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.
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.
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 is no need to lock consumers into one way or another when there are already phones that can handle either!
You could already connect an off-board DAC to the iPhone pre-iPhone 7
Put differently, when the DAC is in the phone, you need to worry about two things in order to get good sound quality — the quality of the headphones and the quality of the phone. With a DAC in the headphone, you worry about only one.
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.
I assume that issue disappears with the new plug.
Oh, and your complaint about charging the phone while listening, that's the Apple way they've always removed options to have a cleaner design. The superior Apple solution is to buy their pricey iPhone dock with headphone jack hidden in the back and charge and listen at the same time. Not a fanboy, just adding that Apple has addressed your complaint by making more money off of you ;)
A digital cable can also do error handling and correction, meaning damage to the cable does not have the same impact as it does on analog cables.
Yeah, you only have one port. But that's not a restriction of digital ports but of Apple's implementation, I fully expect Android phones with two or more USB Type C ports to be released. As you can see from my post I'm not a fan of Apple's implementation at all (despite the fact that it'd be merely a nuisance for me).
That's nothing new though. Those have been available for years. Some quick examples:
http://www.guitarcenter.com/IK-Multimedia/iRig-HD-Studio-Qua...
In the current implementation the user at least has a choice.
There is no argument here. Bucking the standard and removing a headphone jack is a minus for consumers.
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 don't want a world what I have Apple, Samsung, HTC, LG headphone connectors.
The EU managed to fix this once for power/data connectors. Maybe they'll have to do a rerun for audio.
Then why has almost no one decided to use Lightning headphones when given a choice?
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?
Exactly. I felt that Lenovo was being a bit premature and dropping the headphone jack but at least they're using a standard USB C connector.
You don't know the first thing about noise or the transmogrification of noise at all do you?
> don't weigh up against the universal nature of USB Type C. The sheer arrogance.
Agreed. History is just coming to the downward part of a sine wave again... rejection of standards (see messagaing/storage/networking) and aggressive attempts at monopoly despite lack of convergence on singular solutions.
