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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

"Thinner phone" is a stupid requirement. A thinner phone will be mechanically weaker.

Yes, Apple retired Floppy disks and DVD readers, because those were replaced by something better. This is not the case here.

A Bluetooth headphone will give you an inferior experience. A lightning converter will give you a worse experience because I can bet it doesn't stay plugged as firmly as a headphone in a high vibration situation (e.g. people exercising) and you can't have the charger plugged while you listen to music

Just as a reminder it was the EU who ended the BS of every company having a stupid proprietary charger.

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I agree with the bluetooth being inferior, I hate that the standard headphone jack is going away. If it isn't broken, don't fix it.

That said I've been told that the 3.5mm jack takes up a surprising amount of internal space, and that between freeing up that space and a few other tweaks, getting rid of the jack substantially boosts battery life. Still, I think it's not a great trade-off, now you have to babysit a new battery in your headphones, which probably won't last a full day of use.

On a personal note, anticipated lack of a standard headphone jack is one of the reasons I upgraded to a 6S recently, this way I'll have the best 3.5-mm phone Apple made for a while. If I do have to upgrade later on, I'll be strongly tempted to get an SE instead of a higher end phone, as long as it has a 3.5mm jack.

> getting rid of the jack substantially boosts battery life

Yes, as you say, by moving the power draw for the DAC to another device, which must be charged separately. This isn't a real gain in battery life in any way.

Yeah, I recognize that. It's also extra space to shove battery into. Like I said, I don't think it's a real worthwhile trade-off.

At least for most headphones with some kind of band, there is a lot of room for a battery.

There's also a lot of additional weight.

It's always possible to add a battery. That's not the problem. The problem is that we have a passive device, headphones, that works well and are a stable and mature tech, that will become crap.

I dont want to charger yet another device in my daily routine. I won't, actually, and will steer away from any phone that requires active headphones to work.

I have a phone with a headphone jack, and I'm using Bluetooth headphones for hours every day. The headphone battery lasts a lot longer than the phone. In the past few years even audiophile brands have been releasing blueooth models and they are getting good.

I'm not saying I agree with getting rid of the headphone jack. The amount of utility it provides is pretty high relative to the volume it takes up.

Most of the people I know use the internal speakers on their phones extensively, and hardly ever use audio over either Bluetooth or the 3.5mm jack. In this case, how would battery life be improved. The DAC and amplifier cannot be removed unless the on board speaker is also. I hope this is not the case.

Do you know anyone who works out? Runs? Rides a bike?

Maybe I'm in the minority but I could never imagine not having music pumping in my ears.

> Most of the people I know use the internal speakers on their phones extensively

These people are a pox on public transport.

The only people I know who don't use headphones are both teenagers and reviled by the people around them. If what you claim is the case, public transport would be a wasteland of pop music and clash of clans sound effects. I highly suspect your friends aren't representative in the least of the general population.

I use the phone's internal speakers to play music in the car. I would use the audio jack for that, except that cars no longer seem to come with any way of accepting an audio cable. My car from 2002 had a tape player, and I was happy using an audio cable with a casette tape adapter on the other end. A car from 2015 just can't do it. :(

I also use the phone's internal speakers for playing the notification sound. (And, technically, ringing.) I sure hope that's not going away.

Does your car have a USB port? If it does, it might speak iAP to play audio through it. If it doesn't, you can always replace the radio and get some more inputs.

Bluetooth's more reliable than USB in a car anyway.

Doesn't your car have Bluetooth? Or rather: how old does a car have to be before it doesn't come with Bluetooth as standard? Every rental I've had in the last five years has had Bluetooth to my recollection, and I don't hire expensive cars.

As pointed out elsewhere in the thread, bluetooth is not a good solution when you want to use one speaker (the car) with several devices. The beauty of a cable is that it's unambiguously connected to whatever it's plugged in to, and not to anything else.

Huh? How is it harder to disconnect a phone on bluetooth than to unplug a cable?

I recently had the joy of having to delete a paired device in a car before I could add a new one. For some reason you could only have three devices paired.

Agreed; this is a normal part of renting.

Micro FM transmitters. Plug into the 3.5mm jack, power from the cigarette / accessory adapter. Usually a choice of frequencies to broadcast on which can be picked up over your car's FM receiver.

Quite frequently found at highway truck stops, though almost certainly other electronics stores as well.

And suffer from interference and low volume; has been my experience.

Wireless is convenient.

Wired is reliable.

YMMV.

Plus, they're crap. Seriously. I bought one of the more expensive ones, with auto channel scanning, still crap. Made me go back to burning CDs until I put an aftermarket stereo with 3.5 mm jack in. Fortunately that's a near-universal feature these days.

To be sure, I use it too! But almost never in public; I still use the headphone jack daily.

I just got the One Plus 3 which has the USB3 type C and the 3.5mm jack right next to each other and I have to say the jack is only slightly larger so I don't see the point of replacing it.

Oh and it felt too damn thin as it is I was constantly wary I would accidentally bend it or scratch the metal casing so i got a rubberised cover. Now it feels a lot better to hold.

Yeah, that's my personal pet peeve too; if, instead, we had that kind of armor built into the device itself, it could still be pretty thin, durable, have a 2-day battery (which would be a one-day battery at the end of 18 months of daily usage), and fit a 3.5mm jack no problem. Instead we get a super fragile bendable piece of thin aluminum (which is not known for being very rigid in such gauges, especially with so many holes around the edges) and glass, which we are expected to never drop onto a hard surface or get wet. This would be fine if we all lived in the desert away from rocks and bodies of water, but instead, in most first-world countries, we spend the majority of our lives surrounded by hard things and wet things which don't play nicely with these now-ubiquitous devices.

> Just as a reminder it was the EU who ended the BS of every company having a stupid proprietary charger.

Did they? How did Apple get away with it?

They ship the phones with a small adapter that goes from micro USB to lightning. You're allowed a proprietary port into the phone as long as you provide the adapter for free.

They do? Not in Denmark.

I've never seen this ... I thought it was just the case that they paid whatever fine it was ...

Nice.

http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD820AM/A/lightning-to-mic...

$20 to buy in the US. Sure it cost $.10 to make.

Except for the fact that people have torn down their electronics accessories and found them to be significantly higher quality than the crappy ones you can buy for $5.

http://www.righto.com/2014/05/a-look-inside-ipad-chargers-pr...

Better components, better design, better safety, and better assembly. Plus then you have to package and ship the things.

People complain about Apple selling $20 accessories, then turn around and complain about working conditions in Apple's suppliers like Foxconn (despite Apple doing far better on that front than their competitors).

That link's about power supplies, where there actually is a significant difference in component quality. A lightning to microusb adapter doesn't involve voltage shifting or anything else that's super problematic. About all the lightning connector does is introduce lock-in.

The EU did, here's some background[0]. As for Apple, they didn't 'get away' with anything as far as I can tell. While iPhones are very popular, they make up well under 20% of the global smartphone market. It's a bit early to say standard headphone jacks are obsolete, but the notion sure does generate clicks and catchy headlines.

[0]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24726077

> "Thinner phone" is a stupid requirement.

You may think that the current iPhones are thin enough, but almost nobody actually uses the phone on its own. You need to take into account the thickness of the case, and now that people are playing Pokemon Go, it really needs to be a battery case, which is even thicker. So the base phone needs to be thinner.

(They can't just make the phone a little thicker and put the extra battery inside it because reasons.)

Doesn't need to be a battery case if they design a phone with a replaceable battery, like every phone I've ever owned (after iPhone 3G, which was more or less the only option at the time).

Oh oh and the battery case can have a built-in bluetooth audio module with a headphone jack on it!

Other manufacturers seem to be able to design devices that have the sturdiness and the battery such that extra cases aren't required in everyday use.

I'd say bluetooth is good enough for using the device(s) as a phone - but a jack might be better for connecting a high-end stereo system. On the other hand, even for that, you would probably be even better off with a digital output, and a good DAC (either in the amplifier, or as a separate unit).

FWIW I recently got one of these:

http://us.creative.com/p/sound-blaster/sound-blaster-e3

and I'm very happy (not for use with an Apple device though, I use it with a Sony Xpedia Z3+, my laptop and my desktop via a recent generation usb bluetooth dongle (for AptX support).

I'm going to assume the sound is fine on the Soundblaster, but How is the battery on that thing?

Does it last the full day and them some, like my phone does?

I just got a pair of Bose noise-canceling bluetooth headphones. They work great. I'm looking forward to doing away with the headphone jack.

Good. However:

- You have to recharge it

- If you forget them at home you can't get a replacement for cheap

- Setting up bluetooth is an extra hassle as opposed to just plugging the thing

- Bluetooth audio codecs do lossy real-time re-encoding of the audio, affecting the quality

and usually introducing quite a bit of latency

Assuming you want to listen to music, latency really doesn't matter much.

I mean, nobody would ever want to use a phone to talk to someone, amirite?

I certainly wouldn't.

> Bluetooth audio codecs do lossy real-time re-encoding of the audio

Lossless transcoding is possible too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AptX#aptX_Lossless

iPhones and Macbooks support aptX now. Surely this isn't just a hardware change — once Apple discloses the details, it won't be at all surprising if aptX Lossless (at minimum) is required for MFi licensing going forward.

FWIW, the transcoding you mention isn't a requirement of Bluetooth audio. MP3 and AAC bitstreams could be delivered straight to headphones for decoding there. We don't yet know if that's something Apple is discussing with MFi program members.

Yes, there are better codecs than the defaults. Now go to the specifications page for a random popular bluetooth audio device, and see if they even list which codecs are supported. If by some astonishing miracle they do say so, then work out which codec they would use with a random popular mobile device. It is all theoretically possible, but in practise regular folk are going to have a hard time!

I looked up recommendations for Bluetooth devices at Wirecutter and then went to the relevant tech specs page:

Mentions "bluetooth" (sometimes a2dp) and no more:

* https://www.bose.com/en_us/products/speakers/wireless_speake...

* https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Mini-Bluetooth-Speaker-P...

* https://www.marshallheadphones.com/mh_us_en/acton-black

* http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/PUSA/Car/Digital+Media+Rec...

* http://www.kenwood.com/usa/car/excelon/kdc-x998/spec.html

* http://www.jabra.com/music/jabra-move-wireless

* http://www.jbl.com/over-ear-headphones/SYNCHROS+E40BT.html

* https://www.ultimateears.com/en-us/ueroll2

* http://www.logitech.com/en-us/product/x300-wireless-speaker

* http://www.apple.com/iphone-6s/specs/ - the Nexus 6P page doesn't even mention bluetooth

Mentions codecs:

* http://rivaaudio.com/riva-turbo-x/#specs

* http://www.peachtreeaudio.com/deepblue2.html (Says "aptX bluetooth")

* http://www.bowers-wilkins.com/Wireless-Speakers/Wireless-Spe...

> Now go to the specifications page for a random popular bluetooth audio device, and see if they even list which codecs are supported.

That's an excellent point.

Sadly, I don't think the average consumer knows or cares about the badness that is lossy-to-lossy transcoding.

For those who do, aptX support is pretty easy to find in the sense that vendors tend to make "aptX" searchable in the name and/or description. (If you Google "amazon aptx headphones", you'll see what I mean.)

Finally, this is a great example of how Apple gets to "own" the mindshare for tech they don't invent. If Apple decides to hang their hat on the aptX brand for the iPhone 7 launch, that'll be how most people hear about it for the first time. Since aptX isn't their brand, it's more likely that Apple will simply tout "perfect wireless audio" and make sure customers know to look for "Made for iPhone" headphones.

there's not enough bandwidth. it's a marketing lie.

I have to recharge my phone too, if I forget my phone at home I can't get a replacement for cheap, and after the initial setup, Bluetooth is easier than plugging in headphones.

Sure, but I never forgot my phone on a trip or going to work. My headphones, on the other hand...

Same here. I've never lost a phone (knock wood), but have lost any number of sets of earbuds (also charging cables, wall warts... basically anything that isn't permanently attached to the device gets lost).

For me it's actually the opposite. I have small high quality headphones that I can forget in a pocket. I always have them on me, and they work on all my devices: iphone, ipad, laptop, work desktop.

My iphone losing the audio jack would be a major inconvenience. I would have to carry multiple headphones, and also potentially bigger headphones since they will need to do more (blutooth, DAC, etc). Frankly, after having owned pretty much every iphone and ipod model since the begining, I will most likely be looking for an alternative.

It's easier if you have one device. It's easier to avoid getting tangled up.

It's harder if you want to listen to something on your laptop for a minute instead or on the phone. It's also harder when the phone is in your <front/back/just the wrong> pocket and because it's just in the wrong orientation for the BT to work your audio cuts out.

Recharging the phone and the cost of the phone are the things that are not going to change, regardless of what happens with the headphones, so I'm not sure why you're bringing it up.

> Bluetooth is easier than plugging in headphones.

Until it isn't, like needing to re-pair the devices, keep them charged, switch between multiple devices, etc. It's a hassle that I don't want to have to think about. I've got bluetooth headphones, but I never use them because they're a pain in the butt (and don't work with everything I want to use headphones with, anyhow). I don't understand people that are for removing functionality from their devices.

Point me to a nice BT sweatproof headset that also has decent enough mic to use for Siri and conf calls.

I've been through 10 BT headsets and the Apple EarPods are still the best and most flexible all-rounder. It's the equivalent of the inexpensive DSLR walkaround lens to me.

Why will a thinner phone be mechanically weaker? What about if everything on the phone is flexible?

Can everything on the phone be rolled up into a taquito shape? Oh, 99% of all silicon chips are rigid, not flexible? Oh, bummer. I guess that'll take some serious semiconductor fab breakthroughs before it happens.

To use a 3.5mm jack headset you need to add power amplifiers inside the phone, do proper impedance matching and hope that noise in the path does not corrupt the data. But sending power and digital data solves all these problems, the wires don't need to be as well made either!

You've simply moved all those pieces outside the phone, increased headphone cost, and decreased modularity via dedicated Bluetooth pairing.

But the noise susceptible analog signal does not have to travel a long path, digital signal does. As such the power amplifiers do not have to be as power consuming/over designed. Moreover, you can do other stuff with the headset like taking multiple button inputs without additional wires.

It's just a way to differ estimate a flagship device. Apple is pushing volume to enterprises, etc and will make the iPhone line more diverse.

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