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Comment by ericabiz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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...!

> 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).

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.

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.

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

> 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

>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!

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?

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