5mm jack is the new floppy drive and ADB port, USB will be the standard that kills it, like it killed the others.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10273/intel-proposes-to-use-us...

Last time i looked at a USB-C analog audio out suggestion it wanted to overload the basic USB pins with yet another task (thus interfering with charging and data transfer) while the extension pins went ignored.

This article also misses that a large amount of people aren't tech savvy and as such have to live with all the DRM issues. I've had to explain many times to people as to why they could not freely listen to the music they bought on any device.

Combining the rumors of the dropping of the headphone jack with http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2016/06/22/apple-iph... ("And what would help to really turn heads? The fact its chassis is also expected to be ‘all glass’…")

I envision this iPhone:

  - 100% glass enclosure out of one piece
  - screen everywhere (front, back, left, right, top, bottom)
  - no connectors:
    - wireless charging
    - Bluetooth audio
  - waterproof (you would get that for free, once you've figured out
    how to close the glass enclosure without frying the electronics
    inside it)

Problems abound: I wouldn't know what the utility of the extra screen space would be (yes, you cannot accidentally take the thing out of your pocket with the back side facing you), wonder whether a device that can't be plugged into billions of existing devices would be successful in the market, and don't have the faintest idea how one would go about making one.

However, it is a design I would like to see Apple attempt.

I guess a version where most of the device is display with the bottom of the device a separate part with only a lightning connector, would be doable, or at least not completely out of reach for a company willing and able to spend big on manufacturing technology.

If that is their vision, I can see them wanting to give up the audio jack. Problem, I think, is that many people own expensive headphones and audio systems that require one.

I don't own expensive headphones, I own cheap ones - and I very badly want to keep things that way. I'm fine buying a $10 replacement pair of earbuds every time I snag my current ones on something, but I would be pissed if I had to buy a $40 replacement pair.

I think apple will sell cables: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11968130

I wish everyone would stop calling it an analog audio port. Yes it's a 1/8th port, but they haven't been purely analog for quite some time.

But the 1/8" TRS/TRRS jack (headphone / headphone-with-mic jack) is analog when it's used for analog output (headphones/line-out) or input (microphone/line-in). The DAC is on the device side, not the accessory side.

Perhaps you're referring to the SP/DIF "hiding" inside the 1/8 jack of many Macs?

But it is an analog port on the iPhone/iPad devices, which this is about. They don't have optical/digital audio like the MacBook's TRS-TOSLINK port.

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