The End of Headphone Jacks, the Rise of DRM
eff.org
eff.org
No, hardware-wise you're still going through a DAC, and the complex audio subsystem of the OS is still deciding, upon receiving the connection signal, to re-route the application audio through that headphone DAC. Or not. Jack or Lightning doesn't change this.
> Apple can choose which manufacturers get to create Lightning-compatible audio devices.
Sure. Or you can use the included lightning-jack adapter and just use normal, un-DRM'd headphones.
>Once Apple gets the ability to add DRM, the record industry gets the ability to insist that Apple use it
See my first point: the audio jack wasn't your last guardian of freedom.
>In other words, if it’s impossible to connect a speaker or other audio device to an iPhone without Apple software governing it
Use the adapter. And see the first point.
> the only way to connect an iPhone 7 to a recording or mixing device will be over the suboptimal Bluetooth connection or a dongle provided by Apple.
Aha! They finally acknowledge the adapter! But do they acknowledge that it's functionally identical to a built-in DAC?
> It's possible that iOS or specific apps will be able to disable the dongle.
It's also possible the phone will halt and catch fire if you run an unapproved app. But disabling the dongle would be moronic. For one thing, they'd be incurring the wrath of ADA-defender groups.
>the converter you rely on to hear your phone on your hearing aids—just became less useful.
See previous point.
>But you shouldn’t have to depend on a manufacturer’s permission to use its hardware however you like.
Then don't even buy Apple. They've been locked down in so many other ways for a long time.
Anyhow.
The simple explanation (see Occam's Razor) is that the designers noticed that they were using valuable internal space for a redundant connector (considering the hardware has been able to route audio over Lightning for a long time), and figured they could reclaim that space for something else. Clearly, people disagree with this change. The market will tell.
Blame the MPAA here. Apple would rather have it DRM free. It's better for consumers, it's better for their sales.
I think that was the major tipping point for DRM on music. Apple followed after that.
But the book publishers would apparently be happy for ebooks to go away, Amazon to stop selling books, and their higher margin deals with Borders to come back. So they called Amazon's bluff.
The only DRM that should be on ebooks is there should only be one version of it at a time. Just like a printed book.
I don't know much about Apple & Amazon's timelines, as such things would be secrets.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080517114107/http://www.apple....
What prevents Apple from obsoleting the adapter in the future and making analog jack incompatible with lightning jack?
"Look at all these new great features you get with this update! Oh, btw your old, obsolete headphone jack won't work with this version anymore... but look at all these new great features! It's entirely your decision, but don't you want all these great new features? Oh btw, here's a voucher for a discount on these awesome new air bud 2's!!"
At some point, sound needs to make it into your ears.
Internal DAC has only 1 piece of information: a device has been connected to the jack. A lightning jack has access to way more information: like the manufacturer of the DAC & type of the device (headphone, midi/DAW, car radio, DJ's Mixer, etc) and may opt out of "working" in some instances: e.g. this song should only be played on this headphone whitelist- this is simply not possible to achieve with 3.5mm jacks. Remember the "analogue hole"[1]? Apple just closed it on the iPhone.
If they were really being "courageous" about removing the headphone jack, they would have shipped it without the adapter and not made one available.
The people who think that just because they included an adapter, there won't be DRM, need to remember that from now on any service played on an iphone can decide whether or not to enable analog output, or even have a different output over analog. Cue the services that have decided not to work on analog, and paid ad-free audio.
You'd have to be very naive to not be worried about this in my opinion. calinet6 wrote a great comment about it in the comments here.
It will happen.
>Then don't even buy Apple. They've been locked down in so many other ways for a long time.
Once in a while my Nexus will piss me off, but then I remember what the realistic alternatives are. I do like Apple products, but the lock-downs become a hassle. I can't imagine having to carry around yet more adapters for them. The market probably won't even punish them as the Apple brand is so strong and BT headphones so common, that it'll just royally piss off only a very small percentage of buyers. They're welcome to buy a Nexus/Pixel/Whatever. Apple isn't changing its ways for us. That's fine because we have a choice in mobile OS's.
Sigh. I like Cory Doctorow, I agree with the principle of the battles he's fighting, but yeah. He's... strident.
Nobody's forcing you to buy an iPhone 7. Nobody's taking away all your analog ports. It's like the NRA here getting all up in arms because someone had the audacity to declare a gun free zone in a school which impinges on their freedoms.
Seriously, get a grip Cory. You're free to criticize Apple's decisions but don't make it out like Apple's destroying the world.
It's never been easier to make your own phone. If Cory and the EFF were really interested in changing the world they'd go and make an open-source, open-hardware smart phone so they had something to point to when people are feeling cheated by companies like Apple.
Yet.
Let's talk again in 12 or 24 months, when all the other manufacturers have done their usual thing of stampeding blindly to ape whatever Apple's done lately.
> It's never been easier to make your own phone.
Making a phone is the easy part.
Getting permission to use that phone on closed, proprietary networks controlled entirely by a giant telcos who have absolutely no interest in letting you do so, on the other hand...
You'll have nobody to blame but the other vendors, and I think they'd be stupid to follow Apple here. The answer to headphones that Apple has now is the Lightning connector/adapter plus their wireless solution.
Other companies have nothing. Can USB-C do the job? Do they have a wireless standard they can all agree on? I have my doubts.
> Getting the telcos...
They have no say in it. You can use an unlocked phone on any network you want. You can already build your own phone with a Rasperry Pi and a GSM module. There's really nothing they can do.
They won't sell it in their retail stores, that's a huge barrier, but not if you don't care.
And I think it does it well. Cory Doctorow is a self promoting fear monger, and I think it's a useful addition to the conversation to make that clear.
It lets people calibrate their outrage over his most recent pronouncement.
if your phone only has a digital jack and a certification process, you can decide to provide high quality audio to your digital headphones and low quality audio to the 3.5mm adapter.
It's not guaranteed that the DAC you are getting in the 3.5mm adapter is as good as the DAC that you were getting before inside the phone (and given that the 3.5mm adapter costs $9.99 I would be surprised if it was)
I am personally really interested in somebody testing the new external adapter DAC against the 6s internal DAC and see what the quality loss is like. Maybe these days you can create a quality DAC and sell it for super cheap, but it might also be the case that the adapter DAC is going to be much worse than it was before, and in that case there's not much you can do about it if Apple does not license the technology to 3rd parties to create their own.
The DAC sockets on recent iPhone models (5 up) has been pretty good.
The difference in DAC quality is so far below your perception that any perceived difference is placebo.
If you do not believe me, I strongly encourage you to perform a blinded ABX test. I, too, was surprised by the results.
I've generally been in favor of Apple's hardware changes; for example the original iMac helped the entire industry adopt USB and the Lightning connector is much better than the 30-pin connector (and has a number of advantages over the microUSB pretty much everyone else uses). I've been in favor of their video port changes (except microDVI on the original MacBook Air) even though it created problems for me and my colleagues at work. I'm unhappy about Ethernet being dropped from all their laptop models but it really was an obstacle in their physical design. This change seems unnecessary and I don't like how Lightning is on Apple devices only.
I'm not sure there's an evil DRM plot, I could totally believe Jonny Ive or some designer just didn't like this analog turd messing up the symmetry and digital purity of their designs, especially a connector that's 30+ years old.
If you are recording stuff from your iPhone using the 3.5mm jack you are already suboptimal perhaps even to the bluetooth.
For one you are going through the iPhone DAC (luckily the iphone DACs are pretty descent) then through a generally crappy mini amplifier. If you are doing this you are expecting suboptimal or really don't care about the music quality. I'm not audiophile and hardly care about extreme music quality but If you are mixing/recording you shouldn't be adding artifacts.
If you do care about quality recording you either tranfer content off the iphone, bypass the phone jack (aka amplifier), or bypass even the DAC (and get a stream directly). There are several products that already do this on the market for the existing iPhone.
(It would be nice if some one would comment instead of downvoting. I don't know if my comment is inappropriate or factually wrong... or just in the way... seriously who records stuff off their iPhone? I'm not disagreeing with the intent of the article just that I doubt audio/music experts are going to be affected by this change)
I've had reasonable results using the headphone output on both iPhone and iPad with music-creation specific programs intended to create quality / usable output (e.g. Figure & GarageBand). The switch to this iPhone7 setup is bad for me because I have purchased several portable devices that use a dongle - well, now a chain of dongles - to allow me to use them with the device. As in, with my Akai LPK25, I use a USB cable to the Camera Connector, and then an adapter to Lightning, then into an iPhone. Then I use a pair of headphones to listen directly to what's going on. In the iPhone7 setup, now I need Bluetooth headphones if I intend to use one of my hardware devices, at least in theory. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth, both because I don't trust the latency / connectivity until I try it, and second, I don't feel like shelling out $$ for Bluetooth headphones that may or may not be to my studio-type work.
This isn't a grand conspiracy of DRM or Apple or the Music Industry in that regard, it just looks like more of a cash grab of the 'because we can' type nature, which I don't believe should be all that surprising.
This is also what I always do with my external DAC. I don't see how currently this will be prevented, if that's what you're suggesting.
All the other DAC-type stuff should still work provided the iOS / Apple platform will support them (don't see why not). I've just been reluctant to purchase iDevice specific audio cards, so to speak, preferring the USB standard because I use a PC primarily.
This isn't true at all, unless your hardware is legitimately bad. All but the worst cables and amplifier chains can carry a 20 kHz signal (again, we're talking audio here -- that's basically D/C to modern electronics) at better than the ~45dB signal/noise ratio needed by the ADC on the other side.
And bluetooth isn't in general lossless. If the codec sets match, it's theoretically possible to send a music file directly over an A2DP pipe, but in practice I find almost all audio gets re-encoded for the transfer. In my car, I actually get significantly clearer music with the jack than I do over bluetooth.
Still stick with the 3.5mm jack over Bluetooth for quality.
Of course in the car everything sounds like garbage to me. I don't have the speakers nor the attention span nor the multitasking ability to notice it.
That being said interference is always noticeable.
More than several, also certainly not limited to iPhone. My external amp/DAC works through lighting-to-camera USB output.
I wouldn't be surprised if someday my amp/DAC wasn't supported through the existing lighting-USB adapter. Couldn't they restrict how digital sound is output from the iPhone? That is, restricting the use of what external DAC you can use.
What I am having a hard time understanding is why is that any different than the OS influencing what gets sent to the 3.5mm jack? It isn't like apps running in iOS had to interact with APIs to do all the other things (e.g. camera) but not the jack. Is it?
How secure are these dongles? Will we see third party ones, or do you need key material from Apple before they will light up?
The Xbox is full of this kind of thing, btw (most peripherals require a "security chip" that just needs to handshake; purely revenue protection, and nothing to do with security).
I could be a bit off the mark here, not my area.
The 3.5mm jack outputs an analog signal. It's already been converted from digital data to an analog signal by the phone's DAC chip.
In practice that sounds ridiculous.
Their issue seems to be that it is not analog. The lightening port and bluetooth connection are two-way data connections, and the phone will be able to identify what is attached (rather than just outputing an analog signal). Here's the quotes that make that clear-
> But intentionally or not, by removing the analog port, Apple is giving itself more control than ever over what people can do with music or other audio content on an iPhone.
>With Bluetooth, the phone can distinguish between different types of devices and treat them differently. Apple can choose which manufacturers get to create Lightning-compatible audio devices.
If they do give the ability to distinguish the lightning-to-3.5mm adapter from other lightning headphones, that isn't any greater than the ability to distinguish between the 3.5mm jack and the lightning port is it?
A not so far fetched Scenario extending on the exclusive iTunes release practice:
Popular new Artist - New Album: Listen before everyone else exclusively on beats
If you want to run OS X/macOS on your own hardware it's doable. The only trick is finding drivers, not cracking DRM or license protection.
If you want to run another OS on your Mac you might need to fiddle with the EFI settings and/or update that with an EFI mod tool to make it more compatible, but there's no real impediment to installing anything you want.
For their iOS products, more locked down equals more safe. They're treating them more as appliances than as general purpose computers. For consumers this has some appeal: The risk of malware and trojan/virus like applications is effectively zero on iOS.
If there was a way to offer security without locking things down they'd probably do it, but I think that's a logical impossibility.
If you don't like that model you have a ridiculous number of alternatives, more so than in the PC space.
So this is less a case of Apple using DRM when it suits them and more a case of Apple using DRM when it suits the consumer. Running only trusted, signed applications is a limitation, but it's one that is not without benefits.
Obviously apple will gladly lock down, control, restrict, and regulate their users (and even their devs) when it serves their purpose. Just look at iOS. The entire platform is restricted from top to bottom.
Apples to oranges. OSX only runs on apple computers - you 'pay' for OSX when you buy the hardware. However, MS has to sell the software itself. You also downplay the magnitude of the problem "finding drivers".
Unless they start doing serious hardware anti-tamper in headphones I don't think it's a real risk.
Don't like the situation, don't buy the service offering it. It turns out, society doesn't really care about these things.
Well, that was five seconds well spent.
How many times will it take you forgetting your dongle to just pony up and buy the apple approved headphones? How long will it take you using the non-default, non-apple, non-sleek, clunky dongle as you show off your fancy new iPhone 7 to your friends before you decide it's got to go? What if they're using it the apple-intended way?
How long will it take before nobody buys headphones anymore? A few generations until they deprecate the dongle since nobody is using it? Where you can no longer buy a $10 set of headphones at a drugstore and plug them in? Where 'every audio device must provide analog audio output in a universal format that every device has been able to read since audio was invented or it is functionally useless' is no longer a maxim?
Long-term, we are giving up a universal and open protocol that all devices work with for a proprietary one. If you don't expect companies to abuse this to make money and to stop you from doing what you want with your equipment, well, I've got a bridge to sell you.
Any time you introduce two way communication, you introduce the possibility of DRM, but that does not guarantee it. I can still use my HDMI with my linux PC. DRM is exclusive of the technology and I see no reason to hold back the technology because we are worried about DRM.
There are lots of compelling reasons to dislike this change. Among them the fact that I have a large investment in traditional headphones and devices that work well with them (my iPod, my HTC Phone, my stereo, TV, piano, guitar amp, etc etc etc), a decrease in quality, convenience and weight of wireless headsets (how long do they work? How much do they weigh? Can I swim or workout with them?). But DRM is not automatic.
I am, and I do. Floppies were ubiquitous, durable, reusable, and cheap enough to give away. There's no replacement today - flash drives are the closest thing but when was the last time someone handed you one with no expectation of getting it back? Or bought a box of 50?
Sneakernet became much less vibrant with the death of the floppy.
Of course with flash drives we can wait the short time it typically takes someone to copy the contents off to get it back. And since they can hold significantly more data, they are also far more reusable.
Much more dangerous than an infected boot sector. See the BlackHat talk on a malware program can replace the firmware on a USB device.
Floppy disks were always terrible. Slow, unreliable, prone to failure at the worst possible time. A simple magnet could trash them beyond repair. A bit of water could render them unreadable. Leave it loose in your bag and it gets bent? The thing was toast.
In the dying days of the floppy disk, around the time Apple introduced the iMac with no floppy drive, they were already obsolete. 1.44MB could barely hold anything useful at that time, most people doing any serious exchange had already moved on to Zip drives because they held a more reasonable 100MB, or CD-R since you could burn six times more than that onto them. If you had tiny WordPerfect files then floppies were adequate, barely, but what kind of a market is that?
So long floppy. You won't be missed.
The death of the floppy didn't kill sneakernet, the rise of portable networked computing did.
Physical write protect switches
Large space for writing a label
Small enough to fit in your pocket but large enough not to get lost from your pocket
Cheap enough not to care about
Disk could be ejected but still sitting in the drive not sticking out far enough to be a bother
I'll give you the write protect one, but...
> Small enough to fit in your pocket but large enough not to get lost from your pocket
You can get keyring flash drives, I'd rather that than something larger. Anyway a floppy barely fit in a pocket.
> Cheap enough not to care about
Flash drives are cheap enough not to care about... but my data isnt!
I would definitely give a flash drive to someone if they needed it. They're like $4 each or something. And on a $/Gb comparison they obviously blow away a floppy.
> Disk could be ejected but still sitting in the drive not sticking out far enough to be a bother
You can safely remove a flash drive and leave it plugged in if you like.
Or do like I would do, which is buy an Android phone. I mean they only have 88% market share, how long will _they_ be around?
What do you think is going to happen to Android phones' headphone jacks?
My new-issue Dell work laptop lacks an optical drive and Ethernet. My dad just bought an even beefier Dell laptop and the first thing he asked was "where's the DVD drive?" Dell offered to send him a free external USB optical drive, but told him that internal optical drives were simply not an option on that make of laptop.
The question is, who is going to win: the legion of teenagers and young adults who listen to audio via the headphone jack, or device makers?
(It's the legion.)
If you had a replacement that was better - cheaper, less of an annoyance than $5 headphones plugged into a cheap phone - then you might win. But the proposed replacement is superexpensive, battery-powered wireless headphones. When the no-strain-relief Apple cables break, probably within weeks, you're supposed to buy another superexpensive set. That's not going anywhere with the horde of teenagers. It's a non-starter.
I suspect that Apple has enough usage data reported from customers to indicate how many of its customers use bluetooth (which is a universal and open protocol) to justify this from a business perspective - while it'll be inconvenient for me - I understand that in many ways, I'm not the typical Apple customer.
The EFF article? its FUD, pure and simple. A couple of the early android devices had no headphone jack - there was no great outcry about the encroaching DRMed world, some minor grousing about the annoyance of not having a headphone jack was all. Apple will likely support the adapter as long as most everyone else does - as in the past they were never the first to get there, just the most notable.
> How many times will it take you forgetting your dongle
> to just pony up and buy the apple approved headphones?
:)
From some consumer devices, sure. It's not going anywhere in commercial and industrial applications, where wireless networking is often verboten.
You have it precisely backwards.
Far from going away, everything became Ethernet.
Take a look at the modern interconnection standards: HDMI, USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, etc. They are all packetized transfer across an impedance controlled double pair of wires.
I don't agree however, call me a luddite but I'm partial to the simplicity and speed of wires. Not for my phone of course, but for my main desktop PC, I'm happy it's not wireless.
Perhaps I missed something in the announcement, but won't any Bluetooth headphones work with iPhone 7?
> Long-term, we are giving up a universal and open protocol that all devices work with for a proprietary one.
Does Bluetooth count as a proprietary protocol? It's not exclusive to Apple, but I don't think it's a totally open standard either.
Plugging the audio jack seems to be Apple closing a loophole. It's not at all different from soldering RAM on motherboards to close the after-market RAM upgrade loophole and force customers to decide at purchase time how they'll use the computer in the future. Either they'll by too-low spec'd machine and have to upgrade sooner, or buy high spec'd and pay more upfront. Either way Apple wins. Their phones don't have card slots but my $50 LG phone does, so it's not a question of capability. When you can add 32GB of storage for $15, that money doesn't go to Apple.
The truly bothersome thing is how in denial people are about Apple's true intentions, or maybe it's simply that they own Apple stock. Apple's a public company, this is profit motivated pure and simple. Whether this move will also coincide with the interests of the customer remains to be seen.
(edit for typos and clarification)
Anyway, I think that is a great point. Smart phones need a good serial port for 3rd-party hardware. USB would work, but everyone uses a different standard. Is the lightning port any easier or more difficult to work with? I imagine there's some sort of cost to using a proprietary port like that as well.
At the hardware level, that's a microphone. I don't see any a priori reason to imagine it would fail to work via the Lightning to 3.5mm adapter, any more than any other microphone would. It's less convenient mechanically because the connection is no longer rigid, which may make swiping uncomfortable, but that's the only drawback I see.
(And a sibling comment mentions having seen Apple explicitly call that out as something which will keep working, so maybe we don't need to reason a priori here.)
Audio is not like video, where it's hard to get a decent copy from the screen. With audio you can always just hook up to the analog output to the speakers themselves and get a copy indistinguishable from the original
Fighting for DRM on headphones would be an uphill battle in so many ways, and I'm not sure the record industry is stupid enough to waste the effort. They've already seemed to learn what everyone know: piracy is solved by making the content easily, universally available at a reasonable price. Piracy is tedious. Just make a better service and the customers will come to you.
The record industry has made so many stupid attempts at DRM, I don't think anyone has been able to keep count.
Back to the headphone lock-in: Is it profiteering from customers who really like the Apple ecosystem? For sure! Is it just another instance of using music to sell something else with even higher profit margins? Sure! Will it result in a doom-and-gloom future where thousands of music fans are rounded up, sued, and punished for finding a work-around on their own? Seems very unlikely.
As an aside, what a strange creature is man that he wants to replace a device which is analogue by nature - ears not being digital after all - with a digital counterpart which is clearly sub-optimal, overly complex and fraught with potential restrictions. Meanwhile that same man will brag to his friends about the analogue turn table he purchased on which he plays his analogue records for that true analogue experience, claiming a much warmer sound that is clearly superior to that produced by digital players which 'chop the sound into bits which takes away from the experience'.
Bizarre, but profitable.
Well, if you're hearing it it's ultimately become analog. The question is where does it become analog. I can legitimately understand that many people would like that it happens at your ear and you don't have wires.
It does not take that much thought to see through the rhetoric and discern the true reason for omitting an analogue output, I'd even go so far as to claim that it takes more thought to remain wilfully ignorant of the fact that Apple simply wants more control over how, when and where to 'allow' the device to produce output.
I agree the situation is not optimal, but please, stop this "they so greedy", "this is only for selling adapters" etc. After all, it's apple's product, and if it doesn't appeal to you, don't buy it. As you have stated yourself, the rest of the industry might not even follow them here.
This kind of attitude isn't logical and is in fact extremely dangerous. It's the same argument as "if you don't have anything to hide, why do you mind being spied on by corporations and governments?"
It is entirely reasonable and in fact GOOD that people have strong opinions about things even if they do not personally interact or care about the actual thing. When an increasingly large amount of our society is shaped by Apple or Facebook or Google, their decisions affect everyone, even those not directly using those services or being customers.
Opinions matter. Don't tell people that they should shut up and ignore global implications because they themselves wouldn't buy the product.
However, I'm sick of people calling out Apple for being what it is: A capitalistic enterprise. Ultimately, of course they want to make more money. But they have clearly explained reasons other than "sell adapters" (which itself is kind of stupid, since they ship a free one with every iPhone). And after all, they don't control the market. Heck, here in Germany they don't even have 15% market share. It's not like they force the other 85% to drop the headphone jack.
If everybody is open about everything, the result is not that all spying/invasion ends. In fact, it doesn't really prevent anything (it makes those who were spying more powerful in fact - you've done their job for them.)
On the other hand, if nobody bought the products a company is selling, that company eventually goes out of business. Or finds that their products don't have a market fit, and adjust them accordingly.
I'm not a free-market-solves-everything type by any means, I just don't see how these can be considered "the same argument" at all.
(Though, I agree with your basic point that we should not only allow, but encourage discussion and opinions. At the root of it, I agree with where you're going.)
Isn't it obvious that companies like Apple intentionally spin product announcements?
Are we supposed to believe that Apple's engineers are so incompetent they could not have designed around this, if they had wanted to?
Are you seriously telling me Apple is incapable of making a camera unit that doesn't interfere with audio output?
No, of course you're not. Apple is just doing what Apple does, and I won't buy one for that reason.
This is just factually incorrect.
Even before today's announcement lightning headphones have been available from multiple independent headphone makers, including Bose and Phillips[0].
https://www.google.com/amp/www.mirror.co.uk/tech/dont-panic-...
Surely, the point is Apple can easily control what works and what doesn't. Whatever the situation is today is no comfort against the potential abuses of the future.
As a potential headphone manufacturer you can't even know the exact agreement (including terms and royalties) without signing an NDA.
The biggest problem is that others often copy stupid or customer unfriendly decisions Apple makes, leading to a lot less choice if you want to avoid it.
> "which few people really need these days"
According to sales figures people do need/want them.
> "The biggest problem is that others often copy stupid or customer unfriendly decisions Apple makes"
And how is that Apple's fault that other companies try to copy what works for them?
Like the 5 lines of iPhone that Apple offers[1]?
They buy the iPhone because of the brand, or they use Android because that's the free phone that was available, or the one the Verizon store pushed.
Geeks like us spend a lot of energy projecting our beliefs onto an audience who simply does not care. I know I've gotten riled up about open standards and DRM and stuff like that; my non-geek friends just roll their eyes at me.
Maybe they do it because they don't care. Or maybe they do it because we geeks treat everything like a Chicken-Little sky-is-falling thing.
There's not a snow-balls chance in hell I would have these be wireless, or a proprietary standard:
1) Latency. Anything over 2ms is not acceptable for live music. That's the difference between a band sounding "in-time" to "needs practice"
2) We use various tablets, phones to control the mix to our ears, and sometimes in between sets, listen and review music.
3) Removing the 3.5mm pretty much means Apple is exiting professional audio because it's now incompatible with 100% of everything.
4) There is no way in hell my $300 pair of custom-molded IEMs bound to a standard that Apple is going to change in 3 years. Not only would I have to replace my IEMs, but any equipment that's not Apple would have to be updated to match. Not going to happen.
http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMX62AM/A/lightning-to-35-...
How so? If they were through carriers, you probably still paid for part of it through your monthly bill, and part of it was subsidized by your carrier.
Either way cmdrfred's
> An Android phone costs less than the dongle.
is incorrect. Most people are paying for their phones in some way, whether Android or iOS, whether directly or via their carrier, and the dongle is free with the phone.
Thank goodness the carriers have been moving away from that kind of deceptive pricing.
> In the Box
>> Lightning to 3.5 mm Headphone Jack Adapter
If there's one thing to be said about Apple products, it's that there's no shortage of doohickeys that connect to them.
Wait for a tear down but it isn't a DAC.
Overall my hunch is that it's not digital only yet.
They specifically said in the announcement that the earpods are digital not analog: https://youtu.be/G6I-IKYEVMI?t=21045
https://9to5mac.com/2014/06/03/apple-introduces-mfi-specs-fo...
Either way I feel your pain and hate this decision.
How many times you can ignore 1% of your audience until you have none?
It is being interesting to watch and discover.
They removed it from the phone, nothing else. In what scenario are you using an iPhone with custom IEM's in a professional audio setting?
They are heading down the path of lowest common denominator just like Microsoft in the early 2000's. I expect the same fate awaits them as someone else fills that role.
What have they specifically done that has made your creative work more difficult?
Obviously you want your in-ear sound to be as exact as possible, but a 2 ms difference will not make a band sound bad. I remember hearing 9 ms was the threshold for live music, but I can't find any references. If it truly is lower I would love to read some source material.
There are very few people in the world that would be capable of playing within a 2 ms tolerance (but maybe you're just holding you in-ear reference to a higher standard to allow for human error).
Edit: here's an interesting resource, not much data but they did find problems start between 10-20ms. http://blog.highfidelity.com/blog/2013/05/how-much-latency-c...
Musicians can compensate to some degree of latency, but not when your audio is delayed by approx. an 1/8th note at 140bpm. (1/8th note at 140bpm = 214ms). Even 40ms isn't terribly tight.
So rule Bluetooth audio out for this.
The dongle is an option, of course, but it probably is not as robust as a soldered-in 3.5mm jack.
I'm sure in-ear monitoring with an iPhone is unfortunately too much of a niche application for Apple to care much, though...
Source: personal experience in the field with various in-ear and stage monitor systems, and lots and tons of research over the years
Yes it's annoying if you already are set-up for 3.5mm, and yes I can see why you wouldn't want to use a consumer wireless audio standard for live music performance, but it hardly equates to Apple "exiting professional audio".
In the past the Apple's designs needed to respect a vast pre-existing ecosystem of headphones, amps and assorted other audio gear. Dropping the socket largely takes them out of that ecosystem, but today the success and reach of their devices exerts pressure on that ecosystem to move in Apple's direction too. That pressure does the rest of the ecosystem a significant disservice: the interoperability of the devices, cables and practices in that ecosystem provides so much utility!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/apple-iphone-7-full-...
Maybe this is an evolution to a super thin iPhone 8.
You can order laptops now and they are talking about a phone. They even negotiate with OEMs, such as Intel,[0] to provide more open versions of their products, diligently trying to create widespread change. They aren't all the way there,[1] but seem committed to the long run.
(I'm not affiliated, and all I know about them is what I read.)
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[0] https://puri.sm/posts/petition-for-intel-to-release-an-me-le...
[1] https://puri.sm/road-to-fsf-ryf-endorsement-and-beyond/ - Note that's from Aug 2015
Yet, anyhow. If they ever lock you down to only approved headphones, then we've got a real problem, and not just for being able to do what you want with your music.
You can effectively make songs that only play on certain headphones or songs that play better quality when you have your beats plugged in.
This isn't the first time this has been brought up this was the first thing everyone had in mind when the rumors about Apple ditching the headphone jack first appeared.
With audio being pushed through lighting port in a digital format Apple knows for sure what device is connected to it, and even if you spoof the device id they can still use DRM because the device decodes the digital signal and if it doesn't have the correct set of keys or decoding configuration it would not be able to play the audio.
One way or another, the audio is cut off. Just because it's another jack/plug customers won't be upset?
Second is the subtler stuff -- like how the jack can now communicate about the music and the device with the phone, so you really could do things like have exclusive Apple music releases only playable on Beats, or (behind the scenes) have a higher quality version play on your Beats than your other headphones, reinforcing the illusion that the new port and devices are "better" than the old analog one (which is impossible). Or have advertising play on radio, except on headphones that have paid a premium to be "ad-free."
It also opens up much more positive possibilities, like the phone knowing the frequency profile of the headphones that are plugged in and automatically using the right equalizer settings to make it sound great. Or, simply wireless devices being able to charge through the port when plugged in. Or having headphones with memory that can keep a few hours of music on them 'synced' by plugging in so you don't even need your iPhone to listen.
So all in all, it's a set of tradeoffs, giving up some freedom and simplicity, for the opportunity of more possibilities in the future. It's difficult to say exactly how it will be used, but the realist point of view is that it's all ending up as the same analog sound in the end; there's only so much that can be revolutionized. Time will tell.
That said, this is only true as long as it's still a 3.5mm plug for the headphones. If headphones start directly integrating with the new port, this equation drastically changes.
If they ever...
Boiling frogs.
As long as we're listening to music via physical speakers manipulating air pressure, there will always be an unencoded electrical audio signal somewhere in the system.
Now, when we start getting DRM-enabled bone conductors implanted in our jaws...
This, plus the fact that most copyrighted audio will be playable and copyable through unprotected channels for a while (Spotify / YouTube on PC / Android) I don't think this move has anything to do with DRM.
If apple honestly wanted digital audio they would have used the universal USB-C standard for the future. Apple wants customer lock-in to their platform and using lightning will prevent customers from leaving because these customers have invested a lot in their ecosystem. Ditching the lightning and moving to USB-C was the right thing to do, converting everything to lightning isn't.
I agree with a lot of what EFF does, but in light of the adapter provided, they're blowing this issue way out of proportion.
Sounds anti-competitive to me....
The next iteration of the watch is probably self-sufficient, no phone needed, and will require BT accessories.
Not tomorrow, but in a few years when lightning headphones have spread a bit.
Absolute, utter nonsense. I have a 3 year old Samsung Galaxy S4 Active that sports an open headphone jack and can be SUBMERGED in water without any problems.
I don't want to have any heavy batteries sitting over, on or in my ears. Let alone the trash DAC and amplifier that these bluetooth devices have.
There was an Apple controlled DAC in your phone before, now its in a dongle 2cm away. Its annoying but not a diabolical plot.
The point is that having an Apple DAC in a dongle makes no fundamental difference from a DRM perspective over just using the internal one on old phones. Its not a plot. We're in Texas here, hearing hoofbeats and everyone is insisting that zebras are coming.
Other manufacturers seem to be able to achieve these ends without removing the headphone jack.
2. Apple earbuds aren't the only one's you can use. There are lots of lightning compatible headphones and they've been around a while.
3. This is not 'The End of Headphones Jacks'. It's one phone manufacturer. Globally iPhone market share is less than 20% so if you want a headphone jack you have a lot of great options.
I'm not sure why anyone considers this relevant. It is not like apple is signing a contract which would allow us to sue them if they "change their minds".
Those are two separate issues. Whether or not the "whole debate is conspiracy theory at best" has no bearing on whether a statement like this from apple should hold any weight. Apple's claim may or may not be true, but we should look to other sources of evidence to evaluate this, and completely disregard 'because apple said so'.
Regarding Apple's history with DRM, that's not something to completely ignore but its not very compelling, either. I see no evidence that Apple (especially as it exists today) has a true, sustained ideological position against DRM. Apple explicitly positions themselves as the platform with the least regard for empowering their users to use their (mobile) devices as they see fit (because being seen as 'more secure' is marketing gold). If the situation arose in which Apple's leadership believed they would make more money (on the whole, and long term) by embracing DRM in more places, they would do so.
DRM has nothing to do with whether a device has an analog audio jack. Nobody in their right mind copies audio through the headphone jack output.
If an audio output device enforces DRM, that can be done just as well by a built-in analog out as by some bluetooth add-on or whatever. Analog out starts out digital. The audio data flows to some audio chips. Those chips have drivers, and the drivers can be signed, part of a signed OS image, etc. You can make a device that will only play digital-rights-managed content, even if it has analog outputs.
I wonder how well that's going to work in China (and for that matter most of the rest of Asia)
Of course I guess they can also sell "premium DRM" snake oil to recording companies now, because nobody can tap audio from hardware. That's totally impossible right?
Apple just loves to tax their ecosystem. They also have a huge fetish for eliminating connectors, plugs, etc. even when they are well past the point of diminishing returns there.
BTW I don't mean this as some sort of "Apple are too nice to do this" thing. TBH I think they don't enforce audio DRM largely because they wouldn't be the beneficiaries. If and when that changes then I'm sure we'll hear different rhetoric.
Is the number of people who only buy music from iTunes really enough to keep iPhone where it is in the market?
I'm going to take a punt and suggest that the answer is no. Why do I think that? Because Apple haven't restricted music to DRM only.
Removing the headphone jack sucks, but the reasons given are not why.
A headphone socket can report whether there's a jack plugged in or not - that one bit of information is the total extent of traffic in the reverse direction. There is no electronic standard for back talk from analog audio devices, and it would be pointless for Apple to try, because no analog device currently on the market would comply with it.
That's how those stripe card readers work, sending "modem noise" into the phone: http://www.instructables.com/id/Read-any-magnetic-strip-card...
Now that lightning is default and the adapter is an extra legacy, it's much more "reasonable" (in heavy quotes) to just pop up a dialog with "this accessory is not compatible with the media file"
The headphone jack is still there, it just has to be accessed via the dongle. It's gone from being physically on the device, but the capability is not gone.
I think a post like this undermines EFF's credibility. Steve Jobs has railed against DRM for music and finally was able to get it. iTunes music has been DRM-free for years now. Why would Apple back out on DRM-free music?
The customer base of Apple has no problems spending huge amounts of money. Why should they need to be controlled in such a way?
exactly, and thus it is probably to control other manufacturers' access to that customer base. With digital non-public interface to headphones, you'd have to buy a license to produce such headphones. Basically extending "in-app purchase" 30% house cut to hardware accessories. Or another example from history - PC architecture vs. PS2.
Apple seems to provide confidentiality, if you buy their marketing, and Google is much more open/free. These should be, IMO, fundamentals of IT, but it's not even a realistic option.
To be completely honest, literally 0 of the people I know with iphones have anything other than official Apple headphones. Even when they break, they go into an apple store and buy new ones.
There will be lots of complaining, but for most people this won't change anything except the annoyance of not being able to charge while using the headphones without an adapter (which is the only reason I see the average joe complaining about this change).
[1] https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press-releases/pr...
These other stats claim that Apple & Beats, combined, account for 70% of future purchase plans for teens.[1] Th definitely have the edge with regards to marketing.
And also, looks like just recently Bluetooth headphones are outselling wired headphones.[2]
With Apple controlling Beats, and Beats nearly controlling the headphones market, I still think this problem will end up affecting a mere niche demographic one year from today.
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0. http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/13/tech/beats-headphones-audio-ma... (from 2014. Also, beware opening on mobile, it's banner heavy for me)
1. http://www.statisticbrain.com/headphone-industry-market-shar... (March 2016)
2. http://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/16/07/28/bluetooth-h... (July 2016)
Those who use different headphones are largely already using Bluetooth or care enough about sound quality that they bypass their iPhone's DAC and/or amp and use a portable DAC/amp instead.
The remaining affected crowd is relatively small.
There is no shortage of good local bands anywhere in the world so I'm not worried