They're often the ones holding the gun.
Example: if they didn't remove the 3.5mm headphone jack, almost nobody else would have.
Example: if they didn't remove the 3.5mm headphone jack, almost nobody else would have.
Apple customers historically are often the most accepting of new things, even if that means change that involves spending more money, because Apple will cover the other end of change well (& expand a little that way).
The 3.5mm jack loss is tolerated because of airpods.
I'm old enough to remember the furor caused by Apple taking the 3.5 floppy drive when every publisher used Apple hardware for QuarkExpress & everything Adobe, replaced with this new-fangled usb thing.
The crucial thing over there was that Apple didn't bring in their own USB drive thing, but instead let IOMega try to deliver it & it went poorly for Apple customers who had big data swaps between them & others (DTP shops, magazine layouts, Photoshop artwork etc).
Second, as with all of Apple products, aesthetics concerns were more important than functionality. If you've ever dealt with that original iMac, it's a tight fit. The design ratios would be off with a floppy so it had to go.
Now I wish it didn't also have a bios battery that would freaking explode at about the 10 year mark, splattering battery acid everywhere and destroying the hardware but that's part of the long tradition of Apple's occasional exploding devices.
Iomega's Zip and Jaz drives came out in the 1994 and 1995 and were pretty popular for a while until CD-R and CD-RW drives became cheap and reliable enough in the late 1990s.
Perhaps the DTP shops were complaining about the iMac dropping the SCSI port which all Macs had had up to that point for USB, obsoleting their existing external SCSI peripherals - scanners as well as various external drives.
I find this a little hard to believe. If there really are no compromises to continuing to support the 3.5mm jack, then I would expect other phone manufacturers to continue support on their flagship devices, and hammer Apple for removing it.
I think in reality, mobile devices are so small, that having a single purpose port just doesn’t make sense. The 3.5mm port is larger in volume than a USB-C port, and USB-C is quite capable of carrying analog audio. I don’t see why any manufacturer would continue paying the cost of a 3.5mm port, when it’s so trivially rolled into other existing ports on the device.
I also suspect that the current domination of wireless headphone would have occurred even if the 3.5mm jack had stayed. After all it’s trivially easy to adapt a pair of wired headphones for a USB-C port or lightning port, and yet people still choose wireless headphones.
The only real exceptions are Asus and Sony who are both targeting niche buyers with most of their phone offerings.
I could get on board with the idea iff, phone manufactures had dual USB-C jacks (ideally one at the bottom and one at the side and this could make it easier to consume landscape content like movies/games). Right now you have to choose between audio or power delivery with one port (or have a massive dongle that's half the size of the phone).
i mean, there's clearly enough space for it, so was it really just to make way for the (very profitable) earbud trend?
As for headphones/earphones, IIRC there was a marked trend in adoption of bluetooth headphones, so Apple bet on that. Funnily enough, the competitors that derided Apple for removing the jack, and building some of their marketing campaigns around that, would remove the jack a year later.
Personally I think you could still make a small phone with a jack, but ultimately it doesn't matter much either way. Adapters work fine and bluetooth works even better.
3.5mm is a standard that just works and works everywhere. I hate the pressure to get rid of it. It seemed nothing but self serving on the part of phone manufacturers to do so and driven partly by DRM concerns and a desire to either sell accessories (airpods) or ride a minimalism trend to shave design and manufacturing costs.
absolutely everywhere, anytime!
Than what?
No analog unpredictability or crackling, clean digital all the way to the DAC matched to the speakers, no wires to tangle or damage, reliable controls.
The removal of physical keyboards from phones, lack of a serviceable battery, notch, death of the floppy, removal of ports from laptops, 3.5mm jack, these all would have completely happened, exactly like they did, exactly in the way they did, without Apple?
Instead I believe we live in a dysfunctional era of "designer as absolute dictator" and it turns out copying Apple is a safer choice then wandering through the wilderness and claiming your own path.
Investors, the board, senior management, very few have that courage and the path of Apple knockoff feels less risky.
I hate the monoculture through risk aversion, especially spearheaded by a company that seems hell-bent on turning everything into a locked down consumer-grade appliance but I get why it's that.
Why low contrast hairline grey fonts on grey backgrounds was the design trend until Apple stopped and why flat design where you can't tell if something was interactive or not was extremely popular until Apple decided it wasn't.
No, the options are not limited to “being a fortune teller” and “holding a gun.”
Ironically you try to refute "Apple is prescient" and "Apple is holding the gun" with... "Apple is omnipotent, and all their decisions turn out right and are slavishly copied by others".
> I hate the monoculture through risk aversion, especially spearheaded by a company that seems hell-bent on turning everything into a locked down consumer-grade appliance but I get why it's that.
It's amazing that you call Apple risk-averse when they, to quote you, did all these things, often against considerable backlash: "The removal of physical keyboards from phones, lack of a serviceable battery, notch, death of the floppy, removal of ports from laptops, 3.5mm jack"
Don't forget that also it wasn't just "removal of physical keyboards from phones". It was launching a completely new product for a company that never made such a product in a highly competitive market with lost of entrenched players.
Risk-averse my ass.
It's the antithesis lesson of the Edsel. It made (at that time) the big 4 recalcitrant, overly conservative, and weary of change. Everything that GM acquired ended up looking like a giant amorphous indistinguishable blob.
People just want to do well and they get spooked by failures so patterns and histories create cultures of design. Nobody knows truly what the future is so they end up doing "best practice" which is a euphemism for cultural conformity.
Apple was not this under Steve. He was pattern breaking change in both Steve I and Steve II incarnations. And he had a superhero batting average. Why that is is a huge conversation outside the scope here but yeah I agree with you.
Please reread my comment. Thanks