Hacker News Reader

Comment by ignu | Hacker News Reader

Wireless headphones are the future.

Weird annoying notches in your screen better not be the future.

Wireless earbuds are yet another thing you have to remember to charge every night, easier to lose or break, expensive, and nonstandard. What's the point?

In the abstract, not having wires is clearly better in almost all situations - the only catch being, it doesn't take away features that wired tech have (lower latency, higher reliability/bandwidth, etc). Hopefully Apple's decision will spur some innovation in wireless charging/battery tech for headphones. Sometimes even if the decision is dumb, given the existing state of tech, it forces the industry to change, because of the market pressure that Apple exerts.

Except for musicians, who need a latency-free audio path that won't degrade depending on distance or saturation of the wireless spectrum. Given the amount of music apps in Apple's ecosystem, I'm pretty surprised they removed the one jack that made their device compatible with literally every musical instrument and mixing board out there. They're gutting a huge market.

Jesus. The adapter is like $7. Just leave it attached to your musical instruments and mixing boards.

...and charge it how? If it's in active use recording there's a decent chance it would be nice to charge and record at the same time.

Ditto. It's imperative to be able to charge while you're playing, since music apps along with the screen being on all the time really eats the battery quickly.

The iPhone was never a good choice to produce professional music anyway. An OS running garbage collected apps, running on a hardware platform that suffers from thermal throttling is a bad combination to begin with.

>They're gutting a huge market.

How big is this market of people using iphones to produce music?

Have you ever even used a music app on an iPhone? They do not suffer from performance issues, even with several running at the same time. And Objective-C is not even garbage collected; it's reference counted, so I have no idea what point you're trying to make.

Having attended and played hundreds of rock shows throughout the world, I've seen many musicians use iPads as synthesizers, loopers, effects pedals, and DAW recording studios. I and all of my professional musician friends use it in performances for both audio and visuals. The audio latency and MIDI support of iOS is legendary among musicians, and is why they dominate the musical app market compared to Android with its unusable 20-300ms audio latency.

> expensive

To be fair, OK-ish quality wireless earbuds are now available for ~$30.

You can get voice quality ones for less than $20.

Charging is annoying though. :(

To be fair, I think the wireless charging pad will help a ton here

I've very glad they went with a current standard like Qi instead of inventing their own.

It's hard to express the convenience and ease-of-use in wireless earbuds until one tries them. If you hate wires, then these are straight up revolutionary

What are they if you love wires?

I totally get wireless headphones. The problem is, not every device I listen to music on has Bluetooth. I don't take my phone on runs and I'm not buying two sets of headphones. Not to mention, even when I'm not running, I listen to music on my iPod classic and only use my phone for podcasts.

The Nintendo Switch is a good example - it has a headphone jack but no bluetooth headphone support.

It has Bluetooth comms to up to 8 Joycons and a general purpose operating system, so the limitation is probably a lacking audio implementation, not physical impossibility.

Good news... Apple has the device for you! (the Apple Watch)

Don't worry just make sure you plug in your families 4 laptops, 4 sets of wireless headphones, 4 phones, 2 tablets, 2 ereaders. If you arrange it right you could have an entire shrine to technology.

with inductive charging, this could be as simple as setting all of your devices on a table with a large enough mat (one day.. since obviously not all of those devices support it today).

Every night? You either don't have AirPods or you do and you use them a lot.

i probably charge mine every two weeks. amazing product.

Used to think like that. Bought a pair. Am 100% converted.

Wired earphones are cumbersome and don't really offer any significant audio advantages.

I have a pair of studio headphones for listening to music when I'm at home. But when I'm out in the gym or heading to work on the metro, wireless earphones are 200% more convenient.

Remembering to charge them is easy. I reach my office and plug the charger right next to my laptop charger. Impossible for forget it

You don't get to decide the future! Apple gets to decide the future. Notches and dongles for you.

Well, yeah. They're the ones putting in the graft. So it makes sense they're the ones who get to decide the future.

A headphone jack doesn't stop you from using wireless headphones.

That's true, but it's not a sufficient argument. An integrated MiniDisc player would also not stop you from playing music from files stored on the phone, but it wouldn't be a strong argument for including an integrated MiniDisc player.

I want this.

Maybe use it as product placement in the movie 'Last Action Hero 2'?

The real argument is that having a wired option is not a money maker for apple. Apple wants YOU to buy accessories, which are the meat of their business with ridiculous margins. That's just selling to users something they don't need in the first place and making them pay premium for it.

> Apple wants YOU to buy accessories, which are the meat of their business with ridiculous margins.

This is laughably false. Accessories are a tiny percentage of Apple's revenue.

Apple will likely sell tens of millions of AirPods this year. At $159 each, and presumably at very healthy margins.

This is no small business, even by Apple's standards!

Removing the headphone jack was a marketing-driven decision. AirPods are a cool product, but wouldn't have sold anywhere near as well without the forcing effect of the jack removal.

This guy managed to install a fully-functioning jack back into an iPhone 7:

https://strangeparts.com/bringing-back-the-iphone-headphone-...

I never said that accessories don't make Apple money, but that money is a tiny percentage of the amount brought in by devices.

How many fewer AirPods do you think they would sell of the iPhone 7 still had a headphone jack? Given that every iphone 7 came with lightning EarPods and a lightning to headphone jack adapter, I would guess that AirPods sales would barely have been affected.

What is that an argument for? It seems like you should be arguing why removing the jack is a bad idea, but plenty of good ideas could also be implemented purely to make money.

Maybe they're the future, but they're still much crappier than a pair of wired Shures, by a long shot. When that changes, then wireless headphones will be the present. Until then, leaving off a headphone jack is an idiotic omission.

Notches will disappear when we’ll be able to put all those sensors under the screen. Until then I think of them as “more” screen rather than less. However cutting into videos/photos taken on the phone is wrong.

It's amazing they can make screens that are non-rectangular. Are there any details on the manufacturing of them?

The actual tech challenges aren't that bad, it's more just supply/demand. Check out below for more info.

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/102540/why-t...

The idea is that you don't break things that work fine and then replace it with a proprietary island solution that isn't even supported by your non ipad/iphone devices. If I buy lightning headphones can I use them on my macbook? No.

I haven't used wireless headphones yet but I will continue to hesitate until they have fixed the audio quality and pairing issues for good.

Try Airpods. They are amazing and the audio quality and pairing are stellar if you can deal with their fit/shape. It's been about 5% of people that I've had try them where they just don't fit or sit right in their ears.

> the audio quality and pairing are stellar if you can deal with their fit/shape

Wait, you mean for music? I've tried them once and I felt as soon as there's more than 5-6 instruments the expression goes way down, it becomes basically impossible to even identify all the strands. Would not recommend - you can get something like AKG k702's for cheaper and get better sound.

I've got a pair of Grado headphones and a set of those exact AKG phones and I test a few different songs with each pair of anytime I'm assessing a new set of headphones. I test "Fame" by David Bowie, "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen, and "Paranoid Android" by Radiohead. The Airpods sounded great for in-ear headphones but they did have a significant break in period of almost 2 weeks. In addition to the fit, ease of pairing, and the overall experience, I can still wholeheartedly recommend them. The AKG's are great but they're not for the same target. I'm not going to go running or working out in my AKG's or my Grado's.

Fair enough. I could see myself wanting wireless headphones for physical exercise, because cable noise is annoying. Thanks for the break in info, it does explain quite a bit!

I've heard they are not better than ear-pods sound-wise

They may not be but I even the EarPods sound good to me and have good range once they're broken in. If you only ever put them in your ears for 1 song and decided they were no good, you're not going to get the best or most objective sound.

Have you tried Shures, or any other decent pair of in ear monitors? If you haven't, you should.

I have. None are wireless and offer the same ease and consistency with as good of sound as the Airpods.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com