Steve Wozniak has warned about killing off the headphone jack in the iPhone 7 | Hacker News Reader

Steve Wozniak has warned about killing off the headphone jack in the iPhone 7

businessinsider.com

I like my phone as thin as the next guy but not by sacrificing usefulness. I am in the market for a new phone but a headphone jack is a needed feature.

Bluetooth headphones are pretty good at this point. And wire free. Do you really need a jacked in headset?

Bluetooth headsets are more expensive, sound worse, and require charging. Amazingly, some people don't regard wires as inconvenient enough to be worth the tradeoff, and resent having the choice taken away from them.

Woz Woz Woz. If you really want folks to listen to you, do something again. You probably don't need the money but frankly I'm tired of you popping up every couple of months or so poo pooing some Apple thing or another. It's tiresome and irrelevant.

It's 2016 - let's simplify and push headphone makers to innovate and stop making headphones with cord. I'm really going to enjoy this change.

You're never going to get the same audio quality through wireless. Not even close.

Never?

What? Bluetooth is digital so it comes down to the DAC/AMP used, which can easily surpass what's in a phone.

I'll mention since I didn't see a /s,

there are certainly environments and use cases when self-powered headphones would be convenient.

But there are also many many circumstances where the last thing you want is self-powered, radio-driven, digital headphones.

Some of the concerns that would make this not work for me, personally: - integrated rechargeable batteries (nonremovable) - radio interference with sensitive recording paths - de facto compression - the necessity of integrating your amp into a miniature form factor

Sound recording and review and critical listening in environments where you don't have plug-in ('mains') power on hand, possibly for months at a time, and need absolutely uncolored access to your recordings, often with high quality amps...

...these are very different from consumer convenience listening e.g. while commuting or sitting at a desk.

There's room for both in the marketplace happily...

...and need for both.

So I am among those who think a trend towards dropping analog microjacks is truly terrible.

The case for phones is 'OK' but the more they become both a model e.g. for light-weight laptops, or laptop replacements themselves (e.g. in 'phablet' or pad format) the more risk there is of innovating us into a very limited corner (in which a lot of battery life is spent on mandatory DRM no less...)

But you could always use an analog-to-lightning adapter. Or buy a phone with an analog jack. Dropping the jack on one phone doesn't equal to not being able to use wired headphones at all in the future.

And DRM is irrelevant as long as an analog adapter exists.

You can already buy wireless headsets and they already work with all phones. You want to take away the choice because... ?

They have to make back all that money they gave to Dr. Dre somehow.

"I have cars where you can plug in the music, or go through Bluetooth, and Bluetooth just sounds so flat for the same music."

Is there any more effective way to kill your own argument dead than this? Surely Bluetooth doesn't downsample, compress, or otherwise process the underlying audio while it sends it, which means that this "bluetooth is bad" argument basically comes down to his subjective audiophiliac bias that's not been borne out by any scientific test?

Bluetooth does compress the signal as far as I can tell.

"designed to obtain a reasonably good audio quality at medium bit rates while keeping low computational complexity, having Bluetooth bandwidth limitations and processing power in mind " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SBC_(codec)

Bluetooth does in fact compress the audio stream. If I were in a situation where I cared about sound quality, I definitely wouldn't use Bluetooth.

There was definitively heavy compression. I thought however, that this was fixed with newer versions.

Edit: if client and receiver support aptX lossless it's all good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AptX

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