The iPhone dongle is still my fucking nightmare
theoutline.com
theoutline.com
So the author is complaining about proprietary tech on his iPhone (Lightning port analog audio adapter) when open alternatives exist (3.5mm jack), while also claiming other proprietary tech (iMessage) in the face of open alternatives (standard SMS) keeps him using the iPhone.
https://medium.com/message/its-kind-of-cheesy-being-green-2c...
Google's Pixel is a great phone, but it has a USB-C phone.
I wouldn't go near any other phone for lack of updates, and premature "death" of the phone from lack of updates. The hardware coming from Samsung is excellent, but their software practices are unacceptable when they are at or near the price point of an iPhone.
But if I really look back, I can't remember any of it. Nothing was actually that important. It seems like it is on the moment, but the really important stuff, people make the effort to reach out to me for it.
It's actually a good social filter.
Since when does he have to on android? Seeing as google produces about fifteen messaging apps, you get all sorts of color (and style) choices! That's if you choose a locked down phone that doesn't let you make your own themeing choice
At work I use Google Hangouts to converse with a few friends, and it blows my mind that when I post a URL, it doesn't inline it. It does now with youtube links, but they wont play inline. Think of it as Slack vs old 90's IRC. I dont know how droid chat shows up these days as I have long left the android camp with no plans of returning, but iMessage is a killer feature for Apple.
It's a small bit of friction, but it is friction.
Most people don't find simply "being open" to be a compelling virtue. Maybe more of the open source people need to recognize that, and come up with some other compelling functionality.
Then I finally gave in and got airpods, and now I see the light. Airpods are just amazing. I was skeptical at first just like the author, but he is fighting the wrong battle. Holding onto wired headphones and complaining about the 3.5mm jack is completely missed out on how amazing wireless headphones are (note: I have no idea if other wireless headphones are as good as airpods).
I can now be charging my phone and walk around my house listening to music. I can seamlessly transition my headphones from my computer to my phone with one click. When I'm working in the shop the cord so longer snags on things and rips the headphones out of my ears. When I'm biking I can just wear one headphone and leave the other one in my pocket instead of having the other headphone dangling down. When running there is no cord bouncing around.
And airpods don't even fit my ears, I have to put a little silicone wrapper around them every time I take them out of the charger and I still love them.
I'm basically always listening to something. Podcasts, news, etc.
Not even music.
Airpods literally don't fit my consumption needs.
Actually, just the fact the airpods are in-ear limit the quality of the experience they can render.
Also, I always have both wire and wireless on my table, because there is no way the wireless headphone battery is gonna enough.
Add in the mix anything that gets in the way of the signal, the oh-so-annoying latency, then the lower quality of the sound provided with in-ear head phone and voilà.
From what I can find online, the AirPods have a latency of around 250ms. When playing 16th notes at 180 BPM (common for my music), I'd be playing the 4th note by the time I heard the first note.
The latency can be dealt with when watching movies by slightly delaying the visuals to sync up with the audio. That approach doesn't work when I need to hear a sound as a result of doing something.
Oh and the Alitalia flight I was on just last Friday still had those dual mono jack atrocities while the flight attendants only had those crappy stereo ear buds. I think one guy on the whole flight had an adapter while the rest of us got one channel of audio from a stereo signal for 8 hours. The meal was decent though.
But even if they did work I'd still recommend a nice pair of bose quietcomfort headphones or some other noise cancelling headphones for those airline trips.
Works for me.
I can't connect a proper headphone to them, and frankly, batteries go bad. When your battery dies on those, you'll be paying another 1XX dollars. And they'll still sound like a 10 dollar earbud.
Oh, I can also get beats! So then I can get something that sounds like a 30 dollar headphone (like the Monoprice retros) for a 10x premium. If I get a 200 dollar headphone (like... say... the Sennheiser/Massdrop 6xx or the Beyerdynamic DT 770/880/990) then I expect it to last for years.
Or, if we're talking IEMs, perhaps the $100 1More triple drivers...
So, my primary complaint is that convenience isn't worth 200 dollars for something that is guaranteed to fail due to the battery.
The official out-of-warranty Apple battery service on Airpods is $70, and anecdotally nobody seems to be complaining that the batteries life degrades anymore than you'd expect.
Frankly, I rate the AirPods far on top of the list of my favorite tech products. My Apple Watch a distant second, and I love my watch.
- A new iPhone and a new MacBook — out of the box — have no way to physically connect to each other.
- A new iPhone comes with earphones that cannot be used with any other device than other iPhones (e.g. not your new Mac).
Why have Apple's peripherals been broken for more than 2 years?
Though it's rumored the 2018 iPhones will include a Lightning to USB-C Cable in the box... https://9to5mac.com/2018/05/02/iphone-x-2-fast-charging-bund...
I still remember buying earphones for my walkman, cheap ones lasted couple weeks because cables broke so often. Don't even get me started on untangling cables after taking those out of pocket. Bluetooth earphones are like magic for me, I don't need hover board I know I live in the future. How do they even fit battery for 3 hours, bluetooth module, antena, charging module (it also is saying how much juice each earphone has), audio playback module.
its like taking away your charger because you have a battery
On the phone I can see the motivation. They are down to one connector port, but really they'd like to get to zero ports. And zero physical buttons if possible. Just a seamless wafer-thin card.
Johnny Ive took "worse is better" too literally.
They should have sealed the entire phone by moving to wireless charging. Waterproof unibody design would have been an interesting innovation. But instead we lost the jack and now they do stupid stuff like the notch. Also, I don't get the idea of making a personal computing device that is going to get handled a lot and bumped around so thin and fragile. The first thing people do is put a ugly case on their phone and buy a battery pack since it barely has enough charge for a days worth of use.
I do use bluetooth headphones while working out and mowing the yard so I don't have the continual distraction of the wire. Though they sound pretty good it's a drag to have to keep them charged and they have a tendency to cut in and out when working outside. So I'd say bluetooth isn't quite there yet.
I wonder what the latency is on Bluetooth audio with Apple’s newer peripherals? My experience using Bluetooth speakers at home was “not for playing music” (on a keyboard).
At least my ‘SE still has a headphone jack, as does my iPad Mini 2. I usually just use the headphone jack, even if there’s a little bit of noise bleeding across it. OTOH, I do have a powered USB hub with a built in DAC in it, like you mentioned, for plugging in multiple controllers.
Thanks for pointing out this latency issue. Hopefully Apple just might reconsider the needs of a somewhat important customer subgroup. Cuz, musicians are cool :-)
(And Apple is all about being “cool”, right?)
It's the difference between me being willing to read this site in front of my little kids vs. not.
I also have >$100 bluetooth headphones, so that actually is one of the biggest factors in sound quality and lack of cutting out -- the $20 ones off Amazon etc sound not bad, have cutting out issues, etc.
I stuck with my wired earbuds for quite a while because I didn't imagine the Airpods were much better than the various bluetooth options I had tried. It turns out that they're much better in terms of range, quality, battery life, etc. They improve the experience of using an iPhone dramatically.
Apple should include Airpods with every new iPhone even it means raising the price of the phone by $50-$100. It's the best improvement since high resolution displays and making it non-standard means most people won't even try it.
Going back to using a wired earbuds after using the Airpods is a stark reminder of the many small annoyances, like untangling the cable, having the earbuds yanked out of your ear when the cable gets caught, not being able to leave your phone on your desk while you use the phone, etc.
I would never choose to go back to wired earbuds after using Airpods and I expect most people would have the same experience.
I have more of a problem with the ipad. If they also ditch the audio jack on the ipad, I don't think there is a decent competitor to the ipad pro 10.5 (i.e. bigger, high refresh rate screen).
It doesn't seem possible to be able to use wireless headphones long term, or for long periods - battery life is simply too short for the amount we use digital devices today.
5 hours of continuous use over time, is useless. 10-15 are likely a better goal. I can't just wear in-ear headphones without thinking about having to recharge my headphones. So I own 2 pairs. And then eventually forget to keep them charged too.
I've used bluetooth headphones for about a decade before the first phones lost their headphone jacks. The use case was convenience. Connecting to a laptop and phone at the time with some compromises: battery life, and sound quality (less so now). But, there was always a backup to a wired headset.
Maybe we'll start to see phone cases with a headphone jack, and a lighting/usb-c case integrated into them. Or a way for bluetooth headphones to wirelessly charge. I'd buy one.
Battery life on them is 5 hours each.
They have a great experience when they have battery life. Just can't charge them 2-3 times a day.
The quick charge on Airpods is 15 minutes for 3 hours. My BeatsX are much quicker and provide a longer use - 5 minutes of charging for 2 hours.
Still, Airpods only have 5 hours talk time, which guarantees and require a recharge for 15 minute in the middle of each day - that doesn't work for many. I regularly end up on 4-6+ hours of back to back calls, plus other listening. Can't have sound cutting out during calls.
My daily drivers right now are BeatsX (8+ hours), which can be charged quicker than Airpods using a 2.4A power source. Still, a dealbreaker when they cut out in the middle of a call on the same day.
There seem to be 2 headsets worth looking at beyond AirPods or BeatsX currently that offer in-ear sound, and 9+ hours of sound:
New Apple Powerbeats 3 (12h): https://9to5mac.com/2017/02/18/beatsx-powerbeats3-and-airpod...
Plantronics 6200 UC (up to 9 hours) with in-call noise cancellation: https://www.plantronics.com/ca/en/product/voyager-6200-uc
I've owned more BT headsets (easily over a dozen) than most folks I know, including Airpods, which were promptly returned.
Airpods are very nice for casual listening of short commutes, etc. They may make people feel space age, but they are still not the 3rd or 4th gen where it's worth paying attention to most of Apple's products. They are overpriced and underpowered, but cool tech, especially the W1 stuff. I bought and returned the Bose QC30's too, only because they don't apply noise cancellation to calls.
In-ear Bluetooth sound has to evolve be forgiving enough to provide 10-20 hours of use to allow charging every other day.
But without the headphone jack, this use case becomes harder. Now I suddenly have to accept a trade off: either I (1) spend a lot of money for fancy headphones (e.g. Airpods), (2) deal with cheap Bluetooth headphones, or (3) deal with dongles.
My use case used to be simple, but now it costs me money, convenience, or both.
And the space excuse seems like a silly one: They managed to fit one in the quite thin and small iphone 6. The 5 / SE is plenty thin (my preferred phone right now) and has one. Really, I don't need a phone to be smaller than that, and phones keep getting getting larger anyway!
More generally with apple products, I don't need them to keep "innovating" all the time. My 2013 retina macbook pro is the best laptop I've ever used, and they had to make it thinner and remove a bunch of stuff for no good reason. sigh The latest iphones are marginal improvements over their previous iterations, especially in comparison to how huge a leap each one of the first few iterations were. And this is fine! It means you're approaching a stable, mature product. Stop rejiggering everything. :-(
I'm not going back to wired music on my phone. This is better.
Its risky, but when done well...you get this.
But clearly no-one at Apple ever gets on a plane.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rykmwn0SMWU&t=42s
They specifically called out Apple for losing the jack, and a year later the Pixel 2 didn't have one either.
That being said, I agree its not very consumer friendly. There is no reason they couldn't have done this in multiple steps.