Hard to buy Apple doing this for sound quality. They haven’t given a shiny rounded portless shit about it in the past.
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I heard a pundit on the radio this morning say the headphone jack is being removed because it isn’t ‘reliable’. Deep breaths. Bluetooth is for people who don’t like music, but really enjoy regularly and futilely resetting car audio, bt headphone, and phone settings instead of listening to music. I get progress, I get formats being superceded, but Bluetooth is consistently terrible in my experience, the headphone jack is not taking up much space or resources, and removing it is arbitrarily stripping a huge swath of non-software based/settings nightmare compatibility with other equipment because thinner/newer/reasons.
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Android.
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I think you will discover you are wrong. Apple doesn’t do this sort of thing for the hell of it, they have a Plan and Reasons (besides greed) for doing things like this that piss people off. Switching from the standard jack to a lightning jack makes no sense and serves no purpose I can discern, but switching from wired headphones to wireless ones makes perfect sense as part of a strategy to make their devices wireless (as in, needs no wires). apple has been very much into wirelessness for a long time - desktop macs have come with wireless keyboard and mice for what, almost a decade now?
It’s quite possible that either this year or next year, the iphone will switch to wireless charging. Then you have a device that only gets wires hooked up to it when you need to do an actual backup to a computer (and if they can make Itunes wifi sync not be made of flakes, not even then).
ETA: Well, I was wrong about wireless earbuds being included with the phones. Wirelessness was touted in the event, as I predicted with 100% automagical pairing, but as an optional extra purchase. The other reason they gave for deleting the headphone jack was to make space inside the phone for other things. Which I didn’t think was important enough to justify the change, but then I’m not a phone engineer trying to TARDIS a cubic foot of tech into each cubic inch of space inside the phone.
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Does Square not make an Android version?
What headphones are you using? I have a hard time finding decent cheap Bluetooth headphones.
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OK, so my anecdotal evidence is entirely the opposite. I’ve had zero trouble with the various BT headphones I have owned, and pairing has never been an issue. Whereas cabled headphones are for people who really enjoy spending hours untangling mysteriously knotted cables, and actually causing damage through getting caught on something…
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I see this as further steps to the zero ports totally sealed device that they’ve been chasing for years. While that seems great for waterproofing, I don’t share their obsession with “clean design”. I’d rather have $3 charging cables that work with all my other devices. Headphones that work without RF in all my devices and expandable on board storage. Backwards physical compatibility trumps looking good.
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I suspect any Apple adapter will have an input for charging.
I have never owned an Apple product in my life.
As one commentor said, the headphone jack is a marvelous bit of engineering. Simple and straight forward, true to the principle of KISS. What Apple is doing is tossing that out for something more complicated, which will likely have a bugs and will require updating on a regular basis.
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Excuse me…?! there literally is no way for a Lightning connector, of itself, to “provide better audio” than any standard analog connector. None. Zilch. the only way to do so is to provide better headphones and/or improve the signal before it gets to the headphones.
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I am pretty sure that this switch will change the overall market distribution of Apple and Android devices by more or less zero.
Adapter stays on wired headphones.
Cable has built in DAC (which audiophiles are always claiming we need anyway)
Charging and listening to music at the same time is such a non-issue for the majority of people most of the time (outside of, what, lengthy road trips? People who can’t plan ahead enough to make sure their phone isn’t charged when they want to use it?).
Bluetooth is getting cheaper and better for most importantly good enough for lost people. Audiophiles forget that most people don’t give a crap and abstract stuff like “presence”, and “head room”, and “response”.
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And of course they will get away with that ridiculous, overpriced, almost mandatory adaptor, because god forbid you miss the next apple product. Jesus.
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The latest version of the wireless bluetooth mouse and keyboard that Apple sells automagically pair when you plug them into the computer – and doing do also charges the battery. Ditto the Apple Pencil.
So I predict that any bluetooth earbuds made by Apple will also automagically pair when you plug them into the phone to charge. Which makes the complaints in the linked article pretty pointless.
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Rockbox is an operating system / firmware itself, not an application. That’s probably why there is no stable port for Android.
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I’m no “audiophile”, but it’s pretty easy to tell with blind tests (yes, I really did so, when I was thinking of going for a Bluetooth setup) which of 2 versions of any audio is over Bluetooth or cable in most cases; hip hop was the most difficult, most of the time, to detect any difference, but it still was almost always quite apparent, even with high-bitrate MP3s and FLAC. Bluetooth really IS rather “flat”.
The real poop on the matter is, Bluetooth uses very aggressive, rather lossy compression/decompression in its codec. If used in conjunction with another lossy audio codec, such as MP3, the difference can be very large, indeed.
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Anybody using square in a POS environment in any serious way can not do so with their 3.5mm jack hardware. The free/cheap one does not handle chip cards, the $30 one that does handle chip cards is shit and breaks every 4-6 weeks (the biggest non-reported hardware disaster I’ve ever seen).
We moved to a bluetooth terminal reader a year ago, and yes our gen2 POS iPad still has an audio jack.
You could do this without getting rid of the headphone jack, though. In fact, there are plenty of water-resistant phones out there already with headphone jacks.
Which brings me to what cheeses me off about this–and I’m not likely to be affected, since I have an Android phone and tablet and no plans to switch back. If they’re going to do this, then let them do it. Let the market vote with its dollars, which usually works out pretty well for Apple. That’s fine.
But what’s less fine is the avalanche of fake “no, really, this is good for you” stuff they’re going to throw out there, including the waterproof thing (which I’ve heard elsewhere too–I’m not directing this at you). Maybe it is good for me–but that’s not why you’re doing it. As a consumer, I expect a certain amount of abuse from the free market. But don’t ask me to thank you for it, Apple!
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Only if you buy Apple headphones. And Apple headphones just ain’t all that, sorry.
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