‘Courage’
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
If Apple was really pushing for "a better technology" then they should have just included the airpods.
What they've done instead is compromising the experience and pushing the user to drop an additional $170+ on any of their headphones.
When they got rid of Flash, they didn't ask for more money to use the alternative nor did they provide a subpar flash player "as a nudge"
Also, while dropping Flash made the battery last longer, dropping the port only forces me to charge an additional battery.
Apple ships the phones with an adapter for lightning to 2.5 inch headphone jack. Old headphones may become harder to use, but they're still perfectly usable.
We can't argue that the future is in wireless. Headphone cables get tangled, headphone sockets collect dust.
I'm currently using an iPhone 5 and the headphone input, spits out the earphones from time to time. That's because it collected dust.
IMHO that's why the article is spot-on. Apple always had the courage and boldness to push things forward.
I remember when the current macbook came out, everyone -including me- made fun of it. Just a usb-c port, really? Or performance??
But now I think that mobility beats performance, and simplicity beats complexity on portable devices.
On the other hand the price politics, and marketing ploys of Apple do make me angry.
Same is also true for lightning, where's wireless charging then? Also, both are perfectly cleanable.
As for the headphone jack, I tried to clean it many times but couldn't fix the problem. Although, I haven't tried compressed air yet.
We have wifi sync, bluetooth peripherals, the only remaining thing for a cordless future is wireless charging.
Maybe we'll see the removal of the lightning port as yet another bold move. It would line up with Apple's vision. But then I think Apple will develop some kind of a new short-range wireless transmission protocol that's inconsistant with everything else.
If they'd fix all the problems, what would be left to sell :)?
You can always introduce new ones and suddenly there is a whole market for next generation of accessories and "using lightning in 3-rd party devices"-fees.
For one, I own multiple devices that are somewhat obsolete now. This wasn't a case with Flash, since I doubt anyone cared for technology the video was using — it's fine either way if you see same pixels on the screen. Apple also wasn't making money from every website that didn't include Flash, but I bet that's the case for each Lightning device produced, and the major reason jack is removed.
It's not even headphones-only either, there are multiple devices using 3.5mm for extedning iPhone's functionality that Apple don't get a cut from. I'm interested whether those will be supported via adapter.
I'm also not sure that 3.5mm is objectively worse than wireless. If anything, both have advantages and disatvantages.
>open standards
Like the headphone jack. Oh the irony.
I'm not an Apple fan so I didn't read much about it, the only thing I got was that they're dropping the headphone jack. But I thought "Well, at least they now use USB-C for everything."
But this is Firewire all over again...