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Comment by can16358p | Hacker News Reader

Did they ever remove the headphone jack?

No but a lot of people seem to think they removed it, they didn’t

They did remove the input jack with G3 (2012-2015), and S/PDIF (digital line out) with G4 (touchbar) though.

There’s optical digital line out up until the 2015 Macbook Pro, sending light out of the headphone jack. You need to add a little plastic adapter compared to standard TOSLINK cables, which I presume were getting too big.

It's interesting how silently they dropped the optical line out, I never saw it mentioned. I needed it for something on my iMac Pro the other week and was boggled that it didn't support it. The argument I read about it was the DAC is so high quality now, digital out is simply not needed.

I’m still slightly bemused as to why they dropped optical out from the Apple TV too. It’s not like it’s supposed to be a media hub at the centre of your house or they run a music streaming service or anything!

I assume because modern HDMI supersedes it. Sucks if you have an old receiver/amp tho.

I specifically got a device to split audio out of the HDMI stream (technically it just copies it out) to RCA so I can pipe it back into the stereo in zone 2. Annoyingly complex but it works.

Optical out was a real blessing back when electrical connections (iMacs to amps) were noticeably noisy.

To go from optical back to electrical just seemed wrong from a tech evolution standpoint. Not hearing a lot of call to rip out multimode fiber in backbone networks and replace it with a shinier coax. But HDMI seems to be meeting the need, and there is always the aftermarket for fully annealed 99.999% oxygen-free HDMI cables to consider.

All the home audio stuff supports audio over hdmi now. One less fragile cable to worry about, it’s great.

For legacy equipment you can get a box that takes hdmi in and spits out spdif.

SPDIF has less bandwidth than HDMI and doesn't support formats like lossless surround or Atmos.

> There’s optical digital line out up until the 2015 Macbook Pro, sending light out of the headphone jack.

Yes, that's what I wrote was dropped in G4.

No but they did move it back to the left side, which matches the location of the wire in most wired headphones. No more need to wrap the wire around the back of the machine...

It's still there, now with better support for high impedance headphones which is great for music producers.

Wouldn't music producers use a dedicated DAC though?

It depends if they want to test how things sound through a Mac and happen to have high impedance headphones lying around. Seriously though the DAC in the Mac is very good, you’re talking $300+ to get something better and for my money it sounds nearly as good as a Topping D90 for example.

The $9 iPhone headphone dongle is a better DAC than most audiophile products, and has a bigger R&D budget than the entire industry. Headphone amps are real for electrical reasons, headphone DACs are a scam by the gold plated cable people.

(The Google equivalent dongle is also good.)

Don't think the same. I remember when they removed the jack I was using iPhone with a pair of wired CX 880i's. On old iPhone they sounded great (of course not a true audiophile setup, just a comparison). After I got my iPhone 7 which removed the jack and gave the dongle instead, they sounded absolutely terrible through that DAC. The change might not be noticeable for average EarPods user, but those Sennheisers which were great earbuds for its time was literally sounding worse than back-then-not-so-good Bluetooth headphones through that DAC. With all the world moving to Bluetooth/wireless (speaking of casual use, not pro setups), I doubt this will ever change.

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/q...

You certainly shouldn't be able to hear DAC differences through earbuds, but they shouldn't have issues being driven either unless they're really exotic. If I had to guess, I'd say the plug wasn't seated properly, or there was an issue with the in-line microphone.

In a studio: Sure. But on the go it could be a nice asset.

Music producers are using an external interface regardless, and if they are on the go and just using headphone jack, it doesn't much matter because they know they arent getting a true monitor grade signal to judge the mix with.

This is just great for headphone nerds, audiophiles.

Fair-ish points. For on the go, they can still take their dedicated over-ear monitors though, thus reducing the compromises. Sure it's not the same but better than the alternative.

I don't think Apple has, but people might have had a fear they would do. Now by adding those additional ports it's clear what route they're going and the jack is safe. I guess that's what he meant...

No; it's still there.

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