To be fair to Apple, I think they have a good point. Digital connectors are superior in almost every way (space use, port flexibility, sound quality, even cable integrity). I admire them for ripping off the bandaid, like they did previously with disk drives and parrallel ports. Someone needs to lead the way to abandon legacy, and Apple can do that far more effectively than others (e.g. Motorola has also abandoned headphone jacks with their Moto Z line).
One thing I cannot get over though, is that they chose their own propietary, you-have-to-pay-Apple-for-a-license, cannot-use-them-with-anything-else Lightning 'standard'. USB Type C is the standard for this stuff now, and any trivial technical merits Lightning might have over USB Type C don't weigh up against the universal nature of USB Type C. The sheer arrogance.
Digital connectors the future? I'm on board with that. Propietary connectors? Fuck that.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think that the audio jack is one of the few cases where an analog port is good because if the signal in not already analog it must be converted to analog via a DAC. If the DAC isn't in the phone, it has to be in the headphones. So, not only do you need to worry about the quality of the headphones, you have to worry about the quality of the DAC, and the DAC needs power. Seems like a few good reasons to not ditch the audio jack for now, especially if you care about audio quality. Also, those that care about audio quality probably have several expensive sets of headphones that are now incompatible with new Apple phones.
The corollary is that you have to worry about the DAC in the phone if you have an analog jack, and they're not good. So with digital only, you have the option of buying a good off board DAC (if you care), or otherwise selecting digital headphones at a price point you like.
All that said, I'm struggling to see the good side of Apple's decision to remove the 3.5mm jack. It'll make the phone worse in daily use for me - I won't be able to sit at my desk all day and charge my phone while listening to my existing, good headphones.
The DAC in the iPhone is as good as any external DAC you can buy, when it comes to human perceivable sound quality. Any other claims are audiophile BS and placebo.
There are valid product reasons for moving away from the 3.5mm jack though, like adding a power line that allows you to make active noise-canceling headphones that don't require their own battery, or outputting to more than two (stereo) speakers over a single cable.
There are also ways to do Active Noise Cancelling without an external battery and without a new cable. I had an old Sony laptop that did ANR with software on the laptop and mics on the earpieces wired back into the laptop. Also the connector was backward compatible with a standard 3.5mm. They just used a 3.5mm connector with extra conductors on it like this one:
https://www.amazon.com/Connectronics-TRRS-Conductor-Metal-Au...
I had one of those tiny Sony Vaio's that did the same - great idea and tech but did you ever use it in comparison to the state of the art from Bose etc? It was night and day - the Sony was barely better than normal ear buds on an aeroplane...
I agree, I remember it being very poor compared to my Bose aviation headset. Still was a cool proof of concept. I imagine with the right software/hardware it could work just as well as external ANR
Here's the thing though - you have to have a DAC in the phone anyway because the phone needs to have a speaker built in. Now, it might be nice for some people to be able to get an external DAC in addition, but that should already be possible with something like USB OTG.
Nice external DACs connected to phones is nothing new - USB OTG has been around forever, and even back in the "iPod Connector" days digital IO pins were available. Lightning does not provide anything new in this regard - and certainly nothing more than Lightning + 3.5mm ever did.
The problem with external DACs is that they don't easily fit in your pocket and cost a pretty penny. Cheap headphones will get even worse and good ones will get more expensive for including a good DAC.
There are no winners in this game except for Apple, which can push more licenses and proprietary accessories.
> The corollary is that you have to worry about the DAC in the phone if you have an analog jack, and they're not good. So with digital only, you have the option of buying a good off board DAC (if you care), or otherwise selecting digital headphones at a price point you like.
You could already connect an off-board DAC to the iPhone pre-iPhone 7
my wife has a dock that does this with her iphone SE. it doesn't use the 3.5mm jack, just lightning. So I'm speculating it's not a limitation of the lightning connector per se, but that of the dongle.
The DAC is better placed in the headphone than the phone, because otherwise you get bad sound quality when you use high-end ($100) headphones with a low-end ($100) smartphone. I was able to clearly make out the difference compared to plugging in the same headphones into an iPhone.
Put differently, when the DAC is in the phone, you need to worry about two things in order to get good sound quality — the quality of the headphones and the quality of the phone. With a DAC in the headphone, you worry about only one.
Except they only gave you one port, so you can't even do something as benign as charge your phone and listen to fucking music at the same time.
> sound quality,
I challenge you to prove that one, I'm sure sound quality is indistinguishable. If it's good enough for every sound engineer ever it's good enough for me.
> even cable integrity)
Again, is that even true? You can knock out a cheap headphone cable that works perfectly, whereas lightning devices are always crazy expensive.
Regarding cable integrity. Am I the only person to have had headphones pop in my ears due to (un)plugging the cable or causing some kind of friction at the connector?
I assume that issue disappears with the new plug.
Oh, and your complaint about charging the phone while listening, that's the Apple way they've always removed options to have a cleaner design. The superior Apple solution is to buy their pricey iPhone dock with headphone jack hidden in the back and charge and listen at the same time. Not a fanboy, just adding that Apple has addressed your complaint by making more money off of you ;)
It wasn't even the point of my post, but I'll bite: a digital cable means you no longer have to rely on the form factor/budget constrained DAC included in the device itself and can go for DACs of your own choice. That doesn't necessarily imply improved audio quality, but it means you have more control over your audio quality.
A digital cable can also do error handling and correction, meaning damage to the cable does not have the same impact as it does on analog cables.
Yeah, you only have one port. But that's not a restriction of digital ports but of Apple's implementation, I fully expect Android phones with two or more USB Type C ports to be released. As you can see from my post I'm not a fan of Apple's implementation at all (despite the fact that it'd be merely a nuisance for me).
> a digital cable means you no longer have to rely on the form factor/budget constrained DAC included in the device itself and can go for DACs of your own choice. That doesn't necessarily imply improved audio quality, but it means you have more control over your audio quality.
That's nothing new though. Those have been available for years. Some quick examples:
I've put multiple pairs of earbuds through the washer and the dryer and they work just as well (and are cleaner!) as they did before. I don't see that happening with AirPods.
The thing is, we already have a lightning port. It's a thing that exists. We could already have lightning headphones and the current headphone jack. Together.
Digital doesn't make up for the fact that we're moving from a near-universal standard headphone jack to a proprietary port. One that, mind you, is flat vs. round. The design of the headphone jack is superior. You can plug it in at any angle, and rotate it while plugged in. Now people are stuck with a flat cable that will just twist up during movement.
I'm more than a little shocked and disappointed that more people on HN don't care about avoiding proprietary formats. Most people here _make_ stuff. Open formats allow you to more easily make interoperable stuff.
I don't want a world what I have Apple, Samsung, HTC, LG headphone connectors.
I think it's a case of self-selection bias at work here. People who avoid proprietary formats are more likely to simply avoid iPhone/Apple threads altogether, so you simply won't hear them chiming in as much.
I completely agree. If they're going to get on their high horse about being brave they should have done this with USB-C. Now their phones will either never go USB-C or it will take 5 years before they do it otherwise all of those lightning headphones you just bought are now useless.
It's not a chicken and egg problem, every iPhone for years has a Lightning port and yet almost no one buys any Lightning accessories other than charging cables. For headphones it offers no advantage and an obvious limitation.
If Apple didn't remove the headphone jack in the iPhone 7 do you think any large number of people would intentionally buy Lightning headphones?
> Digital connectors are superior in almost every way
You don't know the first thing about noise or the transmogrification of noise at all do you?
> don't weigh up against the universal nature of USB Type C. The sheer arrogance.
Agreed. History is just coming to the downward part of a sine wave again... rejection of standards (see messagaing/storage/networking) and aggressive attempts at monopoly despite lack of convergence on singular solutions.
I just bought a Moto X, and I'm glad I did because the Moto Z looks like its replacement. A standard headphone jack is a basic requirement for me, anybody who doesn't have one won't get my money.
One thing I cannot get over though, is that they chose their own propietary, you-have-to-pay-Apple-for-a-license, cannot-use-them-with-anything-else Lightning 'standard'. USB Type C is the standard for this stuff now, and any trivial technical merits Lightning might have over USB Type C don't weigh up against the universal nature of USB Type C. The sheer arrogance.
Digital connectors the future? I'm on board with that. Propietary connectors? Fuck that.