A crazy experience losing Apple earbuds in a remote town in Chile
twitter.com
twitter.com
Exactly. The idea that one looks at this situation and somehow concludes that Apple is good and the manufacturers are bad is absurd.
Without taking sides, I'd say the fundamental problem in this case is the deception. They are pretending to sell one thing and delivering another. If they told you what you were buying, I'd call it clever and totally reasonable.
!= not bad
I see this logic often, and I don't understand it.
If I did something people considered unethical, arguing that I did it out of greed wouldn't change people's minds. It would probably hurt my argument.
When a big company does something people consider unethical, there's almost always someone who mentions that the point of a business is to make money, as if that's a excuse for their behavior.
It's like there's a separate set of ethics for business, and the worst sin of all is not being profitable.
> I see this logic often, and I don't understand it.
You may be reading more into what I said than I intended. I am merely suggesting that big companies are in no way deserving of our sympathy. In this case, Apple is looking out for their best interests, and so are the manufacturers selling bogus products. Nobody forced those manufacturers to choose this route, and as big faceless corporations out to make a buck, why let them off the hook and blame Apple?
At least you know what you're spending top dollar for when you buy something from Apple. It's entirely your choice if it's worth it.
For whatever reason, that's the only place in tech I've seen a group of people nodding along to "complaining about bad thing is bad because the person complaining also is bad generally." It's a specious argument, so it sounds odd, and outside that context, people aren't likely to steelman it.
I'd be super annoyed just as the author, for the same reasons.
Why are they more expensive to make. Is it for the good of humanity?
Recommended viewing:
https://www.metacritic.com/movie/steve-jobs/
Computers as "art", according to preferences of one person, versus computers as machines for the benefit of everyone.
Closed systems to extract maximum profits for Apple versus open systems that can be modified and expanded to benefit everyone.
"I wish @Apple would devote an employee or two to cracking down on such a technological, psychological abomination as this."
How about lowering the cost of making "lightening" devices. How about offering the option to use a non-proprietary protocol?
"And I wish humanity would use its engineering prowess for good, and not opportunistic deception."
No doubt that's what people is rural Chile want, too. They do not mind paying higher prices. As long as the products are "Apple-certified". /s
This person tweeting seems to be having a hallucination where Apple is neither opportunistic nor deceptive. Nevermind its deliberate attempts to make its computers incompatible (preventing interoperability) and needlessly expensive.
> I wish @Apple would devote an employee or two to cracking down on such a technological, psychological abomination as this.
Why blame these manufacturers for finding a clever workaround and not Apple for requiring hardware DRM and extracting royalties out of accessory manufacturers in the first place?
selling bluetooth headphones without disclosing they're bluetooth is however anti-consumer, buyer should know what they're buying
I'm so glad we're mostly past this bullshit with Apple's move to USB-C.
Since tweets have no title, I followed the convention used in poetry where a poem with no name is referred to by its first line.
I guess technically then I should have titled the post [A crazy experience — I lost my earbuds in a remote town in Chile].
It would only require a port supporting 3 wires and a miniscule onboard amplifier. I'm sure Apple have the courage to invent a new port for the good of humanity, maybe they can even pave the way for a new standard.
hides
For the increasingly unlikely case in which I really do need wired headphones, I just carry them with an adapter permanently plugged into them.
> a miniscule onboard amplifier
That amplifier would be dead weight for me! (To be fair, it would be in good company with all the power amplifiers for 5G bands not available in my country, but I get the point of unifying SKUs globally and I can hardly plug one of these in with an adapter when traveling.)
The dongle life is so much fun, especially when packing for a flight!
I get the objection to Apple artificially creating demand for proprietary adapters; I dislike that too.
But what good would it do me if they make me pay for a component I don’t need? I don’t get gratification out of reducing (nor increasing) their bottom line.
If Apple sold a model with a headphone jack and a model without, then we could compare sales numbers between the two models and you could make that claim.
Of course, Apple doesn't sell a model with a headphone jack.
What they do sell however, coincidentally enough, is $300 wireless headphones.
I'd also like to make the comment that almost all high-quality headphones are made for analog jacks.
So as a person who values high-quality audio, I am not interested in wireless headphones of any kind, cheap shitty USBC headphones, or needing to use an ugly inconvenient dongle to use my good headphones.
Lucky for me I'm not an Apple customer anyway for a myriad of reasons, but I'd argue there are no good alternatives for what would be my use case.
I also note that those need a large ugly USBA to USBC adapter.
If I'm honest, the design of those also doesn't personally appeal to me, and I've tried AT headphones before and I didn't find them comfortable and didn't like the sound. For phone use I'd be looking for IEMs and not over the ear models too.
I am aware that there are good USBC headphones out there, but the available options are so much fewer than analog headphones.
Also, I already have good analog headphones.
3.5mm to USB-C adapters are tiny and can include a much higher quality DAC than most phones reasonably will. Into those, you can then plug any headphone your heart or ears desire.
Audiophiles are such a niche market all things considered, and on top of that they seem to prefer their own DACs and/or headphone pre-amplifiers anyway – why waste space and money for a headphone jack that most users wouldn't use, and the ones that do would augment with external dongles anyway?
And for users that just don't want to deal with charging and pairing Bluetooth headphones, cheap headphones and adapters do just fine as well.
It’s just a worse situation all around. The DAC and amp built into the iPhone previously was of similar quality. Now life - especially working with audio gear - is more complicated and annoying, so that Tim could sell more e-waste.
People in tech circles also lambasted Apple for removing DVD drives and a lot of other things. Yet a lot of non-tech people prefer Bluetooth ANC buds or headphones.
Also, if they were so intent on killing the jack for money, why do they still have it on MacBooks and even upgraded it with an amplifier that supports high-impedance headphones?
Better waterproofing and re-using the space sound like perfectly valid reasons.
Artificially limiting the available options coincidentally encourages some to buy the $300 headphones.
Selling some $300 headphones is better than none.
>Also, if they were so intent on killing the jack for money, why do they still have it on MacBooks and even upgraded it with an amplifier that supports high-impedance headphones?
They will remove it when they can. The laptop frog is not yet boiled enough.
>Better waterproofing and re-using the space sound like perfectly valid reasons.
Phones haven't gotten thinner or more waterproof despite removing the headphone jack.
My Samsung S10 5G from 2019 is the same thickness and has IP68 waterproofing just like the iPhone 15, but does have a headphone jack.
Coincidentally, it's the last flagship Samsung with a headphone jack.
Phone companies are just regurgitating the same shit year over year.
The SOCs take up the same space and batteries should be improving, so I don't accept space saving as a valid reason, especially when they haven't become slimmer.
I wish all the companies would just make the best phone they could instead of nickel and diming their customers.
But Apple is definitely the worst offender, and does their best to normalize so much anti-consumer stuff.
You think the literal few cents that a headphone jack costs would be more of an incentive than being able to force their victims to buy $300 disposable headphones?
How anyone could claim in good faith to not understand this, I can't even.
They even purposely gimp the USBC port they were reluctantly forced to add so it doesn't support headset microphones.
And what have Google and Samsung won by people having to buy a USB-C adapter, most likely for them? They also removed the headphone jack, and have never had a proprietary adapter standard to replace them.
Didn’t someone add a jack to an iPhone 7? Difficult for DIY, but not impossible. I saw a similar mod for an iPhone 13 as well. https://www.strangeparts.com/bringing-back-the-iphone-headph...
I’d pay quite a sum for such a service. The value of a lossless, universally compatible port is hard to overstate. At the very least they could give us a second USB-C port on top-end phones.
What can Apple do though? Any change that cracks down on this will render these devices unusable for thousands of people, generate tons of e-waste, and create a huge backlash towards Apple.
It reminds me of when FTDI permanently bricked FTDI clones [0].
Further, I'm not sure I agree with the OP's vitriol against these manufacturers. They're using an open standard to bypass Apple's MFi tax. It's a hack for sure, but if it leads to cheaper devices -- which is the ultimate goal for this segment of product -- I don't see the problem. I could see the problem if they're advertised as wired headphones without mentioning Bluetooth though.
[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/ftdi-admits-to-bricking-innoce...
Apple created this situation, I just hope they don't feel the need to "fix it". Given their sensitivity to bad PR, I'd be very surprised if they did.
Since these adapters are active, I wonder if there's a slight mismatch in what the Pixel adapter advertises and what the iPhone expects. Maybe the iPhone identifies it as a USB speaker (i.e. output only)?
I also wonder who's out of spec here: My guess would be Apple (especially Google's history of pushing USB-C and even producing some open-hardware debugging tools for it), but then again I've had my Macbook struggle with a Chromebook charger, and only that charger in the past.
Would be curious to see a USB-knowledgeable person run a logic analyzer on the Pixel dongle to see what's going on.
What a surprise that is. There's no lengths that Apple won't go to to sell more dongles or overpriced airpods.
I'd also be really curious what's going on here, but you just seem to have an axe to grind. In my experience, Apple has been pretty ok at complying with standards (assuming they even implement a given one, anyway).
For example, I've had a USB-C Chromebook charger that would cycle on and off when connected to my Macbook, while several other USB-C chargers (including very particular ones like the Nintendo Switch one) were able to charge it without any problem. From my point of view, the one Google product I used was the outlier, but I wouldn't go as far as saying "Google's USB-C implementations are crap and a money grab".
So that made me even more inclined to think Apple has gimped their USBC ports to sell more dongles and airpods.
OP wants want Apple to crack down on open standards?
What tyrant king declared that Bluetooth devices need to be powered by separate batteries? I think this is an ingenious solution, to a problem Apple created in a way that should be illegal, no less. And one less battery in the landfill on top of it!
Interestingly, Apple’s own keyboards and mice pair to Bluetooth automatically using lighting cables.
I think this is a case where the first world perspective is blind to the burdens that big multinational corporations put on poorer countries. A $4 Apple lightning license may seem like no big deal to a high income country’s citizen but the rest of the world is used to electronics like this costing less ~$5 or less.
Anyway, I'm accustomed to twitter links being an incomprehensible mess of UI showing people responding to stuff without showing what it is or how to get to it. This is remarkably sane and coherent. Do I... like twitter now?
https://help.twitter.com/en/using-x/x-premium
EDIT: $3 is a "basic" subscription, long posting is reserved for "premium" and "premium+" lol
Wireless costs more because suddenly you need to deal with antennas and RF and whatever. Adding a wire back on top of that doesn't magically make it cost less again.
Spoiler: Apple EarPod clones cost about $1.59, with free shipping over $10. Crazy.
audio-wired headphones
power-wired wireless headphones
For hacker points, there could be an open-source logo for the bizmodel workaround, borrowing from the mythologies of Halt and Catch Fire, HBO Silicon Valley, Wild West, Sherwood Forest, or the Silk Road of Marco Polo's travels.
I can't help but wonder which "World Police" are supposed to take action here, and exactly how they're going to stop this.
The laws of one country should not be forced on others.
> True Apple lightning devices are more expensive to make. So instead of conforming to the Apple standard, these companies have made headphones that receive audio via bluetooth — avoiding the Apple specification — while powering the bluetooth chip via a wired cable, thereby avoiding any need for a battery.
Ditto for minijack to lightning adapters.
Wonder if this will be fixed now that Apple uses usb-c like they should have been doing all along.
USB-C wasn't a thing when Lightning was created. And Lightning was way, way, way better than Micro-USB. Apple has been converting their iDevices to USB-C for years, they held out on the iPhone because it is a high-impact switch that would affect a lot of customers with purchased accessories (some of which are quite expensive).
Might be a bit strong?
> Design for the USB-C connector was initially developed in 2012 by Apple Inc. and Intel.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB-C
> Lightning is a proprietary computer bus and power connector, created and designed by Apple Inc. It was introduced on September 12, 2012, in conjunction with the iPhone 5, to replace its predecessor, the 30-pin dock connector.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_(connector)
It wasn't a thing Apple had sole control over.
And they still use it for keyboard and mouse (with usb-c on the other end).
So I went back and swapped them for another pair, from a different brand. But those headphones didn't work either. We tried a third brand, which also didn't work.
By now the gift shop people and their manager and all the people in line behind me are super annoyed, until one of the girls says in Spanish, "You need to have bluetooth on." Oh yes, everyone else nods in agreement. Wired headphones for iPhones definitely need bluetooth.
What? That makes no sense. The entire point of wired headphones is to not need bluetooth.
So I turn Bluetooth on with the headphones plugged into the lightning port and sure enough my phone offers to "pair" my wired headphones. "See," they all say in Spanish, like I must be the dumbest person in the world.
With a little back and forth I realize that they don't even conceptually know what bluetooth is, while I have actually programmed for the bluetooth stack before. I was submitting low-level bugs to Ericsson back in the early 2000's! Yet somehow, I with my computer science degree, am wrong, and they, having no idea what bluetooth even is, are right.
My mind is boggled, I'm outnumbered, and my plane is boarding. I don't want wireless headphones. And especially not wired/wireless headphones or whatever the hell these things are. So I convince them, with my last ounce of sanity, to let me try one last thing, a full-proof solution:
I buy a normal wired, old-school pair of mini-stereo headphones and a lightning adapter. We plug it all in. It doesn't work.
"Bluetooth on", they tell me.
NO! By all that is sacred my wired lightning adapter cannot require Bluetooth. "It does," they assure me.
So I turn my Bluetooth on and sure enough my phone offers to pair my new wired, lightning adapter with my phone.
Unbelievable.
I return it all, run to catch my plane, and spend half the flight wondering what planet I'm on. Until finally back home, I do some research and figure out what's going on:
A scourge of cheap "lightning" headphones and lightning accessories is flooding certain markets, unleashed by unscrupulous Chinese manufacturers who have discovered an unholy recipe:
True Apple lightning devices are more expensive to make. So instead of conforming to the Apple standard, these companies have made headphones that receive audio via bluetooth — avoiding the Apple specification — while powering the bluetooth chip via a wired cable, thereby avoiding any need for a battery.
They have even made lightning adapters using the same recipe: plug-in power a fake lightning dongle that uses bluetooth to transmit the audio signal literally 1.5 inches from the phone to the other end of the adapter.
In these remote markets, these manufacturers have no qualms with slapping a Lightning / iPhone logo on the box while never mentioning bluetooth, knowing that Apple will never do anything.
From a moral or even engineering perspective, this strikes me as a kind of evil. These companies have made the cheapest iPhone earbuds known to humankind, while still charging $12 or $15 per set, pocketing the profits, while preying on the technical ignorance of people in remote towns.
Perhaps worst of all, there are now thousands or even millions of people in the world who simply believe that wired iPhone headphones use bluetooth (whatever that is), leaving them with an utterly incoherent understanding of the technologies involved.
I wish @Apple would devote an employee or two to cracking down on such a technological, psychological abomination as this. And I wish humanity would use its engineering prowess for good, and not opportunistic deception.
What's the problem again?