Hacker News Reader

Comment by kefka | Hacker News Reader

This is very much the "Apple" style, and gave me a laugh.

http://4dpavshx5ly3quwy2v9yv83i.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c...

Seriously, I have very little to add to this. It's overly expensive wireless earbuds to go alongside a failure of 3.5mm jack.

View on HN

Removing the audio jack also removes a whole market of products that were taking advantage of the audio jack for non-audio purposes (e.g. the Square dongle). Now that the audio jack is gone, companies like Square will have to pay Apple a licensing fee to use the only available port on the iPhone, and even companies that want to attract consumers of their audio products to be used with iPhones will have to get licensing from Apple as well.

> Removing the audio jack also removes a whole market of products that were taking advantage of the audio jack for non-audio purposes (e.g. the Square dongle).

Except that it doesn't. Yes, you have to use an adapter now, and that's slightly (but only slightly) more clumsy than before, but "Square readers don't work any more!" is a particularly tired piece of FUD, which it would be nice not to see spread around any more by people such as HN participants who really should know better.

OK, how about things like the Apogee Jam[1] and MIDI adaptors? As far as I can tell, there aren't any MFi-certified Lightning splitters that support both data IO and audio out. (Usually it's just audio out + charge — and poor audio at that.)

[1]: http://www.apogeedigital.com/products/jam

Well, how about them? That's a reasonable concern, and a major problem for people who want to use such devices with an iPhone 7. They aren't Square readers, though, or any other kind of device that uses the headphone jack for data, and it's inaccurate, disingenuous, and unhelpful to claim that such devices no longer work.

I had to stop and think... Concealed where?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com