iPhone 7(apple.com) |
Are they Bluetooth or not? Or is it the usual proprietary crap?
One point about the stereo speakers is that you'd need to put your face/nose right next to the phone to appreciate the stereo, surely?
Also, no new MBP is very disappointing.
[Edited for technical correctness]
Also, spending money puts it back in the economy, and Apple spends plenty. Taxes are probably the worst way for money to cycle through from an efficiency standpoint.
All that said, they should obviously pay what they legitimately owe.
If you are still trying to justify Brexit's shitshow you're doing it wrong.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/22/investing/apple-stock-cash-e... http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/04/13/fun-numbe...
(Edited for clarity)
Which is what zoom is. Only that in a normal zoom, the 'switch' is a slider.
I suppose even with just two focal lengths, the focal length can be "varied" which is the normal definition of zoom, but I have never heard the term used that way.
Noun:
A drop in the level of the uterus during the last weeks of pregnancy as the head of the fetus engages in the pelvis.
Verb:
[1] To make or become lighter in weight, pressure or sensitivity.
[2] To make or become more cheerful or less serious.
[3] To make or become lighter or brighter.
[4] To emit flashes of lightning; flash with lightning. (rare)
None of these things is similar to charging your iPhone.
I never understood this. Any product you buy is a series of compromises made by the manufacturer.
If you define zoom as the physical action of sliding a piece of glass to achieve different focal lengths in a lens, then a digital zoom, by that definition is also not a zoom.
Now, the iPhone is not using a teleconverter, which is something that is added to the lens, but a different lens plus sensor alltogether to create the effect of a zoomed image. And this is the point where the old definitions break down; is a camera the sensor or is a camera the device that creates the picture? I think it is the latter, and in that sense I think iPhone 7 plus does have a 'discrete' zoom.
"Optical zoom" has always meant continuously variable optical focal length. That doesn't mean there is a clear definition, but there is room for confusion using it in this context.
In binoculars there is quite a difference between "dual magnification binoculars" with a switch, and "zoom binoculars" which allow for continuous change.
I'd be completely happy with the use of "2x discrete optical zoom" here - it removes all confusion.
At least the toilet drop is okay now.
1: Floppy drives, optical drives, MacBook Air ports, etc
I've been looking for over a year for a good (build quality) laptop which can run a unix-like environment. And I always end up circling back to macbooks, which have been comprised of very old hardware for quite some time now.
Hard to justify spending so much money for a 3/4 year old CPU.
The alternative is to have a machine that requires more maintenance than my 5/6 year old thinkpad running OpenBSD.
11:59 am For those joining in late, there have been no announcements about the MacBook Pro or other Macs as expected.
The new iPhone 7, however _is_ water _resistant_[0].
[0] Which is what you probably mean.
Just because iPhone isn't doesn't mean no other can be ;-)
End of discussion.
$969 for premium specs.
http://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-7/5.5-inch-displ...
But honestly, complaints and analysis don't matter, people will line up to buy this garbage and to make it worse it'll become a stupid trend that will bleed over into Android-land and now instead of the perfectly fine $10 headphones I picked up at Big Lots, I'll have to shell out 10x that so I can listen to a podcast on my way to work.
edit and they don't even have the respect for their customers to ship their stupid buds on time with the product that requires them...so that their customers can look like bluetooth douchebags from both sides.
The size, performance, battery life and construction of the wireless earpods are anything but "basic". In fact, most run-of-the-mill competitors are at the same price or more for wireless earbuds.
>There's not even the decency to see if people care about a thinner phone by offering both a thin model without a jack and a thicker phone with one (for some strategically important price differential).
The "decency" of not having a focus and vision as a company, and throwing stuff out to see what sticks?
>All that's been achieved is that Apple has now created/affirmed a new non-optional secondary market
You know you can use all other brands of wireless (and wired with either the adapter or with lighting) headphones, including all your older headphones, right?
>But honestly, complaints and analysis don't matter, people will line up to buy this garbage
So, people buy it, but it's still "garbage" because you say so?
>and they don't even have the respect for their customers to ship their stupid buds on time with the product that requires them...
The "respect" to magically fix the production slowdowns? Maybe ask the Chinese to whip and beat their workers more or over-clock the assembly line robots?
Or the "respect" to delay the release of the phone for 2+ weeks, so that those interested in those specific wireless buds (a small percentage of the overall iphone buyers) get them simultaneously with the phone?
Even the starting premise is wrong. Nothing "requires" them. You can use your old, non wireless buds, third party wireless buds, new non wireless headphones, and even third party Lighting headphones. Apple's new wireless earpods are just one option upon hundreds.
>so that their customers can look like bluetooth douchebags from both sides.
Maybe you have some anger issues, but Apple doesn't seem to be the real source...
I don't mean this to be personal, but I've never seen you post (and I just searched back comments on HN) anything even remotely critical of Apple, and most of your Apple related posts relate to you popping up to defend the company or "clarify" something that could be construed as negative to the company. If I didn't know better, I'd say that you worked for the company -- but you've claimed you don't a couple of times.
I got a regular Dell XPS 15 (but the keyboard and everything else I think is the same) and while the laptop looks great I was expecting better quality for this price range.
My review was on Hacker News recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12289479
EDIT: yeah, it's the end.. sadface
Compared to posts that suppose that the iPhone is garbage and people are idiots to "line up to buy this garbage", or that those using bluetooth are "bluetooth douchebags"?Or that not having the earpods available on the same launch day but some weeks delayed shows lack of "decency"?
Yeah, my posts lack such subtleties.
>If I didn't know better, I'd say that you worked for the company -- but you've claimed you don't a couple of times.
Yeah, I don't. I'm a (mostly) web backend developer, with side gigs in video production. I just happen to like their products and agree with most business decisions they make. Which, given that they are the richer company on earth with billions of sales, doesn't seem very outlier-ish.
I don't like some of their stuff (e.g. their mice before the Magic Mouse were crap, I'd prefer they kept the magsafe adapter in the new MBP, not particularly sold on lower-height keys on the new MacBook, Apple Music is a mess, etc), but I do like most of the hardware and OS. Been using it since 2003, and have had worked with SunOS (pre Solaris), HPUX, Windows, RedHat, SuSE, Debian and other OSes and flavors (still use Windows and Ubuntu personally, and Centos professionally).
I also don't like the trivial and complaint-for-complaint's sake arguments most people on the internet use. And judging from sales volumes, most people don't particularly care for them either.
But all of these are beside the point. Even if I were Cook himself or Gruber (which has a HN account actually and has commented 1-2 times IIRC), what matters is the arguments I put forward.
Maybe respond to those?
I don't believe any phone is water proof.
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/138727-apple-iphone-7-and-7-...
Waterproof
• Down to 1.5 m • Max 30 mins • IP rating 65/68
This is _not_ water PROOF.
Was USB-C supposed to be their future or not...? It sounded like it when they introduced the MacBook. Do their teams communicate well with a lack of strife?
I know nobody else cares...
Meanwhile, just a decade or so ago most phones had camera bulges, edge bulges, antennas that stretched out from the body, were 3-4 times the thickness, etc.
Also what's up with Apple being so obsessed about pictures? I know you want to have the nude selfie in the toilet to be the best as possible, but come on!
And everything revolves around fitness. People wont get up from their bum, just because their watch tells them to. And the other who already do fitness don't need a watch to tell them how fit they are. They already know. Because they can feel it.
And I almost forgot that having now two different types of back casing is a feature apparently.
Last but not least, Apple is still ignoring the cries of millions of users about the battery life. That majority of the people would trade in the slim design for days worth of juice.
Who cares about paper thin phones when you have to put them into a case with extra battery within it to have it powered through the day?
Who cares about the seamless Jet Black casing when you put the phone into an ugly plastic case?
It looks like 'Form Over Function' again for Apple.
Good job apple, this is probably the most uninteresting keynote ever. Except for the people dancing in stockings at the end.
Siri integration and easier charging is definitely really cool, but not worth paying $120 over regular Bluetooth headphones that will probably be copy cat'ing that functionality in t minus 3, 2, 1...
It is truly a astonishing, how they manage to use the same TSMC 16nm, and get 40% single core performance increase. The rumors is the same SoC core from A9 but 40% higher clock speed from 1.8Ghz to 2.6Ghz, while keeping the same thermal envelop.
Some people were wondering if these Smartphone CPU can easily scale up the clockspeed. Turns out it can. And the performance could now exceed the baseline performance of Macbook.
i.e, Apart from compatibility reason, there is no longer a case for Apple to continue and use Intel CPU. A Quad Core A10 may even outrun the current Macbook Pro given the similar TDP.
Galaxies have been splash proof for some generations, and Bluetooth phones aren't new (only the design of this one seems to beat everything else).
Other than that, only traditional Moores Law advancements, like, more battery, more RAM, more processing power. None of these are enabling techs, in that they don't enable you to do anything that you can't with older devices.
So, I guess, update when the old one gives up the ghost?
It also looks really plastic-y in those renderings.
Anyway, AR is about to explode.
If you're talking about groundbreaking mixed reality, like the HoloLens or Magic Leap then maybe. Microsoft is doing the right thing by first marketing to business. The consumer tech isn't ready, and won't be for probably 5-10 years (to be at a place where it won't require any overhead.)
Having hardware that can do depth at scale with an application layer is a big step - not sure that the 7 plus gets there but it's a start.
IMO, they will not. I know 8-10 people with 6S/6S+ iPhones and _none_ of those people use force touch.
Unless getting dunked in water, I haven't heard of anyone having any issues with water damaging their IPhone.
Now they consider the waterproofing good enough to guarantee it.
Well, no, since liquid damage isn't covered by the warranty, there is no actual guarantee. There is a claim (and maybe a third-party certification) of meeting a particular standard, but that's different from a guarantee -- its marketing with no risk of having to pay out money if the performance isn't up to snuff in practice.
A guarantee puts warranty money where your marketing mouth is.
Here's an ad for the 1957 Chevrolet Bel-Aire. (Available "with two four-barrel carburetors!" Two-tone paint! Tailfins!) There's about as much difference between the new IPhone and the N-1 model as there was between the 1956 and 1957 Chevys.
Also, I'm concerned about the LTE: on the Verizon network it sounds like they're using the same modem as the Galaxy S7. https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/modems/x12
Is that correct?
The main issue seems to be that you now can't charge and listen to music at the same time. How often do you actually do that? In the past 5 years I have probably done that once.
For those of you who do think it is an inconvenience, I bet there will be a product on the market in 2 weeks that eliminates this problem.
My two use cases that I expect are pretty common:
1. In the car, plugged in to charge since using GPS navigation drains the battery very fast, and car audio input is AUX only.
2. Phone on the nightstand, plugged to overnight charge and I go to sleep listening to podcasts or music on headphones to avoid disturbing my partner. I can dozily remove my headphones, but I can't switch cables without waking up.
I agree that there will be aftermarket products to solve it. Just makes the thing more expensive for me, so less likely to buy.
Lots of times. Me and anyone that takes medium to long trips in their cars and and uses GPS navigation while charging and listening to music like basically all people that use smartphone do.
Compare it with cars clothes and other things
I just looked up prices on CL, and it looks like the used-iPhone market is approaching saturation... The going rate for 1-year-old iPhones is 150-200.
Even the packaging mostly ends up in landfill. There is something unhealthy about "shiny new toys" released every year that we must have according to the media's frenzy of Apple advertising.
The only innovation Apple is introducing here is the creation of a completely unecessary but new captive market that they then are best positioned to sell into.
There isn't really much innovation in the iPhone 7, it's just the next iteration of the models before it. It just doesn't sell that many phone telling people: Yeah it's a little fast, so if you feel that your phone fast enough, maybe don't buy it.
It is true for a long time now, that Apple sells a lifestyle. It really kicked off when they introduced the iPod and the new line of Mac's not to mention the debut of the iPhone.
I'm not denying the genius behind their marketing strategy, but I'm wondering when this cow will start giving less milk.As more and more people in the upcoming generations are tech literate, the harder it will get to impress them with a better camera and a shiny gloss finish.
I feel this road doesn't lead to more useful innovations. Maybe it will lead to a fitter, happier life with loads of pictures in it.
I'm not saying they're not adding or upgrading other features, but it really feels like the biggest selling point is the camera now.
Like last year trying to sell 3 second videos as live photos.
I think he just meant that now the waterproofing is good enough to advertise it as a feature. Making it official, so to speak.
eBay probably has a more accurate picture of price for the average person.
My point is, tech literacy is irrelevant; the lifestyle brand is everything.
https://www.engadget.com/2007/06/30/iphone-doesnt-work-with-...
The prices are not bad either. They seem to range from $32.41/month up to around $46/month for the most expensive possible model, which translates to about $1/day up to $1.40/day. It includes AppleCare as well.
If you trade in after only one year, you basically paid a dollar a day to rent the phone. But if you had bought one outright and sold it at the end of the year in order to buy the new model, you would not be a whole lot better off -- and you might have had to deal with potentially scummy eBay or Craigslist buyers.
And the cost difference is the same as the cost for Apple Care, which is included. So if you were going to sign up for that (which I have to do) you're already breaking even.
I imagine these new ones would stay better because the lack of weight from the wires. I'm not excited about them though, I don't use headphones outside, and at home I don't need new ones.
Don't forget to pay me 40% of sales for idea.
AirPods is certainly not for running bc it's loose and no water resist at all. But you are right even in daily usage, it could fall off and go no where.
Just the thing BART & MUNI really needed.
If you meant something like this [0], DECT [1] works on a different frequence band.
[0] https://en-us.sennheiser.com/phone-headset-wireless-call-cen...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Enhanced_Cordless_Tele...
So on a full frame sensor camera, shooting someone's portrait with an 80mm will give you very shallow DoF, on a sensor the size of an iPhone, it's probably close to infinite.
Edit: I don't think the above is technically exactly correct...Here's a good explanation: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/depth-of-field.ht...
But you're correct that the short (actual, not equivalent) focal length of camera phones makes an f/1.8 completely irrelevant.
mobiles are mature products and the players are strictly in cash-cow or market share mode. nothing of importance is changing.
I've got an iphone se and an iphone 4 and you can't tell me that's the most they can do for 6 years of product development by one of the richest companies in the world. (yes i know that it's faster with more a and more b and more c etc)
Apple needs to drip feed improvements over the next x years to keep sales up so we can't expect anything game changing.
"The Others" are trying this and that but nothing seems to be sticking, probably not able to drive consumer desire enough.
so if nothing is happening, what is the post-phone next-big-thing to get into?
I won't pretend to know how things will pan out -- I agree with the idea that inventing the future is easier than predicting it.
I'd like to hear some contrarian thinking against IoT and VR. And maybe a list of "next big things" that weren't. Clean tech might be one of them. I recall some pre-www hype by Bill Gates about the "CD-ROM business", which seems to have been less of a business than a cheap distribution medium. Flip cameras were a blip.
This definitely applies: http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
"Live in the future and build what seems interesting"
People trying to jump on trends are usually too late, because 1) they pick the wrong trend due to lack of fundamental understanding, and 2) It takes years to develop true expertise.
The people really profiting from deep learning now were toiling in obscurity 10 years ago. And plenty of people picked a line of AI research 10 years ago that has already fallen out of favor. There's no free lunch: risk and reward go hand in hand.
How the fuck is it acceptable to completely remove the jack and replace it with this 'superior' technology?
But the answer is no - they advertise 5 hours.
Or you could just buy a different phone. It's their product, what is "acceptable" is up to them.
(Yes, the first part is sarcasm.)
Edit: Looks like you wanted to say this, but made a typo.
Both the airpods and the case can be charged together.
In any case even with a bundled adapter I feel that removing the jack is a pretty sketchy decision.
I'll be sticking with my 5S, and my wife is no longer upgrading her 4S to the 7 as we were planning.
We love our iPhones, but we do need to replace hers and now looking for non-Apple alternatives since while I prefer the SE over everything on the market, she thought she was going to want the 7 Plus.
This is an honest question, I have continually upgraded my iPhones for years and this new phone doesn't speak to me either but you are on much older hardware, what about the new phones doesn't speak to you?
Personally I am considering a move to the SE because the form factor of the 6/6s is still too big in my opinion and the 7 doesn't seem to offer me anything I actually need or want.
She usually has her purse and uses her phone more than me, essentially as a tablet. Playing games often such as something I've become accustomed to, Cookie Run. It's really preference. She doesn't mind the larger phone and doesn't mind the inconvenient size for day to day use.
I'm very letdown the 7(Plus) doesn't have a Lightning port pass-through port on the new charging cables. I can let go of 3.5mm, as I don't have any particularly great investment in headphones, but I can't accept inability to charge and use a wired headset at the same time.
I think they will bring in Lightning port pass-through cables with the iPhone7S, but right now want to rake in expensive, more quickly obsolescent (batteries) wireless Beats headphones before they do that.
Wireless stuff to me just means 1 more thing that needs charging, and while I do like those LG around-the-neck Bluetooth headsets, I dislike being forced into it if I want to charge my phone and use a headset.
Weak. Give me 400 monkeys, then 4000 monkeys, then 400 000 monkeys, and now the monkeys are forming a fractal, but the fractal is just the surface of a sphere, and zooming out there are a million spheres, and the spheres form… a monkey.
Now THAT's a demo.
5 minutes of dicking with bluetooth pairing later: "FUCKING BLUETOOTH GODDAMN IT. welp, never mind"
(conversational lull follows)
Honest question, not having owned an iPhone before - is this really the first iPhone that can produce stereo sound through the speakers? If true, that seems like a crazy thing to advertise given how standard a feature it has been in most phones for so long. On the other hand, if iPhones have had stereo output already, why shout about it now?
http://www.phonearena.com/news/Best-phones-with-front-stereo...
I'm sure many others.
I can almost see that distortion field works...
Wikipedia claims 1GB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_7). Can't be right?
It seems very unlikely they'd go from 2GB (in the 6S and SE) to 1GB though. Most likely 2GB. I could see 4, but that seems quick on them to increase it compared to usual.
Airpods might become the virtual reality for your ears.
That said how would the phone display the 3D image? One of those cardboard VR things? Not very Appley.
I expect either VR support, 3D imaging, or using them+dynamic light sensing of iPad Pro to have a "reactive" UI where gradients in the UI behave as if they might have real world lighting applied to them
Holding some features back for the next model, perhaps. They have to smooth out the 'wow factor' for each model to keep growth steady.
[1] http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MNEN2LL/A/beats-solo3-wire...
Edit: I am wrong
Connections
AirPods: Bluetooth
It's also compatible with old iPhones going back to the 5, so it can't be anything too custom. My bet is it's Bluetooth but a custom profile and custom pairing.
Android is getting to the point where most users will not really notice a difference between Android and IOS, even on a very inexpensive device.
Having had experience recently with top-end Android devices, I'd beg to differ. Functionally an Android device is roughly equivalent to an iOS one, but the design, UI, responsiveness etc. is IMO miles apart.
It may be a matter of subjective taste but I would recommend that anyone reading the above and considering switching spent some serious time using Android first.
This was my perspective too, last year. Moore's Law seems to have made Android's slower approach to smooth UI finally just about as silky as IOS, even on low end hardware.
32GB standard for all models, except the matte black, which will ONLY come in 128GB, and you'll be paying $100 more at $750.
Nice underhanded move by Apple to maximize profit for what will undoubtedly be the most popular color.
First they force everyone to buy the 32GB upgrade last year on the 6S, now you're forced to do the same to 128GB, unless you want a rose colored phone.
The camera upgrade looks nice, but the headphone jack is a joke. Another wire that will inevitably fall apart like the other Apple lightning connectors.
EDIT: Jet Black, NOT Matte Black. Still dumb.
Another theory might be the branding they started with the cylindrical Mac Pro which is also this sort of gloss black. So perhaps we'll see more products with this gloss applied?
Either way, I've always ended up regretting getting a lower capacity model. I only upgrade every 3-4 years and I am definitely looking forward to 128GB or more so I don't have to juggle apps, audio, and pictures constantly. So for me that's the starting price. Steep but I don't buy phones so often so it's not my biggest budget worry.
With multiple cameras as 12MP on this thing, 32GB is just going to become as silly as the 16GB model was. Embarrassing it's such a small amount on a $700 device.
Jet Black will be full of scratches by the time you've unboxed it.
On the other hand, I will be very surprised if no one has come out with a dual adapter within a year.
For that matter, what about charging while using headphones?
Regarding the comments about how do I charge and listen, I accidentally found this dock[0]. Not sure if it's a new product.
[0] http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MNN62/iphone-lightning-doc...
Closed VR headsets (maybe some AR, but still bulky headsets) for the next couple of years, with moderate adoption amongst gadget lovers, enough of a market for lots of investment and R&D, but ultimately never make it mainstream.
In around 5 years' time, with miniaturisation + battery improvements, the tech eventually evolves into a light, practical and nice-looking AR glasses form-factor which does achieve mainstream adoption and becomes ubiquitous - possibly even replacing the glass-slab smartphone as the primary mobile computing device for a majority of people.
I've owned several Nexus devices, but not the 6.
I stopped using a BT trackpad because I would get disconnected randomly though, so maybe it comes down to the devices?
Also not the first time we've had a chat in HN comments. How's the robot boxing chess league? ;)
A few weeks ago I was riding with my father and brother in my car, and they both wanted to play some music. We paired my brother's phone and all was well. Then we did my father's phone and we simply couldn't make it work despite a great deal of trying. They have the exact same iPhone model, but one worked and one didn't. A few days later we tried my father's phone again and it worked that time. No idea why.
I almost said you had me confused with someone else, then I finally managed to remember that conversation. Where did we even talk about robot chess boxing? I remember discussing it in pretty alarming detail, but I can't remember where.
Almost half a year ago. Not sure how I remembered your name when I forget to pay my rent half the time, but that's my brain I guess.
It definitely won't be pretty, but whomever puts the work in will probably benefit from it somehow.
I can't afford an iPhone but I have an iPod touch and a Bluetooth wireless headphone set that has good battery charge which I bought this summer following my set of previous generation 3.5mm audio jack headphones having broken down after 5 years or so of active use, and I do appreciate not having to charge my headphones too often, but I think if the headphones are easy to charge alongside the iPhone and iPods, users will find that it is unlikely to be much of an inconvenience.
While we are on the subject, I must say that I am very pleased with using wireless headphones with my iPod. IMO, the advantage of never having a wire dangling around your upper body and being a general annoyance far outweighs the inconvenience of having to charge them now and then.
The only thing that I am a little sad about with the wireless headphones is that while they work excellently with my iPod and the audio quality is impeccable for me, if I connect them to my desktop computer, which I run Fedora 23 Linux on, then the audio quality is complete garbage. With my laptop, which I run FreeBSD on, I am not able to use audio over Bluetooth at all. I found some reference to A2DP support under FreeBSD, and I think A2DP is the name of it, but have not had time to figure out if it is usable and if it is then how to make use of it.
My Bluetooth headphones do have a 3.5mm cable which I can plug into it but I've only used that twice. I might have to begin using the cable for a little while since my iPod charger cable broke and I am waiting for a new one to come in the mail so I can't use my iPod right now and as I said, the audio over Bluetooth is not working well for me in Linux and FreeBSD.
So now I'm carrying my headphone charger with me everywhere?
If you want to listen to 6+ hours of audio straight, then you'll have to use something else.
Making people get into the habit of always putting them back into the case when not in use should also reduce the likelihood of loosing them.
Here is an article by Popular Science that talks about relationship between volume and period of time: http://www.popsci.com/limit-headphone-time-hour-day-says-who
FTA:
>The idea is to minimize unsafe listening practices, which depend on two factors: how long you listen and how loud the sound is. The sound of a typical conversation is 60 decibels, which won’t cause any hearing problems. But an idling bulldozer is about 85 decibels, which can cause permanent damage after eight hours. Sounds like a clap of thunder or even a close vuvuzela clock in at 120 decibels, damaging hearing after just nine seconds.
I phrased my first comment a bit poorly. There is a lower limit to what is damaging, but my point is like the quote says, even volumes which aren't extreme can damage your ear if you expose your ear to that level of sound for an extended period of time.
Side note, I think it is hilarious that Apple can't get the AirPods to ship at the same time as the iPhone. Anyone who buys the new phone on release is going to be stuck with the crappy lightning headphones for at least a month and a half.
Another dongle to loose. Tons of headphones obsoleted. Can't charge while listening. Laggy audio. more batteries in the world. They're ok with a bulge for the camera but not headphones? I work in a lab and a phone with headphones is standard equipment on the commute and work (for at least part of the day).
I would seriously move off iOS if I was making music with it. If only iOS devices were made by other manufacturers... (I know I know....)
on the plus side minimum memory had been bumped.
This confuses me too. The camera wart is ridiculous, and I bet if they made the device just that slight bit thicker they'd have room to retain the 3.5mm jack.
The other possibility is that the headphone jack makes water resistance that much more difficult. Maybe they think it's worth it?
They do provide the lightening-to-jack adapter in the box for free.
You're conflating the switch to a proprietary jack with the introduction of wireless AirPods. Those are separate things. You can still use 100% of existing wired headphones with the iPhone 7, just with an adapter, which is a tradeoff that gets you some great other features like the new camera system.[1] The bundled wired headphones and any wireless headphones don't require an adapter. If you don't like wireless headphones, you don't have to use them.
> I would seriously move off iOS if I was making music with it.
Why? That comment seems unsupported by your reaction to this headphone jack change.
[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/johnpaczkowski/inside-iphone-7-why-...
Is iOS used as a platform in professional music making? Is that really a thing?
If you shell out for the AirPods, you can.
Though I definitely agree - I'm pretty sad to see the headphone jack go.
Can you explain this?
I'm also worried about the potential for consumer-hostile DRM on audio playback, especially since it looks like they're introducing their own proprietary wireless protocol.
> I would seriously move off iOS
Memories of all the feature phones I had with adaptors tells me they will break all the damn time. Kids have a happy habit of losing small things - adaptors and bluetooth earbuds.
So that's 3 sales lost here - not buying 7's for the kids. They can put up with the iPhones they have, buy themselves (slim chance), or switch to Android. That's my popularity shot for a few days.
That didn't even occur to me! Holy crap, what a design flaw. I'm glad I'm not an iUser today
This is a complete deal breaker for me. I was confident that apple was going to unveil two models, one which had the headphone jack and one which didn't.
Lenovo at least had the good sense to offer at least one model that still had the headphone jack, as they were introducing a similar model which did not.
I'm so disappointed in apple.
Many people have the micro usb cable for charging, and iPhone users use the lightning charger.
Only issue for me is you can't listen to music via headphone and charge at the same time.
Audio latency used to be a HUGE advantage for IOS vs Android. It was their biggest USP in my opinion. Android has been improving but it's still not there yet. If the next ipad has this it will be the end for musicians using IOS.
This is huge.
This seems backwards. Only reason to buy Apple phones is the superior hardware. As far as the OS goes, Android (and the google services backing it... especially Google Now) have completely surpassed it and continue to increase the gap every day. Increasingly, Google is treating the mobile devices as just a conduit to access their cloud services (including their far superior machine intelligence backing it). While Apple continues to treat the iPhone as a beautiful device with mediocre cloud services backing the hardware.
Don't believe me? Imagine if you Google stopped creating apps for the iPhone. How big a catastrophe would that be for Apple management? Now imagine Apple ceased to exist. Would the Android ecosystem be affected in any way?
One thing I cannot get over though, is that they chose their own propietary, you-have-to-pay-Apple-for-a-license, cannot-use-them-with-anything-else Lightning 'standard'. USB Type C is the standard for this stuff now, and any trivial technical merits Lightning might have over USB Type C don't weigh up against the universal nature of USB Type C. The sheer arrogance.
Digital connectors the future? I'm on board with that. Propietary connectors? Fuck that.
Except they only gave you one port, so you can't even do something as benign as charge your phone and listen to fucking music at the same time.
> sound quality,
I challenge you to prove that one, I'm sure sound quality is indistinguishable. If it's good enough for every sound engineer ever it's good enough for me.
> even cable integrity)
Again, is that even true? You can knock out a cheap headphone cable that works perfectly, whereas lightning devices are always crazy expensive.
Digital doesn't make up for the fact that we're moving from a near-universal standard headphone jack to a proprietary port. One that, mind you, is flat vs. round. The design of the headphone jack is superior. You can plug it in at any angle, and rotate it while plugged in. Now people are stuck with a flat cable that will just twist up during movement.
Then why has almost no one decided to use Lightning headphones when given a choice?
Exactly. I felt that Lenovo was being a bit premature and dropping the headphone jack but at least they're using a standard USB C connector.
You don't know the first thing about noise or the transmogrification of noise at all do you?
> don't weigh up against the universal nature of USB Type C. The sheer arrogance.
Agreed. History is just coming to the downward part of a sine wave again... rejection of standards (see messagaing/storage/networking) and aggressive attempts at monopoly despite lack of convergence on singular solutions.
Were any of them? MacBook Air released in 2008. DVD media sales rose YOY 2005 => 2009. Flash video did not decrease in popularity pre-iPhone, it decreased because of the iPhone.
> The headphone jack is just as popular today as it has ever been
"DVDs are as popular today as they have ever been" - someone in 2008
> they by design can't be a universal solution
They've been explicitly designed to be as close to a universal solution as is possible. Pair them with one of your Apple devices and that pairing is synced to all others. Instead of unplugging your cable from your phone to your Mac you simply start doing something on your Mac and the audio source switches.
If the Airpods did not require power and were simply completely wireless they'd be the perfect solution. Apple is betting that battery advances will mean that the utility of these headphones (no wire, built in sensors) massively outweighs the cons (require power). Right now they only benefit "a lot" of people.
> Were any of them? MacBook Air released in 2008. DVD media sales rose YOY 2005 => 2009. Flash video did not decrease in popularity pre-iPhone, it decreased because of the iPhone.
And yet most people still need to buy external DVD/Blu-Ray drives. It's been 7 years, and not having DVD drives built into Mac hardware is still incredibly inconvenient.
>> The headphone jack is just as popular today as it has ever been
> "DVDs are as popular today as they have ever been" - someone in 2008
I'm sure someone said that, but I think most people were already moving on to Blu-Ray.
What percentage of motor vehicles had a DVD player in 2008, vs what percentage of motor vehicles have an aux port today?
A car is not something you can just go out and upgrade. Try getting a dealership to install a factory bluetooth system in your 2010 chevy - let me know how it goes. Keep in mind Apple is decidedly against, on a cultural level, aftermarket customization, so some off the shelf, bestbuy radio head unit is not an acceptable apple-like solution.
>They've been explicitly designed to be as close to a universal solution as is possible.
Oh thats great news, then they must have covered these extremely common cases, right?
How about all my friends cars? Will i be able to play a song after my friend by virtue of this magical universal airpod system? (oh right, as long as i remember to carry my handy-dandy headphone dongle in my pocket at all times everywhere i go, ill be able to do what ive done for years without carrying anything!)
When i get into my car and bluetooth doesnt connect before i take it out of park, how will this system magically connect my phone so i can listen to music on my drive? (again, as long as ive got my trusty headphone dongle on me, all things are solved. It Just Works TM)
And those lightning headphones i just bought for my new iphone, how do i plug them into my mac, which doesnt have a lightning port? How about my PC? my android tablet? my ipod nano from years ago i use for working out? (yet another dongle of course! any true minimalist would swoon over the idea of having to keep track of several dongles with their mobile device - minimalism is apple design cue of choice afterall)
Besides all that, what is the latency on these airpods headphones? Movies are largely unwatchable over bluetooth because of the audio lag - has this been fixed? How about battery life? I use bluetooth headphones all day in my office, i generally connect them to my mac, because otherwise i end up with a dead phone battery near the end of the day - how does airpods resolve this issue?
Basically, what about this system is BETTER than what i currently have access to. To defend the removing of the headphone jack, surely you can come up with at least one feature that wasnt possible on phones with the headphone jack? I mean its not even any thinner....
As long as you only use Apple hardware, of course.
Second, DVDs were and are an inferior technology with a better alternative in every category of use. Yet when it comes to headphones, I own a pair of very expensive monitors that I use with lots of different devices. Am I supposed to just ignore that investment in the name of an Apple branded phone? There's nothing wrong with them at all and they far outperform a $150 pair of bluetooth "AirPods".
Regarding your statement about the Bluetooth being a universal solution, you're offering a red herring. Bluetooth was always available, so if someone wanted that, they'd have used it already. The issue here is the port itself and in this case, that means adapting all hardware not just to a new plug, but to a PROPRIETARY plug that won't work on my PC, digital piano, stereo amplifier, car auxillary port, or any of the other music producing devices I own. That's insanity.
But instead they chose Lightning, so now we have iPhone headphones and Android headphones.
Why did it have to be this way?
-- Lightning pre-dates USB type-C, which fulfill the same usability goal
-- AirPlay pre-dates Miracast
-- Metal pre-dates Vulkan
In some cases, Apple's product was later adopted as the standard:
-- The mini-DisplayPort was their custom connector but later adopted as an official standard
-- the MOV format was adopted for the ISO base container format (MPEG-4 Part 12), which forms the base of MPEG-4 Part 14, commonly known as the 'MP4 container'.
In some cases, they did develop custom tech where open ones existed:
-- ALAC is fairly close in implementation details to FLAC, which pre-dates it.
-- Apple's 'HTTP Live Streaming' came well-after MPEG standard ways of doing HTTP streaming, and is roughly contemporaneous with Adobe's and Microsoft's proprietary ways of adaptive streaming. Later, DASH was developed as a vendor-neutral alternative, and is now the preferred way of doing adaptive streaming via HTTP.
I don't believe that Apple is any more proprietary than a lot of other companies. It's just that they're a tempting target, because they dictate their ecosystem so strongly, and it certainly doesn't help that they ship a lot of locked-down, premium devices.
But blatantly user-hostile changes like removing the headphone jack won't earn them any goodwill.
Not because there's anything wrong with the 6! Ivan Krstic's talk about Apple platform security at Black Hat was probably the best talk of the whole event. Nobody is delivering seamlessly integrated chipset-up-through-application security the way Apple is. Forget about in mobile devices; I mean, in computing, period.
I'm excited to learn what else is coming there!
1.) Audio+GPS+Charging in non-Bluetooth Car.
2.) Listening to music at desk and still have enough charge for the Audio+GPS for the drive home.
3.) No more listening to music/audiobooks as I fall asleep because in the morning the iPhone won't be charged for my desk usage the next day unless I wake up and plug it back in during my sleep.
They can do whatever they want with the headphone jack, but pretending like we don't need to plug the phone in!! Thats daft.
iPhone 6s: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10193201
iPhone 6: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8292029
iPhone 5s: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6361558
Similarly, this year iPhone SE got even more upvotes (567) than all of these https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11330226
Maybe due to an upswing in HN traffic? Lack of other news today (it has been slow)?
I'm not sure this release was particularly exciting.
"Water resistance IP67 under IEC standard 60529. Liquid damage not covered under warranty."
How does one make such a big deal of it being water resistant (Product film: 1m 35s; "...to make this the first water resistant iPhone") but not cover liquid damage under warranty?
The adapter is useless for me since it doesn't allow power to be supplied so my long drives are now problematic. I guess I'll have to take that into account on buying the next car.
Instead we got a button to switch from one lens to the other, for a 2x optical zoom. That's it. 99% of the time that second sensor and lens will do absolutely zilch. The computational bokeh appears to only use the 56mm lens for the actual photo, and the other lens to capture a depth map to compute the fake bokeh. This is hardly any better than the existing fake bokeh solutions shown many times before on Androids, Nokias and in iOS apps over the years that do the same, except it's a bit faster. The whole thing feels like just another checkbox feature, with very little actual value.
A depth map and face recognition is used to locate the foreground subject and a heavy blur filter is applied to the background layer. For the same reason we don't have software today that does perfect (or even halfway decent) automatic masking of faces, the edges become a blurry mess. You don't get any of the beautiful out-of-focus point of light scattering, because the lenses are incapable of capturing it.
http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMX62AM/A/lightning-to-35-...
I must say, I'm a bit shocked at the price. I wouldn't have expected Apple to sell a paperclip for under $19. Their Lightning to USB cable, which seems like it must be strictly simpler than this adapter (no DAC!) costs $19.
Joking aside, I think most people won't notice as the new EarPods connect to the Lightning. That is what I mostly see people with iPhones around having.
But in all seriousness, if they make the port count any lower, the MacBook Pro will cease to be a laptop. It will become an iPad without a touchscreen.
1. Most of the use cases being discussed here are irrelevant for the average iPhone user. Charging and listening at the same time is not a thing for most users. I know there are perfectly reasonable scenarios where it is useful, but most people don't care. Regarding battery life: personally, I use my iPhone quite a lot, often with bluetooth headphones, and I have had to charge it only once or twice during the daytime in the last two years. If you play a lot of games, or use GPS intensively for a few hours, then battery life could be an issue. For the average consumer, I don't think it will be a major concern.
2. OTOH, in the last few years headphones have become a very, very big market. They are a huge status symbol for teenagers and early 20-somethings. If you've saved a lot of money to afford a pair in that stage of life, the headphone jack is a big deal. It's not going to be "cool" to carry around an adapter all the time, and regardless people will hear "no headphone jack" and be annoyed. That demographic seems key to me in maintaining Apple's market lead over the long term, i.e. trend-setting young people.
Overall, I actually think that (2) will be a very big issue. Whilst I am of the opinion that wires are horrible in general, Apple may have misread its market here.
The high-gloss finish of the Jet Black iPhone 7 is
achieved through a precision nine-step anodization and
polishing process. Its surface is equally as hard as
other anodized Apple products; however, its high shine
may show fine micro-abrasions with use. If you are
concerned about this, we suggest you use one of the many
cases available to protect your iPhone.[1]
On a related note: I wonder if one reason for eliminating the jack is to close that open interface which some devices like the "Square" were using. I'm not sure how much of an impact this has though; it was just a thought.
But I don't know what kinds of OS-level permissions go into allowing apps to pair with bluetooth devices on iOS.
My concern was basically about Apple being able to prohibit manufacturers from making hardware that they don't explicitly approve. (I don't know if they can or can't.)
I don't know why I didn't think of that.
iOS still continues its march of adding minor features that should be in regular OTA updates and packing them up with some serious marketing hype. There's barely any improvement here and most of the features are already well implemented in Android / Google Apps or Facebook Messenger.
Disappointing.
Yup. I remember the original iPhone/iPad announcements where many features were fairly innovative. Now applauded feature announcements are for features already out on Android phones.
> New stereo speaker system
Oh cool, you mean like the forward-facing stereo speakers on my 2-year-old Nexus 6?
The screen is beautiful. The two cameras are a clever trick that I hope work as well as advertised -- and their cameras have been historically very good. Splash resistance is overdue, but appreciated.
But A10 is a bit of a disappointment [1][2], only as powerful as the A9X. Do they have any new hardware encode/decode blocks at least?
With A9 they were having yield issues and had to different traces being manufactured by two different fabs to enhance capacity. What do we know on the chip front?
[1] https://www.techtastic.nl/smartphones/apple-a10-soc-van-ipho...
[2] http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/iphone-7-benchmarked-here...
[1]: http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/07/11/apple-chip-builder...
While messaging with iMessage, Facebook messenger, WhatsApp, etc. can be done over WiFi only, calling is traditionally reliant on a cellular provider. The new iPhone only requires a WiFi network, and with the proliferation of WiFi and the first city-wide networks (e.g. Barcelona), it is possible that in the next decade all communication will be done over the Internet.
Also, during a recent trip to Japan I saw an $120 SIM card that gives unlimited Internet access for a year. This works out to $10/month, which is far less than what I pay for Verizon. So in a way this new iPhone may eventually cause cellular networks to primarily become providers of remote Internet access, as telephony shifts to the apps that the local people use to connect with each other.
Do you remember which telecom this was?
I got a 1 month SIM card for 2,200 yen ($22) which still works out to far less than what I pay Verizon. The network name on the top of my iPhone said "docomo".
Oh so till now whatsapp calls were android only?
Previously, WhatsApp showed you a notification when you get an incoming call (if app closed / minimized).
Seems iOS 10 is allowing apps to take over the screen for calls (just like they did on iOS 9 with reply via notification which was only available on iMessage)
Apple looked so uncool and out of it when they continued to talk about it. Half the crowd has forgotten Pokemon Go even existed by this point.
They could have made it funny by having the worst Pokemon appear. Or having it run away. Very poor showmanship.
> Half the crowd has forgotten Pokemon Go
The crowd that originally played the game when it came out was gigantic. Even half of that is still a huge number of people.
I think he means to say talking about a game at keynote is not very Apple-ish, considering their luxurious brand image.
"Unauthorized playback."
It makes me imagine how nice it would have been to ditch both the 3.5mm & lightening port & replace it with a USB-C port across product lines.
Obviously that would have been even more drastic in many ways, but I can't help but think that they have painted themselves into a strange corner.
I imagine the audio industry would revolt if it was removed.
I imagine the audio industry would revolt.
I ask as my 2012 MBP non-retina needs replacing at some point (I think I'll shove as SSD in first, to get 3 more years life) but where do we go from here?
I really hope you aren't actually writing this on the display.
Lighting to 3.5mm audio: $10
Lighting EarPods: $30
MagSafe to MagSafe2 Converter: $10 (for that new laptop)
http://web.archive.org/web/20160907200621*/http://www.apple....
Meanwhile, nobody has attempted to archive links for iPhone 8.
I guess maybe the IA crawlers found links to the page from elsewhere. Links made either by mistake or by someone making a joke about the release of iPhone 7 back in 2014 and betting on people not actually following the link. I dunno.
I think you answered your own question there.
We could have a world where Vulkan was the one stop shop graphics API anywhere. Instead, we are in this situation where everything but Apple products supports / will support it.
Why did it have to be this way?
You can't do anything beyond play/pause or answer calls on iOS with Samsung headphones or vice versa.
I really don't want a shitty android phone. Might get a 6s I guess. I damaged my 6 recently.
It took 30 fucking years and a lot of blood sweat and tears but finally finally there is a global, universal, cheap and simple charging standard that just works. You can find a USB port anywhere and there are extra cables everywhere and life is just slightly better all around.
Except for Apple.
I have to change my cables every 5 years, not exactly "a" global standard.
I see this as the direction the market is headed anyway. Apple has just moved to embrace it early.
2. USD 160 for a AirPod! thats too much and the design really is not up to the mark
> I have a pair of bluetooth headphones I use for the gym and I love them.
Yeah, that's why you don't see it as a problem. The majority of people still use corded headphones, some of which are high-quality, pricey investments that you don't just want to stop using. If you end up misplacing that little dongle, you can't listen to music privately until it's replaced. Seems like a downgrade in functionality, with almost no improvement, considering you are already using your bluetooth headphones effectively.
Ever been on a call with your fancy blue tooth headset while someone turned on a microwave near by? I have, that shit stops working!
I'm all for moving forward with an all digital solution, but blue tooth just doesn't cut it 100% of the time.
This is just a terrible decision IMO. OTOH I'm a diehard Nexus guy so I guess I really don't care :)
That, and you'll wind up with at best, something that performs equally well to the traditional analog output jack. Is that really worth mangling years of standards and backwards compatibility for?
[1] https://en-us.sennheiser.com/momentum-wireless-headphones-wi...
In any case, I just decided to replace my iPhone 5 with an iPhone 6s, which I should be able to find on sale.
Bluetooth is ok in general, but I hate to have one more battery to keep an eye on.
Macbook, iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods. That's already three different charging mechanisms for the devices you are likely to carry when traveling.
I would be very happy if they could even just add one extra USB port to Macbook USB-C charger so that you could charge the laptop and phone with the same charger.
Also back then Apple had a minuscule market share, so they did not really kill it. It just made most people have to buy an external floppy drive. Yes the floppy did have to go, but USB sticks needed to come first, and they were not there yet. There really wasn't any other alternative for say saving your work at school and going home.
I know it's hackneyed to glorify Steve Jobs but he always seemed to have his eye on the ball when it came to tech. Macintosh is the obvious example but if you look at his work at NeXT or building products like WebObjects, you see a CEO who predicted the resurgence of distributing computing and the overall dominance of networking in software. With the iPhone, Apple's move to phase out the physical keyboard on mobile devices was done to put content front and center - a design informed by Jobs' vision of a portable "post-PC" device that would act as the source of most of our media consumption.
What is the removal of the 3.5MM jack informed by? Trivial product metrics like thickness and water-resistance? A cynical attempt to make money from licensing proprietary standards? Or maybe Apple is going through the motions, asserting its reputation as a "gatekeeper" that dictates which standards should be left in the past.
Whatever the case may be, the iPhone 7 is not a compelling product. As an iPhone user, my next smartphone will most likely be an Android.
It could be that the only reason bluetooths outsells jacks, is because people get jacks anyway for free.
At $45 they're not the cheapest but they've got pretty good sound quality and work well from a physical standpoint
As far as traditional headphones go, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Unfortunately, Apple knows we've hit Peak Smartphone, and they are running out of grown opportunities, so this is simply an attempt to create more growth where it doesn't otherwise exist.
It's mostly milking their customers and the industry.
With audio connectors, it's not like that at all. For wired connections, there's one universal standard that works great. There's no analogous situation to being unable to fit your massive bloated Word documents onto a 1.44MB floppy disk. Moving past the floppy disk solved a bunch of serious problems, while moving past the headphone jack isn't solving any problems.
Whenever you install or upgrade to a new OS, Apple prompts users if they'd like to send the anonymous usage data and I feel the headphone jack would be an important data point they've been researching.
The other problem I've run into is having a phone and headset with the same version of bluetooth.
Bluetooth audio, once high quality enough through codecs like aptX will become like wifi, we will wonder why we were tethered with wires to begin with. Bluetooth 5.0 appears to have taken a big step towards the audio quality issue resolution. I've previously owned the Sony MW600 and SBH52 bluetooth receivers for the past 5-7 years. As the tech improves it's going to become more viable and is in line with Apple's generally wireless strategy between Macbook, iPad, iPhone, etc.
Nope, but "iOS devices support the non-mandatory codec MPEG-2/4 AAC, as defined in Section 4.5 of the A2DP specification, Version 1.2.Accessories should use the AAC codec in addition to SBC, because it provides higher audio quality for a given bit rate. " source http://theheadphonelist.theheadphonelist.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c... via http://theheadphonelist.com/wireless-fidelity-making-sense-b...
I'm very surprised that I have seen almost no mention of the fact that Apple didn't just remove an "outdated" interface and inconvenience their customers, they also simultaneously reduced the quality of their audio experience.
I seem to remember commenters on "social media" (or at least their precursors) being just as confused over all of those changes. (With the possible exception of less outcry over optical drives going away.) It seems like there's always some supporters and always some detractors when Apple does something like this.
Maybe that changes soon or maybe AirPods solve this for iOS users (they by design can't be a universal solution)
There's an Apple pattern, where they support a less popular but more capable existing standard or come up with something superior to a standard, which spurs the development of an even better universal standard. It's high time that someone developed wireless headphones that weren't as much of a compromise as they generally are.
It's a bad move from Apple to remove the jack. I dislike wireless headphones as you can't quickly move them from iphone to macbook, they need charging and they'll always have some form of lag.
Besides, wireless earbuds that only last for 5 hours would be completely useless to me, since I often listen to music all day while hiking. I can't imagine I'm the only one who dislikes having ever more things that need to be frequently charged: wireless mice, "smart" watches, now earbuds. I'm pretty happy with my digital watch that lasts several years on a battery, and my cheap headphones that don't need to charge, and won't get lost when they fall out of my ears. Sorry, but not everything can or should be wireless.
Perhaps Apple could sell some kind of wire to attach to the AirPods to keep them safe. The other end of the safety wire could plug into the phone's lightning port, for extra safety.
Lightning headphones are a stop gap. The future is wireless.
It is more likely that we will see other manufacturers drop the headphone jack as well because Apple did. Again, most people will be fine with that. Bluetooth headphones and ear pieces have already been around for awhile. You also have to think about Apple's purchase of Beats Audio.
With that said I will concede that I am also a bit bummed about them removing the port now as well, but I have learned that Apple is incredibly stubborn when it comes to listening to their consumers about these decisions, and you just have to abide, or buy something else.
That that said, I have a few of them and pretty much never use them because the extra battery life hassles aren't worth it relative to just plugging into the audio source.
Apple has lost a few sales in my house because they failed to support one thing or another. My wife is an apple user, but I can never get over the lack of sd/pci/whatever slots, or frequently things like bluray playback... When shopping for a new device.
As far as headphone jacks? Probably just another reason for me not to buy an idevice, I have a fairly large collection of bluetooth headphones, because of some work I was doing with A2DP a few years ago, but I pretty much use wired headphones because I've had the headphone battery die before the phone/etc way to often, and frankly when it comes to comfort (while sitting at my desk), or fit when running I stick to certain headphones not because they have cables but because they are better in the given use case.
Why? The phone comes with an adapter. Any headphones that worked with previous iPhones will work with the iPhone 7 via the adapter. People will just continue to use the headphones they already have.
No matter how many times people want to try this, Apple doesn't have a monopoly when it comes to the mobile/smartphone (hardware) space.
Pros for wired: better fidelity, no batteries to charge, lighter weight, more headphones to choose from, cheaper headphone options, no adapters to lose, can listen to music while charging.
Be bold.
Was that downward slope clear at the time Apple made the changes, though? I remember "no Flash on iPhone" being a major complaint of many pundits.
Let's say I go with AirPods. The presentation just showed initial pairing and focused on the phone. It seems to work with iphone 5 and forward, which is great, but does it work with my older laptop? What about non-Apple bluetooth devices? It would be also be a nice little perk to have it work with AppleTV for watching TV at night. Traditional bluetooth sucks when switching between devices (in addition to pairing). It would be nice if they could prove to everyone that was a solved problem (and prove the lighting earpods aren't just a stopgap) before ditching the headphone jack.
There will always be initial 'outrage' but that is nothing new. Apple have no doubt made a calculated decision, weighed up the pros and cons and determine this is the best course of action moving forward.
The iPhone6S series isn't going anywhere anytime soon and it's certainly still serviceable as a device, it didn't die today with the release of the iPhone7. If people are concerned, hold off on the purchase, do the research and make an informed decision for your own needs.
1. Switching to a proprietary connector for wired headphones.
2. Releasing improved wireless headphones as an optional add-on.
So you still get "convenient and dependable" wired headphones supplied with the phone. And you get an adapter for using 3rd party wired headphones, so you are not "stuck with the crappy lightning headphones." Wired headphones, whether existing ones from 3rd parties or the upcoming ones from Apple, are unaffected.
As for whether Apple is Really Wrong This Time in requiring an adapter for 3rd party wired headphones... Putting aside how utterly vindicated they've been every time they've done this in history... According to Apple this was to enable major iPhone 7 features like the improved camera.[1] Was that worth requiring an adapter for certain cases, cases which will probably diminish over time as more 3rd party headphones go wireless? I'd say it seems in the ballpark of the sorts of tradeoff decisions they've made in the past.
[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/johnpaczkowski/inside-iphone-7-why-...
Otherwise a Bluetooth receiver with extended battery life to wired headphones seems more robust and practical to me anyway. Otherwise I never use headphones when on the go, so I cant really talk about that use case in practice.
There are other vendors that make Lightning headphones (Philips, JBL...) and plenty of wireless headphones in the market.
Yes, you could use Bluetooth, but I'm guessing (hoping...) Apple has done some work to make the stream quality sound better and the connection process more stable. If they were to freely license that technology, people could buy great sounding headphones, with an improved UX, from any company they chose too. Now, it just seems like Apple's "courageous" way forward is all about pushing you to high margin Beats and EarPods.
...you haven't even used them yet...
Bluetooth is still an option
To ensure compliance, most manufacturers include cheapy bud and microphone wired headset kits in their boxes.
By virtue of their control of 12% or so of the phone market, Apple is putting a lot of Lightning headsets into the stream, and making a bet that a lot of those people in the ecosystem will upgrade to the pods.
[1] http://www.ncsl.org/research/transportation/cellular-phone-u...
Yeah, we can lose 4% of Abba lovers. Go for it
I could just about tolerate a very simple small analog adapter, but this is going too far.
Apple wants to make a thinner phone and eliminate wires. If you want to use different headphones than the ones that come with...well, do so. Are AirPods the most advanced headphones ever to come with a music device? They're usually pretty bad.
> Are AirPods the most advanced headphones ever to come with a music device?
They don't come with it. They are optional accessories. The new phone comes with Thunderbolt wired headphones.
They never made a candy iMac without a CD or DVD drive. They didn't drop optical until the current design of aluminum iMacs in 2012.
> I always wondered what you were supposed to do if you had hard drive problems
When they dropped the optical drive with the first MacBook Air, they shipped it with the OS on a USB drive http://www.iclarified.com/images/news/16130/55529/55529-500....
Phones will continue to get thinner and thinner. Apple have looked ahead and said, in the future when this thing gets thin enough there won't be any space for any adapters. The main competitor for use of the Lightning port is charging (as we can see from all the comments), but what if come iPhone 8 they will introduced simple wireless charging. Suddenly the need for any port then would come into question and pave the way for a significant further reductions in phone thickness.
That said, I've had an iPhone headphone socket fail owing to pocket lint. (It was fixed at the Genius bar for no charge.) I've been told that pocket lint being forced into iPhones sometimes leads to more serious internal damage.
Besides that:
1) How often do you use headphones with your iPhone? I use my iPhone as a small sound system or a wireless source for my car far more often than I use wired headphones (basically, on planes). As I understand it, Apple has greatly improved the iPhone's speakers. (The 12.9" iPad Pro has ridiculously good audio.)
2) Have you gotten over Apple ditching serial ports in favor of ADB, ditching SCSI in favor of IDE (which was a technical regression at the time), ditching ADB in favor of USB, ditching the floppy drive, switching from round laptop power connections to magsafe, not supporting Flash, going from magsafe to magsafe2 and providing $10 converters, switching from the horrid old iPod adapter to the lightning port?
3) If you have one really nice set of headphones you use with your iPhone, just keep the adapter on it. (And if your cable is replaceable, which is the case with all the mid- and high- end headphones I've owned, you can presumably get a lightning-compatible replacement.)
If you have several — the adapters are $9 each.
If you have a ton of different crappy headphones that you use with your iPhone… Why?
4) I really hate dealing with headphone cables. Usually they get tangled unless I carefully spool them back into their case (in the case of Apple's earpods or whatever they're called). If I were paid $5/h for the time I've spent untangling or spooling headphone cables, I would be able to buy all the lightning adapters I'll ever need. If the wireless headphones live up to Apple's claims, I'll be pretty happy.
Now you just have to carry your phone plus a bluetooth receiver to plug into!
Apple is a digital content distribution company in the first place.
But seriously, how hard would it have been to do a generation of keeping the jack with the Lightning headphones (and putting Lightning on Macs)?
Pretty sure they can just use standard Bluetooth headphones. Also, these exist: http://www.samsung.com/global/galaxy/gear-iconx/
Upgrade to iPhone 7 with Apple Plug.
The cord is a bit of a pain, but the cost of the bluetooth headphones was more so!
I remember the lack of Flash support on iOS being fairly controversial at the time. IMHO, it was the combination of lack of iOS support + iOS usage skyrocketing that killed Flash; not that iOS dropped Flash because it was already dying.
Most of my friends are using bluetooth headphones nowadays.
I was never sure if the jack is all the way in or it is halfway in. Sometimes the audio would disappear, and I would find out the headphones have slowly came off; but not all the way out, just enough to distort the sound.
AliExpress can deliver you a decent set of Bluetooth headphones for $50-$100, or earpieces for $12.
And about the same as USB-C driven headphones. Which the iPhone supports just fine. How did you manage to avoid mentioning that in your comment?
Why crappy lightning headphones? What makes them crappy?
It looked like it was the wrong time to drop it, but Apple was able to move consumers along.
Another is a universal standard that has worked with every type of device for decades.
This isn't even comparing apples to oranges, it's comparing apples to giraffes
As you mentioned, when the other technologies were abandoned, a suitable replacement existed that was widely in use regardless of platform. With the headphones, buying a set for an iPhone will now no longer work with other non-Apple devices (at least, at the moment -- are they licensing this to others and are any others interested in lightning headphones?).
I have two friends, recently, who destroyed their iPhone 6 (toilet and cement drop) and opted to purchase a higher-end Android device as a replacement (slightly less expensive with slightly better specs and they liked my phone when I let them play with it). Had they owned a pair of $200 "pretend" high-end headphones[0] that would have only worked with an iPhone, I doubt they would have been so quick to switch. I guess that could work the other way -- preventing Android users from switching to Apple, except it's resolved by a dongle on the Apple side without loss of perceived quality.
Wireless isn't a suitable replacement, either. Every time I see a new set of excellent Bluetooth wireless headphones, I think of the drawer full of the previous BT headphone/headset devices I'd bought and the several that aren't there because I've lost them. Usually something fell off of the device or the battery stopped holding a charge as long as the phone (when I remembered to charge those, too). The AirPods are small so they end up in the pocket opposite my phone with other things[1], most likely, my keys. They appear durable enough to survive in that environment, but it'll take about a week before I pull my keys out (I've only got 3 keys and a couple of rings), one snags on a ring and falls onto the ground without me noticing. Welp, I'm done, off to the drawer you go, mono-Pods.
I lose wired headphones much less frequently. They're usually plugged into my phone (and recent phones hold them tight) and wrapped inconspicuously around my neck. If I pocket them and they snag on my keys, I notice. But the best part is if I lose them, I can find a pair that suites my needs for $15 or less. Something tells me the Lightning headphones aren't going to be that cheap for a long time[2].
[0] "Pretend" high-end headphones refers to the likes of "Beats by Dre" and many others that are little more than the "Air Jordans" of headphones. You pay five times the price of similarly capable headphones because it's got a logo of a perceived "bad ass" on it.
[1] Because, at least where I live, wearing them in your ears when your not using them is going to get you labeled a "Douche Bag" pretty quickly.
[2] A quick search yielded several with the "basic features" I'd be looking for at around USD$50.00. Yikes.
It already was, even more so now. Why am I even here.
People can't handle change. Reminds me of Steve Jobs ditching Flash in 2010... https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
Behind the Scenes with iOS Security
Abstract - https://www.blackhat.com/us-16/briefings.html#behind-the-sce...
Slides - https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-16/materials/us-16-Krstic.p...
Beyond the secure enclave, if the haptic home button is anything like the new trackpads, it'll be an amazing feature. One less moving part to break. And the cameras...wow. Finally decent depth of field on the camera that's always in my pocket.
"Another thing I tried: the new home button, which uses a "taptic engine" to give you physical feedback when you press it — it's pressure sensitive too, so it can tell if you really mean to press it or just tap it. And it's awful. On a MacBook trackpad, you get this uncanny feeling that you're actually hitting a button. On the iPhone, the whole bottom of the phone just sort of "kicks." It's not bad haptics like you remember, with weird vibration, it's just a new kind of bad haptics. It doesn't feel like a button at all. It's a bummer."
http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/7/12827772/iphone-7-plus-phot...
Recently I upgraded to the Samsung Galaxy S7. It was about $400 and it has an incredible camera; far better than my old iPhone 5s, and it looks substantially better than the iPhone 6/6s photos I have seen. Plus, it has a headphone jack, microSD support (so nice to be able to upgrade), and a really beautiful screen. Yes, Samsung installed some bloatware but some of it is actually useful (their UI for toggling radios is quite good) Android Kit-Kat is solid. To me, this was Android's first reasonable phone.
I take your meaning though, and that there is reason to hope it will work better than the mechanical button. And even if the feedback were to fail, the button might keep working.
[0] http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MGRM2AM/A/iphone-lightning...
> Audio+GPS+Charging in non-Bluetooth Car.
If you currently have a cigarette lighter charger and an aux port, how can you charge your phone and listen to music?
Y-Cable (dock connector to audio & USB): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005LUKCX4
Dock to Lightning adapter: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B014854UWG
For a cleaner solution (and if you also need a cigarette lighter to USB adapter), there's this from Griffin, but it's out of stock and unclear whether it's discontinued: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00NCF0LHC
I've never had anything but a terrible experience with Bluetooth, and I'm definitely never using Bluetooth to connect my phone to a rental car, so I imagine I'll be using the above system for a long time to come.
So an adapter is definitly possible.
Can you really sleep with earbuds in? In that use case, I use the device's speaker.
I wear these each night and listen to relaxation videos such as ASMR [0]. Many people in that community use these.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_sensory_meridian_re...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/SunbowStar-Universal-Charger-Adapter-...
Well you could get a standalone charger and a spare battery-- oh wait, no, they got rid of that too.
She requires complete silence to go to sleep ;)
Your desk probably has a power outlet located nearby in case you are willing to change your routine.
Is your car older than 3 years? If not, what prevents you from listening to audio via USB?
My personal car is 14 years old and runs fine, but I need to use the aux input on the radio to listen to my phone.
I've rented a fair number of cars while traveling in the last year and hit a number of problems:
* Everything Ford makes has a bug where the car's computer will lock for a minute or two and either crash / decide the phone doesn't exist or display a blocking modal dialog telling you that you have too many tracks on your phone if you connect it using USB. I have ~11K tracks (iTunes Match) and that's apparently more than they tested with. Toyota had a similar failure with USB.
* Bluetooth is more miss than hit: pairing is usually buried in the UI, slow, and reconnects are unreliable so you might have to try a couple of times before anything connects.
* None of the cars have a UI designed for more than a handful of tracks so while you can get something to play eventually, the experience is terrible.
* Not everyone supplies enough power to charge over USB or does so inconsistently, so you may arrive with 10% battery if you used the GPS.
100% of vehicles with AUX in lines work perfectly every time without any fussing. I want something like Bluetooth to work but there's this massive market failure where almost nobody seems to have a QA team or a support process where updates actually happen (BMW suggested that a friend buy a newer car to fix their bugs). I'll give Subaru an honorable mention for having reliable software but they desperately need to hire some UX specialists.
http://cars.axlegeeks.com/d/f/Bluetooth
yes, there are 11 pages but if you click on say Dodge and filter by 2016 you'll find only 3 high end vehicles with base trim on bluetooth. This means people actually need to choose Bluetooth which sounds crazy to us why they wouldn't but most people have no idea.
2) Most people store their music on their phones though.
If you're at a desk you probably have a computer. Why not listen on that? Most people are using streaming services so it's only a matter of logging into Spotify's website or iTunes and you have access to all your music.
>> 3.) No more listening to music/audiobooks as I fall asleep because in the morning the iPhone won't be charged for my desk usage the next day unless I wake up and plug it back in during my sleep.
I fall asleep to podcasts every night - I have never, ever had my phone plugged into a charger whilst doing that. The main reason is safety (I'm just not comfortably with a charging battery next to my head while I sleep). But the other reason is that it's totally unnecessary thanks to the sleep feature built in to the iPhone (in the clock app). I've go to bed with about 60% battery, wake up with around 40% and then connect it to my laptop when I get to work.
Is this supposed to convince me to buy the device?
With the 820 Qualcomm was able to make their own custom cores (I think they went with 2 or 4 instead of 8) and generally overcome the 810 trainwreck. Qualcomm's ability to integrate the radio, GPU, DSP, crypto chip and some other things with a custom CPU into a true SOC is really a massive advantage within mobile and I expect them to build on that with more custom designs.
One last note about big.LITTLE. It seems like a panacea - just move all the big jobs to the big processors and the little ones to the little processors, yay! But this is much, much harder in practice. Doing this wrong leads to disastrous UX, screen tears because rendering shifts off of the big cores being one prime example. Process scheduling is already very tough and current schedulers are the result of many years of experimentation and heuristic best practices. Of course Apple controls the whole stack (i.e. they don't need to worry about where Kernel maintainers want to go with the schedulers) and I'm sure they have some amazing engineers working on Darwin so maybe they were able to overcome problems here. If you can schedule correctly it does seem like a big power savings win. But (and I may be behind the times here) that is a big if...
Yes, it's unfortunate that if its damages under 50m it's your word versus their word.
The series 1 watch had the same caveats but proved very water resistant in practice. To make stronger promises you need to understand how the seals age and how the device behaves in lots of situations, or you need to over-engineer it with bulky seals and other compromises. You also need to understand and deal with extremely tight manufacturing tolerances.
If Apple said the iPhone was waterproof people would take it scuba diving then post YouTube videos showing how "crapp" the new iPhone is, then we'd have watergate (lol) all over the tech press.
Much like Trump/Hillary, people don't hold anyone else to the same high standard they hold Apple to. (If Trump manages to not vomit on himself at the first debate he'll be declared the winner by the media. )
If you brought in a water damaged phone how would you prove that you didn't exceed the rated coverage?
It is impossible to prove a negative, but the percentage of people taking a phone on a >50m mixed-gas technical dive is vanishingly small.
If you need to go diving with your phone, either get a proper waterproof case or get a properly ruggedized dumbphone.
Let's be honest. You seen the adapter? It's not very thick and basically just a little bit of cable. Why do people make a big deal about "carrying around an adapter"? You connect it to the headphone and then you roll the headphone cable up just like before only this time there is an extra two inches of the adapter cable in there. How is carrying around that thing even an issue? If you want to keep your old headphones and use a new phone you just have to keep the adapter on your headphone cable all the time.
I don't think it's unreasonable to say that people connect to more than a single pair of headphones with their phone. That puts you back into dongle carrying territory.
Sometimes I walk to work without bringing headphones, then use the pair I leave at the office.
I have an Aux cable on the stereo in my living room that my friends occasionally use. Should they make sure to always bring headphones to the bar? They're not planning to listen to music at the bar, but at least they can convince themselves they didn't lug a fucking dongle around all evening just to play music pregaming at my place.
Many people nowadays don't have a computer -- especially in that big Asia demographic that Apple so loves. If your phone is the only device you own that is capable of playing music, then charging while you listen is often obligatory.
Feels to me like Apple has gone to far in designing the iPhone for a particular kind of luxury buyer (who can afford Beats or $159 earbuds) instead of targeting the mass market.
Many people use battery packs, in fact, on a recent trip to Tokyo, I bet almost everyone had a battery pack - it was commonplace to see a little USB wire coming out of the bag and into the phone. And also, many of them used headphones - that would turn out bad when competing for the same power - and strangely, almost everyone had an iPhone 6, so, I don't see how they will manage with the 7. There are so many iPhones in Tokyo that it feels like the Nokia of the 2000's.
I've run into this issue a few times with headphones that do: - apt-X only - apt-X + AAC - AAC only - neither
and as long as it supports AAC it sounds good with Apple devices. Sadly, manufacturers don't really put it on the label so it's hard to know.
They are a huge status symbol for teenagers and early 20-somethings.
Example: http://leicaphilia.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/BP-M3-5414...
I just worry about scratches though because I always sell my phones when I'm done with them.
Used to be I could just gift to my relatives, but they're pretty happy with their iPhone5's.
The "9 step polishing process" is pretty much how you'd polish anodized aluminum to that level anyway.
(I do a large amount of machining).
Anodizing does not make it actually stronger. The layer it generates is slightly harder, but still do not have great wear resistance
There's not much you can do about this as long as you use anodized aluminum.
I could totally envision v2 of these having better battery life and being able to "enhance" hearing the same way a hearing aid does. Also, more people using these will hopefully reduce the stigma some see with wearing hearing aids.
They're circumaural, so they sit comfortably on the sides of your head rather than mashing your pinnae flat, and their velour pads are nicely breathable; they also mass only a quarter kilogram (260g), and they're an open-back design so that ambient noise is merely reduced rather than totally occluded. (Also, unlike closed-back and especially noise-canceling headphones, they do not produce a constant pressure on your eardrums, which has been suggested to cause hearing loss and certainly plays a role in listening fatigue.) Their reproduction is quite good as well, with a surprisingly flat frequency response for the price range; if that suits you, you're good to go, and if you prefer otherwise, they won't interfere with you EQing your music to your heart's content.
Depending on where you find them, they run anywhere from $100 (Amazon Prime) to $180 (MSRP), so they're considerably less expensive than your QC15s, too. I really can't recommend them favorably enough.
I've since moved on to other headphones, but I always consider if the headphone is to tight, heavy, or the ear cushions are cheap pleather that makes my head sweat.
The QC20 have been amazing, and have longer than apple's 5 hours battery life. The wireless QC20 will be out soon, and they're rated at 10 hours I think (maybe 8, can't find the article now).
I don't suspect they'll be able to do wireless active noise cancelling, so the argument for the lightning port supporting active noise cancelling functionality is weird... do you want people to go wireless, or not? My first reaction is that that was a poor justification.
It was a big discovery for me, as 16 hour days in the lab with studio headphones once resulted in a blocked ear canal, from ear wax melting & reflowing! Weird & gross, I know.
You're just comparing them to shitty wired $5 chinese earbuds from Amazon in your head. $160 isn't even expensive for earbuds in general, more like lower mid-range.
I'm comparing them to my $90 noise cancelling over ear headphones that, while yes no exactly top tier, don't require their own charging infrastructure and have much better audio quality than stock apple.
I may as well have an entirely separate MP3 player that costs me a good bit less than $160 than deal with this BS.
[1]: http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/5/12798640/bragi-wireless-hea...
I ended up going for the Jaybird X2 which is about $150.
Also no mention of standby time that I could hear, only 5 hours listening, but no idea if just having them on (in case of infrequent phone calls) would use up the battery as fast or not
I currently have a pair of Bose QC20 (their in-ear noise-cancelling earbuds). I'm pretty happy with them, but they were really expensive at $250. If Apple's were noise-cancelling and able to compete with Bose's tech (they're rated the best [1]), they'd be a deal.
But as it is, they're not.
Maybe a firmware update, maybe they're negotiating tech/patents with Bose, maybe the next iteration...
[1] http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-noise-cancelling-in-ea...
Where'd you get that from? That would be awesome if true.
Also, did you see the event? Not the same phone at all.
Wide color, awesome new camera and dropping it in the toilet might be enough.
Isn't the iPhone 6 already "fast enough" for end users?
My current phone is a Moto G 2014 which is still good enough for all my use cases.
the old phone that is
That said, the new home button sounds very interesting (I say that both as a developer and end-user), and the new camera will be a very welcome addition. And battery life improvement on top that? Perfect.
It is an iterative improvement for sure, but I don't see why that's a bad thing.
I can't blame Apple for it. I think they've reached feature saturation. The stuff is just Good Enough now.
That said I would not just walk around like an asshat with them in all the time or anything.
Talking to yourself with a non obvious headset will always be awkward looking though.
I think my personal beef with them is when I interact with someone wearing an earpiece, it makes me think (rightly or wrongly) that they are happy to interact with me BUT at any moment a ping from their earpiece will be by default more important.
Maybe it's (perhaps in part) my own issue though.
On the other hand I can see the value in it, especially if Siri's abilities improve, and if speech recognition improves also.
Maybe I'm just old fashioned and in time this will built into our social fabric (I think back to the late 1980s and early 1990s when walking around with a handheld cell phone seemed incredibly dickish)
And that's maybe not wholly something I understand anyway, but sort of feel bad about regardless. I mean, I do wear one [1] during my commute so I can listen to podcasts without wires all over the place, and I'm really hoping iOS 10's speech recognition via crappy mics is good enough that I can integrate voice control into my exocortex. Does that suffice to make me an asshole? Or does it require that I use it to have loud conversations about business things? Or what? I'm not all that sure I grasp the nuance here.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Firegram-Mini-ear-Bluetooth-Headset/d... - it's about the size of the first joint of your thumb.
Check out the list of compatible apps on their website, companies like Ableton, Korg, Yamaha, and countless indie devs take this seriously, and really, we all should.
It's a shame they're discontinuing the line, the build quality of this phone is immensely good, it shows me the quality Android phones _should_ have.
Based on my experience (which is worth next to nothing), people don't really care about the thickness of their phone. Most people I know end up throwing it in a hideous Otterbox (or similarly gigantic case) anyway. Who's going to notice an extra millimeter matter then?
Or just break open the phone and solder a fucking 3.5mm jack into it.
That would be NTT.
Courage is running into a burning building to save a family. Courage is going to war for your country knowing you might die. Courage is being more afraid than you've ever been in your life and doing the right thing anyway.
To call throwing an age-old standard into the toilet while shoving vendor lock-in down people's throats "courage" is offensive. Shame on Apple.
A pair of rigid plastic Bluetooth headphones that are easily damaged or lost for $159 is consumer price gouging. You do the math.
Talking of the rigidity of the shells on Apple headphones in general, they aren't designed for everyone's ears. I have fairly small ear canals and those things physically hurt to use. I much prefer a nice pair of Philips with gel caps.
Plus the cord to me is actually a good thing ZIMHO, it provides some weight and also helps me stop losing the things.
Courage my ass, it's them simply trying to milk more $$$ from people who can feel more superior from buying salvation at no matter what the cost. :-)
Anyway just my 2c
2. $160 might be too much for the AirPods, but I don't know that anyone can really know that yet. Whether they are worth that or not really depends on the functionality and sound quality, and I haven't really seen any reviews on that yet. What I do know is that $160 is really on the low end as far as good headphones go. My Jaybirds were $150 when I got them and my ATH-M50xs were also around $150.
Same was told about cd-roms, usb type c and lightning port not far ago.
> "disregard the large portion of the population that isn't or doesn't have them"
Thats why they provide you with a adapter and a set of lightning headphones for free with a new phone.
The car is another use case. My car has the cable, but no Bluetooth. Gps navigation is still a big power draw.
I get the feeling our use cases are no longer the same as the people who design these devices.
Removing the headphone jack forces people to solve the wireless headphone problems: pairing, latency, and charging.
I'm not convinced apple isn't timing this well, but I see what they're getting at and I think it may be more like these past example than people are saying.
I'm guessing they're using standard bluetooth if paired with something standard, but use something Apple-proprietary when pairing and listening when possible. (NFC-like operation and their own audio codecs on top of bluetooth)
I've tried using EarPods on a plane before (where my ancient Sennheiser earbuds get 95% of their use) and I couldn't find a comfortable volume setting -- loud enough to hear clearly over the engines is painful (and probably just audible to the person sitting next to me).
The AirPods sound like a great idea on paper -- very small size, charging case, potentially less flakey than a typical Bluetooth device -- but since they're nothing more than wireless EarPods, I can't think of a use for them myself.
Well they did remove a certain feature... If you use that often then it makes perfect sense to wait.
The headphone thing annoys me enormously, but it probably won't be a factor here.
If Apple didn't remove the headphone jack in the iPhone 7 do you think any large number of people would intentionally buy Lightning headphones?
The headphone jack was not dying out up until yesterday. As of today, it is. In the next five years a whole bunch of phone manufacturers are going to do the same thing.
You're going to absolutely shit yourself when Apple removes the lightning port from the iPhone 10.
> one has to admit that replacing it by a proprietary system like Lightning is a bad idea
Apple's view: we've replaced it with wireless. Use Bluetooth or Apple W1-enabled headphones. It is much better for many reasons. If you can't use them for some reason, use the Lightning headphones we shipped in the box If you can't use them, use the 3.5mm=>Lightning adapter we shipped in the box.
> the only official wireless alternative they offer is a $159 pair of headphones
The only official laptops they offer start at $700. Apple is a premium brand. As of today the complete range of choices Apple enables you to make on headphones, right out of the box:
1. Wired lightning headphones
2. Wired 3.5mm headphones via lightning dongle
3. Any pair of bluetooth headphones
4. Any pair of Apple W1-enabled wireless headphones
If you don't want to spend $159 on a pair of bluetooth headphones then you can go ahead and buy some cheaper ones!
Apple doesn't want everyone to switch to lightning. They are banking that bluetooth will eventually be the 90% even 99% standard among consumers. I tend to agree.
- Plantronics Backbeat Go
- Jabra Pulse
Both worked perfectly paired with my Surface Pro as well as my Nexus 6P. I also had a Nexus 6 prior to that and it paired to that device with no issues whatsoever as well.
The vast majority of people I see in public use the standard Apple earbuds. I suspect that the percentage of people with expensive cans is very low, and that most people that buy the iPhone 7 will continue to use the stock lightning earbuds.
Are people really using high-end headphones on the go with their iPhones? I have some very nice corded cans, but they require a headphone amp to really sound good, so they only get used at home.
A Bluetooth+USB+AUX deck from a brand like Pioneer or Alpine is about $100USD. Yes, it sucks to spend more money, but you also get Bluetooth calling, proper audio format support (does your Chevy so OGG?) and even support for apps like Pandora sometimes. Worth getting _without_ even having an iPhone, for me at least.
Why do i need to get RAM upgrades from Apple? Storage upgrades? CPU? battery?
Why cant i just get a third party magsafe charger?
Because Apple's ethos says that you do it right the first time or you live with the consequences (or live with our prices for upgrades) - the equivalent of which would be insisting on a factory bluetooth system rather than getting a third party device.
Of course there are numerous benefits to going with third party/aftermarket devices. If Apple is counting on its users doing that, then it represents a major cultural shift from Apple.
I assume that issue disappears with the new plug.
Oh, and your complaint about charging the phone while listening, that's the Apple way they've always removed options to have a cleaner design. The superior Apple solution is to buy their pricey iPhone dock with headphone jack hidden in the back and charge and listen at the same time. Not a fanboy, just adding that Apple has addressed your complaint by making more money off of you ;)
A digital cable can also do error handling and correction, meaning damage to the cable does not have the same impact as it does on analog cables.
Yeah, you only have one port. But that's not a restriction of digital ports but of Apple's implementation, I fully expect Android phones with two or more USB Type C ports to be released. As you can see from my post I'm not a fan of Apple's implementation at all (despite the fact that it'd be merely a nuisance for me).
That's nothing new though. Those have been available for years. Some quick examples:
http://www.guitarcenter.com/IK-Multimedia/iRig-HD-Studio-Qua...
In the current implementation the user at least has a choice.
There is no argument here. Bucking the standard and removing a headphone jack is a minus for consumers.
I don't want a world what I have Apple, Samsung, HTC, LG headphone connectors.
The EU managed to fix this once for power/data connectors. Maybe they'll have to do a rerun for audio.
Btw a neckband should have been the ideal form factor for this - comfortable, great battery life, doesn't require expensive tech like earpods , hard to lose, buttons.
It's strange because I don't need any of this stuff right now with my iPhone 6+, it was a solved problem. Never before, after a new Apple release have I felt that what I have now is more desirable than the newer version.
> there is zero benefit to consumers
Completely untrue. Just because you don't care about the various benefits doesn't mean there is zero benefit. If there was zero benefit, Apple wouldn't do it. More than any other company I know, Apple cares deeply about user experience, and they're dropping the headphone jack because they think it's holding back the product.
The most obvious benefit I can think of is dropping the headphone jack let them put a second speaker in where the jack was, which is probably what let them get 2x louder speakers.
I'm a big fan of SimplyNoise / SimplyRain, and also have a little one-line bash script colored noise generator that I use these days [0]. ASMR seems like a similar idea.
I've heard of SimplyNoise. I have used the RainyMood + YouTube webapp in the past. Pretty novel concept.
[1] http://nextshark.com/nilay-patel-apple-watch-review-bracelet...
I had to get an external usb battery but only use that when I know I'll be busy a full day with more than usual usage (which is still quite a bit). Example being a full day of work (commute in and out) plus a sportsball game at night or similar where I'm seriously out all day.
A water resistant rating that indicates I should be fine walking home slowly and enjoying getting drenched, instead of speed walking to save my electronic device, is all I am asking for. If the risk of destroying my phone because I like to stroll through the rain just dropped to < 0.1%, that is good enough for me.
Most pure wireless headphones cost more than $150. Are you the target audience? Probably not, but for people who are looking for that type of solution Apple's pricing is very reasonable.
i use mine with whitenoise (grey or brown noise, usually) most of the day, and it helps me get in 'the zone' more than anything else.
I mean, bar special hooks Apple can have because they don't give a fuck about standards, I really don't see how that is hard.
The real hassle is in my car, which unfortunately this doesn't solve. Toyota's system isn't the best. I have to hit a button then say "pair audio". Wait no, it's "pair audio player". No... wait it's "pair bluetooth"... ah I'll get the manual. Okay, got the phrase right. Now I have to press the button again and say "confirm". Now it asks me what I want to call my audio player. That's fine. Hit button again and say "confirm". Now I have to decide if I'm pairing from the car or from the audio player? I have no idea what that means. From the car I guess? Hit button again and say confirm. Okay now it's searching... but my phone says pairing failed. Okay, now it's kicked me out and I get to start over again. Let's pair from the phone this time. Nope, that failed too. Let's pair from the car again? Hey it worked!
And in between every button press, there is an ear-splitting beep that can't be adjusted with the volume controls in the car. And even then, I can only store three phones in memory, and it remembered both of my failed attempts plus my wife's phone that I paired for her. So to try a third time, I have to remove one of them... so it asks "which audio player do you want to remove?" then it lists all of them... "Player 1: iPhone". "Player 2: iPhone". "Player 3: iPhone". Fantastic.
Most of the time I just use the USB cable, except when I updated to iOS 10 and it started saying Error: 5 randomly during a song.
Pairing a headset with a phone is the easiest thing in the world, and it happens to be the "problem" that Apple solved. But the real problem is pairing with dumb "smart" devices that unfortunately are everywhere.
http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/pcm1754-q1.pdf
That lists the size as about 6x5x2mm. Should fit comfortably within a lightning connector.
Consider that the new wireless earbuds have a DAC in each earbud, plus a full Bluetooth radio, all squeezed in there.
It might not be cool or interesting, but it's fairly standard 'Apple'.
But that's my problem, not Apple's.
Bluetooth pairing seems to work just fine on my family's Ford Fiesta 2016 (using the simpler version of Ford Audio). Once done for the first time, it only takes a few seconds after I turn the key and they're working together. Occasionally sound cuts off for a sec or two if I have the phone in my pocket but I blame it on my ole' Galaxy S3 and CyanogenMod drivers.
http://www.macworld.com/article/1133334/original_imac.html
"Considering all these amenities, the most shocking part of the iMac isn’t what it offers, but what it lacks. The iMac has no floppy drive, which might be forgivable if there were a Zip drive or other removable-media option, but there isn’t.
And most dramatically, this new consumer offering has no SCSI port, no standard serial ports, and no ADB ports. Apple has opted to replace these familiar connections with USB, a high-speed serial architecture that has suffered from slow adoption on the Wintel platform despite its technical advantages (see the sidebar “USB: Ready for Prime Time?”). Currently, no USB devices exist for the Mac."
Many think it was the iMac that made it into the success it has become.
Lightning is just a stop-gap.
It was on sale, so it was cheaper than what you see there.
I have pretty good experiences with it so far. It would also solve your rental car problem!
EDIT: found it - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HQ0UVTG?psc=1
I've definitely seen some live iPad mixing and synthesis, though.
USB-C indeed. Apple chose not to use it though
The Dell XPS 13 has a USB-C (Thunderbolt 3) port, which can do display, audio, and AC power all in the same port.
Which will need charging themselves.
Now I have to choose between being concerned about either my phone's battery or my headphones' battery.
Besides, you can charge your phone and your AirPods at the same time, you just need to have two outlets (or two USB ports) and two cables.
I wistfully remember the days when I could go away for the weekend and not have to take a charger for either my ipod or phone...
No, I'm simply talking about a scenario where I want to listen to something but my headphones aren't charged.
In such a scenario, I have to wait 15 minutes.
Murphy's Law in this case means that the best outcome is to remove the possibility of poor planning by not having to juggle multiple devices that require you to plan your charging schedules around in the first place.
Isn't the point that you shouldn't need to 'plan' this at all. That's just extra mental load that isn't necessary.
My ~5 year old laptop came with a blue ray drive. It has never held a blue ray disc and only once held a DVD. I wish other manufacturers were quicker to follow suite.
No, most people who buy Mac laptops and iMacs do _not_ buy an external DVD or Blu Ray drive. Apple is not shifting Macs:Drives in a 2:1 ratio or anything even approaching that.
> I think most people were already moving on to Blu-Ray
In 2008 Blu Ray vs HD-DVD was only just coming to an end. It's extraordinary to claim that "most people" [who had a DVD drive] were transitioning over to Blu Ray. If anything, I'd argue that a huge chunk of people who had DVD players flat-out have not transitioned to BR at all. Either way "most people" is an insane number.
It's possible my experience isn't representative but I do know hundreds of Mac owners and DVD drives aren't very evident. Nor are any discs, generally. It seems to be a very networked subculture.
I'm considerate of the price premium this represents, and how Apple's new buds unfortunately only offer 5 hours of charge. But I just want you to know there is another perspective.
> the biggest difference is that those technologies were all on the downward slope of their popularity when Apple made the move
This was not the case when Apple pushed hard on USB as compared to other peripheral standards with the iMac in the late '90s.
Would you like to revise your priors concerning Apple products?
https://griffintechnology.com/us/collections/itrip/itrip-aux...
Get one of these instead: https://www.amazon.com/Aftershokz-Wireless-Stereo-Headphones...
Yes. It was fast and I was extremely happy with it when I bought it. After the update, its slow.
To spell it out - One code path is fast, one code path is slow. They chose to force the latter upon us, as part of an intentional decision. I wish I could go back to the previous iOS version which was not slow, but Apple, intentionally block that with their DRM. Things which were instantaneous are now sluggish, ruining my experience after spending like 700 dollars. I could have gotten the same experience with an under-powered android phone for $50. Thanks Apple.
>I feel sorry for you.
How sorry do you feel? I mean .. thanks for being condescending and all, but I was just curious.
Geekgench puts the 4S at 282 and the 6S at 2389 on single core performance.
> Higher scores are better, with double the score indicating double the performance.
https://browser.primatelabs.com/ios-benchmarks
That would imply that the 4S is running at least 8x slower than the latest hardware.
All you've done is agree with me. What was your point?
I'd say just a small amount. Don't worry, I've gotten over it.
For something like a card reader, you really want a device that plugs straight into the phone. If Square isn't able to build a Lightning reader just because Apple controls the port, that would be kind of irritating.
If you are talking about their new wireless headphones, It will probably have some delay but probably not even close to bluetooth. They could just modulate that same bytestream to some ghz radio frequency without adding anything remotely as over engineered and cumbersome as a bluetooth stack. I'm pretty sure those airpods are not bluetooth compatible.
Edit: From the official product page:
> Connections
> AirPods: Bluetooth
What about encryption?
Not to mention that Bluetooth doesn't use PCM because of battery life constraints (more radio traffic == more energy used), I doubt that Apple's protocol is uncompressed.
But I will say that Sennheiser is one of my favorite companies. I've purchased 5 different items from them over the past 7 years or so (HD 555, RS 180, MM 550-X, CS 686G, and the GAME ONE headset) and they all still work to this day with fantastic audio quality. I broke the MM 550-X, out of warranty and totally my own fault, and they still replaced them with a brand new set.
Are you saying that the feeling of pressure will stretch the eardrum or something?
I've been told that from an audio standpoint, the only difference between the 558s and the 598s is the bit of foam stuck to the inside of each can on the former. Supposedly removing this foam improves audio quality, although having done this with my home pair but not my work pair, I can't say I have noticed any difference other than perhaps that ambient sound is a little easier to hear without it. I also haven't noticed any difference between my 558s and a pair of 598s I once had the opportunity to try, thanks to a former manager who had a real thing about one-upmanship. So I'm not sure quite what you get for the extra $50 other than style. (Though the 598s are very stylish!)
http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/27/11516410/intel-usb-c-audio...
Apple really can't change ports again. I think they're really going to push for wireless. When they get wireless charging they'll remove the lightening port.
The second reason is that the physical USB-C connector is thicker than the Lightning connector. Not by much, but it really is; in fact, it's about as thick as...a 3.5mm headphone jack. Right then. (This is also why the wildcard option of putting both a Lightning connector and a USB connector on the phone was a non-starter.)
I know there's an argument to be made that it's all about the Benjamins, that Apple just wants licensing money and maybe to wave around the DRM boogeyman. Maybe, but I honestly think that's more of a happy bonus for them than an overriding consideration. They're control freaks who don't like to share with others, but they're regularly on board with non-proprietary standards when they think that's what makes a better product. Remember, they were one of the first major companies out of the gate with a USB-C (only!) computer, and Apple was involved with the design of the USB-C connector.
Wireless is a poor substitute for wired in most real-world usecases. Wireless gives you: unpredictable performance, latency, contention for available frequencies, and having to deal with batteries.
I think it's OK for wifi, only because most of the time the bandwidth of wifi is greater than the bandwidth of your ISP. But I think that's a problem with the state of ISPs, not a blessing of wifi.
Only games that I think have ever gotten this right (insofar as lag correction can be "right") is the Rock Band series, which has auto lag compensation via a photosensor and mic on the guitars.
I imagine the best rhythm game experiences will remain on crappy PCs running Windows XP Embedded for a while.
Apple's tech specs list them as bluetooth.
Seems to me it's a solved problem for most devices.
I'm talking about the ability to walk off an airplane, in any country in the world, and having forgotten both my charging cable and my charger, I can find a plain old USB port somewhere[1] and someone (possibly my hotel) can hand me a plain old USB cable and I can charge my (device).
[1] On my own laptop, preferably.
Also, hotels have cables.
Yes, there are parts of the world where the above does not hold, but did you really mean ANY country in the world?
At least they succeeded in being popular enough to be practical.
If I drop my phone on the ground screen first, I have an idea that it might not break, but it might break. If it doesn't, I'm happy it survived, and if it does I don't go out and sue Apple.
Same if my phone gets hit in a rain storm by a bunch of drops of water.
Yes, another proprietary connector no better at it's task than the equivalent industry standard connector.
I lose headphones like crazy, and I'm not an audiophile, so my average spend on headphones is under $20
Also $200 isn't that expensive when talking about headphones.
There are other similar models around the same price. You don't have to spend $100+ to get similar audio quality to $20 headphones that happen to have Bluetooth as well. Bluetooth chips are stupid cheap these days, pairing that with a small battery really doesn't add much to the cost of normal cheap headphone equipment and you'll find plenty of pairs <$40.
The headphone connector is already pressed close to breaking point in my pocket, I can't have something even bigger sticking out of the phone in a tight pocket.
It's not really clear to me what the issue is, though, since the dongle can just be treated as an extension to the headphone cable. If anything, it should be harder to break, because the headphone jack part is on a flexible cable, and the part that's attached to the phone is the fairly durable Lightning connector (whereas 3.5mm male connectors are often somewhat flimsy).
Doesn't sound like an Apple problem to me.
While I decry the drive towards "1mm slimmer!" do consider that the 3mm jack is probably around 10% battery capacity in space usage on most devices. You might not be able to perfectly reclaim the space, but still, I would always prefer to just use a wireless headset with 5%+ more battery.
All that said, I'm struggling to see the good side of Apple's decision to remove the 3.5mm jack. It'll make the phone worse in daily use for me - I won't be able to sit at my desk all day and charge my phone while listening to my existing, good headphones.
I mean, it's great for sound quality but downright dangerous when paying attention to your environment is critical.
Someone else being inattentive doesn't dismiss you from your responsibility.
> You really beleive that was intentional? Like there's some code there that says if running on 4S then run slow?
You:
> To spell it out - One code path is fast, one code path is slow
Intentionally designing new features for new devices and potentially screwing over old devices is _way_ different than having checks that say if (iPhone4S) { sleep(300) }
-------
The solution as the other poster replied is to not update your phone past 1 major version, even if apple lets you. The other solution is that Apple magically makes your processor 8x faster in a software update. At this point I don't even know what you're expecting.
My only experience with creating music electronically was with Fruity Loops back in the day, so that's what I had in my head. I figured it would be hard to manipulate something like that on such a small screen.
The iPad does seem more suited, as the other comment mentioned.
There are valid product reasons for moving away from the 3.5mm jack though, like adding a power line that allows you to make active noise-canceling headphones that don't require their own battery, or outputting to more than two (stereo) speakers over a single cable.
And there's no line-out, so you're effectively dual-amping any signal if you use an amplifier on the built-in 3.5mm jack.
In any case, I think they should have kept the onboard jack, and people who really care would continue to use external DAC/Amp stacks.
There are no winners in this game except for Apple, which can push more licenses and proprietary accessories.
There is no need to lock consumers into one way or another when there are already phones that can handle either!
You could already connect an off-board DAC to the iPhone pre-iPhone 7
Put differently, when the DAC is in the phone, you need to worry about two things in order to get good sound quality — the quality of the headphones and the quality of the phone. With a DAC in the headphone, you worry about only one.
There are plenty of waterproof phones with headphone jacks.
Waterproofing the headphone jack isn't more complicated than waterproofing the charging port.
Not to mention, they replaced the headphone jack with even more holes which also require sealing.
With that in mind removing the 3.5 jack does not make the phone sleeker you need to see the adapter as a part of the iPhone as the phone is mostly useless without it.
It's the exact same size as the 6s.
It may be a smart move in the end, but it's not obviously so at this point.
For example, I rooted my phone to find out if any wake locks were draining my battery. It didn't show anything. Looked at the battery usage screen, it didn't show the culprit. Eventually I had to do a science experiment on my phone and disable all background processing and then switch on apps one by one to see the battery life change.
I finally found it was my carrier's generic usage app that was killing my battery. The app was installed from the app store on my unlocked device, so it wasn't carrier pre-installed crapware that caused this.
On iOS, I've never had to do this because app developers are not able to drain your battery like that.
---
Camera software speed and quality has never been matched for me on iOS. Maybe motorola gets to iOS's camera speed. The software also makes getting good photos a lot easier with things like detecting your hand shake with the accelerometer and taking the photo when you're still in the moment.
Siri has better locked screen and in car voice interaction for me compared to android when I tried with android OS 5
---
If google disappeared, you would basically get china and other companies would fill in the gap.
The series of caveats there tells a tale of it's own. Google Now is so far ahead of Siri, there's simply no comparison... starting with the basic magic of automatic contextual updates and notifications without even asking ("Your flight has been delayed by 30 minutes", "Heavy traffic on 101. Leave in 10 minutes to reach your meeting on time" etc.)
Add to that almost perfect voice recognition with any accents in the world, automatic language recognition etc and all that backed up by Google search engine. Sorry, calling out Siri as a Apple's superior cloud service is simply not credible at this point.
For me, I only use voice in a car and some other basic cases, since it fails on the locked phone case for me, it's not that useful.
---
My basic issues with android:
1. A battery monitor that just works(tm) without playing science experiment. An OS that clamps down on apps to prevent it becoming an issue in the first place.
2. Faster & better camera software, quickly accessible from a locked screen, quick to start, helps me take photos without me realizing it.
3. A voice interface that works well when the screen is locked or occupied by another app, where it easily does things like:
a) Send & speak text messages
b) Control my music / podcasts
c) Change my GPS navigation.
4. An OS that really tries in security. Android is not as secure as iOS, as evidenced by the prices of jailbreaks.
5. An OS that will get updates on devices for years to come. Windows has being doing it for decades despite having similar hardware fragmentation, why can't android do it?
https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/how-to-see-whats-kil...
The difference is you don't have to play science experiment because you can clearly see what the cause is and how to shut it off. The android battery monitor is ineffective in comparison in my experience.
The incoherence of that response (China is not a company) should be a clue.
In china google play services don't really work due to the GFW, so everything is replaced with some local chinese equivalent. You have android without the google parts for the most part.
While this is a usage pattern familiar to HN'ers the average user doesn't care too much about cloud services.
Average users care more about things like camera, battery, music, playing games and overall ease of use.
The only critical Google service for iPhone users is search (and maybe Youtube). Both are available from the browser.
Umm don't know which world you're living in but Google Now/Search, Photos, Maps/Waze, Youtube, Gmail, Calendar, Hangouts, Drive.. etc. Pretty much every smartphone in the world is running one or more of those services on a daily basis.
Care to name one Apple cloud service that's so indispensable to that many users? Or perhaps, even just to iOS users?
I never said they weren't running one or more of those services. Of course they are. I said that aside from Search and Youtube they weren't critical.
But I also wasn't aware we're calling basic web search, email and other web applications that have been around for a decade or more "cloud services". When did that happen? I guess by that definition (everything is a cloud service!) then you're certainly right - cloud services are indeed very popular.
I'm particularly fond of IMAP "Cloud Email" or as it used to be called "email". That's a good one. There's also "Cloud Messaging" (I've been calling it "texting" but I guess I'm pretty old school).
>Care to name one Apple cloud service that's so indispensable to that many users? Or perhaps, even just to iOS users?
I'm not sure why you're trying to make this an Apple vs Google thing. That's not at all what I intended. But re-reading your original comment I see thats exactly the kind of thing you were trying to stir up. I'm not interested in that type of discussion. Not even a little bit. Goodbye.
I don't think the disappearance of Youtube app in it's current form would make any difference.
[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/8116/some-thoughts-on-apples-m...
[2] (slide 20) https://www.khronos.org/assets/uploads/developers/library/20...
I only ever programmed with OpenGL 1.3 and 1.4, so my knowledge is not very up-to-date to say the least...
The architectures are all based off Mantle, but OpenGL 3.3 and DX10 were very similar in their hay day, and porting was still fairly limited (you can still partially blame the horrible adoption of the 3.x series that took so long to take off).
Eventually Metal won't be used anymore since there's no point in using the less portable API with the same capabilities. Finally, once use of Metal is low enough, discontinue it in a new iOS/macOS update.
Upgrades with parallel maintenance and deprecation timelines are well understood, and very feasible for a company with Apple's engineering prowess. There's really no argument other than continued lock-in to stick with Metal only.
The pain is going to be that very few video games will be ported to OSX / iOS unless they dramatically increase their market size to justify the heavy cost to port to Metal just for those systems. If Apple cared about customers in this case, it would be an obvious choice to use Vulkan to pressure developers into using the industry standard rather than the Microsoft only product they are using predominantly now.
And sales is what will drive ports.
Bluetooth 4.0 really dropped power requirements for a lot of use cases. It's an adapting standard that's not sitting still by any stretch.
The current output of the USB port can vary from less than 1A to up to 2.4A at 5V which is not as much power. Some are so low that they're unable to charge the phone while its doing all those things. Since the iPhone 7 uses only one port for both power and audio/data out you're stuck with whatever the car manufacturer happened to provide in the USB port.
Let's face it, providing a robust USB port is not high on the priority list for car manufacturers. They probably have an intern throw that in as an afterthought and the primary purpose for it is transferring data, not power since every other device besides the iPhone has a separate port to provide power and doesn't usually rely on the USB.
Actually, it's not really about appearances for me. It's just that it wouldn't sit flat. Like a table with 1 leg that's an inch longer than the others at a shitty diner.
That said I'm very much not a fan of Motorola's attitude to security patching http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/07/motorola-moto-g-z-m... which is one reason for me to want to move off the platform.
I saw one of those at the store, but instead went for the Hamsung Falaxy. Then I went and got a sweet Magentbox TV.
Edit: no they're not, I was skimming the news too hard. Oops. Well I guess they're trying to fix the Bluetooth latency everyone is complaining about with their existing stuff then.
In a few years I'm sure Apple will find a wireless charging solution they like, and then they'll drop the Lightning connector as well. I cannot even begin to imagine the hue and cry that one's gonna cause.
Update: as noted below, they do use Bluetooth though that's not in the marketing pitch. They don't promise compatibility outside of Apple devices though so who knows if it's based on a standard profile.
But there is no 'other' open standard yet, although Intel and other vendors are pondering it [1].
This doesn't mean that HDMI or DisplayPort can't be shoehorned to do it and you can't carry those over the USB type-C plug, but they're meant for other things. This type of 'let's invent one that meets our needs slightly better than the 5 others' is what leads to standards proliferating (and I'll avoid linking the xkcd).
Are they? Because none of their computer nor laptops have a lightning connector.
Apple's NIH syndrome is exceedingly strong...and I say this being an Apple product guy.
The shit-show that has been owning a 6 Plus, the rapidly declining quality of OSX & its applications and now this has me quickly looking for the door.
Edit: And they're pushing iCloud hard now...to the point that I don't sign into it on my devices anymore. iOS nags me to create an iCloud Backup _every day_ and when the setting was (accidentally) automatic, a single backup filled all of my free iCloud storage space...which caused iOS to nag me into paying for more iCloud storage. I simply cannot stop it from sending push notifications.
Vulkan was announced first. Apple was even a part of the effort. Then they went off and did their own thing and withdrew from Vulkan and announced Metal.
As I see it, Apple took Vulkan ideas. Of course it was faster for them to create Metal because they didn't have to care about cross-platform and multi-party support.
No it wasn't. Khronos' own slides on Vulkan disprove this (slide 6) [1], saying they began the effort in June 2014. Apple announced Mantle to the public that month.
[1] https://www.khronos.org/assets/uploads/developers/library/20...
Announced, didn't release.
In the same presentation as you linked, on slide 9, you can see Apple was a part of the Vulkan effort. The subsequently withdrew from Vulkan, before releasing Metal.
Lightning only operates at USB 2 speeds. Well, except for the large iPad Pro.
Oh, and it requires an authentication chip so has to be approved by Apple (not overly 'usable', but definitely proprietary).
I used the word 'usability' to attempt to imply UX, and I was deliberately avoiding commenting on speed, features, DRM, and the like, because those aren't delivered by USB type-C, which is only the plug. As you imply, those points are addressed by the jump from USB 2 to USB 3.0 or the type-C-compatible USB 3.1.
Source? The entire industry as far as I can tell still uses HLS as the only mobile streaming tech, whether within or beyond the Apple ecosystem. HLS won. If DASH is going to take over, I haven't seen any evidence of that yet, and don't expect to in the near future.
Getting rid of the headphone port would have been better if the alternative port was USB-C rather than Lightning.
Awful
It does look like you've shoved a cigarette in your ear.
"The technical engine behind it is better, but the UX for using it on a locked phone isn't good"
The OK Google thing on completely locked device has been working on Moto phones (and later Nexus devices) way before hands-free "Hey Siri" thing became generally usable on untethered iPhone 6s last year (at long last).
And calling the incredible functionality of Google Now as "better technical engine" is quite an understatement. If iOS had this service integrated behind it, the entire world would be plastered with TV ads 24x7 calling out this "Magical" experience. Instead Apple's best effort is Siri, which works so well that this entire subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/Siri/) is mostly devoted to Siri's hilarious fuck-ups. That's the reason you don't really see much marketing about Siri anymore. Instead the focus has shifted mostly on hardwares... especially the camera (which is indeed amazing).
Car crash standards are okay, because the car always crumples, and they don't make promises like "you can crash a car at up to X pressure and the crash will not penetrate and cause damage". If a company was parading third-party lab results showing an immunity to 10mph collisions vs. walls, their warranty has no place excluding 5mph collisions vs. walls.
> Also $200 isn't that expensive
But forcing a $200 purchase is. Your parent already has good headphones they like, has had them for years, and none of those headphones needs replacing because they broke down or are obsoleted. The $200 purchase your parent mentions is because of Apple obsoleting something.
It absolutely is. Is it more common now than a few years ago? Yep. But it's still expensive, especially when there are excellent options below $50 and serviceable ones around $4-5.
If they provide excellent sound over BT, maybe they're worth the $200 (160?), but they'd still be expensive.
Security+convenience+waterproofing are the key characteristics for me and the iPhone hits those fairly well (now).
I've tried various androids but from what I've seen of their security/update policies the only way to get a good level is either use a nexus device or manage OS patches/upgrades yourself, even there I think that Android is still some way behind iOS on the security front.
[1] http://www.usb.org/developers/docs/devclass_docs/audio10.pdf
[2] http://www.usb.org/developers/docs/devclass_docs/frmts10.pdf
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_connector_(audio)#TRRS_s...
http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMX62AM/A/lightning-to-35-...
That certainly does help alleviate the pain.
But, seriously, it comes with the territory. Some people are okay with it. Some people are not. Both are fine. I don't really understand why it gets so far up people's noses either way.
It may be that from many people's point of view, the user experience is comparable and/or better. But it's accomplished using a fundamentally different mechanism. I wanted better apples; even if some oranges are tasty too.
https://sixcolors.com/post/2016/09/what-to-look-for-at-wedne...
The adapter that comes in the box is the proverbial drug dealer's "first one" that's always free.
Imagine getting a $4 royalty on every pair of iPhone-compatible headphones that's sold in the world. That's worth a lot of free adapters in the short run.
Just as a first-order estimate: Forbes says that annual worldwide sales of headphones are $300M. If the average price of headphones is around 20 bucks (taking into account there are a small number of very expensive headphones but also a lot of cheap ones, that's probably high), that's something in the neighborhood of 15M pairs sold per year. If half of those become Lightning-connector equipped, that's $30M/year in revenue (on costs of zero!) going to Apple.
The connector could make the phone substantially worse as a phone and it still might be worthwhile. There doesn't need to be a compelling technical reason.
[1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/theopriestley/2016/01/11/apple-d...
The risks are so staggering that I would think they must genuinely believe that the jack connector is so technically obsolete that it makes the iPhone worse than the iPhone will be without it. I just can't fathom Tim Cook (or anyone) betting 100 billions for $30M/year. Of course I can be completely wrong.
[1] http://www.statista.com/statistics/263402/apples-iphone-reve...
Tim Cook's Apple is all about grabbing extra small amounts of cash from users. e.g MacBook being unable to use USB devices or HDMI displays without a $90 dongle
2- do you seriously think a company with a $515B market cap is doing this solely for the financial reason of adding a $30M/yr revenue stream? If Apple TV was considered "a hobby" for years the wired headphone market is... I don't even know. A momentary flash of color?
Can't the reason be exactly what Apple said? Wired headphones using an analog connection kind of suck. wired headphones with a smart connection are a little better because power and noise cancellation or other "smarts" don't have to all be bolted on to the earphones, but honestly still kind of crappy because of wires.
Clearly Apple thinks that wireless audio is the future but today wireless kind of sucks as well (pairing, moving between devices). Apple thinks it can make that better. So if in their view that is the future why would they waste energy and time and space on a 2nd dedicated IO port for audio?
I use my headphones for:
-Listening to the environment while PC Gaming using a Windows PC
-Listening to records using my stereo
-Listening to music while working on my Macbook Pro
-Listening to music while being mobile w/ iPhone 6
-Listening to music while driving in my car (audio jack works faster with less interruptions then USB)
The big win of 3.3mm audio jack is they work with all these different systems and use-cases. There is nothing to lose, nothing to think about. Plug and Play. Dead simple. Dumb analog.
Now to fully cover all my uses cases I have 2 more things to carry around with me full time, and not lose. Not a simplification, buying a Nexus. Steve Jobs is dead.
See http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMEF2AM/A/airpods, then scroll down to "Tech Specs".
Connections
AirPods: BluetoothHow they pair with non-Apple gear is yet to be seen, but the connection is BT.
Update: CNET is providing a little more on this, looks like they will be compatible (but without any buttons on them, it may not be a great experience):
http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-intros-totally-wireless-airpo...
> They all work with Apple's new proprietary W1 chip that's being described as a custom chip that uses ultra low-power Blueooth and keeps the two earbuds in sync. CNET reporter Shara Tibken spoke to Apple reps who confirmed the headphones will work with other Bluetooth devices, not just the new iPhones
Have a source for that? That they claim it works with existing Macs kind of implies that it uses Bluetooth.
When your[1] answer to a dongle problem is "add more dongles", you really need to rethink the situation.
1. The generic "you", not specifically you, Phillip.
Why does this matter? Because I can still have my phone's audio going to the car by way of an AUX cable.
There are lighter-plug Bluetooth receivers that have an analog out specifically for cars, I'll likely have to buy one of I end up getting the 7.
Edit: also in the car (I have an older car with just an AUX jack).
maybe they'll make a lightning hub/splitter so you can do both?
Hopefully with the improved power features of the new CPU, the amount of time when you want to simultaneously listen and charge is reduced.
(Sarcasm)
Which is to say, this may very well be true, but the lack of third-party devices with lightning ports can also easily be explained as just nobody wants to do that.
[1] http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/183567-apple-unveils-metal...
[2] http://appadvice.com/appnn/2014/09/unveiled-at-wwdc-2014-for...
iPhone users will always prefer iPhones for something.
> Android Kit-Kat is solid
The S7 doesn't ship with Kit-Kat, does it? I think it has always shipped with at least Marshmallow
I'd rather the jack, however.
You should look up what symmetry means.
When in use, sure.
When not in use, then it becomes an extra item to carry / keep around.
> the fairly durable Lightning connector (whereas 3.5mm male connectors are often somewhat flimsy)
Citation needed. Actually, since the 3.5mm port is deeper, and the 3.5mm jack thicker, physics says the same amount of force would be better spread out via 3.5 connections than via a shorter, thinner connection as Lightning.
When not in use, why not just keep it attached to the headphones?
> Citation needed.
Uhh, personal experience? I've certainly bent my share of 3.5mm plugs, but I've yet to hear of anyone actually bending their lightning cable plug.
> […] physics says the same amount of force would be better spread out via 3.5 connections […]
This is a specious argument. Physics does not say this at all, because you haven't defined the materials you're working with. If the lightning connector and the 3.5mm plug are made out of the same material, and the 3.5mm plug is completely solid, then you could make this argument. But in my experience 3.5mm plugs are not made out of material that's as durable as the material lightning cable plugs are made from, and 3.5mm plugs also often give the impression of being hollow inside. Sure, you can probably make an extremely durable plug, and I'd guess that more expensive headphones probably have more durable plugs than cheaper headphones, but regardless I don't think you really have to worry about bending your lightning connectors.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12447431
> Uhh, personal experience? I've certainly bent my share of 3.5mm plugs, but I've yet to hear of anyone actually bending their lightning cable plug.
And in personal experience, I have never once damaged a 3.5mm plug, despite extreme rough use (and I mean the "extreme"). Can't say I have bent / never bent a lightning plug though, since I've never used an iPhone.
I won't go wireless. The last thing I want is another battery to manage, and I do care about music quality. I always saw the iphone as an ipod with internet. I stashed a spare iphone 6s so I don't need to change my habits for another 1-3 years. Then I guess I will have to learn how to use my phone again by switching to Android.
I'd be curious if the 6s starts trading at a premium to the 7. That was the case of the Galaxy Tab 1 at one point, bigger screen, better battery, looks like people preferred it to the Galaxy Tab 2.
> I do care about music quality
It seems that AirPods aren't bluetooth but are instead something else. I'd expect the audio quality to be better than bluetooth. But I guess we have to wait until people have actually tried them out to determine how good it is.
> Then I guess I will have to learn how to use my phone again by switching to Android.
I do not believe for a second that you're going to actually change platforms simply to have an audio jack without a dongle. I bet in 1–3 years you're going to realize that there's a plethora of lightning headphones to choose from, along with an adaptor that lets you use headphones and charge simultaneously, and you'll stop thinking about this change as a problem.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/6FT-Genuine-Apple-iPod-Dual-USB-Fire...
This is the wireless future they're talking about. We shouldn't have to have a device to charge and listen through at the same time. We should charge wired and listen "wirelessly" (even if the audio device is wired for power).
The only justication I see for it is that they're trying to unite the touch interface gestures of their Macbooks and phones.
Are you... trying to imply I don't know what symmetry means? Unbelievable!
> How can it be symmetrical with a 3.5mm port? Does it have two of them?
You couldn't look it up yourself?
Put one 3.5mm port on the centerline at the top of the device, and the microUSB port on the centerline at the bottom of the device. There.
(The stupid option is to lift the ground on your mains adapter, but you really shouldn't do that, somebody might get killed.)
Sounds like another dongle to me! The last half of your sentence contradicts the first half.
Found a good example here: http://www.techinsider.io/why-the-s7-camera-is-better-than-i...
Search for 'bokeh'.
2. I wasn't the one worried. You were, when you said "3.5mm male connectors are often somewhat flimsy".
Am I that weird?
So any time I'm going to be out long enough to have to theoretically carry full kit for my phone (in a hypothetical multiple-dongle world), I'm also going to have that bag with me, or some equivalent object for carrying things (i.e., extended outings not involving going to work), and not have to stuff everything in my pockets.
Apparently this is weird enough to be downvoted into negative-score territory.
I had never thought of it being a significant cultural difference.
Wouldn't the dongle just be permanently attached to your headphones ?
Or that my headphones are always used with just iPhones.
Basically, no more plug-and-play. This is exactly why 3.5mm was good: universal plug-and-play.
That said, their vision for the world to go 100% wireless is absolutely right. However, I don't think their execution is great in this area. Their AirPods don't hold a long enough charge quite yet and they are highly susceptible to being lost. Also, while I think Bluetooth has many many problems, I wish Apple spent time improving that standard instead of introducing their own standard.
Or a simple analog jack would work too.
A little dogbone shaped white silicone thing would look a lot nicer than duct tape.
I think you already realize both of those things.
The primary issue is interchangeability. In the event you leave your earbuds at home. Borrowing a friend's, or purchasing an additional set is a simple. This is nolonger a simple solution.
But more to your point, the adapter would belong with the phone not with the headphones. There are potentially N number of headphones, and one phone for which the adapter will be used. So the adapter being carried with the phone instead of N adapters for N headsets makes more sense.
Personally, I'm going to hold on to the 6s for as long as it's usable and then consider my options.
The funny thing is, they made a huge deal about catering to runners in the watch presentation. In the offseason I run about 20 to 30 miles per week, and I can tell you bluetooth headphones suck for running. They fall out easily as soon as I start sweating. Also, during training season the headphones will run out of juice if I don't remember to plug them in. They also drain the phone's battery - on a 30 minute run that's no problem, but on a 2-hour run that sucks. The best earphones are over the head, light-weight ones I can tuck under my cap whcih keeps them in place.
Oh well, maybe on the 8 they have a change of heart. And if they don't... there's always OpenMoko
Edit: In previous version I accidentally said Samsung Headphones.
Personally, I could never run with corded headphones again. I've used Motorola S8/S9 forever. Get last gen for $30-40, and they've held up to years of sweat.
In finding a link for you though, I see the price has become outrageous as they've apparently been discontinued :(.
I find it's the wire that goes first, probably from all the twisting and tangling that happens day to day. At 5x the cost I could see wireless ones being cheaper, long term.
I still wouldn't want to muck about with batteries, etc though.
I vastly prefer bluetooth for working out, but I am incredibly sceptic about the sound quality from that lightning adapter.
I mean, Apple's justification is that they are being courageous in pushing the world towards their vision of the future, which is wireless. Ignoring, for the moment whether this is a valid vision, how does a courageous move towards this future involve bundling not one, but 2 wired options with the phone?
I'm fairly certain I would have been unhappy with the decision to drop the headphone jack no matter what, but couching it as courage has taken me from unhappiness to screw them.
All I wanted was them to tell me what great benefit that space in the case being free brought me, be it more battery, waterproofing, more processing power. But what did I get? I got told they were doing it because they hate wires and it's a courageous thing to do, like I'm supposed to applaud them for that. No solid justification for it at all.
For years I have used my headphones in my iPhone on the way to work then as soon as I get to work I plug them into my laptop.
Now I have a choice of: - switching over the BT (gonna be fun pairing and unpairing when I arrive and leave work) - using my same headphones and carrying a dongle having the dongle rattling around my desk during the day, then taking the dongle with me for the trip home - buying two pairs of headphones with one that ONLY works with the iPhone
None of these are good solutions.
https://www.amazon.com/Nike-HJ020-headphones-Discontinued-Ma...
For bicycling, I am mainly on bike paths but when I have to enter traffic for a bit, I would never, ever ride with any kind of ear bud or closed headphones. The Flite design has gentle pressure pushing the phones against my ears, for a very open design that keeps me aware of what is happening around me. They are very stable, resting on the back of my neck, even while running. I don't remember them every falling off from exercise.
The original Flite headphones were somewhat overpriced, and lasted about a year before they failed. The Chinese clones moved in and the price collapsed. I bought a batch of ten knockoffs for $17 a few years ago, and they still last a year or so.
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=sport+headphones+behind+...
http://www.consumerreports.org/smartphones/samsung-galaxy-s7...
http://www.jlabaudio.com/products/epic2-bluetooth-wireless-s...
Not sure if you've seen or tried these.
My connectivity has been fine while running, and always surprises me in the gym. I leave my phone in my gym bag now and range is no problem if I'm super setting exercises and moving to different equipment. These are my first and only pair of BT headphones, and they spoiled me to the point where I'll never go back to wired for exercising.
Besides, no BT headset would relieve the battery problems.
For me something like this works really well: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QHOCTG6/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_goh0...
Just put my hat over them and they are firmly held in place.
http://www.plantronics.com/us/product/backbeat-fit (cheaper on Amazon).
Just another option to add to the list.
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Motorola-SF600-Wireless-Sports-Headph...
Edit: More like in the 80s.
With that said, I don't actually disagree with taking the headphone jack out. I do think there needs to be a more universal replacement than what they are suggesting though.
It's mostly the fact that it was replaced with the lightning port that gets to me more than anything else. If it was something like USB-C, I'd feel more comfortable since that should be more widely available in time.
The software platform Apple has built is unrivaled.
Too afraid to test it myself though.
This race to thin phones with unusable battery life reminds me to the race to more and more mega pixels in digital cameras with unusable low exposition quality some years ago. It's just about the buzz, it just hinders the technology in order to be able to tell a more catchy number to consumers.
I would happily go with a 33% thicker iPhone with great battery life and a headphone jack and I doubt that most of the people would notice the difference in size.
Oddly enough, the main complaint I had about it was that because it was so flush and shiny, it slid around too much on a table. Had to put a protective film on which was a bit more grippy.
I'm guessing that the average consumer has no idea what an f-stop is, or that having a maximum lens aperture of f/1.8 is any better than f/5.6 or f/16. And the people who do know probably also know that for a lens and sensor that are maybe a quarter of an inch wide, a bump in the maximum aperture is not going to make the camera perform anywhere near a dedicated camera, so the focus on that detail is a bit odd to me.
This looks like another method to lock in the consumer to their eco system and or squeeze that extra buck out of them. Not so much about shrinking in size or technology.
IMO this is nothing more than selling and controlling peripherals that can play with iphone and drm.
Edit: Why the heck am I being downvoted for this? I'm not even expressing an opinion as to whether I think the jack should have been removed or not.
All in all. I'll wait a year for 7s to replace my 6s if nothing else worthy and working out of the box comes out.
>This confuses me too. The camera wart is ridiculous, and I bet if they made the device just that slight bit thicker they'd have room to retain the 3.5mm jack.
I hate that they removed the 3.5 but if you assume that people are using a case then camera wart does not really make the phone any thicker.
So tired of this argument in defence of the wart, people use a case because of the wart and then this is used to justify the wart "everyone uses a case"
Wouldn't surprise me if iPhone 9 was wireless only. Somehow.
what annoys me more is that most advancements are only for the 'plus' size model. that's the easy way out of the tech race, and I was just hoping that they brought feature parity with an updated SE model
so far I see no good replacement for my 5s except the previous year SE, but I'm not the one to spend that money on two year old hardware.
The animation when loading the page made that bulge almost phallic. That phone appears like an erection, growing up and up...
It's almost certainly only in my mind though.
I recall Apple having a patent on a manufacturing process to bond a small aluminum region around the headphone jack to a case made of something harder, so maybe the headphone jack was causing problems in advancing case materials?
If an opening for a 3.5mm jack was an issue for some future design, so would all of the other holes (esp. the lightning port).
I'll never use the lighting dongle and I don't use corded buds/headphones now so I will literally not feel a difference in that respect. I only listen to audiobooks, podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify on the phone, so I'm not exactly getting the greatest audio I could be anyway.
However, having increased dust and water protection are something I'm very happy to get if it improves the longevity of the device. I don't really care too much about it getting that much thinner either, but I'm happy with making the phone more physically robust if they can.
Moreover, if you want to play a song from your phone through your stereo and want the best sound possible, you'd use a digital connection versus an analog one.
And what about the battery life? Don't you care about that either? Or do you even recognize it's a critical issue for many people? It just sounds like you're desperately defending an Apple product at all costs.
Really? How long do you keep your phones for? 2 years, tops? I've never damaged a phone I've owned, let alone rendered one unusable because of either dust or water.
This will have no appreciable effect on the life of the product for me.
I can't imagine iPhone line continue this way for next 5-10 years. They need to get into something new fast. VR, AR etc.
My boss said something today concerning Apple that is relevant to this. After hearing Warren Buffet bought a bunch of APPL.
"Apple isn't a technology company anymore, they're consumer goods, so that's an understandable choice."
People say they want lots of battery life, but slimmer devices consistently outsell thicker ones.
What a coincidence.
The camera bump on the 6S is ~1mm high. 30% more battery capacity in that amount of space seems optimistic.
I guess if they make battery last 30% longer, then you won't be forced to change a phone in 2-3 years when battery starts deteriorating and it is bad for business.
Apple gets royalties from the production of Lightning connectors, which they certainly don't from standard 1/8th-inch TRS jacks. So therefore, they have a very obvious and vested interest in killing off standardized connectors and pushing everything to proprietary connectors, for which they receive royalties, whenever possible.
> This is the cry of people who desperately want to love a company unconditionally
Insulting people is not how you win arguments.
Edit: Seriously guys, what's with the downvotes? I feel like I'm being brigaded at this point.
Must be magic, if Apple hasn't trademarked that already.
FWIW this is what I use, and I buy 3-4 pairs at a time, about once per year: https://www.amazon.com/Philips-SHS3200BK-37-Flexible-Headpho...
Maxell HB-202 Stereo Head Buds https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00006JPRQ/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_32k0...
Sounds like you didn't actually watch the video. 1) AirPods don't use Bluetooth. 2) Connecting them is super simple; just hold them close to the device and tap OK. And you only have to do it once per family of devices associated via iCloud.
Plus, Apple always promises the new iPhone will fix everything you didn't like about the previous one and people eat that up.
This would be perfect for me - headphone cables and wheelchair wheels do not mix.
http://www.shure.com/americas/products/earphones/se-earphone...
Maybe I'll regret it but my next phone (and last iPhone) might be an SE.
It turns out the important dimensions are the overall width (for being able to hold it one handed) and the screen height (to reach everywhere with your thumb), and the iPhone SE's top and bottom bezels don't screw up either of those.
With the Z3C you can hold it one handed, but you can't use it effectively unless you have gigantic hands. Making a phone fit in one hand isn't enough; if the entire face is covered with screen then it still takes two hands to operate it.
You mean those stupid plastic flaps with the gaskets that came unglued and prevented the flaps from even closing properly?
http://stellatech.com/pubs/uploads/54c8de18efd94.jpg
And after marketing it as an underwater camera, they later backpedaled and said "waterproofing was tested in a standby state under laboratory conditions, do not attempt to use the phone underwater"?
http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/sony-don-t-use-waterproof...
Waterproofing, maybe. Top notch waterproofing, absolutely not.
This. Girlfriend had that phone. The device and their after-sales service was completely garbage. Sony failed to repair the unplugging flaps, even after multiple service attempts. And every single time, they did complete factory reset on the phone to replace the flaps (!!!).
My phone flaps are fine, but I charge it using the magnetic connector, so I rarely open them.
That's why I listed magnetic charging as a key feature ;)
My last Android (Samsung Galaxy Nexus) had AWFUL battery life (3,700 mAh battery, btw) and I had a couple of spare batteries with me at all times. My iPhone 6S+ gets me from 0500 to bedtime nearly every night without a charge throughout the day. According to the release notes I should expect another hour of battery life with the iPhone 7, so it's not like they took things away and decreased the battery life.
For me, and that's all that matters in MY buying decisions, better durability and extended battery life at the cost of a port that I have never used on this phone are an unequivocal upgrade.
There was never a Galaxy Nexus with 3700mAh battery.
A shame actually, for me it was the perfect phone. The curved screen, just the right size, the textured back and (I think) headphone on the top.
I agree, I used to go through a few pairs of cheap headphones a month when marathon training, but once I stopped buying the $10 variety (wired and bluetooth, you can get OK ones on Amazon for $20) and got closer to the $100 range, I've had those for more than a year. Definitely a self-fulfilling prophecy. You get what you pay for.
http://www.idropnews.com/2016/09/21/10-alternatives-to-apple...
But I agree, that staying under $30 is key!
I've probably spent a hundred bucks on fifteen pairs of Philips over the years. And they're cheap enough that I can keep a pair in my bag, a pair in my house, and a pair in my car. Most of my listening is podcasts. They sound fine for that.
In contrast, I only have one pair of noise canceling Bose headphones which cost 3x as much as all the Philips put together. They sound great and are wonderful for the train to work, but they were also very expensive and I don't run with them.
Headphones are a very personal product, from fit to use case, which explains why many people are having strong reactions here. All we each have are anecdotes. Meanwhile, design and tech march on.
I would guess most people are okay using their phone during the day and charging at night.
My phone's about 3 years old now. Even when it was new, I couldn't use it indiscriminately and expect a full day of charge. If I want to have it available for critical purposes like emergency calls, it's literally not usable in the way that I'd like to use it. I don't think that it's even remotely unreasonable to advocate for better battery life, and I think it's only a slight exaggeration to call current phone battery life "unusable".
At least in the iPhone ecosystem it's not so much best option available, it's the only option available.
There's no immediate danger of people not buying iPhones because they want better battery life, so Apple doesn't even have to try harder than an average show of effort.
My iPhone 2G had better battery life than this given similar usage patterns. Sure you can cite LTE vs. 2G and processor ability etc, but battery life made the modern(-ish) phone less useful to me under what I consider are not that strenuous of conditions. This is a real problem, and battery life will definitely be a major consideration to the next phone I buy.
Small sensors are getting better. I am shocked at how good the image quality is on my RX100 (with a "one inch" sensor; one inch refers to the size of vacuum tube that would contain such a sensor if it were 1960 or something, no dimension is anywhere near one inch). I'm not going to give up 4x5 for it, but it's way better than a phone.
That said, the camera bump is ugly. Why can't they use a telephoto design (your 500mm SLR lens isn't 500mm long, remember).
It's a look Nikon used to have ten or so years ago, and to me it suggests over-aggressive noise removal.
To be fair it's very good for a tiny camera, and amazing considering the state of the art ten years ago.
But I wonder if it's starting to fall into uncanny valley: the closer it gets to pro performance, the more obvious it becomes that it's not there yet.
They did mention that you'll be able to capture raws with the iPhone camera now, which will hopefully alleviate some of that.
They are, but they will also hit a physical wall at some point (if not already), and you'll continue trading "natural" dynamic range and low noise for software interpolated dynamic range and smoothing, which as others have noted, starts looking like Madame Tussaud's museum.
Then again, if Apple really wanted to impress me with their camera skills they would have to develop a medium format mirrorless digital camera for less than $5k. One can dream, I suppose.
At $159, they only need to sell 15000 to reach $2mm in sales.
Unless you thought I meant units. I definitely think millions of units is possible, if Apple continues selling hundreds of millions of iPhones. But it's not just AirPods sales. Apple makes a few dollars with every lightning device that is sold. So essentially, even if those hundreds of millions of iPhone devices don't lead to sales of millions of Airpods, they will lead to sales of 10s of millions of Lightning headphones. Which means tens of millions of free dollars for Apple.
Here's the other thing though. If Apple does not expect to sell millions of Airpods, then the whole "Courage, because the future is wireless" justification falls apart, because if not even 1% of the headphones being sold are Airpods, it's likely the future is not wireless.
I don't think they make design decisions on that basis
Researchers have not come to a definite conclusion about how much EM waves can be related to diseases, but they haven't denied it either. And one thing is obvious: long-term exposure to EM radiation cannot be good, no matter how much low-power it is.
Apple (and other Bluetooth headphone companies) are building on a presumption that EM waves are not harmful, and even if they are, lawyers can easily close the case for Apple.
forcing you by including wired headphones in the box and wired headphone adapters in the box and not even having the bluetooth headphones available at release date? That kind of forcing?
long-term exposure to EM radiation cannot be good, no matter how much low-power it is.
You realise that wires radiate E/M as well, right? And that light is 'electromagnetic waves'? and that radiant heat is too?
Yes, Apple has included those wired headphones, too. But don't forget that the focus henceforth is on "wireless" headphones, about which I wrote my concerns.
You can ignore the facts and go on and just "trust" these companies, or you can read for yourself and realize that not every new technology is inherently good for your health.
Basically, pixels are so small these days that even tiny amount of camera motion is going to blur a point of light between two pixels. I'm not sure how much that matters, but I think it does. So you can't make the sensors small and increase the detail you get. 20MP is the best you are going to do with full-frame, much less APS-C or 1" or iPhone size. Maybe image stabilization fixes all of this.
I took some photos on an airplane of a lightning storm today with a 1" sensor camera. ISO 5000, .5 second exposure hand-held, and they're pretty sharp. Not portfolio sharp, but good enough for some Internet Points probably. My iPhone did not do well, however. (I tried that first, then realized, hey I have a better camera with me.)
[0]: http://www.accountingcoach.com/blog/what-does-m-and-mm-stand...
Not really true anymore. Android (while drinking Google Koolaid) is an amazing platform. I bet for most users (in terms of apps and basic phone features), there is really no justification to get an iPhone over an Android.
Android's great. You just have to spend an incredible amount of time researching the gigantic ecosystem and all the permutations of hardware and software to figure out which phone actually has the combination of good/responsive enough hardware, support for things you want to do, and comes with a recent version of the OS and magic proprietary Google bits. Then once you've put in the time doing that, the ecosystem has moved on and the phone that would have been correct to buy when you started now isn't and will probably never be updated again, because in the Android world anything that's been on the market more than three weeks is an ancient obsolete toy.
I don't understand why more people don't want to join that ecosystem!
Android is approachable and slick now a days (and yes I remember when it was utter crap :) )
iOS is just a better platform.
Going to have to disagree.
There are no redeeming qualities for Android. From a sloppy, disjointed user experience to an incredibly shady app store, Android doesn't compare to iOS.
That's not to say iOS doesn't have issues. It certainly does, but in terms of comparability it's not even a contest.
Luckily for Android many people really don't care about design.
I found Apple's flat UI design to be very awkward, especially things like the decision to use text labels with hidden bounding boxes as "buttons".
Apps tended to have inconsistent UI language, and I frequently found myself surprised by UI interactions that weren't discoverable, like the speed setting in Pocket Casts. It was a flat element - if you tapped it, it would toggle between preset values, but if you long-pressed it, it would pop up a weird slider. But there's no feedback from the UI.
On Android, I find that UI elements are much more likely to provide visual feedback - tapping elements produces an animation, long-pressable elements show proggessive animation, etc. For example, the Pocket Casts app on Android's speed setting actively animates when touched, and pulls up a standard settings dialog with intuitive sliders and checkboxes.
And I can't tell you how many times I would attempt to open an app link only to have it open in a web browser with a giant banner telling me to install the app I already have.
I like multiple app stores, and multiple vendors to buy apps from. I like downloading program source and building an apk from it. I like having a terminal app and a file manager. I like running an ssh server to get files on/off the phone. I like using the phone as an oversized USB flash drive, and not having to install a vendor's software to do it (and not caring which OS I'm booted into at the time).
iOS is pretty, well-thought-out, performant, predictable, and the best ecosystem on it isn't produced by a tarted-up advertising firm. It has a lot to recommend it...but I'll still take the tangled nest of features over the carefully pruned garden, because I don't always agree with the decisions of the gardener, and I like to have other options.
>>Luckily for Android many people really don't care about design.
Not only iOS tops the software platform charts but it has superior design. Facts! Goodness, I was the impression being fanboi was out of fashion.
As for your comment on user experience/design, I realize we're entering the realm of subjectivity here. All I can say is the latest Androids are _beautiful_ with Material Design.
As a dev. platform I'd take Android any time (and steer clear from obj c)
https://www.plantronics.com/us/product/backbeat-fit
But now I just wear them all the time, as they're so convenient. Can take calls on them, they have a remote on them, they also just scrunch up in to a pocket. Battery lasts at least all day, for me, anyway.
And as they don't enclose the ear canal (which could be a good thing for maintaining awareness of ones surroundings) it can leave them ineffective for anything other than very quiet environments.
Two BT headsets will. I buy cheap Chinese ones for $20.
What bugs me about the iPhone 7 is that I expected if Apple was removing the headphone jack that they would add USB type C and Bluetooth 5 instead of the same-old lightning port and 4.2. In fact, it looks like there's more than one model of iPhone again, and the 6S' support for both CDMA and GSM appears to be a fluke, or they couldn't do it in time with the new antenna design. Unless I'm reading the iPhone LTE specs page incorrectly...
I actually carry three: the one I use every day, the spare for that one, and the other one that's more comfortable but lacks the volume for use during my commute.
This is not a big deal if you carry a satchel or purse or backpack or pretty much anything bigger than the pockets in your clothing; all three of them, plus charge cables and manuals, fit in a hard-sided case that's about the size of a can of Skoal, and which very conveniently came with the first Bluetooth earpiece I bought. If I didn't have such a preference for entirely in-ear monaural models, they'd take up a little more space, but only a little.
It's totally doable and not even inconvenient - this latter, in particular, not something which can fairly be said of wires.
Hmm. Interesting.
If Apple wants to continue pushing into the jewelry and personal-accessory business, this suggests an obvious direction. They tend to be good at making unfashionable things fashionable.
> Connections
> AirPods: Bluetooth
> Charging Case: Lightning connector
Thanks.
The point is that the battery didn't last even a full day.
All these gimmicks and breakthroughs don't mean shit, make a phone that lasts 3 days and that will be a game changer.
Oh, I completely agree with that. It's more that I have an iPhone 5S that I replaced the battery in and it lasts for about 24 hours with my usage patterns -- would I love more? Heck yes I would! A phone not making it through from morning to evening though implies that it's likely a dying battery, as the iPhone 5S should last longer than that.
I seem to recall hearing that was because people most often carry their phones upside-down in their pockets, in order more quickly to bring them up to viewing position when retrieving them. (Think about it: Your hand goes fingers-down into your pocket, but viewing position has the top of the phone alongside your fingertips, so if you pocket your phone upside-down, you don't have to rotate it around the Z axis to get it into position before you can use it.)
No idea whether that's actually the case, or whether instead it was something to do with easier component placement or the like. But as far as just-so stories go, it's not a bad one.
Of course apple and their legion will claim it as an innovation.
Do we really need that last sentence? Is this perhaps not already divisive enough a subject for anyone?
Then he realized why they do it, and now I know zero people who store it right-side up.
> it is more naturally of a movement to pull it out of my pocket that way.
How is that more natural than simply landing your hand on the phone in the position that it will be holding it? I'm having trouble seeing this as a matter of opinion.
Why not? They did just moved it to the bottom just as frivolously.
They're both the same level of difficulty.
Still feel Apple completely dropped the ball with iOS7, just ambiguous tappable text labels everywhere... now we're at a point where it's been there so long without fixing they just take it for granted that it "works" when it's really poor.
Spent 10 minutes on the phone to my mom once trying to find out how to search in the app store. She couldn't see the search box… turns out it's because 2 months ago she searched for BBC iPlayer and the search text still read "BBC iPlayer" in light grey with a tiny light grey magnifying glass next to it. Doesn't even look like a search box.
One of my ex-collegues is now working for one of the android-phone manufactures and by his words the whole process of creating the the new device is basically trying make shit work good enough to pass Google's tests (something is going wrong with hardware? fuck it, we'll fix it in software later), then releasing a bunch of patches, then new phone, because nobody will ever invest their time into makeing the currect device to work with new Google's test. It just won't.
2.) Reach into your pocket with your left hand.
3.) Grab the phone by edges near the top between your thumb and middle finger.
4.) Lift upward while rotating your wrist counter-clockwise. The phone should swivel between your two fingers while coming to rest right side up in the palm of your hand.
It is an entirely fluid motion that does not require flipping the phone over since pulling it out upside down results in the screen facing away into the palm of your hand.
That's very reasonable. Conversely, my iPhone does everything I want out of a pocket phone, and the Androids I've tried have not.
A sysadmin buddy of mine thinks it's awesome that, when a process spins out of control and pegs his phone's CPU, he can drop right into a root shell and kill it from top. I think it's awesome that in five years and two iPhone models, that's not something I've ever needed to think about doing. Different strokes.
("Phone" is perhaps an oversimplification of those. But "pocket effective and reliable communication and navigation device" has all the grace of a two-ton truck hitting a Jersey wall.)
I dunno - if they were really in this for making you buy new headphones, they'd not bundle the adapter, like they did in the past when they switched from 30-pin to lightening.
Connections
AirPods: Bluetooth
Not to mention the point made elsewhere in this thread that they bundle the adapter for people who still prefer wired.
I even own a pair of wireless Bluetooth headphones (nice onces, Sony's) but it's a pain in the ass to keep them charged and deal with pairing/unpairing them to various devices, or connecting to the wrong device when I want to use them with something else, or get them to work with various laptops' shitty Bluetooth drivers, when I can just use a pair of decent wired headphones and stick them into the ubiquitous 1/8" jack and move on with my life.
I personally favor Bluetooth headphones even with all the annoyance because as bad as it is, cords are even worse.
For those who feel differently, I suspect they'll either use the bundled earpods or just leave the lightning adapter attached to their best pair of headphones and move on with their lives. Maybe I'm wrong and everyone except me is rotating five pairs of headphones between six different devices on a regular basis, but it seems like just another case of piling on to resist change.
You obviously have no idea how Apple works. Apple would never in a million years make a user-hostile decision like this simply to collect royalties. They hold user experience to be sacred, and the fact that they're making this move now means they think that, at least in the long term, this will provide for a better overall user experience, despite the pain of the transition.
Everybody complained when Apple ditched the 30pin connector for Lightning too, basically all of the same arguments here (e.g. "Apple just wants everybody to buy new accessories"), but it turned out to be the right move. Making this argument again over the headphone port just means you don't know Apple and you don't know history.
I have no comment on how Apple actually works or doesn't work but I admire the marketing acumen of a company when a random internet user can argue so passionately about eternal goodness of the company. Especially a company that's about as secretive in it's actual operations as nation-state level intelligence agencies.
This is a repetitive cycle. See it happening right in this thread with the "Apple invented a proprietary wireless protocol to DRM all the music, close the analog hole and make you license their tech" stuff. When... it's just Bluetooth. Same thing happened when they put the microphone and volume controls in the iPhone earbuds; people said it was a way to insert a secret "DRM chip" and force only Apple-approved headphones to be able to listen to music.
So if nothing else, the weight of history is against your "just did this to charge people money" argument. Plus, y'know, the adapter's literally included in the box.
Who's talking about goodness? I'm talking about the values that Apple has, and how your claim is a gross violation of those values. I didn't say Apple was "good", however you want to define that. User experience is but one facet of the whole, though it's an important one. And if you're trying to dismiss my arguments on the ground that I'm a "random internet user", then you have to dismiss literally every single comment made in this thread, or any HN thread, including yours.
Why doesn't they Macbook ship with the dongle to connect it to HDMI screens and regular USB then? Why does that dongle cost almost $100?
Tim Cook's Apple is VERY MUCH in the business of lopping things off to just sell you an addon later.
Also, FWIW, I just checked Monoprice and the HDMI dongle costs $35. And Apple's own dongle (which is $79) includes more than just HDMI (it has a USB port as well, and a USB-C charging port).
I had no comment on any of that. In fact I started my comment with "I have no comment on how Apple actually works or doesn't work"
The power in the signal between the phone and the nearby base-station/cell-tower is going to be orders of magnitude larger than between the phone and any bluetooth headset.
I don't think anyone is arguing that using bluetooth headphones is 'good for your health', just that it's 'not bad for your health'. I'm not aware of any mainstream studies that have shown adverse effects from exposure to 'normal' levels of radio waves of the type produced by consumer products. I am open to being proven wrong though!
I often listen to audio on my iPhone through wired headphones as I'm going to sleep (either relaxing ambient sounds, or podcasts).
When I do this, I put the iPhone on Airplane Mode to disable all radio transmissions. I also keep any other radio transmitting devices well clear of the bed (this is commonly recommended for people who have impaired sleep, which I do).
On any occasion when I neglect to enable Airplane Mode before falling asleep, I awake feeling significantly less refreshed in the morning (or even awake in the early hours of the morning feeling terrible).
Given this, the prospect of having to switch to Bluetooth headphones while I sleep is at least somewhat unappealing. Bluetooth may not be as powerful and disruptive to brain waves as cellphone transmissions, but when sleep is already impaired, you want to avoid anything at all that will make it any harder than it already is.
So, I'll be sticking with wired headphones and keeping all transmissions turned off when I sleep.
I'm not aware of any mainstream studies that have shown adverse effects from exposure to 'normal' levels of radio waves of the type produced by consumer products. I am open to being proven wrong though!
Studies of these kinds of effects are notoriously hard to do accurately, as they usually study a random sample of "average" people, but don't/can't take into account increased sensitivities of people who fall outside the norm due to illness or other factors.
Anecdotal evidence is often sneered at by those who pride themselves on being only persuaded by "data" and "evidence". But those of us who fall outside the populations represented by the samples usually included in mainstream studies learn the hard way that anecdotal evidence is the only way for us to figure out what is good or bad for our day-to-day wellbeing.
http://www.who.int/peh-emf/publications/facts/fs296/en/
This leads people to think that this means that no-one can be effected, whereas it could be that the self-diagnosed simply have a large false-positive (a high-proportion of people that while believing to, do not have any hypersensitivity).
It also doesn't help that there have been no proposed mechanism by which EMF could act on the CNS/body. It also doesn't help that usually the signals complained about are orders of magnitudes smaller to other signals that people might just not be aware of/think about, like TV/Radio transmissions.
You're right that it's not very easy being in the fringes, here's hoping you get better.
BTW, it is completely ridiculous to think the Sun is more dangerous than manmade wireless devices.
Plus, how come there weren't reports of people (self)diagnosed with "hyper-sensitivity" to EM waves, before the "wireless age"? By your claim, billions of people who lived before us must have been felt similar effects on their body, but as far as I know, they were fine.
Omnidirectional antenna on the other hand, transmits information in all directions (kind of like a sphere around the antenna). The transmitted power per surface is identical at a certain distance, and for the same input power, power density of an omnidirectional antenna is less than that of a directional one.
Complete omnidirectional antenna doesn't exist in practice, but sources like the Sun and wireless modems (some of them) come close to this definition. BTS towers on the other hand, make use of directivity methods to further cover the area, which is why you see something called SAR (Specific Absorption Rate) on your smartphone's box. In layman's term, SAR measures how much EM power your body-flesh absorbs because of your phone, and as you might guess, the less SAR, the better.
Please see my comment below; sneering about this topic isn't helpful or fair.
I have Omnidirectional antenna's that put out power at about 46 dB, and directional antennas that do likewise at -24 dB.
The Macbook Pro ships with one…
Still, I think the last non-USB-C Macbook didn't have HDMI either.
I'm not averse to having a cellphone or other transmitting devices close to my body for extended periods of the day; it's having it right next to my head/brain for the entire 8 hours I'm trying to get good quality sleep that I'm more cautious.
You could have replied to that effect to begin. HN is a better place when people are charitable in their interpretations of comments and kind in their replies.
I can get a little indignant (I'm working on it, I really am), over the tendency of some HN commenters to exhibit belligerent skepticism in response to people sharing sincerely-considered views or insights regarding yet-to-be-settled matters in health/medicine/science.
In that state, I mistook your comment as being sarcastic, which I now realise it wasn't. Please accept my sincere apologies.
I haven't diagnosed myself with "EMF hypersensitivity", or hypersensitivity to anything else (I'm not a voluntary gluten-avoider, or heavy consumer of organic kale or chia seeds or any other faddish "superfoods").
I'm surrounded by EMF all day from the iPhone in my pocket, the Wi-Fi enabled laptop on my lap, and the Bluetooth sound system in my car, not to mention all the incidental EMF that you mention. And I don't have any belief that any of it is a major problem, any more than the full-gluten bread and pasta I eat, the red meat I enjoy, or the red wine and beer I drink - all in moderation of course.
Over the 10+ years I've been dealing with this illness, I've tried living with and without all of these and many other things, and have developed a very good sense of what my body tolerates well and what it doesn't.
One thing I know very well is that my sleep is of lower quality when I have a transmitting cellphone right beside my head all night.
And whilst I don't need lab studies to convince myself, for your benefit I can point to some studies [1] and a perfectly plausible mechanism for why this is the case, which is that the phone transmissions alter brain waves (i.e., Alpha, Beta, Theta, Delta), which play a significant role in sleep quality. (Speaking of which, I've personally had good success improving my sleep by entraining my brainwaves through the use of binaural beats [2] – indeed this is one of the very reasons I use the headphones while sleeping in the first place.)
Whether this will also be the case with Bluetooth, I don't know - I'm open-minded either way. As I've always done, at some point I'll experiment and go with what enables me to sleep and feel my best. But in the short term I'll stick with what has been working well for me up till now.
You're right that it's not very easy being in the fringes, here's hoping you get better.
Made all the more difficult when your conversations on the topic so often tend towards patronising misappropriations of science to dismiss your experiences.
But for what it's worth, my health (and sleep) is the best it's been in at least 5 years, and continuing to improve at an increasing rate, thanks.
[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mind-control-by-ce...
[2] https://www.stevens.edu/news/sound-asleep-student-uses-binau...
I wasn't trying to lump you into the group of people self-diagnosed with 'EM hypersensitivity', but explain why some people find it hard to believe when people profess to having issues with mobile phones/wifi etc. If there are a vocal majority of people who make claims that can't be backed up, the minority of people who have valid claims will suffer.
My original comment back up the chain was to a comment that looked logically inconsistent regarding bluetooth power output vs. a mobile phone overall. Yours was perfectly reasonable.
I had read about that mobile-phone/brainwave study before, and I'm sure that given time we'll understand more about how EMFs do interact (however subtly) with the body. It is worth noting that I think bluetooth power output is many orders of magnitudes lower than having your phone communicating with a tower.
Lastly, have you looked into getting a femtocell for your flat/house? Could help reduce the power output of your phone overall when you're at home.
The whole issue is very complex, that's for sure. The extent to which these kinds of "illnesses" or "sensitivities", in myself or others, are "all in the mind" or "imaginary" is something I've considered and researched very heavily, and found it to be applicable to a significant degree.
But to someone who is in distress/pain/fatigue, the retort - whether from a doctor, a well-intentioned layperson or an insensitive asshole - that "it's all in your mind" or a "placebo/nocebo", is unhelpful and simplistic, particularly if you accept that the mind and body are all one entity anyway.
And then there is the reality, that you acknowledge, that certain effects are too subtle to be observed with current measurement technologies and diagnostic methods, inevitably leading to both false positives and false negatives.
In my case, the key to getting well has been to address all aspects, including diet, environment, and mind/emotions - the latter of which has had the most significant effect. Which puts me in a position to say "yes, in fact it probably really is the placebo effect, and I've used it to recover from having really terrible health to having great health", to which the next standard response from curmudgeonly skeptics is "the placebo effect doesn't actually change anything about your health, it only makes you feel better" - as if feeling well and being well are independent phenomena.
So, in my case you chuckle to yourself as you realise you're having an unwinnable argument with people who are more interested in feeling smart that achieving any good, and get on with doing what works for you.
As for the "femtocell", thanks for the tip, I hadn't heard of it. But really, as I said in the previous comment, EMF in my environment is really not an issue I worry about, I only take care to avoid having a transmitting phone right next to my head as I sleep - given that good sleep is the most critical factor in overcoming fatigue.
Many thanks for the discussion.
You could take a cue from joncrocks' last comment for civility and kindness. See my reply to that comment for discussion of placebo/nocebo effects.
That said, my relative is very one-sided and wont acknowledge the mind part and is firmly convinced that it's only the physical phenomenon of em-waves that creates the physical reactions.
This person is old and uneducated so suggesting experiments is out of the question. However you seem like a scientifically aware person. So my question is, have you tested your ability? You said that you sleep bad when you know that you have a active phone beside your bed. Have you tried getting someone to place the phone in an shoebox either off or on for some weeks? It wouldn't be a double blind study so it wouldn't be super valuable but if that other person is scientifically minded it would be cool if you could get 100% coverage over a month. 10 days on, 10 days bad sleep.
That kind of trial isn't something I'd consider to be particularly valuable, as the whole issue of sleep quality and overall health is too complex for it to be possible to isolate one factor like this.
I should point out that at the times when I've experienced poor sleep with the phone on, I haven't been aware of it until I woke up the next day. It's been a case of waking up feeling less well rested, thinking "shit, why do I feel so terrible?", then reaching for my phone that had been sitting on the pillow next to my head and realising that it was turned on. So it is somewhat blind, without being scientific.
I certainly don't claim this experience as clear evidence that "cellphones impair sleep" – it's just one factor among several that seem to make a difference in my case.
It's this complexity that makes these kinds of illnesses so hard to understand and overcome. For me, good, refreshing sleep has been hard to achieve for many years, even with the phone turned off (though mercifully it's getting much better lately, as is my overall health and happiness).
And I know other factors make a difference too - what I ate/drank that day, what time I got to bed/sleep, what kind of exercise/activity I did that day, what my emotional state had been that day. Any one or combination of these factors on any given day could cause worse sleep than normal, so it would be very difficult to isolate the phone being on or off as a standalone factor.
Given all this, I'm perfectly open to the possibility that the phone being on or off is actually not a factor at all.
But given that (a) there is some established evidence that cellphone transmissions alter brain waves, and (b) it takes close enough to zero time/effort to turn off the phone's transmissions before going to sleep (as well as preventing interruptions from any calls or alerts that may happen during the night), I'm content to keep up the practice of keeping transmissions turned off when I sleep.
By the way, if you want a somewhat-scientifically based explanation that may help you understand what's going on with your relative, I'd recommend reading The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton. He has some colorful ideas and is easily dismissed by curmudgeonly skeptics, but his approach has solid scientific basis, and it's only by following the principles he recommends that I've been able to start enjoying such good health lately.
That aside, I wish you all the best for your relative's wellbeing.
