I say no. I use my iPhone heavily as a synth or guitar processor etc. Bluetooth latency is too high to make it useable wirelessly so I require a hardwire into a mixer to perform. The iPhone has the lowest latency audio stack of smartphones when used with a wire. This is important and removing the headphone jack means dongles or latency. What makes this especially bad is that the iPhone camera connector dongle is already required when plugging in many MIDI controllers. This has prevented me from upgrading beyond my 6s as many of my apps are challenged without a real-time audio output that doesn’t also use my lightning connector which I need for the camera connector.
While that’s quite unfortunate for you, is this a use case that affects a lot of users? I imagine that people in your situation are far less common than those who think the bundled headphones are good enough.
Hardly an edge case. Consider the revenue generated by the Line6 Helix or Headrush and their many clones; it's a substantial revenue generator for these companies. Most live music musicians also purchase custom molded IEMs to protect their hearing and listen to a click track. Digital wireless audio simply does not work here. Even major brands like Sennheiser forgo digital transmission on their monitoring wireless packs because 5ms of latency is enough to induce combfiltering and throw a performer off.
I get that wires are better for serious musicians. I doubt that the number of people depending on their iPhones for low latency audio work is dwarfed by the number of people doing latency insensitive things like listening to podcasts or iTunes. iPhones are primarily consumer products, so catering to consumer and not professional needs first makes sense.
Heck, the stuff you mentioned appears to be purpose built audio equipment. How would that be affected by the iPhone ditching the headphone jack?
The difference is that now you won't see DJs in front of crowds using Apple products. Apple has decided to trade measurable cost-cutting for non-measurable brand prestige, and in the next few years I expect Microsoft to launch a new mobile/desktop hybrid with an ad about how Apple is what your grandparents use, and cool young trendy people use Windows.
That wouldn’t be a new move for Microsoft. They have found some success with Surface and they’re expanding the line. However, they are making similar trade-offs to Apple where able. They may release a new, popular product, but it will just solidify the trends that people in this thread are complaining about.
> The difference is that now you won't see DJs in front of crowds using Apple products.
OK, I'll call BS. iPhones and iPads are barely used for live performances. On the Macbook side, other than USB-A, what have they gotten rid of that DJs truly need for performances? We were using USB MIDI interfaces and USB audio interfaces long before the optical audio out went away.
Meanwhile I know a few musicians who haven't touched a Microsoft OS in over 10 years (!). Yeah, Microsoft finally introduced an Audio API in Vista to take on CoreAudio, but that isn't new. Does anybody like Windows 10 given the choice? If anything, I'd expect Microsoft's infamous Update strategy to make anything Windows 10 a non-option for live gigs. About the only argument I can think of is that musicians with less budget might lean more towards a Windows-based DAW.
I’ll repeat since you seem to have reading issues: how many serious musicians were depending on iPhones for live production instead of laptops or purpose built hardware?
You made a personal attack. If you do it again we will ban you.
Please keep the online calling-out/shaming culture well away from this site as well. That's a euphemism for people attacking each other, and we don't want that here.
Maybe these aren't mainstream problems, but they do reflect a change in Apple's brand. Apple used to position themselves as the brand for artists, musicians, and other creative types. They even used to hide an optical audio port in the MacBook Pro headphone jack -- talk about a niche feature!
But around the same time iPhones lost their headphone jack, the laptops lost their optical port: https://appleinsider.com/articles/16/11/02/new-macbook-pro-d.... I'm sure it's ultimately because Tim doesn't care as much as Steve about this stuff, but it does feel like something is being lost.
Both companies stocks soared under each, largely because of their cost cutting / monetization of every aspect of product. However, in both cases, such maneuvers wound up alienating their core supporters and causing strategic brand identity issues.
Eventually the board will have to replace TC (and most of the stagnant C-levels) and hopefully, like Microsoft, this will lead to a revitalization of Apple.
The "XS Max"...really? Sounds like they've outsourced more than just manufacturing to China.
This is just silly. First, Steve Jobs would have cut these obsolete interfaces just as ruthlessly as Apple has done so under Tim Cook. Jobs had a long history of doing so. Second, this almost certainly wasn't even Tim Cook's call. I don't think Tim tells Jony Ive and the iPhone team which design decisions to make.
Saying Jobs would have cut those is contrary to one important fact: Apple under Jobs did not cut those interfaces. He "would have" later? Why? Surrounding market conditions aren't that different. Bluetooth audio is almost 20 years old. A2DP was available mid 2000s.
Jobs certainly wasn't afraid of change but he also seemed to have an appreciation for things that just work, and 1/8" audio jacks & cables have a lot of virtues here. Seems likely that's why they stuck around through his tenure even though he could have put them on the chopping block in favor of wireless as easily as he did floppies and serial ports.
And the optical interface... there's a better argument it's recently become obsolete than there is about 1/8" audio, but far from being "just silly" it's a very concrete illustration of integrating a premium feature with niche utility neatly into the overall package. It's one thing that communicated that Apple was interested in using its margins to make sure the product wasn't just an experience, it was a tool that had the right affordances, the right blade on the swiss army knife for one stripe of professional/enthusiast.
Maybe a more common denominator approach will serve Apple equally well. Or maybe things like touch bars ultimately won't as meaningfully differentiate Apple products. Time will tell.
> Bluetooth audio is almost 20 years old. A2DP was available mid 2000s.
Yes, but for instance NFC, which made pairing within the Apple ecosystem much more attractive, is considerably more recent, as is the processing and charging technology in e.g. the AirPods.
> Jobs certainly wasn't afraid of change but he also seemed to have an appreciation for things that just work
Those who think 3.5" floppy drives and CD-ROM drives just worked in the same way that 1/8" jacks just work have yet to grasp just works.
As for the rest of the airpod tech... inductive charging is old, resonant coupling is roughly contemporary with A2DP, and even Qi-branded resonant coupling is 2010ish. Amenable NFC tech or other means of easy pairing are older. If these were somehow a crucial key to The Future™ that Steve Jobs himself had seen in a vision, there's little reason those couldn't have been out sooner (with Apple's resources, possibly before his death). And all this assumes that for some reason the form headphones take with the airpod is for some reason the primary line for marking the obsolescence of 1/8", which isn't a solid assumption because (a) plenty of people are happy for their application with other devices and (b) for some applications, the prevailing bluetooth profiles are still inadequate even assuming universally adopted airpod tech in all bluetooth audio devices and (c) how far away are we from universally adopted airpod tech? and (d) 1/8" would still be closer to just works.
I don't know if you lived through them but they were very unreliable. Floppy drives can suddenly become unusuable for whatever reason, CDs become scratched. Not to mention their limited storage space.
USB was miles better. It was the right call. It's the same with the headphone jack.
It's not obsolete, they're trying to force it to be. There's lots of high quality analog stuff especially for pros out there with 10+ years of life still in it and Bluetooth is a relatively complicated, expensive, underperforming (latency/fidelity/reliability) alternative. It also raises the barrier to entry to headphone manufacturing meaning we'll have less choice, less competition, and as I hope we all know, that leads to less value for consumers.
Steve Jobs pulled Firewire and ExpressCard ports out of the Macbook Pro at a time when they were used by creators to integrate with their tools and workflows. Apple decided that they were not the future, and faced a ton of complaints for removing them.
Jobs was CEO when Apple rewrote Final Cut Pro, which was hugely controversial among filmmakers when it was released. He was CEO when they dropped Shake. He was CEO when they decided to drop DVD drives, and decided to forego Blu-Ray drives.
There are a lot of reasons to dislike Apple's decision to drop the headphone jack, but invoking Jobs' dedication to what creators want doesn't pass the laugh test IMO. Apple under Jobs had no problem pissing off creators when Apple thought they were right about a technology change.
I'm using the headphone jack right now connecting to wireless headphones with a failed Bluetooth section. The headphones will be sent back to the mfgr for warranty service.
According to Google’s official documentation: “Android 5.0 (API level 21) and above supports a subset of USB audio class 1.” This subset is more limited than the full class 1 specification, limiting audio to two channels of 24-bit PCM data with a frequency up to 48kHz. There’s no default support for high sample rate audio over USB out of the box.
Individual smartphone manufacturers can implement full audio class specifications on top of Android’s default and many do. In fact, Google supports all three of the USB Audio Classes with the Pixel 2. However, this leads consumers not knowing what to expect from their handsets. You can find forums full of users struggling to understand why products don’t work with their specific smartphone, along with headache-inducing workarounds requiring specific apps and USB OTG cables.
Have you checked the Samsung Galaxy S8/Note8 line? It seems that these phones include a customized sound framework for very low processing delays, AND they include jacks. Google for Soundcamp.
The other problem with Android is due to sideloading and app hacking, the best pro level apps (which are expensive for apps) have mostly chosen to avoid Android rather than experience high levels of piracy the last time I researched it. (KORG Gadget for example doesn’t exist on Android)
This is the rub. With the removal of the jack, Apple is telling us that their phones are not [music/audio] creators' tools. Apparently it's their desire that creators use, what, iPad? Their ever-disappointing line of laptops? The outdated Mac Pro? I just don't know.
I do know that from the entire collection of screen sizes and hardware configuration options I'd like to choose my mode of creation, but Apple seems to think that telling me "iPhone is not a creation device" is Just Fine®.
It’s a mistake. We’re paying $1000+ for this tool that presents itself as a versatile information slinger, well I hope it can do more than Facebook, Instagram and Gmail. This is an amazing platform, completely damaged by its limited IO. Apple is moving away from its roots. Not good. Creators will go elsewhere, their desirable creations will become native elsewhere, and the sheep will follow.
I think it'd be a mistake to ignore them. Content creators are cool and they set trends and fashion. The first iterations of the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone were nothing special, yet they were successful because they were used by cool people. i.e. Apple products became status symbols.
While I don't like this answer, I feel like it's probably the most accurate.
Anecdotally, I know a lot of iPhone owners, and of them only one person uses their phone for music content creation. And my hunch is that one friendship may just be a statistical anomaly compared to the greater population of all iPhone owners.
It's the same thing as the Macbook Pro. Not to mention letting the Mac Pro stagnate. They seem to have abandoned power users and decided to focus on mass consumers.
They can do whatever they want. That said, there are certain classes of power users (creatives) that are very loyal users, and it seems like a good core demographic to cater to. Devs are probably much less loyal, but catering to creatives would likely cater to us as well.
The problem with catering directly to mass consumers is that the minute some other brand becomes more fashionable, they will jump to it. And if at that point creatives have been sufficiently fed up with the non-utility of Apple products, they might have already abandoned ship, and Apple will not have a code demographic to fall back to (or to keep it fashionable in the first place).
The most successful companies are those with a minority of power users who evangelize them at every turn. Apple only became the behemoth it its because of the steadfast dedication of its most loyal customers.
1) It's more like I already have the iPhone without the jack and I already attempt to make use of the thing for creation and the Bluetooth lag is a problem.
2) Even if that weren't the case, I'm not arguing power- of course a full-fledged computer has more power. It's about convenience. When does inspiration strike? Often when all I have is my phone; I can't walk around with my laptop at the ready.
Samsung has had waterproof headphone jacks for years. My LG v35 has a quite nice "Quad DAC" and a waterproof headphone jack. It's absurd to think that Apple has eleventy billion dollars but can't design a waterproof headphone jack.
Had mine in my short pockets while wet wading and the damn camera flooded and died. I’m less than thrilled with apples waterproofing, headphone jack or no.
There is marginally more volume for the battery and camera/sensor array to take up. I'd rather have a thicker phone, especially one where the cameras don't protrude out the back, but I don't get to design these things.
So I've tried using several bluetooth headphones before Airpods were around. They all sucked. Things like audio stuttering while inches away from the transmitter and short battery life is what made them suck. I gave up on bluetooth headphones for good; I hated them. Oh and the convenience of wireless wasn't even that important to me (or so I thought).
Now I have a pair of airpods and I love them. The improvement is marginal, but it's an improvement that touches many aspects of my life (commuting, cooking, sleeping, working). I love, love, love them.
> Does anyone truly believe they removed the headphone jack for any reason other than to sell more dongles and more wireless headphones?
I think Apple believes that wireless headphones are the future and they decided to prove that it can be done right. IMO they succeeded with airpods.
Removing the headphone jack was a forcing function. It's only an issue if you don't buy into the Apple ecosystem. Obviously that's a risk, but it's a risk that Apple has taken before.
Assuming it's some kind of cockameme plan to sell more dongles doesn't really fit the profile of Apple as a company, IMO.
Bluetooth headphones are only really good since Bluetooth 4 and its Low Energy standard. Everything before used too much power and connections were to fragile, as you noticed.
If you tried other Bluetooth headphones than the Airpods now, you would also notice the better battery life. My work headphones (over-ear) only need to be charged on the weekend after over 40h of use and they are very light, too.
I used a 15gbp bluetooth headphone 6 years ago without any problems on both linux and android; battery life was fine, even sound quality was acceptable. Colleagues have been using Bose ones for years. Apple didn't fix anything.
Yes. I've worked on phones in the past (Amazon's ill-fated Fire Phone) and there was no pressure that I perceived to sell more third-party accessories. There was, however, a very tangible pressure to make the phone thinner and lighter, and at the same time to pack it full of more shiny-seeming software features.
It's entirely conceivable, based on my experience, that removal of the headphone jack is attributable to ignorance and not to malice.
Ignorance of what? I’m sure they knew some people would be upset about the decision, but they must have predicted that it would be worth it for their bottom line and aggregate customer satisfaction. And I have seen no data suggesting that their prediction was incorrect.
What reason is there to chase more thinness? Phones are thin and light enough as is. I'd rather my phone not blow away in the wind if I set it down outside.
Does anyone actually want it thinner and lighter or is that just an assumption we have had and never questioned? I mean most people end up putting their device in a case anyway to protect it already. They are to structurally flimsy and fragile. Hell otterbox is valued at 2.5 billion and all they sell are thick bulky phone cases. A inch thick phone would be fine and have more room for battery, storage, etc, etc, etc... and still have room to have a sturdy case and most people wouldn't care.
Yes. I think this a “people want a faster horse” situation. The people who don’t want phones to go thinner and wireless everything aren’t thinking it through fully. I miss the head phone jack on my phone right now, I’d like longer battery life... but there is a future where a smartphone is the size of a credit card, is waterPROOF, and never plugs into anything ever. If you think it’s not possible, consider that the chips in each AirPod are more powerful than the one in the first iPhone.
I am temporarily annoyed with the audio jack removal, but I get it. It’s a “burn the boats” type strategy of pushing for the wireless, portless future.
Yes. I believe they did it for several reasons, and while selling more accessories is probably one reason, I suspect it’s a fairly insignificant one. I can’t imagine that dongle sales affect their bottom line much, and while AirPods are a big hit, that probably would have been the case regardless of the headphone jack removal.
I suspect the two most significant reasons were to reduce manufacturing cost/complexity and to improve reliability (one less physical port to get dirty and break, one less entry point for water damage).
Speakers are purely analog devices. The work on digital speakers has begun a century ago in 1920 and still hasn't yielded any usable consumer products. Moving the digital to analog converter into the speaker doesn't change anything. We will have analog speakers for at least another century.
Now if you were talking purely about the connector itself.
Whatever wireless technology was forced upon the population is not actually capable of replacing a wired connection.
* Bluetooth doesn't work in crowded environments.
* Standard Bluetooth sound quality is inferior without proprietary extensions to the protocol.
* Latency between device and headphone can be massive (500ms to 100ms),
* You have to recharge it.
* Devices have to be paired and sometimes "unpair" for no reason.
Bluetooth just sucks for audio. I'm sure there are hundreds of wireless technologies that are better than bluetooth, otherwise these proprietary extensions wouldn't exist.
You can in theory get <32ms latency with a special obscure subvariant of a proprietary standard of bluetooth (aka aptX LL) that no one has ever heard of for which you need a certain dongle and your headphone must support it. (hint your phone and headphones don't support it)
Anyone who believes this needs to sit down and think it through.
Apple's success depends on the iPhone. Without it their services businesses become useless, their retail presence becomes an albatross, peripheral devices like Apple Watch, AppleTV start to look a lot less useful and forget about future growth in AR/VR. And so the idea that Apple would compromise all of that just to make a comparatively tiny hundred million or so is just crazy. And Tim Cook is anything but crazy.
The fact is that the market is moving towards wireless for everything. Audio included. And 99.999% of the world aren't audiophiles who can tell the difference (or even care if they can) between BT and non BT audio. So why waste valuable phone space for an insignificant number of people when you can improve battery life by say 5% ?
>Does anyone truly believe they removed the headphone jack for any reason other than to sell more dongles and more wireless headphones?
There are attributes to wireless beyond it being more expensive. Wireless isn't some gimmik to increase revenue. It genuinely is better in some ways and an acceptable complete replacement. If you're sold on wireless you don't need a headphone jack.
> It genuinely is better in some ways and an acceptable complete replacement.
And worse is some ways. It is not absolutely better; and, for plenty of people, not "an acceptable complete replacement".
Your claim in your original comment ("Anyone who has felt a tug at their head from headphones getting snagged by something accidently[sic] is quickly sold to the merits of wireless.") is also far from convincing that wireless is "an acceptable complete replacement", or even better than wired in more than one minor way.
> If you're sold on wireless you don't need a headphone jack.
In which case, I repeat, you keep using wireless. A headphone jack does not hurt those who want to use wireless. Removing the jack actively denies them a feature, while doing little for those who want to use wireless. Not to mention, removing the jack does not sell people on wireless, it forces them to choose between a dongle and wireless; or worse, a different platform.
Apple is pursuing the wireless future, as simple as that. Be it audio, data transfer, or even power. In the case of headphone jack, they pursue that goal by fixing the bluetooth flaws not by content with what we have right now. Is it a worthy goal to pursue? Time will tell.
Exactly, this was a logical progression to that future. Want to make a completely wireless device? Take away the things that are easy to do wirelessly. First: audio, then power, next up is...?
I am not against the future but shouldn't we have the alternative ready before we kill the 'previous' version of something? For me the new wireless headphones are not an option because of lack of hi-fi options and because of the need of charging frequently. If we had the same exact experience (great sound quality for lossless and once a year charging) than I would be more inclined to buy it.
Caring about hi-fi headphone audio and needing to charge frequently while listening to audio is probably a combination of requirements that affects an extremely tiny portion of iPhone users. Also, there’s wireless charging.
People charge their phone everyday so it isn't a massive deal to charge your AirPods as well. And the sound quality right now is more than good enough especially given that you're asking people to tradeoff their data usage.
I tend to leave my headphones in my backpack or jacket pocket. (well, actually both, they are so cheap that I have a half dozen sets of earbuds scattered around different places - I have a nice ~$150 set of earbuds at my desk at work, and cheap < $20 sets everywhere else)
If I have to charge them then I have to remember to take them out and plug them in, and also then have to remember to take them out of the charger and take them with me.
I'm not super sensitive to sound quality, but charging is a deal breaker.
What makes you think it is normal to charge your phone every day? I charge mine on average every 4th day when the battery has run down to about 30%-35% (or at around 12 hours of screen time). I use two phones, one for daily use and another for work in the forest/on the farm. The daily phone is a Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 which can last for up to a week on a charge, the work phone a Motorola Defy of around 8 years old which now lasts for around 4 days, it used to last for a week as well. While I might be a bit of an outlier with these devices I don't see charging a phone daily as a norm to be espoused. In the age of "dumb" phones charging the thing once a week was the norm, not the exception. If these devices are to be the go-to for all things digital they should have longer autonomy.
I saw a Samsung ad today, boasting that the battery lasts all day... I was mildly disgusted that's where we're at. There are seriously devices that don't last the day?
Exactly this. People don't realize that almost nobody needs better CPUs in the phones and almost everybody would benefit from higher capacity battery. If batteries were developing at the same pace as CPUs we would have batteries that last for years with a single charge. For me the ideal phone is iPhone 6s that does everything that I have ever wanted to do with a phone, and even more that I do not actually need. The only missing feature is a long lasting battery.
I charge my phone once a day. I have to charge my AirPods many times a day, and often have to play games where I take one out to charge it while relying on the other one, and then swap them later. (Note: I like them so much I tolerate this insanity gladly.)
It actually isn’t that easy, like at all. A tiny DAC in a phone amplified to loudspeaker levels is going to sound qualitatively different from a stronger signal out of something built to that spec. Not to mention interference issues in analog signals at low power.
The digital source material is a limiting factor for achievable quality, but so is the DAC that is to translate the source material. Some cheap DACs are not meant to translate specific bit depths and sampling rate, some supply the jack with less output power, some exhibit more crosstalk, some have more limited frequency responses. So yes, second to the source material, it's the DAC that is the limiting factor for good sound.
It's the speakers that is the limiting factor, by an extremely wide margin.
A cheap DAC can produce around 16 bits and 20 kHz. It's not difficult. A pair of $10 earplugs is much more limited in what sound it can physically play.
Actually this is why most of the hifi heads bought iPhones, 6s had the best DAC that you can buy for a reasonable price (less than 1000 USD). I have converted all my collection to ALAC just to be on the Apple platform and be able to listen to lossless on my phone. I also use a decent entry level hifi headphone (Focal Spark - wired) this is where my hearing still be able to identify differences. The entire setup was not too expensive and it had great performance. Now, if I try to have it with the recent iPhone offerings, it will be certainly more expensive and slightly shittier, and I can just convert my entire collection to mp3s because the system does not support it anyways. On the top of that, I was able to listen to my collection on my proper audio system at home before while right now I am not able to connect the phone to the amplifier anymore. So, to summarize, Apple offers my a way more expensive solution that makes me miss out on many aspects of listening lossless music. It is simply not worth it.
They’re also striving for the future where your phone is measurably, obviously thinner than 3.5mm. As in thin-enough-to-wear-on-your-sleeve thin.
It’s a long game, but I think part of their rationale is that we had to get rid of that thing eventually — which is inarguable, IMHO — and so the earlier, the better. If you’re forced to make wireless headphones that don’t suck, you will.
It's like a car manufacturer removing the engine, because "they're striving for an EV future", they just don't know how to build an EV car yet, so now you get one with no engine at all. Shotgun gets a hand crank. Onwards, Mr. Flintstone.
Unfortunately, low latency Bluetooth codecs are fragmented between AptX, which can achieve 32ms latency but isn’t supported by iOS, and AAC which isn’t generally supported by accessories, especially the low latency variant.
So you’re basically stuck with AirPods or new Beats if you want low latency Bluetooth headphones for an iPhone. And this seems unlikely to change.
Wireless is a terrible thing to base the future on. With wired you don't have to worry about interference or the fact that anyone with the right antenna can send/receive wireless. Of course it isn't always practical to use wired, but I think the majority of connection use cases work perfectly fine with a cable, don't need to be made wireless, and are in fact made worse by the usage of wireless.
You're trusting/hoping that [0] will never happen, or (for WiFi) that [1] will never happen. At least with most Internet usage there are additional layers involved that have their own security which can protect your in flight data, but the firmware on BT/WiFi chipsets doesn't necessarily have that sort of layered security.
A) They could make it thicker. It’s not an either/or.
B) No one was calling for the elimination of the headphone jack. Every poll shows broad support for it. Apple themselves said it took ‘courage’ which is not the adjective you’d use to describe an action that the world agrees with.
Sure they could make it thicker. But they won't because I suspect over the last decade they have done market research which tells them IMHO the obvious: nobody wants a thicker phone.
Common sense suggests that if the world wanted a thicker phone then one of the hundreds of OEMs would have made one and been successful at it. But yet that has never happened.
I've consistently heard people say that they would prefer a thicker phone if it meant greater battery life, so clearly there isn't nobody who wants a thicker phone.
It probably takes "courage" to make a phone thicker... I see myself using my phone less and less to listen to music, sometimes because I forget the dongle. Mind you, I also have bluetooth headphones but they're not very handy on business trips where I need to think about yet another cable and about actually recharging them.
I’m someone who always has the smart battery case on my iPhone, effectively doubling its size. I wouldn’t dream of leaving the house without the case attached. Apple has demonstrated that they can offer multiple models of differing dimensions and internals, but they won’t even consider this.
The strange parts guy on youtube added a headphone jack to the iPhone 7. So, I think the stated reason for removing the headphone jack to make room for the battery is complete BS.
OnePlus did a poll that got the answer 88% of customers wanted them to keep the headphone jack. Which they then got rid of anyway. Presumably the poll was hoped or expected to reinforce a decision already made.
It's very clear consumers aren't clamouring for losing the jack. There are a lot more dollars selling wireless and they have an inherent limited life thanks to battery lifespan.
The SE, with a headphone jack, is roughly the same thickness as the new XS without. They both have bluetooth for those who might like wireless.
That's not Apple or whoever listening, that's them imposing.
To put this in perspective, the current OnePlus 6 is 155.7x75.4x7.8mm, so adding a mere 0.1mm to the thickness increases the total volume by about 1100 mm^3. A typical headphone jack that you might find in a phone has a PCB footprint of 9x14mm, so assuming it takes up the entire thickness of the phone that's about 1000 mm^3.
That does assume near perfect efficiency for the redistributed volume. Presumably working around the physical limitations of the where the jack needs to be versus all the other components, efficiency would not be so great.
But anyway who are we kidding? It’s not about making space in the device in the end. Perhaps that’s the straw that broke the camels back, but not what set Apple off in this direction to begin with.
Comparing the headphone jack and Ethernet port is silly. A great majority of users use the jack for headphones which are always within 1 meter of the device. Ethernet is often much further away, meaning wireless adds more value / convenience.
Not to mention that with Ethernet (and wired power) the user is tethered to a fixed place, while with wired headphones on a cell phone the user can get up and move freely, since both ends of the wire are moving together.
> But it comes at the expense of more space for batteries or features that more people will use.
Yet Samsung did fit a 4000 mAh battery, a headphone jack, wireless charging, expendable storage, fingerprint sensor, 512Gb of storage AND a PEN in their IP68 Note 9.
Anyone that has walked through Shinjuku, Tokyo or Shinagawa station in peak hour with Bluetooth headphones will be able to confirm that there is not enough spectrum.
I get audio drop outs with airpods everytime I pass through one of the above stations.
Funny how they really should have worried about this but apparently haven't.
But you can still use the lightning earphones that come together (or buy a dongle, since the newer model phones are dropping the adapter). 3rd party dongles are cheaper and some allow you to charge and listen to music at the same time.
Since a year or two in entire EU using any electronic devices is completely allowed (except for a takeoff and landing but that's for security reasons in case of emergency) so I'm not sure where are you flying. I've been using my Momentums' without a single issue for few years now and I fly a lot.
Mostly Eurowings, Ryanair, TAP, Alitalia, Aegean, British Airways, Austrian Airlines, Lufthansa, Iberia, Condor, Thomas Cook, Finnair.
I am yet to hear that I can turn Bluetooth on after the security debriefing and even though I fly regularly, so far just boarded like two flights where there was on-flight wlan available.
If you're on a Lufthansa flight I'd recommend reading the safety card or the in-flight magazine. One of them usually mentions BT is allowed at cruise altitude.
You have to turn everything off for takeoff and landing, but inbetween it's all fine - the only difference left between airlines is whether they'll leave people use airplane-mode during takeoff. But don't ask attendants - regardless of actual regulations, when in doubt on a technical point they will always err on the side of caution and tell you to shut it down.
It's not even because of the risk of interference - it's just that if everyone has their electronic devices out and there is sudden turbulence, or worse still, a crash, they become projectiles that cause further injury - laptops especially.
The rules changed fairly recently, but lufthansa.com now says:
> You can use your Bluetooth headphones during the entire flight without restriction – even during take-off and landing, unless the crew instruct otherwise.
britishairways.com:
> Bluetooth devices, e.g. wireless keyboards or headphones, can be used during the flight but must be switched off for taxi, take-off and landing.
I believe that Bluetooth was prohibited on Lufthansa as recently as 2017, so it might be worth to check for each airline you're using.
> I fly regularly and have yet to be on a EU flight where Bluetooth is allowed.
Really? Am I missing something? I've never been pulled up on using bluetooth headphones on a plane in the EU. The flight attendants have never said anything, and I've been in full view of them before...
Airplane mode generally disables all wireless connections, including Bluetooth.
EDIT: researching it that could be just a "be safe" catch all though, and regulation might actually mean just cellular in some cases. No idea how a normal person is supposed to figure out what exactly applies to the current flight then.
I worked at an airline two years ago on the rollout of inflight wifi and they advise customers to enable airplane mode and reenable wifi (if it's disabled). These days within aviation, "airplane mode" refers to disabling just of the cellular radios.
I am amazed this issue isn't raised more often. The majority of my headphone usage is in downtown San Francisco. Any wireless headphones will break up like every other second. For my purposes they are useless.
Some adaptive system for adjusting the transmission power might help. Now I can leave my phone on the desk and wonder to the other floor and other end of the apartment with my AirPods working just fine.
Problem with non-wireless headphones is that they break. One side of the headphones stops playing sounds; you can sometimes spin the connector and get the sound back, but that gets annoying, and it stops working eventually. The less wires and connectors, the less things can break, no?
And as someone who has owned many IEMs over the long term those cables all end up breaking. And for IEMs with replaceable cables it's the connectors that break.
While it is true that headphone cables are prone to failure, from electronics point of view Bluetooth ones are massively more complex beasts, and almost certainly will have limited lifetime (batteries can last only so long). In comparison 40 year old headphones can work perfectly fine together with modern equipment, something I would not expect from wireless headphones of today.
Also repairing a cable is really easy task generally, and there is even easier solution available: make the cable replaceable, i.e. have it also be connectorized on the headphone end.
I don't think the OP suggested connetorising the headphone end as something the consumer should do, but rather as a suggestion to manufacturers. Many high-end headphones already have this, as it not only allows you to replace damaged cables easily, but also choose a cable length and type (straight or coiled?) that suits you. The ATH-M50x ships with three different cables, for example.
You know when I was young there was this whole profession of tv/radio repairmans. Swapping a headphone cable is exactly the sort of thing I imagine they would be perfectly fitted for doing.
But of course these days the whole concept of repairing things is completely bygone thing for most people, so yeah, maybe wireless headphones do make sense.
most half decent headphones these days have a standardised cable connection so replacing or upgrading the cable is very easy and can be cheap.
wireless however have other issues, what of the battery? over time it will wear like any battery does and their runtime will significantly decrease, changing the cable on a pair of wired phones will be a lot less hassle than cracking open your wireless phones to replace the battery
not to mention the fact that wireless devices have far more tech in them that could go wrong, a pair of wired headphones are fairly simple devices, theres a whole lot more tech inside a pair of bluetooth phones (battery, charging circuit, bluetooth components etc) and while theyre wireless theyll still have to be charged by way of a cable somehow so like a pair of wired phones they still have a wire, its just used for charging rather than sound but that doesnt mean it cant break just the same
AirPods, which I think is sort of a good reference here, charges wirelessly too. We’ll ser about the battery life though, I suspect you’re right about them eventually needing replacing. Likely a very difficult repair too!
the airpods charge wirelessly but the case that charges them doesnt as far as im aware so they still have a connector thats a potential point of failure just like a jack
Cheaply made products that break easily are always a problem; there are certainly a lot of terrible headphones on the market, with or without wires.
However, the problem you are describing:
> One side of the headphones stops playing sounds; you can sometimes spin the connector and get the sound back, [...] and it stops working eventually.
I suspect that might be terrible quality wires, not necessarily the headphones. The quality of patch cable at the usual big-box consumer stores has fallen dramatically over the last ~5-10 years. It can be really difficult to find a cable hasn't changed the outer protective wrapping from traditional softer rubber(?) to some sort of cheap plastic. The wrapping on the new cables can harden badly over as little as 2-3 months, leading to sharp kinks/bends forming over time that break the delicate wires inside.
The newer cables also tend to lack protective stiffeners at the ends for protection against damaging the wires if the cables is pulled at a right angle to the connector.
Once the wire has started to break, you might be able to get it working again for a while by turning the connector (if the break is at or near the connector) or otherwise moving the cable until the broken ends of the conductor touch.
On the other hand, most of the cables that I bought in the late-80s/early-90s still work fine. (they never formed permanent kinds) The problem is race-to-the-bottom we're seeing everywhere as businesses try to squeeze every last cent out their products. This will happen to wireless headphones eventually, but for now they are in a honeymoon period where they are still a "new(-ish) tech" that is experimenting with new designs. Eventually the value engineers and must-meet-growth-targets management will get around to "optimizing" their quality and longevity too.
> The wrapping on the new cables can harden badly over as little as 2-3 months
Exactly what happened to my headphones. I end up replacing the cable every 6-12 months. Fortunately user-replaceable cables make it almost a non-issue.
FWIW audio cables in consumer stores were pretty much always PVC, though, as you like many other people discovered, there are quality plastics and cheap plastics. The former will last quite a number of years before turning hard and brittle, the latter won't, smells badly and probably gives you cancer for free, too.
Speaker, microphone and guitar cables for studio / stage use often have rubber sheathing (~neoprene), though many are just higher quality PVC.
> The newer cables also tend to lack protective stiffeners at the ends for protection against damaging the wires if the cables is pulled at a right angle to the connector.
Using the tiniest of ferrules seems to be a conscious design choice, though incorrect material and manufacture are commonly seen as well. In any case, a bad design that's poorly manufactured is not going to work.
As usual, non-consumer products don't have the problem, at all.
> The problem is race-to-the-bottom we're seeing everywhere as businesses try to squeeze every last cent out their products.
While that's certainly true, the ali/bangood-mentality also has to do with it. "Oh look, I can get $thisThing for 2.5 $ delivered from China, which normally costs 10 $". A compounding problem is of course, that the 10 $ store item is the same as the 2.5 $ Ali item, so you actually need to turn to the proper online store to get the quality matching price point.
no it was not, some of us still like our high quality wired headphones. with that said im also a great believer in having a dedicated device, while ill occasionally use my phone for convenience i generally use a separate device for music as it can provide much better sound quality and not hammer my phones already under capable battery but im a little more serious about my audio than most people.
it does however highlight an interesting point, most portable devices make a consideration for air travel in their design, the dell xps15 for example has a 97wh battery because 99wh is the limit for taking into an airplane cabin, yet turn on airplane mode on your phone and it disables all wireless connections, bluetooth included so if you were relying on your airpods to provide your in flight music youre out of luck
is that an iphone specific feature? (im an android user so not that familiar with ios) if not ive just not noticed it before
i guess it highlights how stupid the ban on wireless connectivity on planes is (not like it wasnt blatantly obvious that theyd never let a vehicle carrying hundreds of lives into the sky with unsheilded components that could be brought down by anyone with a ten quid nokia)
It works on my Android phone, and the last few flights I've taken have specifically said "we don't have WiFi, but you can activate airplane mode then turn on Bluetooth".
(Your writing would be much easier to read with capital letters and apostrophes.)
probably and were i not jobless, homeless and using a knackered old laptop with several non working keys including the at/apostrophe key and incredibly intermittent shift keys id likely use them more often but such is life
One argument I've heard is that it's not a single person who leaves their phone turned on that's an issue, it's when 300 people have their phone turned on.
I don't believe that one either, but it's a little more believable than thinking that a single phone can cause enough interference to affect the plane.
I certainly have had PC speakers that picked up interference from a GSM cellphone. Cell phones are wireless transmitters that can transmit in the 3 watt range. A typical CB radio is 4 watts. The radio in the airplane is in the 2-25 watt range, and it's trying to communicate with a ground station that might be a fair distance away.
I don't think the real concern was ever that cellphones would cause planes to fall out of the sky, however, there's real reason to be concerned that they could interrupt the pilot's ability to communicate with ATC, which I'm sure could get dangerous.
There's probably no faster way to get everyone to shut their phones off than a "this is your Captain speaking; a cellphone on board is preventing me from talking to the ATC" however.
if im not wrong the interference affects the sending/receiving equipment not the actual signal itself, the reason those cheapo pc speakers picked up the tell tale pips of an incoming mobile call is because they likely werent shielded (back in the days of cathode ray tvs/monitors this could be an issue as putting unshielded speakers too close to the tv caused issues)
but mission critical equipment like life support systems, airplanes and other such tech would never be allowed to be produced and used without at least basic shielding all round
Some planes are approved for Bluetooth (generally the ones with WiFi), others are not. Fewer are approved for cell signals (only the ones with inflight cell service)
I'm only going by the stuff I've read in the informational section of in-flight magazines [0]. I'm sure it depends on the regulatory environment of different countries, airlines and flights.
It used to be that running any uncertified electronic equipment at all was disallowed on takeoff/landing, no matter what the radio status. In the top hits on Google for "Portable IFE" I'm seeing WiFi devices on pages with 2012 copyright dates that claim no certification is required. Sounds like BS to me.
Well, I am going by the DO-178C/ED-12C (Software) and DO-254/ED-80 (Hardware) from the RTCA and EUROCAE which I have conveniently next to me since I am currently planning a Software Assurance Level D system for use in the A320.
Also I am going by the 2 Portable IFE systems from our hardware partners that I have in my Lab to play around with. Portable IFE systems are completely battery powered and have no connection to the Aircraft. The only "certification" that you need is that you would need to demonstrate that this device does not need certification. Which in the case of the 2 devices I have right here is fairly simple thing.
I’ve used my bluetooth headphones on all flights I’ve taken for the past few years, all of them in the EU.
I don’t hide it and I never had any trouble with it.
The original Ericsson Bluetooth development boards came with a CD full of documentation that included papers describing the effects of personal electronic equipment on avionics systems. They could have just asked you instead.
It’s possible to turn bluetooth on while in flight mode.
People use bluetooth headphones a lot in flight.
One of the premier use case of Bose’s noise cancelling bluetooth headphones is to use on planes.
No announcement is made to ask people to not use bluetooth.
No flight attendant asks people to not use bluetooth headphones.
Planes are not crashing.
It’s probably safe to use bluetooth headphones on a plane.
I like wires. Every time i can, i choose to use a wire. Be it for internet or headphones.
The reason for my wired preference is security. I trust cables more than i trust wireless.
Bluetooth is insecure. I dont think it is secure to walk around in a mall with your bluetooth turned on. (correct me if i am wrong)
Wifi WPA2 is probably secure. However wifi WEP is completely insecure. For many years WEP has been widely used. Another problem with wifi are fake networks that use the same name as a public network.
Another interesting fact with wired headphones is they wont fall down directly on the floor, because of the wires. The same goes with the computer mouse.. sometimes it moves to the edge of the table and might want to fall.. the wire will hold it.
Wireless keyboards is definitively a no go since teorically its possible to passively listen for pressed keys just like a keylogger.
Wireless technology sure looks better without all the wires, however when people choose convenience(wireless), they lose some security.
> I dont think it is secure to walk around in a mall with your bluetooth turned on. (correct me if i am wrong)
You are wrong. I don't recall any Bluetooth security issues from just having Bluetooth on or from having an established connection. Those things are pretty well solved in all vaguely modern wireless standards.
The issues are always around the initial connection and key exchange. PIN-based pairing has various flaws in Bluetooth, but Bluetooth headphones use "Just Works" pairing, which I don't think has had any issues, other than the design compromise that it is vulnerable to MitM. That is vanishingly unlikely to happen with Bluetooth headphones though.
WPA2 is secure if you use a very strong password. WEP is basically extinct.
The WPA2 standard is not secure against key reinstallation attacks, which can be used to decrypt packets in an MitM position. Most implementations of WPA2, though, have patched themselves in a backwards-compatible manner since discovery of this vulnerability.
The IEEE has put out WPA3 which fixes this vulnerability (among other changes).
Well that and I have some very nice headphones that I am obviously not going to ditch because some smartphone removes the single world-wide standard socket in existence...
I've never met a Bluetooth device that connected and worked 100% of the time like wired headphones do. $10 headphones these days sound like $100 headphones from ten years ago. The technology has already peaked. There's no reason to spend more or to settle for a technology like Bluetooth that fails to work on a consistent basis. None whatsoever. I will never choose to buy a phone without a headphone jack because of that. It's that simple. Not to mention the low audio quality of Bluetooth. This is definitely an example of an inferior technology being pushed out simply for profits to replace a superior one.
To paraphrase Doc Brown, "Where we're going, we don't need headphone jacks"
Airpods are awesome, and they'll only get better. A cord running to your pocket is seriously a thing of the past, and all these posts will age terribly. Just like the serial port ones, the floppy ones, the cd rom ones...
And for all this noise, what I can't for the life of my understand is why these people can't just use a god damn adapter. They make high quality DAC ones, too. Just leave it attached to your headphones. What's the damn problem? The rest of us get a better, thinner phone.
Great, so now I've got a dongle attached to my earphones. How about the PA or stereo I need to plug in to, in order to stream music?
Should I just always carry a spare dongle in my pocket? Or rely on everyone having the appropriate Lightning/USB-C dongle already? Or maybe just use the industry standard 3.5mm jack, because it always Just Works.
Did you read peapicker's comment before posting your own? (It's older by an hour). Some people need wired headphones and if the port is used for something else then they can't.
Also it's completely untrue that the iPhone is "thinner" without a headphone jack; this guy added a jack to an iPhone 7 without external modification:
The annoying thing about wireless headphones is that it’s yet another thing you need to charge. We need truly easy wireless charging to make it effortless.
It was an absolutely terrible idea. I use the headphone jack on my phone every single day, either for my high-quality earphones that I'm not in a hurry to replace, or for plugging in to a PA or stereo at a party, to stream music.
I don't want to carry a single around, and the 3.5mm jack is the standard for analog stereo audio.
> the options for phones with headphone jacks and no crapware preinstalled are exceedingly limited.
A thousand times this. The current market for phones is absolute crap. We need more competition. (And we also need at least some of that competition to quit playing "follow the leader" when the "leader" is an imagined title, and the "leader" is clearly blind and thrashing...)
Android One has at least helped expand the options for phones with no crapware and a reasonable update policy. A decent number of them still have jacks.
Project Treble makes updates easier for OEMs but in no way guarantees that they will actually happen.
The Moto G6 for example has Treble but Motorola has said it will only get one major update, to Pie. It came out in May with March security patches, they released the May security patch in July, and then released the July security patch in September.
Android One devices will (supposedly) all receive 2 major version updates and 3 years of monthly security patches.
But when Treble is installed, isn't installing a ROM with the new version a simple business, at least for people who can follow technical instructions ?
As long as the bootloader is unlocked the ROM flashing process isn't really any different from non-Treble devices, at least from the user's perspective. It should make developing the ROMs significantly easier. Obviously there are Treble devices whose bootloaders can't be unlocked and third party ROMs are still impossible on those devices.
In principle a Generic System Image (GSI) can be flashed onto any Treble device and everything will just work. From what I've seen so far this is not really quite true and there will still need to be device-specific tweaks to ROMs, but the amount of device-specific code should be far lower than before and make life easier for maintainers. Hopefully the end result is more devices with functioning and well maintained ROMs available.
Yeah, they made a bunch of jokes/roasts about apple removing the headphone jack, and still having one on the pixel, and then just removed it on the pixel 2. Tech hypocrisy at its finest.
I'm pretty disgruntled about losing the 3.5mm jack, but I don't buy this idea that Apple did it to sell wireless Beats, for one reason: the product lineup sucks.
Apple knows how to make truly great audio hardware; the AirPods really are extraordinary. But the Beats lineup clearly hasn't received any serious attention, as evidenced by two things:
1) they still sell wireless hardware that doesn't have the W1 chip, two years after it was first released
2) for God's sake, all their devices charge over micro-USB!
Well, the article shows that Beats still has a plurality in the bluetooth market in sales dollars and units sold. Beats quality aside, I think that still makes a highly plausible (partial) motivation to push people toward bluetooth.
You’re not the only one. But now I feel like I’m the only one who has the exact same issues with Lightning connections.
I get the same pop when jacking in using the Lightning-to-3.5 dongle. And I mean, making the 3.5 connection first, Lightning second.
Also, Lighting (and I suspect USB C) female connectors are dust, lint, and particulate magnets. What happens when those get fouled, the gold plating on the Lightning cable is scraped off one or more of the pins. So then you have either a broken cable or one that will charge but only if oriented correctly. So same issue, rotate the connector and maybe it works.
AND the thing that pisses me off the most...I have to carry around some old earbuds with the 3.5 in case I want to watch some Netflix on my MacBook Pro because I can’t plug my new EarPids into it. There’s no Lightning jack on any Mac. And there’s not even a dongle for that use case. All the USB M to Lightning F are for charging only.
Huh, I got 3.5mm earphones and an adapter with my phone. Also, get AirPods. Unless you call for several hours uninterrupted every day, like somebody up thread claimed.
Airpods? Lets see. MacRumors Buyer's Guide says "caution - approaching end of life cycle" [1]
Furthermore they look terrible. They're white, and they look like I have an Oral B toothbrush in my ears. I have no option to avoid either of that? Thank you, no.
As for the discussion: I'd like to be able to enter a store, listening to music, with all my radios off. It is called airplane mode. Was removing 1 gbit ethernet from laptops a good idea? I miss it, but having an adequate amount of USB ports solves the issue. Why not have two 2 USB-C ports on a smartphone and be done with it?
- You can't take lightning headphones
and use them as headphones in all
lightning ports.
- You can't take lightning headphones
and use them on any other Apple
product other then modern, premium
iPhones.
- It doesn't enable compatibility with
other new Apple products. In fact, it
hinders compatibility with USB-C ports
in newer Apple laptops. *What?*
- If Apple went all-in on USB-C with
laptops, the lightning port on new
iPhones feels like either an anachronism
or accentuates the lock-in attempt.
- Bluetooth really isn't very good, not
at a level that guarantees perfect,
continuous audio streams. It's not
an ideal step up from a good, durable wire.
- Air pods and other headphone upgrades
are double disposable, in that, not only
are they particularly expensive options,
but easily lost, stolen or destroyed.
Laundry and drop hazards, above and beyond
theft, basically add constant anxiety to
the total cost of ownership for air pods
in particular.
- General inconvenience of replacement
forces odd work-around strategies for
times when you can't find your headphones.
If you're running late, and you lost them
in the couch cushions or under the bed,
what are your options?
I can think of a number of additional diminishingly valuable what-ifs, but you get the point. Life always turns out better with the widely adopted standardized options, since headphones take on the primary expendable accessory, and the alternatives are hemmed in, such that they're always worse.
But now what? It's just going to be this irritating thing, until an excuse lets Apple back down while saving face.
I'll never forget when I realized people were paying for ringtones. Why the heck would you do that? I just downloaded some and stuck them on my phone.
Then I bought Star Wars and watched it at home. VHS for the win! Then the same frickin' movie came out on DVD. I decided to buy it. Why would I do that? Because I was sold on the feature combination of DVDs. Then BluRay. I bought again. Why? The movie had new features, and BluRay was more cool.
I had become those people I was laughing at with the ringtones, spending money for stuff that either should be free or was basically worthless. I love movies. I have a lot of movies in various formats. But re-mixes of the same stupid movie? I'm being taken for a ride.
Now they keep the same movie, the same plot, the same hardware -- but re-make it with currently-popular actors. Why would people pay for this....I asked myself as I sat in the movie theater a couple of months ago.
There's less and less "new people creating new things that enriches society" and more and more "You bought X, you'll really love X1!"
Anybody that doesn't know where headphoneless-phones is going hasn't been paying attention. Ten years from now, when they've finally locked down DRM audio from the seller to the actual device you listen to it on? They'll be charging you multiple times to listen to the same sound.
Plus they make money on the hardware. Double bonus points for getting you on a hardware upgrade gravy train also locked in by vendor.
What the people who keep complaining about this don’t realize and will never realize is that there are tons of users who prefer the new Jack and will never have any issues with it at all.
You keep arguing about this “fiasco” but in reality Apple is fine, the majority of users are happy and this is all just an imagined issue like when they introduced the iPhone which would fail because it was just an iPod with a phone in it, or the touchscreen that would never be able to compete with tactile keyboards or the tablet that didn’t even run a proper desktop operating system.
I was not irritated by the thickness or weight of my iPhone 6 and its headphone jack. I am regularly irritated by the fact that I can’t charge my iPhone and plug in headphones at the same time.
Obviously I can plan around this, but it’s gone from something I don’t have to think about to something I have to think about.
Does wireless charging meet the same performance levels of wired charging? Doesn't it take much longer to do an induction charge? It's like a lose lose here. Poorer audio quality with bluetooth, slower charging with wireless....
Much longer? No, unless you're comparing to using fast charge with a 30W charger and USB-C to Lightning cable. Somewhat longer? Yes. 7.5W is common for induction chargers. Apple's iPhone chargers in the box have long been 5W; I don't know what the wattage will be on this year's iPhone chargers.
Won’t do you much good, though when you’re trying to charge and listen while waking or in a moving vehicle. Unless what you mean is contactless charging - which would be ... interesting ... in public spaces (street or transit).
This was originally going to read "Phenomenally stupid question, but why hasn't somebody brought out an adapter cable that provides both charging and a 3.5mm jack?"
But I figured I should google first. Does anybody have any firsthand experience with Belkin's adapter that lets you do both simultaneously? Asking since my wife's work phone just got "upgraded" and we found ourselves unable to listen to a podcast on our last road trip.
Which is frustrating since GoPro has solved this problem already. They use a single USB-C connector for both charging and audio input with a single dongle.
I bought this for my essential phone two weeks ago and it does actually work, like reviews state. It's been wonderful to get that jack back.
Bluetooth, as cool as it is, has never been 100% reliable for me. Getting random choppy audio and charging headphone batteries is something I don't want to deal with anymore when I am sitting in bed. I tried it for nine months, and the experience sucked big time.
Bluetooth still works fine in my car, though. So I'll keep using it there.
Is the connection stable enough to hold in situations where you would typically have a wired headphone connected?
The usb-c connectors with adapters on my macbook are terrible. On lots of adapters a slight push to the side will cause them to lose connection. They work only in stationary use, and some adapters didn't even work there reliably.
Somewhat ironically, iPhones have only gotten thicker since the abandonment of the headphone jack. The iPhone X/XS, XS Max, and XR are all thicker than the 6/6S.
You can make the signal encrypted all the way to the approved Bluetooth device, making it harder to extract audio to a raw format if it's played on a phone.
It wasn't about thickness - the taptic engine takes up the space that would have otherwise been used for the headphone jack. I would also wager that it makes waterproofing to IP68 somewhat harder (not impossible).
Ended up attaching my dongle to my headphones with a Velcro cable tie after forgetting it one too many times (I need to take it on and off all the time to connect it to my Mac, as it doesn’t have a Lightning port - the fact that that situation exists feels like an omen that Apple aren’t quite firing on all cylinders). It sucks and looks stupid but it kind of solves the problem.
I wish they’d not removed the port, it’s a real pain and I’m not willing to go wireless until there’s a way to do it with zero latency. I’ll be really disappointed if the new iPad removes the headphone socket as it’s pretty essential for music making on the go.
I use a dongle too. I got it permanently attached on my headphones.
i think he makes a false dichotomy in his article. He is not bringing up a dongle at all and makes the choice to either a phone with a 3.5mm output or bluetooth. I would give this more credibility if this was discussed as well.
I've got AirPods and I'm sold. I'm not going back to wired headphones.
Apple has got proximity-based pairing nailed so well, it's easier than plugging a jack in. I can connect to other iPhones as easily as mine. Macs logged in to my iCloud don't need pairing at all. It works like it should, not like a typical Bluetooth crap.
The charging case is more convenient to carry than a bundle of wires. And of course I can walk around, zip my jacket, etc. without minding the wire.
It's more expensive, proprietary, it doesn't work well for some people. But I can definitely see why having AirPods Apple thought wired headphones are the next floppy drive.
I loved everything about the AirPods except that they have no noise reduction. The New York City subway is loud as hell. Street noise is loud as hell. Even when not wearing headphones I wear earplugs to block out all the noise.
The BeatsX are earplug type headphones that do decent sound isolation. They’re not as snazzy as the AirPods and they have some minor UX frustrations, but for the most part have been pretty good.
I'm in the same boat. I replaced the BeatsX tips with some 3rd party foamies and they do a pretty good job of damping external noise.
I don't recommend the PowerBeats though. No matter what sort of tips you use, they mute almost nothing. Also, the slightest breeze causes tons of wind noise.
I don't understand the appeal at all of headphones with no noise reduction. How does anyone use them in a noisy environment without setting the volume uncomfortably high?
> How does anyone use them in a noisy environment without setting the volume uncomfortably high?
This is a large part of why doctors are starting to warn of an epidemic of hearing loss. Headphones with poor noise isolation tend to encourage people to crank the volume way too high.
a) Noise reduction usually requires a powered component, or some kind of neck brace to contain the battery required for active noise cancelling. This adds expense and weight.
b) Sometimes it's good to be aware of your surroundings! When I'm listening to music, noise is usually sufficiently blocked by the sheer volume of the track, and during podcasts and audiobooks I'm also not bothered by the sounds of the streets.
If anything, it's good to hear a siren, or the ramblings of a nearby crazy person in order to avoid them.
The only time I find noise cancellation useful is on airplanes.
None of that requires there to be no jack. Im on the phone for hours at a time, need my hands and speaker isn't an option. Batteries are a real concern and getting a backup pair would be expensive.
AirPods warn you when they're low (it requires a considerable amount of time in-ear to get them low, about 4+ hours), then if you pop them in the case for 5 minutes, you get 45 minutes of play time.
Battery life is rarely a concern for me, and I wear my AirPods almost constantly. I even sometimes sleep with them.
That is 4+ hours in-ear. What usually happens is that someone wants to talk to you throughout your day, and you put them in the case for 5-10 mins and you gain an hour. Or you eat lunch with co-workers and they go in the case for a bit. Then, after work, when the battery is dying, you need to take a shower, so you put them in the case for like 20 minutes and you have enough charge for the rest of the day; then you go to bed and they fully charge over night.
Won't work for me at all, I have my headphones on for hours at a time. What makes it worse is that you could have your wireless ones and someone like me his wired ones.
Apple decided rightly or not that they don't care about me. So be it.
if its that important of a part of your life, buy two pairs of wireless headphones. but given the ridiculously fast charge time of airpods, why worry? otherwise, I hope apple keeps tailoring the products to the normal use cases and not making weird compromises for pro audio users and those with extremely high usage times. that's speaking as a shareholder anyway...
> Apple decided rightly or not that they don't care about me.
If you’re view is that every product should cater to the needs of everyone, then yep, Apple shouldn’t care about you as you are being unrealistic.
You get wired headphones and a dongle in the box, you can buy Beats headphones with the same chip as the Airpods with longer battery life for about the same price, or you can use a vast ocean of other wired or Bluetooth headphones. It’s not like you are forced to use something that doesn’t work for your needs.
The trick for the AirPods is duty cycling such that there is no down time. You put one in the case when the tone sounds, put it pack in your ear a few minutes later, and then charge the other one. You can be on a single call all day.
The pairing isn’t great IMO. So many calls take a minute to figure out AirPod connectivity issues. It’s frustrating switching airpods between a Mac and iPhone. Much of the time only left or right pair, and the only way to fix it is to put them back in the case and re-pair them. Sadly it doesn’t “just work”
Another common problem is the mics tend to rust out after about a year of usage, eventually breaking down. This happens if you use them for any exercise (which apple advertises them for) with sweat rusting the mesh on the bottom.
Eventually I switched back to a manual headphone cable with a mic built in. It always works...
The switching between iOS and Mac is indeed buggy. macOS also lacks system-wide support for airplay 2. I think they must be dealing with legacy code and/or support that needs modernized. Switching between iOS and iPad with AirPods doesn’t give people issues, so I don’t think it’s a problem with AirPod hardware or iOS.
Rhe sweat problem is interesting! I haven’t experienced this degradation, but I think my head’s sweat mostly runs off my nose. Is it because of how your hair is styled?
To be fair I wore them 2-3 times a week running. Sweat definitely roles off my ears onto the airpods. I bet sweat is particularly corrosive. The Apple store tried to brush off the rust and it worked a little better, but not consistently.
I would recommend buying cheap exercise headphones instead of using airpods.
I also sometimes prefer having the over ear headphones for some sound cancelation. You can buy reasonable headphones plus a mic-in cable for less than $50.
I love my AirPods. I find them fairly comfortable and the audio quality is fine, perfect for podcasts (theory: the rise of AirPods and rise of podcasts are related).
However, AirPods don't require the removal of the headphone jack! The removal of the headphone jack is still so consumer hostile: it serves zero benefit to anyone apart from bluetooth accessory makers. If Apple really was serious about advancing bluetooth headphones, they would at least license the W1 for the pairing magic to other manufacturers.
Good Bluetooth headphones AND headphone jacks can exist at the same time! Anyone arguing for the removal of headphone jacks aren't grounded in any sort of reality tbh.
Agree, I love wireless audio and I've used decent bluetooth headphones on and off for a decade now. But that still makes the removal of the headphone jack a disaster and I miss it every day.
Apples user might have become accustomed to the dongle life but it is unbearable. Also, my non-standard dongle have started to glitch and buying a new one costs about 100x more than it is worth. Go figure.
It might have felt better if there was a reason for it. But no, there is absolutely no sane reason to ditch it other than forcing people to buy wireless peripherals. And that is just unacceptable. Too bad alternatives are running out.
This is all also under the assumption that bluetooth is good enough. It isn't.
This is also under the assumption that bluetooth is secure. It isn't.
> This is all also under the assumption that bluetooth is good enough. It isn't.
I don't think that's true. I don't think there's an inherit quality problem with Bluetooth, but it's just that bluetooth is an added cost, so manufacturers cost save on the audio components, or the headphones become expensive.
There are still incompatibility issues in practice.
And even still, you will get something that won't outlast the inbuilt batteries - which makes it absurd to spend money on them. I still use, on a daily basis, my $300 headphones that are a decade old. I can't find any bluetooth headphones fort $3-400 with NC that matches them. And they won't last a decade for sure (whereas my wired ones probably will last several).
> Anyone arguing for the removal of headphone jacks aren't grounded in any sort of reality tbh.
The problem is that there isn’t really a good argument to keep the headphone jack. It’s a redundant port because lightning/usbC and Bluetooth both handle audio. You would need a strong justification to keep it when you could use that space for other stuff in the phone.
What disadvantages come from the removal of a ubiquitous headphone interconnect that's been on our devices for years? iPhone's have gotten thicker since the removal of the headphone jack. Apple's made iPods much thinner than any of the iPhones, and they all had headphone jacks.
There's no problem. It's not redundant if you want to charge your phone and listen to audio at the same time - I have those Bose headphones noice cancelling headphones that everyone travels with. To use them, I need to carry around an adapter which is a pain. When I fly, I have to choose whether to charge my phone or listen to audio.
Look, I love my iPhone X, but I've gotten absolutely nothing out of losing the headphone jack. It's only come at costs.
..although Apple did not use the space for anything else when they removed it from the iPhone 7.
Whats the evidence? Scotty from strange parts actually managed to add a working headphone jack back to the iPhone, in the exact spot where it had been removed!
He cut out one piece of plastic relating to barometric pressure, and moved the taptic engine a bit. And all of this was on the 7, so Apple surely had space for a headphone jack on the 7+, right?
Maybe wired headphones are going the way of the DVD drive. But at this point, the change has felt very user-hostile. If they cared about their customers, iPhones would support USB-C and wired headphones.
> so Apple surely had space for a headphone jack on the 7+, right
That’s easily answerable by heading over to iFixIt. You’ll see the Plus models are near identical to the non-Plus in available space, just the Plus has a bigger battery and even more circuitry (do to the dual camera). Apple doesn’t waste any space inside their devices typically.
>However, AirPods don't require the removal of the headphone jack! The removal of the headphone jack is still so consumer hostile
This is key. When they removed the disc drive in the macbooks there was a decent argument to be made about more space for other ports (or reduced thickness). But the 3.5 mm headphone jack is literally... 3.5 mm, right? Another commentor even pointed out that the new iphones are thicker than the 6 line. I just dont ubderstand the argument here.
Well Airpods work perfectly well with my Galaxy S8. You don't need Apple phones to use them.
And my S8 also has 3.5mm jack for when my 2 hour calls exhaust the airpods battery or when I want to push a drum track from my phone synth to a speaker :-)
this is not my experience. my MacBook often refuses to connect to my airpods. rebooting usually fixes it. sometimes I have to re-pair. then I also can't use them with other devices.
they also cut out quite often probably because I live in a crowded downtown area.
when they work I mostly like them but sadly for me they don't always work.
Man, I really find myself on the opposite end of the spectrum here. The only thing I love about my airports is the charging case. Size wise it's great.
However, airpods are uncomfortable, always feel like they're going to fall out. I've already had to replace one of them because they're easily lost. The sound quality is so-so. I have to crank the volume way up because there isn't any kind of noise isolation, much less noise cancellation.
All around they're a very very average product offering.
Same experience here, don't think I'll ever be able to go back to wired headphones. Especially in the gym / when running, the AirPods are amazing, they fit perfectly (unlike a lot of other headphones), never run out of battery and connect instantly to my devices.
I believe Apple made the right move, many other manufacturers are already following, bluetooth headphones are getting cheaper and quality is getting better.
Not sure I understand - wired headphones are much cheaper to manufacture, are inherently higher quality (they'll always have less loss and less latency), can fit just as well, don't have batteries to begin with, and are much easier to connect to devices. The only point that makes any sense to me is that wireless headphones are better for exercise, but why would Apple remove the audio jack just to indirectly improve the state of wireless audio for when people exercise?
This is just my opinion, but I believe that the whole notion of being more futuristic is also being fully wireless. And partially removing the headphone jack is just part of the move to a full wireless future.
Someone just had to be the first to introduce it to the mainstream, I’m fairly certain that it will be widely accepted in a few years.
I lived in that wireless future for a while and it sucked. Incessant connectivity issues, compatibility problems, irritatingly high latency, and the never-ending hassle of keeping all those batteries charged. I've abandoned it and gone back to wires for everything - keyboard, mouse, headphones, car stereo, kitchen stereo, phone headset, all of it. So much simpler; everything just works, all the time.
Can you replace the battery in your airpods? No? So you mean you're literally buying something to throw away every 5 years or so? How environmentally friendly, but I'm sure Apple is glad you've decided to make paying them a regular part of your life. Nothing about removing the headphone jacks had a point other than to increase profits. The phones are thicker, waterproof phones have headphone jacks, they parts are cheap, the next big thing isn't really a drop in replacement or better yet.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 414 ms ] threadI get that wires are better for serious musicians. I doubt that the number of people depending on their iPhones for low latency audio work is dwarfed by the number of people doing latency insensitive things like listening to podcasts or iTunes. iPhones are primarily consumer products, so catering to consumer and not professional needs first makes sense.
Heck, the stuff you mentioned appears to be purpose built audio equipment. How would that be affected by the iPhone ditching the headphone jack?
OK, I'll call BS. iPhones and iPads are barely used for live performances. On the Macbook side, other than USB-A, what have they gotten rid of that DJs truly need for performances? We were using USB MIDI interfaces and USB audio interfaces long before the optical audio out went away.
Meanwhile I know a few musicians who haven't touched a Microsoft OS in over 10 years (!). Yeah, Microsoft finally introduced an Audio API in Vista to take on CoreAudio, but that isn't new. Does anybody like Windows 10 given the choice? If anything, I'd expect Microsoft's infamous Update strategy to make anything Windows 10 a non-option for live gigs. About the only argument I can think of is that musicians with less budget might lean more towards a Windows-based DAW.
I’ll repeat since you seem to have reading issues: how many serious musicians were depending on iPhones for live production instead of laptops or purpose built hardware?
We eventually ban accounts that won't stop doing this, and I don't want to ban you, so would appreciate it if you'd post thoughtfully from now on.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I personally think that pulling out a strawman is probably more uncivil than calling it out, but whatever you say.
Please keep the online calling-out/shaming culture well away from this site as well. That's a euphemism for people attacking each other, and we don't want that here.
These aren’t mainstream problems, but are problems nonetheless.
I don’t mind using a dongle, as long as it works. In my case, there is no solution. That Why I still use my old Samsung on the gimbal.
But around the same time iPhones lost their headphone jack, the laptops lost their optical port: https://appleinsider.com/articles/16/11/02/new-macbook-pro-d.... I'm sure it's ultimately because Tim doesn't care as much as Steve about this stuff, but it does feel like something is being lost.
Now it’s more of a status symbol, I’ve got an apple rather than a crappy generic android or think pad.
Both companies stocks soared under each, largely because of their cost cutting / monetization of every aspect of product. However, in both cases, such maneuvers wound up alienating their core supporters and causing strategic brand identity issues.
Eventually the board will have to replace TC (and most of the stagnant C-levels) and hopefully, like Microsoft, this will lead to a revitalization of Apple.
The "XS Max"...really? Sounds like they've outsourced more than just manufacturing to China.
Jobs certainly wasn't afraid of change but he also seemed to have an appreciation for things that just work, and 1/8" audio jacks & cables have a lot of virtues here. Seems likely that's why they stuck around through his tenure even though he could have put them on the chopping block in favor of wireless as easily as he did floppies and serial ports.
And the optical interface... there's a better argument it's recently become obsolete than there is about 1/8" audio, but far from being "just silly" it's a very concrete illustration of integrating a premium feature with niche utility neatly into the overall package. It's one thing that communicated that Apple was interested in using its margins to make sure the product wasn't just an experience, it was a tool that had the right affordances, the right blade on the swiss army knife for one stripe of professional/enthusiast.
Maybe a more common denominator approach will serve Apple equally well. Or maybe things like touch bars ultimately won't as meaningfully differentiate Apple products. Time will tell.
Yes, but for instance NFC, which made pairing within the Apple ecosystem much more attractive, is considerably more recent, as is the processing and charging technology in e.g. the AirPods.
> Jobs certainly wasn't afraid of change but he also seemed to have an appreciation for things that just work
Like 3.5" floppy drives, or CD-ROM drives?
As for the rest of the airpod tech... inductive charging is old, resonant coupling is roughly contemporary with A2DP, and even Qi-branded resonant coupling is 2010ish. Amenable NFC tech or other means of easy pairing are older. If these were somehow a crucial key to The Future™ that Steve Jobs himself had seen in a vision, there's little reason those couldn't have been out sooner (with Apple's resources, possibly before his death). And all this assumes that for some reason the form headphones take with the airpod is for some reason the primary line for marking the obsolescence of 1/8", which isn't a solid assumption because (a) plenty of people are happy for their application with other devices and (b) for some applications, the prevailing bluetooth profiles are still inadequate even assuming universally adopted airpod tech in all bluetooth audio devices and (c) how far away are we from universally adopted airpod tech? and (d) 1/8" would still be closer to just works.
I don't know if you lived through them but they were very unreliable. Floppy drives can suddenly become unusuable for whatever reason, CDs become scratched. Not to mention their limited storage space.
USB was miles better. It was the right call. It's the same with the headphone jack.
It. just. works.
Jobs was CEO when Apple rewrote Final Cut Pro, which was hugely controversial among filmmakers when it was released. He was CEO when they dropped Shake. He was CEO when they decided to drop DVD drives, and decided to forego Blu-Ray drives.
There are a lot of reasons to dislike Apple's decision to drop the headphone jack, but invoking Jobs' dedication to what creators want doesn't pass the laugh test IMO. Apple under Jobs had no problem pissing off creators when Apple thought they were right about a technology change.
So I suppose Apple would just want you to buy an iPad as well! for your music production.
Individual smartphone manufacturers can implement full audio class specifications on top of Android’s default and many do. In fact, Google supports all three of the USB Audio Classes with the Pixel 2. However, this leads consumers not knowing what to expect from their handsets. You can find forums full of users struggling to understand why products don’t work with their specific smartphone, along with headache-inducing workarounds requiring specific apps and USB OTG cables.
https://www.soundguys.com/android-usb-audio-class-3-0-18494/
I do know that from the entire collection of screen sizes and hardware configuration options I'd like to choose my mode of creation, but Apple seems to think that telling me "iPhone is not a creation device" is Just Fine®.
Or maybe ... none of the above? Content creators are probably a tiny fraction of Apple's user base at this point. I think they just don't care.
Just to remind, the original iPhone did not allow user-installable apps at all.
Anecdotally, I know a lot of iPhone owners, and of them only one person uses their phone for music content creation. And my hunch is that one friendship may just be a statistical anomaly compared to the greater population of all iPhone owners.
Power users are the worst customers, I'm surprised more companies don't try to drive them away on purpose.
Apple has an eco system, and gets margin on all of it. Others do not.
No need for 2k pricing.
The problem with catering directly to mass consumers is that the minute some other brand becomes more fashionable, they will jump to it. And if at that point creatives have been sufficiently fed up with the non-utility of Apple products, they might have already abandoned ship, and Apple will not have a code demographic to fall back to (or to keep it fashionable in the first place).
2) Even if that weren't the case, I'm not arguing power- of course a full-fledged computer has more power. It's about convenience. When does inspiration strike? Often when all I have is my phone; I can't walk around with my laptop at the ready.
The article is missing that very reasonable use case for no Jack.
Now I have a pair of airpods and I love them. The improvement is marginal, but it's an improvement that touches many aspects of my life (commuting, cooking, sleeping, working). I love, love, love them.
> Does anyone truly believe they removed the headphone jack for any reason other than to sell more dongles and more wireless headphones?
I think Apple believes that wireless headphones are the future and they decided to prove that it can be done right. IMO they succeeded with airpods.
Removing the headphone jack was a forcing function. It's only an issue if you don't buy into the Apple ecosystem. Obviously that's a risk, but it's a risk that Apple has taken before.
Assuming it's some kind of cockameme plan to sell more dongles doesn't really fit the profile of Apple as a company, IMO.
If you tried other Bluetooth headphones than the Airpods now, you would also notice the better battery life. My work headphones (over-ear) only need to be charged on the weekend after over 40h of use and they are very light, too.
Ditching the only analogue sound connector was without question a bad idea though.
It's entirely conceivable, based on my experience, that removal of the headphone jack is attributable to ignorance and not to malice.
I am temporarily annoyed with the audio jack removal, but I get it. It’s a “burn the boats” type strategy of pushing for the wireless, portless future.
There's lots of reasons to believe that removing the jack is NOT meant to drive accessory revenue:
1. They included the dongles in the box for years, and still sell them at $9.
2. They include compatible headphones in every box.
3. iPhones are compatible with all wireless headphones.
I suspect the two most significant reasons were to reduce manufacturing cost/complexity and to improve reliability (one less physical port to get dirty and break, one less entry point for water damage).
Headphone jacks take up quite a bit of space that can be used to improve battery life.
Still, several of the older people in my life have gotten them, and they were a huge improvement for those people.
Now if you were talking purely about the connector itself. Whatever wireless technology was forced upon the population is not actually capable of replacing a wired connection.
* Bluetooth doesn't work in crowded environments. * Standard Bluetooth sound quality is inferior without proprietary extensions to the protocol. * Latency between device and headphone can be massive (500ms to 100ms), * You have to recharge it. * Devices have to be paired and sometimes "unpair" for no reason.
Bluetooth just sucks for audio. I'm sure there are hundreds of wireless technologies that are better than bluetooth, otherwise these proprietary extensions wouldn't exist.
You can in theory get <32ms latency with a special obscure subvariant of a proprietary standard of bluetooth (aka aptX LL) that no one has ever heard of for which you need a certain dongle and your headphone must support it. (hint your phone and headphones don't support it)
Apple's success depends on the iPhone. Without it their services businesses become useless, their retail presence becomes an albatross, peripheral devices like Apple Watch, AppleTV start to look a lot less useful and forget about future growth in AR/VR. And so the idea that Apple would compromise all of that just to make a comparatively tiny hundred million or so is just crazy. And Tim Cook is anything but crazy.
The fact is that the market is moving towards wireless for everything. Audio included. And 99.999% of the world aren't audiophiles who can tell the difference (or even care if they can) between BT and non BT audio. So why waste valuable phone space for an insignificant number of people when you can improve battery life by say 5% ?
Most companies try to leverage their market position in this way. To not do it would be unusual.
The question was:
>Does anyone truly believe they removed the headphone jack for any reason other than to sell more dongles and more wireless headphones?
There are attributes to wireless beyond it being more expensive. Wireless isn't some gimmik to increase revenue. It genuinely is better in some ways and an acceptable complete replacement. If you're sold on wireless you don't need a headphone jack.
And worse is some ways. It is not absolutely better; and, for plenty of people, not "an acceptable complete replacement".
Your claim in your original comment ("Anyone who has felt a tug at their head from headphones getting snagged by something accidently[sic] is quickly sold to the merits of wireless.") is also far from convincing that wireless is "an acceptable complete replacement", or even better than wired in more than one minor way.
> If you're sold on wireless you don't need a headphone jack.
In which case, I repeat, you keep using wireless. A headphone jack does not hurt those who want to use wireless. Removing the jack actively denies them a feature, while doing little for those who want to use wireless. Not to mention, removing the jack does not sell people on wireless, it forces them to choose between a dongle and wireless; or worse, a different platform.
People charge their phone everyday so it isn't a massive deal to charge your AirPods as well. And the sound quality right now is more than good enough especially given that you're asking people to tradeoff their data usage.
If I have to charge them then I have to remember to take them out and plug them in, and also then have to remember to take them out of the charger and take them with me.
I'm not super sensitive to sound quality, but charging is a deal breaker.
3.5mm is de facto hi-fi.
A cheap DAC can produce around 16 bits and 20 kHz. It's not difficult. A pair of $10 earplugs is much more limited in what sound it can physically play.
It’s a long game, but I think part of their rationale is that we had to get rid of that thing eventually — which is inarguable, IMHO — and so the earlier, the better. If you’re forced to make wireless headphones that don’t suck, you will.
So you’re basically stuck with AirPods or new Beats if you want low latency Bluetooth headphones for an iPhone. And this seems unlikely to change.
You're trusting/hoping that [0] will never happen, or (for WiFi) that [1] will never happen. At least with most Internet usage there are additional layers involved that have their own security which can protect your in flight data, but the firmware on BT/WiFi chipsets doesn't necessarily have that sort of layered security.
I'd call it a dangerous goal.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/12/16294904/bluetooth-hack-e...
[1] https://www.krackattacks.com/
I doubt it. Headphone jack was a nice reliable piece of hardware. Thank goodness some other brands are rooted in reality.
What number of AirPods users would there have to be on a 787 for the interference to become a problem?
Ethernet is more reliable than WiFi. Power is more reliable than batteries. But the world doesn't want wires so Apple has to listen.
B) No one was calling for the elimination of the headphone jack. Every poll shows broad support for it. Apple themselves said it took ‘courage’ which is not the adjective you’d use to describe an action that the world agrees with.
Common sense suggests that if the world wanted a thicker phone then one of the hundreds of OEMs would have made one and been successful at it. But yet that has never happened.
What I'd like is a mophie with a 3.5mm jack in that connects to a modern iphone.
https://youtu.be/utfbE3_uAMA
Also, why are you responding to the question about limited RF spectrum? It's like you have an agenda in this thread.
It's very clear consumers aren't clamouring for losing the jack. There are a lot more dollars selling wireless and they have an inherent limited life thanks to battery lifespan.
The SE, with a headphone jack, is roughly the same thickness as the new XS without. They both have bluetooth for those who might like wireless.
That's not Apple or whoever listening, that's them imposing.
But did the poll ask them which they want: Thinner iPhone/No Headphone or Thicker iPhone/Headphone
Were the new generation of phones thinner than the jack I'd have to concede you may have a point, but that is not what we're getting.
If the question becomes "would you like 0.2% more battery or a headphone jack?" I doubt many would vote to remove.
The iPhone X battery is rated for 2716 mAh.
So if you could use 100% of that volume efficiently for increasing battery volume, I think battery capacity increases approximately 6%.
https://www.oneplus.com/ie/6/specs
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/oneplus-ignores-its-...
But anyway who are we kidding? It’s not about making space in the device in the end. Perhaps that’s the straw that broke the camels back, but not what set Apple off in this direction to begin with.
Yet Samsung did fit a 4000 mAh battery, a headphone jack, wireless charging, expendable storage, fingerprint sensor, 512Gb of storage AND a PEN in their IP68 Note 9.
I get audio drop outs with airpods everytime I pass through one of the above stations.
Funny how they really should have worried about this but apparently haven't.
But you can still use the lightning earphones that come together (or buy a dongle, since the newer model phones are dropping the adapter). 3rd party dongles are cheaper and some allow you to charge and listen to music at the same time.
I fly regularly and have yet to be on a EU flight where Bluetooth is allowed.
And even for wlan only since one year we started to get planes where it is allowed at cruise altitude.
I am yet to hear that I can turn Bluetooth on after the security debriefing and even though I fly regularly, so far just boarded like two flights where there was on-flight wlan available.
> You can use your Bluetooth headphones during the entire flight without restriction – even during take-off and landing, unless the crew instruct otherwise.
britishairways.com:
> Bluetooth devices, e.g. wireless keyboards or headphones, can be used during the flight but must be switched off for taxi, take-off and landing.
I believe that Bluetooth was prohibited on Lufthansa as recently as 2017, so it might be worth to check for each airline you're using.
Really? Am I missing something? I've never been pulled up on using bluetooth headphones on a plane in the EU. The flight attendants have never said anything, and I've been in full view of them before...
EDIT: researching it that could be just a "be safe" catch all though, and regulation might actually mean just cellular in some cases. No idea how a normal person is supposed to figure out what exactly applies to the current flight then.
I worked at an airline two years ago on the rollout of inflight wifi and they advise customers to enable airplane mode and reenable wifi (if it's disabled). These days within aviation, "airplane mode" refers to disabling just of the cellular radios.
Apple, not everyone lives in the suburbs and uses their phones primarily at home or in personal vehicles.
Or do they already have something like this?
They probably require a wire to be charged.
They also lose charge when it's least convenient.
And so it isn't like you're carrying anything extra.
And as someone who has owned many IEMs over the long term those cables all end up breaking. And for IEMs with replaceable cables it's the connectors that break.
There simply isn't enough bandwidth.
Also repairing a cable is really easy task generally, and there is even easier solution available: make the cable replaceable, i.e. have it also be connectorized on the headphone end.
Highly subjective. Some people have other hobbies.
> make the cable replaceable, i.e. have it also be connectorized on the headphone end.
I might try that.
But of course these days the whole concept of repairing things is completely bygone thing for most people, so yeah, maybe wireless headphones do make sense.
wireless however have other issues, what of the battery? over time it will wear like any battery does and their runtime will significantly decrease, changing the cable on a pair of wired phones will be a lot less hassle than cracking open your wireless phones to replace the battery
not to mention the fact that wireless devices have far more tech in them that could go wrong, a pair of wired headphones are fairly simple devices, theres a whole lot more tech inside a pair of bluetooth phones (battery, charging circuit, bluetooth components etc) and while theyre wireless theyll still have to be charged by way of a cable somehow so like a pair of wired phones they still have a wire, its just used for charging rather than sound but that doesnt mean it cant break just the same
However, the problem you are describing:
> One side of the headphones stops playing sounds; you can sometimes spin the connector and get the sound back, [...] and it stops working eventually.
I suspect that might be terrible quality wires, not necessarily the headphones. The quality of patch cable at the usual big-box consumer stores has fallen dramatically over the last ~5-10 years. It can be really difficult to find a cable hasn't changed the outer protective wrapping from traditional softer rubber(?) to some sort of cheap plastic. The wrapping on the new cables can harden badly over as little as 2-3 months, leading to sharp kinks/bends forming over time that break the delicate wires inside.
The newer cables also tend to lack protective stiffeners at the ends for protection against damaging the wires if the cables is pulled at a right angle to the connector.
Once the wire has started to break, you might be able to get it working again for a while by turning the connector (if the break is at or near the connector) or otherwise moving the cable until the broken ends of the conductor touch.
On the other hand, most of the cables that I bought in the late-80s/early-90s still work fine. (they never formed permanent kinds) The problem is race-to-the-bottom we're seeing everywhere as businesses try to squeeze every last cent out their products. This will happen to wireless headphones eventually, but for now they are in a honeymoon period where they are still a "new(-ish) tech" that is experimenting with new designs. Eventually the value engineers and must-meet-growth-targets management will get around to "optimizing" their quality and longevity too.
Exactly what happened to my headphones. I end up replacing the cable every 6-12 months. Fortunately user-replaceable cables make it almost a non-issue.
FWIW audio cables in consumer stores were pretty much always PVC, though, as you like many other people discovered, there are quality plastics and cheap plastics. The former will last quite a number of years before turning hard and brittle, the latter won't, smells badly and probably gives you cancer for free, too.
Speaker, microphone and guitar cables for studio / stage use often have rubber sheathing (~neoprene), though many are just higher quality PVC.
> The newer cables also tend to lack protective stiffeners at the ends for protection against damaging the wires if the cables is pulled at a right angle to the connector.
Using the tiniest of ferrules seems to be a conscious design choice, though incorrect material and manufacture are commonly seen as well. In any case, a bad design that's poorly manufactured is not going to work.
As usual, non-consumer products don't have the problem, at all.
> The problem is race-to-the-bottom we're seeing everywhere as businesses try to squeeze every last cent out their products.
While that's certainly true, the ali/bangood-mentality also has to do with it. "Oh look, I can get $thisThing for 2.5 $ delivered from China, which normally costs 10 $". A compounding problem is of course, that the 10 $ store item is the same as the 2.5 $ Ali item, so you actually need to turn to the proper online store to get the quality matching price point.
No.
it does however highlight an interesting point, most portable devices make a consideration for air travel in their design, the dell xps15 for example has a 97wh battery because 99wh is the limit for taking into an airplane cabin, yet turn on airplane mode on your phone and it disables all wireless connections, bluetooth included so if you were relying on your airpods to provide your in flight music youre out of luck
i guess it highlights how stupid the ban on wireless connectivity on planes is (not like it wasnt blatantly obvious that theyd never let a vehicle carrying hundreds of lives into the sky with unsheilded components that could be brought down by anyone with a ten quid nokia)
(Your writing would be much easier to read with capital letters and apostrophes.)
I don't believe that one either, but it's a little more believable than thinking that a single phone can cause enough interference to affect the plane.
I don't think the real concern was ever that cellphones would cause planes to fall out of the sky, however, there's real reason to be concerned that they could interrupt the pilot's ability to communicate with ATC, which I'm sure could get dangerous.
There's probably no faster way to get everyone to shut their phones off than a "this is your Captain speaking; a cellphone on board is preventing me from talking to the ATC" however.
but mission critical equipment like life support systems, airplanes and other such tech would never be allowed to be produced and used without at least basic shielding all round
I would be very surprised if that is how it works, given that some Inflight WiFi solutions do not need any approval at all. (Keyword: Portable IFE)
It used to be that running any uncertified electronic equipment at all was disallowed on takeoff/landing, no matter what the radio status. In the top hits on Google for "Portable IFE" I'm seeing WiFi devices on pages with 2012 copyright dates that claim no certification is required. Sounds like BS to me.
[0] https://i.imgur.com/P1REKZR.jpg
Also I am going by the 2 Portable IFE systems from our hardware partners that I have in my Lab to play around with. Portable IFE systems are completely battery powered and have no connection to the Aircraft. The only "certification" that you need is that you would need to demonstrate that this device does not need certification. Which in the case of the 2 devices I have right here is fairly simple thing.
It’s possible to turn bluetooth on while in flight mode. People use bluetooth headphones a lot in flight. One of the premier use case of Bose’s noise cancelling bluetooth headphones is to use on planes. No announcement is made to ask people to not use bluetooth. No flight attendant asks people to not use bluetooth headphones. Planes are not crashing.
It’s probably safe to use bluetooth headphones on a plane.
The reason for my wired preference is security. I trust cables more than i trust wireless.
Bluetooth is insecure. I dont think it is secure to walk around in a mall with your bluetooth turned on. (correct me if i am wrong)
Wifi WPA2 is probably secure. However wifi WEP is completely insecure. For many years WEP has been widely used. Another problem with wifi are fake networks that use the same name as a public network.
Another interesting fact with wired headphones is they wont fall down directly on the floor, because of the wires. The same goes with the computer mouse.. sometimes it moves to the edge of the table and might want to fall.. the wire will hold it.
Wireless keyboards is definitively a no go since teorically its possible to passively listen for pressed keys just like a keylogger.
Wireless technology sure looks better without all the wires, however when people choose convenience(wireless), they lose some security.
So when i can, i choose wires.
You are wrong. I don't recall any Bluetooth security issues from just having Bluetooth on or from having an established connection. Those things are pretty well solved in all vaguely modern wireless standards.
The issues are always around the initial connection and key exchange. PIN-based pairing has various flaws in Bluetooth, but Bluetooth headphones use "Just Works" pairing, which I don't think has had any issues, other than the design compromise that it is vulnerable to MitM. That is vanishingly unlikely to happen with Bluetooth headphones though.
WPA2 is secure if you use a very strong password. WEP is basically extinct.
> "Just having Bluetooth on puts you at risk," said Izrael.
The WPA2 standard is not secure against key reinstallation attacks, which can be used to decrypt packets in an MitM position. Most implementations of WPA2, though, have patched themselves in a backwards-compatible manner since discovery of this vulnerability.
The IEEE has put out WPA3 which fixes this vulnerability (among other changes).
See: https://www.krackattacks.com/
Well that and I have some very nice headphones that I am obviously not going to ditch because some smartphone removes the single world-wide standard socket in existence...
You can also use wired Ethernet with iPad, the performance is unreal.
Airpods are awesome, and they'll only get better. A cord running to your pocket is seriously a thing of the past, and all these posts will age terribly. Just like the serial port ones, the floppy ones, the cd rom ones...
And for all this noise, what I can't for the life of my understand is why these people can't just use a god damn adapter. They make high quality DAC ones, too. Just leave it attached to your headphones. What's the damn problem? The rest of us get a better, thinner phone.
Should I just always carry a spare dongle in my pocket? Or rely on everyone having the appropriate Lightning/USB-C dongle already? Or maybe just use the industry standard 3.5mm jack, because it always Just Works.
Also it's completely untrue that the iPhone is "thinner" without a headphone jack; this guy added a jack to an iPhone 7 without external modification:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA
The video has over 6M views.
Apple doesn't care much about their users -- but it's hard to blame them, since said users are apparently happy with it.
From my limited knowledge it certainly seems easier to make it waterproof without a headphone jack.
If you bothered to look at the specs, you'd have noticed this not to be true.
I don't want to carry a single around, and the 3.5mm jack is the standard for analog stereo audio.
I want to vote with my dollars, but at the moment the options for phones with headphone jacks and no crapware preinstalled are exceedingly limited.
A thousand times this. The current market for phones is absolute crap. We need more competition. (And we also need at least some of that competition to quit playing "follow the leader" when the "leader" is an imagined title, and the "leader" is clearly blind and thrashing...)
[0]: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/
Blackberry KEY2 / KEY2 LE
Both have headphone jack, dual SIM (or SIM + micro SD) and monthly updates.
BB even has a keyboard!
LG G7 One
Xiaomi A1/A2 Lite
Moto X4
Nokia 6.1/6.1+/7+
The Moto G6 for example has Treble but Motorola has said it will only get one major update, to Pie. It came out in May with March security patches, they released the May security patch in July, and then released the July security patch in September.
Android One devices will (supposedly) all receive 2 major version updates and 3 years of monthly security patches.
But when Treble is installed, isn't installing a ROM with the new version a simple business, at least for people who can follow technical instructions ?
In principle a Generic System Image (GSI) can be flashed onto any Treble device and everything will just work. From what I've seen so far this is not really quite true and there will still need to be device-specific tweaks to ROMs, but the amount of device-specific code should be far lower than before and make life easier for maintainers. Hopefully the end result is more devices with functioning and well maintained ROMs available.
Apple knows how to make truly great audio hardware; the AirPods really are extraordinary. But the Beats lineup clearly hasn't received any serious attention, as evidenced by two things:
1) they still sell wireless hardware that doesn't have the W1 chip, two years after it was first released
2) for God's sake, all their devices charge over micro-USB!
Counter argument. The product lineup sucks so they had to help the sales in any way possible.
There's a big scuzzy pop when you plug in or remove the jack while speakers are on.
I've had several devices get crud in the jack, so that you have to rotate and push and position the jack just right to get sound.
Still, I appreciate having the wire and I wish that USB-C headphones had done better. I would have liked to get phones with two USB-C ports.
I get the same pop when jacking in using the Lightning-to-3.5 dongle. And I mean, making the 3.5 connection first, Lightning second.
Also, Lighting (and I suspect USB C) female connectors are dust, lint, and particulate magnets. What happens when those get fouled, the gold plating on the Lightning cable is scraped off one or more of the pins. So then you have either a broken cable or one that will charge but only if oriented correctly. So same issue, rotate the connector and maybe it works.
AND the thing that pisses me off the most...I have to carry around some old earbuds with the 3.5 in case I want to watch some Netflix on my MacBook Pro because I can’t plug my new EarPids into it. There’s no Lightning jack on any Mac. And there’s not even a dongle for that use case. All the USB M to Lightning F are for charging only.
Furthermore they look terrible. They're white, and they look like I have an Oral B toothbrush in my ears. I have no option to avoid either of that? Thank you, no.
As for the discussion: I'd like to be able to enter a store, listening to music, with all my radios off. It is called airplane mode. Was removing 1 gbit ethernet from laptops a good idea? I miss it, but having an adequate amount of USB ports solves the issue. Why not have two 2 USB-C ports on a smartphone and be done with it?
[1] https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#AirPods
But now what? It's just going to be this irritating thing, until an excuse lets Apple back down while saving face.
Whatever.
Then I bought Star Wars and watched it at home. VHS for the win! Then the same frickin' movie came out on DVD. I decided to buy it. Why would I do that? Because I was sold on the feature combination of DVDs. Then BluRay. I bought again. Why? The movie had new features, and BluRay was more cool.
I had become those people I was laughing at with the ringtones, spending money for stuff that either should be free or was basically worthless. I love movies. I have a lot of movies in various formats. But re-mixes of the same stupid movie? I'm being taken for a ride.
Now they keep the same movie, the same plot, the same hardware -- but re-make it with currently-popular actors. Why would people pay for this....I asked myself as I sat in the movie theater a couple of months ago.
There's less and less "new people creating new things that enriches society" and more and more "You bought X, you'll really love X1!"
Anybody that doesn't know where headphoneless-phones is going hasn't been paying attention. Ten years from now, when they've finally locked down DRM audio from the seller to the actual device you listen to it on? They'll be charging you multiple times to listen to the same sound.
Plus they make money on the hardware. Double bonus points for getting you on a hardware upgrade gravy train also locked in by vendor.
Obviously I can plan around this, but it’s gone from something I don’t have to think about to something I have to think about.
https://wccftech.com/the-iphone-xs-and-iphone-xs-max-both-ha...
You lose some speed, you gain some convenience.
Check this provider out. No connection to me just a customer.
https://www.brandmotion.com/freedom-charge/wireless-charging...
But I figured I should google first. Does anybody have any firsthand experience with Belkin's adapter that lets you do both simultaneously? Asking since my wife's work phone just got "upgraded" and we found ourselves unable to listen to a podcast on our last road trip.
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/5/18/17369236/a...
If you're on Android the answer is no, there's no way to do it.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07FCZY1ZB/
I bought this for my essential phone two weeks ago and it does actually work, like reviews state. It's been wonderful to get that jack back.
Bluetooth, as cool as it is, has never been 100% reliable for me. Getting random choppy audio and charging headphone batteries is something I don't want to deal with anymore when I am sitting in bed. I tried it for nine months, and the experience sucked big time.
Bluetooth still works fine in my car, though. So I'll keep using it there.
Whelp, good thing those Android phone makers ensured this existed before pulling the plug ... oh, wait ...
The usb-c connectors with adapters on my macbook are terrible. On lots of adapters a slight push to the side will cause them to lose connection. They work only in stationary use, and some adapters didn't even work there reliably.
https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/
It’s about DRM and vendor lock-in, nothing more and nothing less.
https://www.belkin.com/resources/img/overview/f8j198/belkin-...
I wish they’d not removed the port, it’s a real pain and I’m not willing to go wireless until there’s a way to do it with zero latency. I’ll be really disappointed if the new iPad removes the headphone socket as it’s pretty essential for music making on the go.
i think he makes a false dichotomy in his article. He is not bringing up a dongle at all and makes the choice to either a phone with a 3.5mm output or bluetooth. I would give this more credibility if this was discussed as well.
Apple has got proximity-based pairing nailed so well, it's easier than plugging a jack in. I can connect to other iPhones as easily as mine. Macs logged in to my iCloud don't need pairing at all. It works like it should, not like a typical Bluetooth crap.
The charging case is more convenient to carry than a bundle of wires. And of course I can walk around, zip my jacket, etc. without minding the wire.
It's more expensive, proprietary, it doesn't work well for some people. But I can definitely see why having AirPods Apple thought wired headphones are the next floppy drive.
I don't recommend the PowerBeats though. No matter what sort of tips you use, they mute almost nothing. Also, the slightest breeze causes tons of wind noise.
This is a large part of why doctors are starting to warn of an epidemic of hearing loss. Headphones with poor noise isolation tend to encourage people to crank the volume way too high.
b) Sometimes it's good to be aware of your surroundings! When I'm listening to music, noise is usually sufficiently blocked by the sheer volume of the track, and during podcasts and audiobooks I'm also not bothered by the sounds of the streets.
If anything, it's good to hear a siren, or the ramblings of a nearby crazy person in order to avoid them.
The only time I find noise cancellation useful is on airplanes.
Battery life is rarely a concern for me, and I wear my AirPods almost constantly. I even sometimes sleep with them.
He he, I won't call that a long time, I would be OK with them if you don't need to recharge them for a week.
I charge my case about once a week.
Apple decided rightly or not that they don't care about me. So be it.
If you’re view is that every product should cater to the needs of everyone, then yep, Apple shouldn’t care about you as you are being unrealistic.
You get wired headphones and a dongle in the box, you can buy Beats headphones with the same chip as the Airpods with longer battery life for about the same price, or you can use a vast ocean of other wired or Bluetooth headphones. It’s not like you are forced to use something that doesn’t work for your needs.
Beats do an over ear set that has 40 hours of battery life ... I don't think you'll be running into issues with that.
The pairing isn’t great IMO. So many calls take a minute to figure out AirPod connectivity issues. It’s frustrating switching airpods between a Mac and iPhone. Much of the time only left or right pair, and the only way to fix it is to put them back in the case and re-pair them. Sadly it doesn’t “just work”
Another common problem is the mics tend to rust out after about a year of usage, eventually breaking down. This happens if you use them for any exercise (which apple advertises them for) with sweat rusting the mesh on the bottom.
Eventually I switched back to a manual headphone cable with a mic built in. It always works...
Rhe sweat problem is interesting! I haven’t experienced this degradation, but I think my head’s sweat mostly runs off my nose. Is it because of how your hair is styled?
I would recommend buying cheap exercise headphones instead of using airpods.
I also sometimes prefer having the over ear headphones for some sound cancelation. You can buy reasonable headphones plus a mic-in cable for less than $50.
However, AirPods don't require the removal of the headphone jack! The removal of the headphone jack is still so consumer hostile: it serves zero benefit to anyone apart from bluetooth accessory makers. If Apple really was serious about advancing bluetooth headphones, they would at least license the W1 for the pairing magic to other manufacturers.
Good Bluetooth headphones AND headphone jacks can exist at the same time! Anyone arguing for the removal of headphone jacks aren't grounded in any sort of reality tbh.
Apples user might have become accustomed to the dongle life but it is unbearable. Also, my non-standard dongle have started to glitch and buying a new one costs about 100x more than it is worth. Go figure.
It might have felt better if there was a reason for it. But no, there is absolutely no sane reason to ditch it other than forcing people to buy wireless peripherals. And that is just unacceptable. Too bad alternatives are running out.
This is all also under the assumption that bluetooth is good enough. It isn't.
This is also under the assumption that bluetooth is secure. It isn't.
I don't think that's true. I don't think there's an inherit quality problem with Bluetooth, but it's just that bluetooth is an added cost, so manufacturers cost save on the audio components, or the headphones become expensive.
And even still, you will get something that won't outlast the inbuilt batteries - which makes it absurd to spend money on them. I still use, on a daily basis, my $300 headphones that are a decade old. I can't find any bluetooth headphones fort $3-400 with NC that matches them. And they won't last a decade for sure (whereas my wired ones probably will last several).
The problem is that there isn’t really a good argument to keep the headphone jack. It’s a redundant port because lightning/usbC and Bluetooth both handle audio. You would need a strong justification to keep it when you could use that space for other stuff in the phone.
What disadvantages come from the removal of a ubiquitous headphone interconnect that's been on our devices for years? iPhone's have gotten thicker since the removal of the headphone jack. Apple's made iPods much thinner than any of the iPhones, and they all had headphone jacks.
There's no problem. It's not redundant if you want to charge your phone and listen to audio at the same time - I have those Bose headphones noice cancelling headphones that everyone travels with. To use them, I need to carry around an adapter which is a pain. When I fly, I have to choose whether to charge my phone or listen to audio.
Look, I love my iPhone X, but I've gotten absolutely nothing out of losing the headphone jack. It's only come at costs.
Whats the evidence? Scotty from strange parts actually managed to add a working headphone jack back to the iPhone, in the exact spot where it had been removed!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA
Maybe wired headphones are going the way of the DVD drive. But at this point, the change has felt very user-hostile. If they cared about their customers, iPhones would support USB-C and wired headphones.
That’s easily answerable by heading over to iFixIt. You’ll see the Plus models are near identical to the non-Plus in available space, just the Plus has a bigger battery and even more circuitry (do to the dual camera). Apple doesn’t waste any space inside their devices typically.
This is key. When they removed the disc drive in the macbooks there was a decent argument to be made about more space for other ports (or reduced thickness). But the 3.5 mm headphone jack is literally... 3.5 mm, right? Another commentor even pointed out that the new iphones are thicker than the 6 line. I just dont ubderstand the argument here.
And my S8 also has 3.5mm jack for when my 2 hour calls exhaust the airpods battery or when I want to push a drum track from my phone synth to a speaker :-)
they also cut out quite often probably because I live in a crowded downtown area.
when they work I mostly like them but sadly for me they don't always work.
However, airpods are uncomfortable, always feel like they're going to fall out. I've already had to replace one of them because they're easily lost. The sound quality is so-so. I have to crank the volume way up because there isn't any kind of noise isolation, much less noise cancellation.
All around they're a very very average product offering.
I believe Apple made the right move, many other manufacturers are already following, bluetooth headphones are getting cheaper and quality is getting better.
Someone just had to be the first to introduce it to the mainstream, I’m fairly certain that it will be widely accepted in a few years.