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?
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.
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.
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).