Apple’s $9 engineering marvel no one wants (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Apple’s $9 engineering marvel no one wants (2017)

misfra.me

214 pointswheresvic1253 comments

I have non-anecdotal evidence that people definitely buy the Lightning to headphone adapter. We sell them in our stores and it's one of our biggest accessory sales.

You know why people buy them all the time, though? Because, frankly, it's a terrible design. It's tiny, easy to lose or forget, and they break easily. That's why it has such terrible reviews in the Apple store site--it's not a good product for what it is.

I deal with Apple products on the daily, and the removal of the headphone jack is still one of the things that irritates me most about Apple.

The others would be: the whole battery scandal where Apple slowed down older phones without explaining that the battery, a replaceable component, was the issue. And the 2016-2018 MacBook keyboards, which are an absolute travesty.

The headphone to Lightning adapter may be a "marvel of engineering", but it was a completely unnecessary one. It doesn't create more room inside the phone, and Samsung had water-resistant phones with headphone jacks. It's basically designed to force you on to more expensive wireless headphones.

> It doesn't create more room inside the phone

Can you elaborate on this? Because it seems like it obviously would. 3.5mm jacks have got to go somewhere.

Sure. A lot of people thought when Apple removed the headphone jack that it would make room for a bigger battery, specifically. But Apple didn't use the space that way. They put the Taptic Engine there instead. The bigger Taptic engine on e.g. an iPhone 8 vs. 6 is used for two things:

1) 7/8 series have a home button that doesn't actually push. The Taptic Engine mimics the feel of a button push.

2) It allows for different types of vibration, e.g. when hitting the corner of the screen while dragging or for more subtle notifications. (https://www.androidcentral.com/its-2018-and-android-phones-s...)

The iPhone 6 battery is 1810mAh, whereas the 8 is 1821mAh. So they didn't increase the battery size; they added the Taptic Engine instead, and got rid of the mechanical home button.

Articles gush about the Taptic Engine, but I'd still rather have my headphone jack back. And I liked the clicky home buttons.

> It doesn't create more room inside the phone […]

> They put the Taptic Engine there instead.

It sounds like it created the room for the Taptic Engine.

The 6S had a taptic engine AND a 3.5mm jack.

And ~100 fewer mAh than the models mentioned above, which precede and follow it. Seems like Apple did use the space to increase battery size, then.

Maybe? Would have to look at side by side of 6S and 8. The 8 is a tad thicker, but that may be the glass.

I wonder what the net change in weight and volume was with the removal of the home button and expansion of the display.

The Taptic Engine existed because they decided to do away with the mechanical home button, ostensibly for "waterproofing." The decision to retain tactility led to necessity for a larger more precise vibration motor, and then punting the headphone jack out of the phone became the obvious thing to do, with a bunch of post-rationalization externally and internal justification hinged around accessory sales.

So they did create space by removing the headphone jack; you just think they used that space unwisely (or that that space would have been best used for a headphone jack).

Waterproofing and reliability -- word started to go around that the home button would break after a while. The "fix" for this was to make the home button a fake capacitive button, and that required a bigger vibration motor.

AIUI the home button was by far the least reliable component left on the phone and the biggest driver of AppleCare support for non-accidental damage.

The problem was so bad that it became an Asian cultural thing to turn on the accessibility feature that gave you an on-screen home button control and to use that exclusively, literally never touching your real home button, because you needed the real home button to remain intact for when you wanted to sell your phone later.

Another option would've been to remove the physical button entirely, which is exactly what happened with the iPhone X (I think? I've never used one; only seen pictures) and with pretty much every flagship (and even less-than-flagship) Android phone nowadays.

The Taptic Engine, along with 3D Touch is probably the most useless things ever on an iPhone. Some may argue that the home button is a moving part and can fail but personally I've never had any issue with them. I don't think the occasional failures (that are bound to happen no matter what) warrant redesigning the entire mechanism.

3D Touch to quick jump to a app with a notification buried in a folder is amazing

> Some may argue that the home button is a moving part and can fail but personally I've never had any issue with them.

Asia wishes to disagree with you.

There are literally millions of people here who turn on AssistiveTouch on a brand new phone for no other reason than to not use the physical home button because they believe it will wear out/break.

> they believe it will wear out/break

But does it actually? Because if it's just a belief, nothing prevents the same belief from occurring with the 3D Touch home button. I guess it's going to be a feedback loop because obviously there wouldn't be reports of failures if nobody uses the physical button, but assuming normal usage, does the button fail frequently enough to be a concern? I think the west is a clear proof that this is not the case (unless something in Asia is breaking the buttons - climate maybe?).

Button working fine on my 6s, older 5 my wife used worked fine as well. The 5 was finally replaced when the battery expanded. Anecdotal evidence says they are dependable.

It does, actually, AIUI the home button was the #1 driver of AppleCare incidents for non-accidental damage. It had the highest failure rate of any component on the phone.

That’s a mass hysteria over nothing. Unfortunately it’s impossible to fix.

The home button on my 5S failed (followed by the screen). So it’s not nothing. It may be an exaggerated fear but it’s clearly based on some failures, otherwise they wouldn’t use the phone at all, in case the screen “breaks”

I guess the difference between the screen and the button is that the screen is mandatory for using the phone, while the button is optional.

Also I'm sure those people wouldn't actually use the phone at all if they had an equivalent way to achieve the same tasks that doesn't involve risking breaking a phone.

Finally let's put it that way - if you use AssistiveTouch right away you lose the home button. If it breaks after X months/years of use you also lose the home button. Wouldn't it still be better to get value out of the button while it's still working rather than falling back to AT right away?

I didn’t say I agree with their usage patterns, just explaining that they have them (I’m not Asian but live here)

It may be a cost/value issue. Better to protect a perceived fragile part so it’s not damaged when they want to sell it for a newer model.

Asia wishes to disagree with you.

Yes, that was parent's "some may argue..." part. That doesn't mean Asia are right. Some in that same part of the world would argue that running a fan can kill me, so something something urban legends.

yeah, that's been written about before. It's a false belief based on info that's not applicable to current devices. It is just baseless superstition at this point. Unfortunately, everyone believes it and makes their lives far worse with that stupid assistive touch thing when they don't need to.

...whereas I use 3D Touch all the time to interact with notifications and icons. It's an important part of my "workflow" because I can do certain things ("yes I just took that medication") rapidly and barely interrupting what I was actually in the middle of doing, which is living my life.

I agree discovery of 3D interactions is terrible -- essentially nonexistent -- which does justify the epithet "useless" to some degree.

Please, can you comment on which app you use to control your medications? From your brief description it sounds much better than mine, which forces me to go into the app, wait for a prompt, and then confirm that I took the medication. Thanks!

I use Medisafe, and interact through notifications, its widget, and watch notification. It gets the job done.

Good luck.

I actually prefer the “emulation” of 3D Touch my entry-level iPad has: the long touch. Just tap and hold for maybe a quarter second. It feels snappier to me than mashing my iPhone screen.

I suspect Apple may go that way, but, for example, long press and 3D Touch on a folder in springboard do different things, both useful.

That’s long press and even longer press on my iPad.

That only works on the 2 or 3 buttons that are hard-coded to support it and doesn't work in the general case (it can't work in the general case because it's literally just a long press, which already does other things).

Personally, pushing on the flashlight or camera buttons with 3D touch actually feels really satisfying, because it really does feel like I'm clicking a button even though I'm just pushing on my screen.

>I agree discovery of 3D interactions is terrible -- essentially nonexistent -- which does justify the epithet "useless" to some degree.

I've had iPhones for work for years and I'm just learning about this functionality today from reading this thread.

> And I liked the clicky home buttons.

Really? I enjoy the fake home buttons much more. In fact, the only iPhone part I've had fail on me was the old style home button. Happened twice.

I also had this experience, as have many of my friends who now know what "Adaptive Touch" means.

Agreed. I replaced the home button in a couple of my wife's iPhones and it's a pain to replace. It's one of the first things that goes into the phone when they assemble it, which means you have to take nearly everything else out to get to it. Haven't had a problem with the solid state home button.

I was curious so I started looking at teardown images before and after the removal. It doesn't look like it was an issue with space. I also found this article. https://bgr.com/2016/09/16/iphone-7-teardown-specs-headphone...

Still on an iPhone 6S for just this reason (and a slight preference for touch id over face id).

The article doesn’t provide any evidence about sales figures. The “nobody wants” phrase seems to just refer to the low reviews on the Apple store website, which are almost certainly due to people complaining about the lack of headphone jack in newer iPhones.

Nobody wants it, but they have no reasonable alternative to it. There are so many disparate factors that differentiate an iPhone from its competitors that the lack of a TRRS-barrel headphone jack is likely insufficient to change the whole-product buying decision.

You just have to pay for the headphone dongle replacements for as long as you own the phone, or the licensing fees and brand-based price differentials for every pair of headphones you buy--the "Apple tax" in action.

As long as someone gets more than $3/month in personal benefit from owning an iPhone instead of the next-best alternative, they will suck it up and buy the $9 audio dongle every 3 months. If they didn't realize that much benefit, they wouldn't have bought the iPhone in the first place.

Anecdote time. I told my family long ago that if they bought Apple products, I would not support those products in any way. If there is ever a problem, take it to the Apple store instead of telling me about it. Two of them chose iPhone anyway--one within the last year. And lo, surprising no-one, or at least not me, those earbuds with the lightning connector broke after ( N < 12 ) months. A conductor is loose between lightning connector and left earbud, the break occurring near the lightning connector. Because that part of the cable has zero strain relief. A flexible cable coming off of a rigid bit of plastic--of course it's going to break there. It's either that, or wearing out the insulation on the cable within 15cm of the connector.

So, this happens: "Hey, logfromblammo, please come with me to the Apple store and hold my hand while I try to get a warranty replacement for these headphones that are otherwise $29 to replace?" "No. I told you 'no' years ago, and I have not changed my mind since; if the problem has an Apple logo on it, it is entirely your problem." And this somehow makes me a jerk. I knew this would happen--I tried to stop it by telling people "don't buy anything with an Apple connector (except MagSafe)". This is why, when Apple first made the announcement that they were removing the TRRS barrel jack from their phones, I raged for days, despite not owning an iPhone, because people around me own iPhones, and knew I would have to hear their pleas and complaints. It has happened over and over and over again. Apple makes a shit sandwich, puts it in a white box with a silver logo on it, and people just... eat it? Why do they eat the sandwich? That guy just got seconds! It even says "poop sandwich" on the box! Why are they doing this?!

The engineering solution may be technically elegant, but it is an answer to a problem that Apple created for itself--a problem that never needed to exist.

What about the touchbar?

I lost 3 of them until my current ones have "lasted" a year. If I move the cord at certain angles, the phones voice control switches on, podcasts skip, pause, or run at 3x speed.

I don't mind the cord, I don't see why $200 shitty earpods that I have to charge every 5 hours and battery runs out after 1.5 years is better.

> If I move the cord at certain angles, the phones voice control switches on, podcasts skip, pause, or run at 3x speed.

It is incredibly reassuring to hear somebody else find these symptoms - it took me weeks to narrow down the cause to the dodgy adapter, and then I ended up buying a $80 bluetooth adapter for my wired headphones, because I couldn't find an "ignore the stupid commands that the broken lightning adapter is sending" option...

>I ended up buying a $80 bluetooth adapter for my wired headphones

What's the point of a headphone if you're listening to MP3/AAC → A2DP transcoded music?

it turns out that even mp3 encoding audio doesn't actually stop it being audible to other people nearby when played through speakers, the headphones on the other hand, mean only the wearer can hear it...

True, but I was talking about a headphone being pointless for A2DP because the transcoding would degrade audio quality to the point that even a cheap earphone would be sufficient.

Or if someone wants the headphone form factor, then 80 bucks is more than enough for an ok pair of Bluetooth headphones that won’t sound worse than the A2DP transcoded stream already is.

My three priorities are convenience, comfort, and noise-cancelling (call me a heretic, but for me A2DP is "good enough" quality-wise, so I don't care about that).

I already have a pair of super-comfortable noise-cancelling headphones that I carry everywhere, and getting an adapter is more convenient than carrying wired headphones in one pocket and wireless headphones in another pocket :P

FYI, I think your terminology is slightly non-standard though - (UK) english normally would describe any device worn on the head which allows you to listen to audio as either 'headphones' or 'earphones' interchangeably, with the distinction you refer to being indicated by using the modifier 'in-ear' beforehand...

Also the cost differential that you seem to suggest exists between them is not apparent - I have seen examples of both form factors of bluetooth headphones as cheap as GBP 10.00 (or less) at a minimum, and you could spend way over GBP 500.00 on either kind if you so desired - you get what you pay for, though...!

Mine constantly produced crackling noises with my noise-canceling earbuds I travel with unless I fiddled with the headphones->adapter connection for several minutes until it was just so. Gave up on it and finally got some bluetooth earbuds.

I have the exact same issue. Took the phone to Apple and they cleaned out the lightning connector and it work great now.

> It doesn't create more room inside the phone, and Samsung had water-resistant phones with headphone jacks. It's basically designed to force you on to more expensive wireless headphones.

Well I was told that Apple viewed the removal of the headphone jack as a necessary step to a sealed, water proof phone. The two key reasons for phone failure are drops and water damage. Water damage will eventually be handled by a sealed device. So it’s not about “more room” AFAIK.

> Samsung had water-resistant phones with headphone jacks

Apple didnt "slow down phones with old batteries", they capped the power output to the cpu of batteries that couldnt deliver reliable peak power anymore, so the phone didnt panic and crash as the cpu usage redlined. Their actions are much preferred to the alternative.

What he means is that they did that silently, without informing that an possibly preferred alternative existed: replace the battery.

I agree, "your battery health is reducing performance, have it replaced", should have been part of the original feature.

The situation was awful. I had a battery that was chronically failing (shutting down with 40% battery day after day) and Apple wouldn't even let me pay for a new battery if I wanted to, because their old battery health tool couldn't identify any problem. They refused to take my money under any terms! I had no choice but to use a warranty-invalidating third-party repair service (which did indeed resolve the problem).

I had the exact same issue and I still get angry thinking about the phone call I had with a support manager at apple. He blamed me, or possibly my backups. His solution was to factory reset the phone and to never restore my phone or my backups. He seriously wanted me to troubleshoot the issue, app by app, on a clean phone. I can't even imagine how long this would take, weeks? He told me that even if I take it to a store, they probably won't replace the battery because the app says it's fine.

Thinking back, I remember how I basically had Stockholm syndrome with my phone. The performance was incredibly terrible. Swiping on the screen took two or three attempts, opening any app took 2 or 3 touches for it to register. Scrolling was stuttered in any app. I remember my partner deemed my phone unusable (it was 3+ years old, so I certainly expected some sluggishness). I had just built in muscle memory to use my phone, swipe swipe, press press press to open an app.

Sigh, and I'm still with Apple.

Their actions are much preferred to the alternative.

Only to the fully rational. Many people would rather have their phone crash faster.

Apple did a horrible job communicating that to people. It would have turned out much better for them had they not played their cards so close to their vest.

Maybe, but probably not.

They were pretty clear that the battery throttling on phones with old batteries was to prevent the phone from shutting down under high load.

I'd argue that 95% (maybe higher?) of the public and the press don't understand this and still believe Apple was throttling the phone speed to force them to buy a new device. You even see this on HN a lot where people should know better. Bringing attention to it may just have caused the bad media response earlier.

They were clear that battery throttling on phones was to prevent shut down.

They weren't clear that they were battery throttling on phones to prevent shut down.

They make the hardware, who else would be doing it?

They weren't clear that they were battery throttling on phones.

I applaud what Apple is doing. I prefer airpods any day over their 3.5 mm jack counterpart and I appreciate a waterproof phone. Sure it is annoying that they can run out of battery and lightning is unnecessary now USB-C is here; but I guess it is a transition.

Samsung Galaxy S10 is still waterproof, still has headphone jack and can drive airpods.

Why do you behave like those things are exclusive?!

The idea that the elimination of the 3.5mm jack has anything to do with waterproofing is a complete misdirection, as evidenced by the list of waterproof Android phones with USB-C and 3.5mm jacks.

Also, any modern phone with bluetooth is just as capable off running airpods or any other wireless headphones whether or not it also has a 3.5mm jack.

Lastly, eliminating the 3.5mm jack has nothing to do with making the phone thinner either. My jackless iPhone 7 is actually a few mil thicker than my older yet nearly identical iPhone 6 which has a 3.5mm jack.

>Their actions are much preferred to the alternative.

Fitting a sufficiently large battery in the first place?

Apple have developed a chronic problem in recent years - stripping out engineering margins in the interests of aesthetics. Fraying MagSafe cables due to inadequate strain relief. "You're holding it wrong". Touch disease and bendgate. Stuck keys because of wafer-thin tolerances on the butterfly keyboard. Macbook CPU throttling due to a marginal thermal solution. Pitifully poor battery durability on EarPods. Display flex cable failures on the MBP.

The minimalist aesthetic has long been a key part of Apple's brand, but they are crossing the line from "minimalist" to "inadequate" with increasing frequency. It's working, for now, but it's eroding their reputation for quality. I've been recommending Macbooks to non-technical users since 2006; I can no longer do so in good conscience, because of the very high price of an entry-level machine and the high probability of a major failure.

The battery was sufficiently large to start with. Then normal wear and tear caused the battery to be weaker. That’s fine. Throttling on a weak battery is sensible imo. The inexcusable part was that the throttling was silent. If there had been any sort of notification then it had been good design.

>The battery was sufficiently large to start with. Then normal wear and tear caused the battery to be weaker.

Your second sentence contradicts your first.

Apple know that battery performance degrades over time. They knew that the batteries they were fitting to iPhones would be unable to supply sufficient current within the normal working life of the phone. They either didn't care about longevity, or chose to prioritise aesthetics. For a company that likes to brag about their environmental credentials and the quality of their devices, that's not a good look.

No, there is no contradiction. We just don’t agree on what level of battery wear and tear we find acceptable. I had a phone that was affected. Batteries are a wear item, and they are replaceable. It was after a long service life and I was fine with the whole thing, including the throttling, except the unforgivable part, which was that they didn’t tell me they were throttling.

Right, it's the lack of user messaging that was the problem.

The problem isn't capacity. It's voltage. Old batteries are sometimes no longer able to provide adequate voltage at peak loads, leading to phones turning off when running on low battery (but before it's actually empty enough for it to turn off in normal circumstances). Until now I've assumed that this generally affects all li-ion batteries over time, but I'm honestly not sure why this issue hasn't cropped up in the Android camp in the same way. Maybe the only reason it became such a big deal was how Apple decided to fix the problem (silently throttling performance).

>The problem isn't capacity. It's voltage.

It's not voltage, it's discharge rate, which is directly proportional to capacity. All else being equal, bigger batteries can supply more current. It hasn't cropped up in the Android camp because Android phones use bigger batteries.

https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/what_is_the_c_ra...

What about physics? A colder battery will have a slower chemical reaction and may not be able to supply enough current to avoid a crash without throttling.

A phone should be able to operate reliably within it's thermal specifications. It's perfectly reasonable for a phone to occasionally throttle because it's unusually hot or cold, but it's exceedingly shoddy for throttling to be routinely used to mitigate an under-specified battery.

> It hasn't cropped up in the Android camp

Samsung was fined for exactly the same thing Apple was doing.

https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-samsung-5-million-fine...

According to The Register, Samsung were fined because they pushed Android Marshmallow to the Note 4, not because of any sort of battery-related throttling.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/24/apple_samsung_fined...

Or they could've been more transparent, everyone knows batteries dont last as long after 1-2 years, but they decided to gimp them down (and effectively slowing them down, even if you dont like that term, it is what it is). Their batteries are sub-par in capacity compared to most manufacturers (They hadnt even passed 2000 mAh until the 6 plus/6s plus, and their non-plus models have never passed 2000 mAh, only the X's have more than 2000)

They could have averted the Brand damage if they had been transparent about the "throttling" from the beginning.

Apple needs to face it: They have an arrogance problem. ("Courage") This applies to a lot of SV: An over-willingness to dismiss the voices of the many.

EDIT: Apple under Steve Jobs didn't succeed by simply going against the grain. Apple at its best knows when it made sense to go against the grain, and when it made sense to cater to the masses. It hasn't been at its best in recent years.

>Samsung had water-resistant phones with headphone jacks.

Don't forget replaceable batteries, up-gradable storage, and an IR blaster.

Unfortunately, no more IR blasters since S5!

It gets negative review from people who don't like dongles, and those people don't care about the quality of chips inside the dongle.

Since you sell them and I'm having trouble finding an answer, do the adapters work with 3rd party microphones (such as a clip-on lavalier)? We bought a lightning microphone advertised to work with the XS but when we sent back video evidence that it didn't they just refunded us with no further explanation. What should be a relatively simple and cheap purchase is wasting a lot of our time. Most answers we see are typical of Apple searches - should work with the Apple products, YMMV with 3rd party.

Mine works flawlessly with the integrated microphone of the Sennheiser HD 598SR headphones. So I assume it works with any third party mic.

Great, I'll head to the glass church of Steve later to buy one :D

It is an impressive engineering feat, and certainly better than the Android ones that just pass analog through the USB-C jack, but it's worth noting that this DAC performs worse than what it replaced [1]. Dynamics have less range, there's more THD, and output impedance is lower, so it's harder to drive heavier headphones. I noticed a difference in clarity using Audio-Technica ATH-M50s and Beyerdynamic DT 990 250Ω. Specifically, the Beyerdynamics could be driven "good enough" for me with the iPhone SE jack, but I wasn't happy with how they sounded on the Lightning dongle.

[1] https://ifixit.org/blog/8448/apple-audio-adapter-teardown/

My experience is similar. I recently bought a USB-C to DC jack adapter from Apple for use on my Pixel 2 phone. The sound on my SoundMagic E10 was flat and mushy. Even though the earphones are "only" rated as 46 Ohm.

My pair of DT 770 Ms sound awful with the lightning to USB adapter, even though they're only 80 ohms. But I guess if you're using high impedance headphones it comes with the territory that you may need an amp.

For me, they sound good driven from my iPad pro and a USB C charging/headphone adapter so I listen from that at my desk.

  > certainly better than
  > the Android ones that
  > just pass analog through
  > the USB-C jack

Almost none of the USB-C ones actually do that. Most of them actually also include DACs. the specification that allowed actual analog output through the USB-C port was not widely adapted.

The link to the measurements from your source:

https://kenrockwell.com/apple/lightning-adapter-audio-qualit...

According to those measurements the adaptor's DAC is fantastic, especially for a $9 part.

And in the spirit of anecdotes, the old iPhone DACs were notoriously hissy and weak, and if you're buying high impedance headphones you have no business plugging that into a phone's headphone jack... spend the $20-50 on an amp/DAC and call it a day. Just a bigger dongle.

Where you can find a good amp/DAC for $20?

Sure, it's not a bad DAC and I'm happy with the sound on wired IEMs. It's just that I could drive my high impedance headphones straight from an iPhone SE and I can't with an iPhone 8. I lost functionality.

> I noticed a difference in clarity using Audio-Technica ATH-M50s and Beyerdynamic DT 990 250Ω. Specifically, the Beyerdynamics could be driven "good enough" for me with the iPhone SE jack, but I wasn't happy with how they sounded on the Lightning dongle.

Scientifically speaking, it should be noted that the adapter performs exceedingly well to the point of audible transparency[1]. You are not going to hear the distortion components as they lie below 90 dB.

The fact of the matter is that your ears simply cannot be trusted, not when it comes to discerning differences in DACs and amps. There is a beautiful read[2] that illustrates this by NwAvGuy, it's worth checking out even for non-audiophile.

And Xiph's Digital Show and Tell[3] (again, a must-read) tells us that the 44kHz of the dongle is more than enough for audible transparency to humans.

The differences you hear are likely due to incorrectly matched volumes. If you volume-match to a fraction of a decibel, you probably would not be able to tell the difference in a blind test. There are other potential differences like a different impedance etc but these should only effect a very small subset of IEMs, let alone your headphones.

[1]: https://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/lightning-adapter-audio-qu...

[2]: http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2012/04/what-we-hear.html

[3]: https://wiki.xiph.org/Videos/Digital_Show_and_Tell

Sure, the Lightning DAC performs well. But there's better-performing DACs already out there, that I assume cost the same. This is objectively a downgrade, unless you're using super low impedance IEMs.

Regarding volume matching, with the SE headphone jack I could put the iOS volume around 40% and very much enjoy the sound. With the dongle I lost a lot of low and high end at 40%, and to bring them back to my typical volumes required iOS volume to be around 60-70%, and caused distortion around the low-mids. Yes, I tried another dongle.

I'm perfectly comfortable with trusting my ears, since that's the whole point of audio - making my ears happy.

> But there's better-performing DACs already out there, that I assume cost the same.

Could you mention any better-performing DACs for $9? AFAIK none exist, which is in part the point of the linked post.

> I'm perfectly comfortable with trusting my ears,

Sure, but then you can't really make objective statements like "this distorts" when measurements are to the contrary and all modern audio science tells us your ears are probably wrong about minute differences like these.

> output impedance is lower, so it's harder to drive heavier headphones

That is backwards. Lower output impedance is better as more power is delivered to the load all other things being equal.

An engineering marvel necessary because of product design stupidity.

One can neither use the same headphones for a Mac and iPhone, nor charge an iPhone from a Mac using the cables that come with the devices.

I barely use that crap adapter because it's inconvenient. Thank goodness Macs still support headphone jacks.

> One can neither use the same headphones for a Mac and iPhone, nor charge an iPhone from a Mac using the cables that come with the devices.

The latter is very much true, but my headphones (not Apple ones) pair to two Bluetooth hosts at a time. I use them regularly with my laptop and my iPhone.

You have to pause the audio output from one to use the other, granted, but it's not a big deal.

I use the air pods now, so it works on every machine except my nintendo switch :(

Surely you can buy a $10 BT transmitter that plugs into the 3.5mm jack?

I've tried that - a cheap BT transmitter has latency high enough that the sound is out of sync with the game.

Can you tell me why I’m always seeing AirPod users with only one headphone in their ear?

To listen for hazards while outside. I don't know about inside.

Podcasts, audiobooks, or taking phone calls.

Single headphone usage is a feature. The AirPods can detect that only one is present in the ear and switch from stereo to mono output. Here are a couple use cases:

* To listen to the environment as well.

* To take phone calls.

* To extend the battery life of continuous listening by listening to one, charging the other, and then switch.

In my case, I lost one of them.

maybe you could connect them with something, so you cant loose them. A cable would work for that :)

halving the wear on the batteries?

I do it when I chain calls and I don't have batteries anymore. I can charge one while using the other, then swap. The battery is great if you're only listening, but as soon as you start using the microphone it goes down pretty fast (a bit more than one hour maybe?).

In addition to the other reasons mentioned, I sometimes wear one at work on the side facing the wall of my office so I look more approachable.

I have a Genki and I like it a lot, though it's pricey: https://www.amazon.com/Genki-Standalone-Transmitter-Headphon...

It is pretty aggravating the Switch still doesn't support bluetooth audio, since it seems like it is a software limitation.

> nor charge an iPhone from a Mac using the cables that come with the devices.

Portable Macs, sure. But USB-a charging ports are everywhere now - powerboards, wall outlets etc. If apple included a type-c to lightning cable you/someone would complain it doesn’t work with those.

Well, you see, this is about products from one brand being able to work as one ecosystem - what we had previously and what we've lost. Before I had to upgrade my work laptop, when I've got to the office I could just plug my headphones from phone to laptop and that's it - now I have to keep additional ones. Phone battery run low - I could've just plugged it into a laptop with one cable - now I have to use adapter/charger. Before all that, if you had to replace your phone/tablet/laptop - you just did that and everything was working as before. Now you have to buy adapters to connect one apple device to another. And don't get me started on travelling.

Not everybody agrees about the sound quality, compared to the jacks on iDevices:

- [German] https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/iPhone-7-nachgemessen-Audio-...

- [Summarising the above] https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/256241/45492

- Another test: http://soundexpert.org/articles/-/blogs/audio-quality-of-lig...

- https://ifixit.org/blog/8448/apple-audio-adapter-teardown/

I've been using Mac products since I was a child (thanks, dad) more or less happily and the removal of the headphone jack and the requirement that you have these adaptors has been the first thing to make me seriously consider going elsewhere. I probably won't, due to years of lock-in, but to rephrase it's the worst experience I've had with anything Apple in my lifetime. I've had three adaptors, two Apple ones that broke in separate ways (one would keep firing commands randomly from the control buttons on my headphones, the other lost the right channel entirely) and a crappy third party one that just fell apart. Even when the adaptor works, having a dongle sticking out of your pants pocket is a total pain that nobody really asked for. It solves no problem, it's in no way better than the previous alternative, and it really just reads like a massive "fuck you, pay me" from Apple to their customers.

I settled on non-Apple bluetooth headphones, which have their own set of problems but at least I can reliably listen to music during my commute (for the most part).

HN hug of death? "503 Service Unavailable"

Here's the Google Cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps...

I'm having trouble with the google cache version too, so here is the archive.org version: https://web.archive.org/web/20190408150115/https://misfra.me...

Author here. Sorry, resizing my droplet now.

Just wondering if you can share your stack and what kind of traffic did you get (in terms of requests/second)? Always curious as to how much traffic HN really brings and why some sites stay up and others die.

Generally two possibilities for managing a large load - either a third party blogging provider that can deal with it, or a static site.

Why anyone hosts small blogs on self-hosted VPNs is beyond me - all sorts of problems including security maintenance and peaky load. You can go one further with caching, but that’s yet another moving part that’s not necessary for a simple site.

Some stats from my front-page a month ago:

  - Time on front page: 15 min
  - Views in first 15  min: ~5000
  - Views in first 60  min: ~7000
  - Views in first 600 min: ~11,000
  - Views over the next 5 days: ~5000

HN front pages bring a bunch of users quickly, but it isn't a scale that will cripple moderate hardware with some basic performance tuning (directly serving assets, for example). The tail is also great, fully 3/4 of my post-front-page views come from click-throughs on social.

It actually seems pretty manageable, I'm surprised the site died. You're running Wordpress by any chance?

I’m using Hugo and Caddy. It’s running out of file handles.

The hugo plugin, or are you running hugo separately?

Separately. I haven't updated it to use the plugin. Thanks for Caddy, BTW!

File a bug, yours is the first we've heard of something like that. And you're welcome!

I saw similar numbers on my server. About 10,000 views over the course of an entire day (derived as total data transmitted divided by the size of one full page load), with the bulk concentrated in the first two hours. My nginx served it without breaking a sweat. Peak CPU usage was at 5% and network load peaked at 1 Mb/s (data at 60-second resolution).

My stack was just nginx serving static files, on a 1/1 VM that also hosts half a dozen other services (XMPP, Gitea, Matrix, Mumble etc.).

It is my belief that everyone who encounters the HN hug of death is doing something wrong.

I used to have a blog that ran on Wordpress (3.0 was I think the current version at the time, this was a while ago) with the APC plugin, served via Apache. An article hit HN and it fell over.

Some time later I had migrated to blogofile and nginx and made it to HN again, the server barely noticed.

May be consider putting a CDN in front of it?

Cloudflare or BunnyCDN.

Btw the Site looks great. Simple and Elegant.

Thanks! Yeah, will look into a CDN or just hosting it from an S3 bucket.

This doesn't replace the fact that I never wanted my headphone jack taken away in the first place. They broke a perfectly good thing in the name of $200 wireless earbuds.

They broke a perfectly good thing in the name of water intrusion, didn't they? IIRC Apple said the headphone jack was the single biggest source of damage.

The first device to ditch the jack was Apple's first device to hit IP67 rating. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207043

Plenty of other companies make or made IP68 waterproof phones with exposed headphone jacks. It's not an issue.

It's entirely possible that Apple doesn't like/trust the way their competitors approached waterproofing.

Given all the many hardware problems Samsung has had -- exploding batteries!! -- if there was a flaw in their waterproofing don’t you think it would have been publicised by now? I haven’t heard any such reports.

If doing it “the Sony way” would involve making the phone 1mm thicker, okay, I can easily believe Apple would decide they need to rip it up completely and do something different.

Samsung and Sony phones aren’t exactly chunky, though.

I would have been really happy with just a waterproof iPhone 6. Then maybe they could follow that up with an iPhone X with a headphone jack. Still do AirPods, just market them as a completely independent product.

iPhones still have charging ports and microphone holes. It's entirely possible to get ip68 with a headphone jack.

Sure, but there are other IP67 devices, like the galaxy s5, the Sony xperia z, and so on that are ip67 rated and have a 3.5mm jack.

I believed the idea that it was a space saving and water ingress issue until the latest iPad Pro also lost the jack.

A "random person" did fit a 1/8 audio jack back inside the iphone without having to modify the case (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA). It's all about a money grab for Apple...

If someone has a different point of view, pleaase let me know

Even before that it seemed questionable. I think every Samsung flagship has had an equal or better water resistance rating than the corresponding iPhone.

Not super obvious, but the "no one wants" in the title is referring to that explicitly.

You didn't want Flash taken away either but Apple started the transition to a flash-less internet which is now viewed as a good choice in retrospect. I tried the Airpods and I don't want to touch a wired headphone ever again.

> Personally, I’m amazed whenever I use it but I always wonder for a moment, “what if Apple just made what people wanted?”

"What people want" is pretty slippery. For every person I've heard complain about needing the dongle, I've known at least one or two others who exclusively use the wireless ear buds and wouldn't go back. YMMV.

Give it a few years I think most people will look at this like removing the CD. The wireless audio experience is mostly better. Airpods for example connect and disconnect effortlessly. Being able to walk all over the office while on the phone has done wonders for my pacing.

It's already been a few years and people are still annoyed by it. Airpods are great, but they're also expensive. Saying wireless is better isn't a fair comparison either, because wireless is an option even with a headphone jack, and most people still use wired headphones anyway with a much less convenient connector.

I would be willing to take a bet that if you stood at one of the entrances to Times Square for 24 hours and tallied wired vs. wireless headphones, wireless would come out on top.

NPD had wireless overtaking wired in sales (obviously this doesn’t account for people using bundled earphones) for the first time back in 2016: https://qz.com/745108/wireless-headphone-sales-just-hit-a-ti...

When wireless is much more expensive, this is unlikely.

Even before the iPhone lost its headphone jack, NPD already pegged the share of wireless headphones under $50 at 30% of the (again, already larger) wireless market. The demand has only grown since then, and the market has responded.

The most popular pair of bluetooth headphones on Amazon is waterproof, has 4.5 stars, and only costs $20: https://www.amazon.com/LETSCOM-Headphones-Waterproof-Sweatpr...

Honestly I’m shocked that the headphone jack outrage is still a thing. When they removed the jack, I thought, “people will be mad for a few weeks then just forget about it, like they forgot about cassettes.” Here we are in 2019 and people are still complaining about it!

If anything, it’s been great PR for Apple. It has served as an anger lightning rod, distracting people from Apple’s other actual problems, focusing everyone’s rage on this other stupid thing.

Personally, I can't stand wireless ear buds. I've tried to like them on a few occasions, but the trade-offs never really made sense to me.

Then again, it's pretty rare that I use my phone for music (and when I do, it's plugged into the car) so I really have no dog in this particular fight.

I have to disagree.

CD's were easily replaced with usb drives and music streaming. However while you (and others) love wireless headphones and will never go back, so many others seem to hate them and refuse to use anything not wired (myself included)

This is the important point. CD's are not less popular because Sony or Toyota decided to stop supporting them - consumers stopped using them.

This headphone thing is putting the cart before the horse.

My wired headphones always work. Wireless has too many issues for me.

My $15 wired ear buds that just work VS $100+ wireless ... ill keep my wire.

The headphone thing is like dropping the floppy drive on the original iMac.

Which as we all know was a terrible choice, because floppies are still in use today..

Also for anecdotal evidence: I’ve gone through 3 or 4 sets of apple earbuds (including a pair of the more expensive in-ear ones).

I’ve had AirPods for about a month and couldn’t be happier.

>The headphone thing is like dropping the floppy drive on the original iMac.

What? That's the type of case GP was talking about. Everybody still uses wired headphones these days, they're not going anywhere. Professionals/musicians will never stop using wired headphones, and most casual users just buy the cheap ones, which are wired

Everybody still used floppies when the iMac dropped them. That was my point.

I don’t know how many musicians are making music on an iPhone.

Wireless headphones exist outside of the iPhone ecosystem.

As a counterpoint I would point out the number of tech-savvy early adopters who are still complaining about the missing headphone jack. Something that I don't recall happening when Apple came out with the iMac or the MacBook air.

Dropping the floppy on the iMac was an easily solvable annoyance for most people who were annoyed. Get an external and plug it in, once and you're done. Or, for computer labs, get a couple and lock them to the desk, once. The awful hockey puck mouse was much worse. The usb floppies worked at least as good as an internal drive (possibly better?)

Bluetooth has pairing, interference, and latency, and for headphones, another thing to charge. A dongle on a portable device is a bigger deal than on a device intended to stay in one place. Clearly, a lot of people like wireless, but it's a tradeoff without a clear winner, and people are likely going to be grumpy about it for some time.

I don't think they will, or at least they ought not to, because the situations aren't equivalent. At the time that Macbooks started shipping without CD drives, every use case facilitated by CDs was achievable via some other mechanism. Wireless audio doesn't cover all of the affordances of wired audio, since it's incapable of low latency transmission. For me it's noticeable enough to even make watching video with synced sound unpleasant, but what it makes basically impossible is any sort of music creation. Music production is a specialty market to be sure, but it's a non-trivial one, and basically everyone who uses their iOS devices for it is going to remain rightfully annoyed that the proposed successor product is literally unusable for their purposes.

> literally unusable for their purposes.

Unless you get the $9 adapter discussed here. I get your point, I use iOS devices as musical instruments, but it's a niche and as such a fair trade-off most consumers don't care about.

I'd rate the healthy app ecosystem for music creation on iOS much higher and more valuable than the somewhat annoying necessity to use adapters for niche applications.

Right, I didn't mean to say that they've made it totally impossible, but that the form factor they're trying to push as the "next thing," wireless audio, is not actually a replacement for that use case ("successor product" refers to wireless headphones, not newer iPhone generations).

But, yeah, I agree that the ecosystem makes it worth it -- it's not like there are any other viable alternatives, anyway.

It's 2019 and Bluetooth still has massive latency problems if you don't use Qualcomm's proprietary aptX LL extension. In theory it is possible to have a good wireless audio experience. Stock Bluetooth doesn't give you any of that and pretending so doesn't make the problem go away. Meanwhile almost any crappy Chinese $2 earphone won't suffer from this problem.

We've had 200ms (roundtrip!!!!) video live-streaming via WebRTC from one side of the globe to another for more than 3 years now but stock Bluetooth still cannot accomplish that same task within the same room. If all you're doing is listening to music on your phone you might not care. But audio latency during video games or even just learning vocabulary via Anki (which is basically the thing I use my phone for) is annoying as hell.

There is no clear upgrade path in which wireless is always better than wired. aptX LL is "adequate" but it's not the default. It often requires 50€ transceivers for specific devices like your switch console, desktop/laptop, etc. It's even less common than the headphone jack.

In comparison solid state storage is superior to CDs in almost every possible way. It's more compact, faster, less prone to scratches, can be rewritten and it is cheaper ($0.10 per GB for SSDs, $0.20 for a 700MB CD). There is no reason to still use CDs.

Meanwhile wireless (= stock Bluetooth), needs to be recharged (acceptable sacrifice), has worse quality, suffers from latency and there are multiple proprietary extensions that substantially improve the user experience but they are not guaranteed and even cost extra compared to regular wireless. The audio experience is not better in every case! There are enough substantial reasons to prefer wired headphones over wireless.

I'm not saying wireless can never be good. I'm saying that it's completely squandering it's huge potential but yet it keeps getting pushed down our throats before it's ready. But why on earth is it not ready? It's 2019. Why isn't "wired < wireless" true in every case?

Designing for what people want is how you get a Homer Simpson car.

https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/The_Homer

Designing for what a single idiot wants is how you get a Homer Simpson car.

My desire for a headphone jack and an SD card support is hardly going to give the phone three horns.

Isn't the whole point of agile development to better respond to what the customer wants? Instead of trying to dictate what features the customers get?

I used wireless ear buds exclusively before Apple removed the 3.5 mm jack, but when I lost them I was glad I had a headphone jack so I could use a wired pair until I bought new wireless ones. The thing about phones with headphone jacks is that it gives you a choice, since wireless still works.

A yearly hardware release is about as "waterfall" as it gets these days.

Apple can’t very well be “agile” with yearly releases when it takes multiple years just to design/test/ramp up the supply line for a new iPhone.

It’s not like they can just push the design to git and have a two week release cycle.

This is just another entry in the "Apple: a Dongle Company" narrative. Apple has long had a philosophy of designing things their way and making the consumer adapt to their whims, rather than accepting standards or designing for the way people like to use things.

If you're charitable, you can say that they design with the future in mind. If you're not, you can say they know they can squeeze out more revenue via dongles and be indifferent to consumer wants because they have the size and market loyalty to get away with it. Depends on how you feel about Apple, I suppose

"Apple makes money off of dongles" is such a ridiculous argument though. And to imply that they would make major changes to their flagship hardware just for that is way on the wacky end of conspiracy theories.

These decisions are based on focus groups, user analytics, and reducing manufacturing costs. Nothing more.

Apple has a long and rich history of making their customers buy dongles to interact with technology.

And they do make money off of dongles[0]. It is obviously a small percentage of their overall revenue, but even a couple percentage points is sizable at Apple's size.

[0]https://9to5mac.com/2018/08/24/dongle-top-seller-apple-best-...

I have yet to disagree with one of their format changes. Lightning was miles better than Micro USB or the old 30-pin dock connector, and USB-C allows me to dock my laptop with a single cable.

Got any other examples?

I like USB-C, lightning, and the new keyboards, although losing magsafe sucks. Having dockability baked into the format is great though. If they move everything to USB-C they will have me satisfied.

The dongles are whatever. I’m not convinced I need permanent ports when I’m not at my desk. Losing the iPhone headphone jack is only an inconvenience when I’m negligent about plugging my phone in and am traveling. I airplay to my receiver at home. I started using a different pair of bluetooth headphones when on the go, but the headphones I actually like, 598s and 579s, are wired. The dongles are priced right. If they were $20 I’d be more upset.

The keyboards were most surprising; as a mechanical keyboard guy, a few months and I’m finding it’s quicker due to low travel and more predictable action. I don’t even have a separate keyboard on my desk now.

I think people just underestimate the big picture benefit of letting Apple shepherd you into the experience they have designed. To them, “everyone” uses bluetooth, so the jack is irrelevant. For me, as someone who REALLY likes my wired headphones, I still get it. The seamless bluetooth experience is nice in and out of the car and traveling.

They make a top level decision like “slim, quiet keyboards!”, “no more buttons!”, or “one cable!” that is appealing to investors and consumers and stick to it. The fact that they are the only brand that seems able to strongly execute on these types of unified schemes, often requiring partners to architect to a specific API (airplay and homekit, for instance) could be proof that the only way to do that is with a lot of steam behind you and strong opinions behind design choices. I cannot wait for what is next in terms of mac/iOS unification.

Other companies that make USB-C laptops still manage to include USB A ports, ethernet ports, and HDMI. Some USB-C laptops even have more esoteric stuff like RS-232. Docking my MBP at my desk is great, but it's a pain in the ass when I need to go anywhere else and use multiple video outs and multiple network connections

If you want RS-232 on your laptop, you must realize that you belong to a vanishingly small demographic that Apple will never even pretend to cater to.

Definitely don't expect Apple to bring back serial ports, just pointing out that if Laptops smaller than a MacBook Pro can have HDMI, serial, USB A, USB C, ethernet, and VGA then I don't buy any arguments about getting rid of ports to keep the device small.

https://sneak.berlin/20190330/apple-is-not-trying-to-screw-y...

I have one. I had to buy it as my 8 didn't come with it.

I think the louder supporters of the 3.5mm jack removal are a bit disingenuous with how simple BT is. I have several iDevices. As does my wife. If we turn on a BT speaker, we don't know which device it will connect to. Sometimes the last one, sometime whichever one responds to the speaker faster[0]. My BT headphones? Same thing; will it connect to my work phone? My personal phone? My iPad? My laptop? Who knows? Here's what I do know, A 3.5mm jack with always[1] connect to the device I want it to connect to.

[0] I'm sure someone will tell me I'm doing it wrong. Whatever, a 3.5mm jack still wins here.

[1] For most definitions of always.

I agree... BT is finicky, specially if you use your headphones on multiple devices. When I want to use my headphones with my TV I have to make sure BT is turned off on my phone and iPad before turning my headphones on.

If wireless headphones are the future we need something better than BT.

Wired headphones have better sound quality, are cheaper and easier to repair (considering the same headphones wired vs wireless), do not need to be charged, and the battery does not degrade over time.

Really, what is the mobile industry thinking? Apple was the first but everyone else is following.

>Really, what is the mobile industry thinking?

The obvious. All the pros you are listed are cons when you are concerned about profitability uber alles.

Because... ?

> Really, what is the mobile industry thinking?

Probably that you can still use your wired headphones with a $9 dongle.

From the comments I've read here, I guess a contrarian take:

If the purpose of the decision was to get people to move to wireless headphones, then specifically for myself and my network of folks, this seems to have worked.

Initially I had the Oppo Wired headphones. Soon after removing-3.5mm-gate (and dealing with the adapter), I'm exclusively on wireless: the Airpods and the latest Sony over ear headphones.

Honestly, at the cost of sound quality (which used to be important to me), but gaining noise-cancelling and not having to wrangle with wires, it's such a convenience. Apple was right, and I imagine the trend will largely be towards wireless. That being said, experience still has a ways to go (connect, battery), and die-hard audiophiles will never be satiated.

die-hard audiophiles will never be satiated.

Very true. They will gradually die off, though...!

> They will gradually die off, though...!

Don't worry a fresh crop of flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, or gold-standard fanatics will spring up to fill that particular ecological niche.

The purpose isn't to convince people to switch to wireless headphones. Most people were already using bluetooth headphones when the iPhone 7 came out.

The purpose is to reduce manufacturing cost and complexity.

> The purpose is to reduce manufacturing cost and complexity

This argument doesn’t hold water for me because successive generations of iPhones have only become more complex. The X family has a tiny Kinect in the display!

The theory about pushing people to wireless makes much more sense if you look 5 years down the road and see e.g. an Apple Watch and some kind of AR accessory (or even AirPods and Siri as the AR accessory...) as the primary mobile compute devices, which everyone and their brother assumes is what Apple is trending toward.

I don't see any reason wireless can't be identical to wired as far as audio quality goes on a phone.

If we were talking about wired vs. wireless headphones on a home stereo listen to LPs, then yeah, there might be something to talk about. There you have an analog source, and with wired the signal stays analog all the way to the transducers in the headphones. Going wireless will introduce an ADC on the stereo end and a DAC on the headphone end.

But with a phone you have a digital source, going to a DAC, and then to the transducers. The difference between wired and wireless there is that wireless puts the DAC closer to the headphones, and the digital signal goes over a wireless link.

I'd expect die-hard audiophiles to actually prefer wireless in theory, because with wired you are relying on a DAC and amplifier provided by the phone manufacturer. With wireless you are using a DAC and amplifier from the headphone manufacturer, which allows in theory for the headphone manufacturer to use a better DAC and amplifier than the phone provides.

Because Bluetooth simply cannot deliver what you're talking about.

In the years that have passed since switching to an iPhone without a headphone jack, I have never once needed to use that dongle. Bluetooth more than covers my use cases. So the article is correct, I don't want it, but I also don't need it.

I picked up one of the belkin adapters that lets me charge and use headphones - I mostly use it with an over the ear headset, for conference calls, as I often have to dial in for multi-hour conference calls, which kinda beat the endurance of most bluetooth options.

My noise cancelling bluetooth headphones claim 30 hours battery life. I've tested 17 hours straight while flying (including layovers). That's longer than my phone lasts without a charger.

I hate double ear devices for phone calls.

That's a totally fair gripe. There are plenty of wireless bluetooth earphones/earplugs with 10/12 hours battery life, which is roughly the battery life of my Pixel 3 when used.

I just got away from them because I'd lose them, forget to charge them or break them.

> Bluetooth more than covers my use cases.

That is great for you. But when Apple designers decide that everyone should be forced into your category, they are actively deciding not to have empathy for the users for whom Bluetooth does not cover their use cases.

Good product design starts with empathy for every user. Apple has written off entire categories of users. I assume it is not because the don't know how to gather user data, it is because the actively DO NOT CARE.

For me, someone who: a) still has their hearing, b) has been listening to classical music for decades, c) has a collection of carefully and critically chosen wired headphones, the lack of a headphone jack is a gigantic FU.

Good product design starts with empathy for every user.

And this is how you end up with the HomerMobile.....

> And this is how you end up with the HomerMobile.....

Ha Ha! I admit that I had to look up HomerMobile.

So let me clarify, Good design starts with empathy for every user. But good product design also means that you look at functionality and manufacturability, and make intelligent trade-offs in a thoughtful manner.

It is inevitable that some users will be put in the category of "Not our target user today", and some in "Not our target user, ever." But those decisions need to be deliberate, not haphazard, and not driven by stubbornness and hubris.

Giving Apple the benefit of the doubt that they follow this process, then they have put me in the "we don't care about him" category. I suspect, though, that at Apple, pretty renderings win over usability arguments.

Not even close.

Also these are features that are already proven to work.

As was the floppy disk, the CD Drive, ADB ports, SCSI, Nubus, 68K processors, PPC processors, etc.

By 'work' I mean including the tradeoffs. Most of those took a good chunk of money for ever-smaller value. A headphone jack costs a very small amount of money, a very small amount of thickness, next to no weight, and still has a lot of value.

Because of this attitude wired headphones will still be relevant in 3 years. No, wireless isn't good enough. Fix it. Then we can talk. The fact that people still write articles about it should tell you something. [0]

[0] https://www.soundguys.com/ultimate-guide-to-bluetooth-headph...

From the article.

However, most people won’t be able to hear the difference

It wasn’t “free” in terms of money. Neither were the tires that came with my car.

It’s also not free in terms of time spent thinking about them. Like all dongles, I have to remember to bring them wherever I go in case I need them.

They’re an engineering marvel, no doubt about it. I just wish I didn’t maybe need it.

As an Android user, I am still regularly annoyed by Apple removing the headphone jack because it gave Google the "courage" to do it. And that has negatively impacted my life regularly in the past couple of years.

The main problem I have with Bluetooth headphones is that it's so much effort to switch them between devices. I have 3-4 things that I regularly listen to headphones on, and after repeatedly loosing my dongle, I just gave up and bought a separate set of Bluetooth earbuds for my phone.

It's the same in reverse with shared Bluetooth outputs like Amazon Echos and my wife and I's car. They always want to connect to whichever phone was last rather than whichever phone I'm trying to connect it to right now. I literally turn off Bluetooth on my phone whenever my wife wants to connect hers to the echo.

With the car, I previously used the aux input and let Bluetooth be exclusively for her. Now I just listen to audio through the phone speakers and don't use the car speakers at all. My car audio experience is significantly shittier than when I had a phone with an headphone jack. Thankfully, I don't drive very much.

I know there are workarounds for this, but they're all significantly more complex and expensive than a simple headphones jack.

That and, of course, it's one more battery to charge.

I am pretty convinced that this greatly degrades audio quality on my aux headphones. Bluetooth quality is normal, but with this cable, I can hear the difference. When plugged into an amp/speaker the grain is so abundantly obvious (compared to a BT or AUX connection)

https://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/lightning-adapter-audio-qu... seems to disagree. Could it be a question of the higher quality output (in comparison to BT) highlighting a lower quality source signal?

> But guess what? No one wants it

With 794 reviews, clearly some people want it. The bad reviews tell us more accurately that; "no one likes it".

i think the point is that people have to buy it, not that they buy it because they want it.

I would've preferred a headphone jack as I've already lost mine.

I've lost like 4 of them by now

https://www.amazon.com/Dongle-Dangler-Keychain-Accessory-Com...

I keep mine on my keys, haven't lost it yet.

A dangle for a dongle. :)

Semi serious question: but where do you keep your keys?

(When I don't have a bag, I find my current keyring bulky as it is...)

That's a brilliant product

It's weird that this much quality went into the guts, but they couldn't make the cable on it a little more sturdy. I use mine sparingly, but it feels like it's going to break if I look at it the wrong way, and I've read that some people have to replace it every couple months.

I understand where you are coming from. I have a couple of these of my own.

Apple probably doesn’t want to make these stronger than the things the connect to: eg headphones or the phone. Within certain load profiles the weakest component will suffer most of the wear. Would you rather the connector broke on the $9 adapter or the $1500 phone?

It's not the connector that breaks. Making the actual cable thicker shouldn't cause anything else to fail first, and the nature of a short piece of cable connected directly to a phone is to get horribly bent all the time; it needs thickness.

It's Apple's Thunderbolt to FireWire adapter that amazes me. That little $29 thing is a full PCI-e device --- there is a PCI-e interface and a FireWire chipset built into the housing. And the little cable has a huge number of individual cables inside of it.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD464LL/A/apple-thunderbo...

It's just a repeater chip[set]. For something that competes with USB it's a pretty bad price. You can get pretty powerful CPUs for half that or less.

No, it's just as the parent describes: A Thunderbolt-to-PCIe bridge chip, a short PCIe connection, a PCIe Firewire host chip, and a microcontroller to coordinate.

Thunderbolt is PCIe.

I have fixed my post to not imply it's only a single chip. It being multiple important chips should cause the opposite of amazement. It means that the product wasn't important enough to get a dedicated chip, which is probably the main reason it costs $29 instead of also being $9.

And Firewire is not related to PCIe at all, so the adapter clearly is not just a repeater. If you want to say something along the lines of"it's just a Firewire host adapter chip + some conversion, doesn't have to be expensive", then say that.

It's shoveling bits through basically unchanged. It's a repeater with a different electrical standard on each side. 90% of the effort is in the transceivers.

Here is a teardown of this little $29 device. Take a look...

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-thunderbolt-to-fi...

If only Apple had put that phenomenal technology in their actual phones instead of making it a $9 dongle.

Like, I'd be more tolerant of Apple's decision to drop the 3.5mm jack if it had coincided with Apple migrating iPhones to USB-C connectors, since at least that has the opportunity to play nicely with the rest of the USB-C ecosystem (which is growing pretty extensively) and could be a good way to push USB-C as "the" new standard for audio device connectivity (especially since USB-C directly supports analog and digital audio; the standard seems to advise rather strongly against using USB-C as a 3.5mm replacement outright, but a bit of "Courage™" from Apple could shift the tides such that such a prohibition is excluded from USB-C implementations). Their failure to do so makes it clear that Apple would rather make money on accessories tied to proprietary connectors than actually make good and useful products.

A related tip - if you've got a ThinkPad X1 Yoga with its awful internal headphone audio, try Apple's USB-C To Headphone dongle. It's a cheap but effective audio upgrade, and the competition (like the M-Audio Micro-DAC) is about 4x the price. It even adds support for Apple inline headphone volume controls too.

For the lazy: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

Does it mean that if I buy it and an female lightning to male usb adapter I'd get a good DAC for US$10?

Would be a bargain.

If you have USB-C you can skip one adapter: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MU7E2AM/A/usb-c-to-35-mm-...

I curse Apple every time they make me pull out a dongle for something that used to just work. I used to love Apple before they became a dongle company. Don't get me started on them killing off MagSafe.

Why hasn't Apple just switched to USB-C already? Then we can have a wealth of DAC/amp options. To make iPhones thinner still or keep the garden walled.

I think they'll do it eventually.

They took a lot of flack from folks when they tossed out 10+ years worth of 30-pin cable support on the switch to Lightning, so they'll likely take a good long while before they switch the phone to USB-C. I think it'll be the last device they produce to make the switch.

I always enable the "product improvement" analytics for companies I trust. And as it happens, I don't care about losing TRRS audio jack, losing the SD slot on Macs (I only have micro SD-using devices these days anyway), Type C (yay! -- and I don't carry any dongles), etc. Since I happen to be happy with these changes I obviously never complain about them.

Apple is famous for not doing market research (though I know they do a lot) and I wonder really if they don't probably know what they are doing with a lot of these changes. As far as demographics go, my kid (20) and my gf's kids and their friends (11-16 yo) don't seem dismayed by any of these changes.

I'm not saying that these are "get off my lawn" complaints, but the phone is the most mass market of mass market devices and every design decision affects some subculture positively or negatively. As for headphones specifically: iphone volume is high enough that the fact that lightning headphones haven't taken off suggests the headphone market isn't as big as one might think.

There are no shortages of boneheaded moves by Apple (I happen to like the feel of the butterfly keyboards but am not happy about how many I've had replaced: 4 since 2016) so this is no apology for a big company that can defend itself!

I've learnt it has a DAC after watching Strange Parts take 1 apart and put the components inside the iPhone 7 so he could have the 3.5 jack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA

Isn't the point of all this that Apple wants you to migrate to AirPods?

I use it almost every day, to listen to my iPhone at work with the studio-grade headphones I've trusted for years (Beyerdynamic DT770). It works great and hasn't failed yet.

Marvel indeed!

site seems down. google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ckxU-A...

If the idea to revoke the eighth-inch headphone jack is such a great idea, why not make it USB-C like the rest of the donglegate devices?

Hug of death - archive link: http://archive.is/rQqtB

If they made a USB-C version of this, they could sell them for 3 times that price and probably run out of stock.

Now I'm interested in what the Google version that comes with the Pixel 3/XL is like

Googled that for you: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MU7E2AM/A/usb-c-to-35-mm-...

They do, and it also costs $9[1]. I bought one after I realized (the hard way) that the new iPad Pro doesn't have a headphone jack…

[1]: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MU7E2AM/A/usb-c-to-35-mm-...

Especially interesting since Apple doesn't make USB-C headphones. I can tolerate the iPhones shipping with Lightning headphones. For the iPad Pro I guess the only official solution is AirPods.

Might be worth adding a [2017] tag.

They're $9 now. I wonder what they'll be next year.

They’ve been $9 for a few years, I’d expect them to stay at that price until they’re discontinued or significantly changed.

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