Rejoice: Samsung's Next Flagship Smartphone Looks To Keep the Headphone Jack Alive (theverge.com) 193
Notorious smartphone leaker Evan Blass has leaked a couple press images of the Galaxy S9, giving us the first indication that it will still have a headphone jack. "The full information spill today is actually focused on a new Samsung DeX Pad, which appears to be an evolution of last year's DeX dock for the Galaxy S8," reports The Verge. From the report: Samsung, LG, and a couple of other companies like OnePlus have remained resolute in their inclusion of a headphone jack, but that was far from a certainty for the next Galaxy S iteration. This is a phone that will compete against the iPhone X, Huawei Mate 10 Pro, and more niche rivals like Google's Pixel 2: all of them surviving sans a headphone jack. So Samsung could have dumped the analog audio output, but it seems to have opted against it, and that's worthy of commendation. USB-C earphones are all still either bad or expensive -- or both -- and phones that retain compatibility with 3.5mm connectors remain profoundly useful to consumers that aren't yet convinced by Bluetooth.
Thanks Samsung (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll be switching to you when I next upgrade.
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I'll be switching to you when I next upgrade.
Come on baby, light my fire.
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Why? to reward them for all the other horrible things they've done?
They've removed almost every feature they used to include on their devices (IR transmitters, HDMI output, SD card slots, user replaceable batteries, phones that weren't so slippery you couldn't hold them without a case, widest screens in the market) and instead given a slightly faster phone than their previous offerings, but because they didn't remove one more feature you think they deserve your loyalty?
Wow we've set the bar low these days!
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I am holding off for the next phone that provides user replaceable battery and screen. Something that really extends the life of a phone.
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Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)
The same engineering reasons that drove their competitors to do it - headphones need a deep hole with lots of mechanical support because of simple leverage. It's harder to waterproof and it takes up more space that could be dedicated to battery or another function. The jack is hard to design such that the point of failure is guaranteed to be the plug and not the socket. It requires a high-quality built-in amp. But yeah, if the market segment for people who want a jack is high enough, it's a good business move.
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It's *NOT* hard to prevent the mechanical force from damaging the board. They could do what some laptop makers have done with their power jacks: Mount the jack to the case, and then run wires/cable to the board.
How much more room would that take up? Maybe an additional centimeter in phone length? I think that's acceptable.
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Of course you can still do these things, but everything you mentioned requires a tradeoff.
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Unfortunately that pushes off the engineering problem to someone else. So far as I can see nobody has figured out how to make a usb to analog audio dongle that lasts more than a few weeks, so that means your only real choice is bluetooth, which doesn't meet everyone's needs.
And basically, why? So you can make your phone thinner, when virtually everyone goes out and buys fat old case. This is a case of engineering for showroom appeal rather than use.
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I can't answer that part - I spend $200 on a phone, max. And only under duress. I use both bluetooth and wired headphones, depending on the situation. What Apple and Samsung do with $600 phones hasn't trickled down to riff raff like me yet.
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You have it backwards. The length of the jack reduces the leverage on the internal components. The leverage an outside force has depends on the length of the headphone jack outside the device. The length of the jack inside the device increases the leverage of the internal components, increasing their ability to resist torque from something outside yanking on the headphone cable..
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The length of the jack reduces the leverage on the internal components.
Whether it reduces leverage or not, the plug itself is very strong with a 1/8" audio connection. It's hard to make the jack stronger than the plug. With USB-C, the plug is supposed to be the wear part, the weakest link.
they filled the space with a piece of molded plastic
That's incredibly misleading. Sure, it's a piece of molded plastic. What you fail to mention is that it is a functional piece of molded plastic - part of the speaker.
Re: But... (Score:2)
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Your source and Solandri's source differ on the purpose of the plastic, but it doesn't change my argument. Whatever it is, it serves a purpose and is not simply a filler piece of plastic as Solandri's comment implied.
Jack replaced by useless plastic, not speaker (Score:2)
But that's not what the quoted article [businessinsider.com] says. They said: "teardown [of the new iPhone] reveals what's in place of the
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Yeah, I read it. You, for reasons that I don't understand, omitted the important parts:
and
So the article is not self-consistent. It doesn't really matter what it is
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With all those difficulties I can see why no one - especially Samsung - has come up with a waterproof phone that also has a decent battery while retaining the headphones jack. Right?
*eyeroll*
Is it harder than not having one? Yes. Is it better? Fuk no. The "difficulty" in providing a product that people want is called 'business'. It's what good companies do for their customers so their customers keep buying their products.
And besides, it's not REALLY that hard to do compared to all the other insane shi
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Samsung - has come up with a waterproof phone that also has a decent battery while retaining the headphones jack
Yes, they have. And we have no idea what cost or engineering tradeoffs they made to get there.
It's what good companies do for their customers so their customers keep buying their products.
Isn't that just a restatement of what I said in my last sentence? I think we agree.
it's not REALLY that hard to do compared
I have no way to judge that, since I work on fairly big machines where miniaturization is not much of an issue. I suspect you aren't qualified to make that statement, either.
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Explain why it is harder to waterproof, if anything it should be easier than any USB type plug.
Not my field, but you can take a SWAG and just look at the size of the connector. Just Google for waterproof headphone connector and waterproof USB-C connector and look a the huge difference in size of the surface mount stuff.
It hasn't changed since the late 1800's
I can't believe you are listing that as an advantage. Almost without exception, the failure mode of my headphones has been that plug and the failure mode of my portable audio equipment... well, it's been drops, actually... but I've also had jacks fail. Most recently on a Samsung phone
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The fact that they were able to produce a phone with a water resistant headphone jack says nothing about the cost or other engineering tradeoffs they had to make.
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I'm not familiar enough to say, and I'm not willing to dig that deep right now. The presence of features does not tell the story of engineering compromises and tradeoffs that needed to be made, so it wouldn't be a worthwhile effort anyway. You'd really need to talk to the engineers at both Apple and Samsung to hear the different challenges that they encountered, and how they solved them.
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What is so proprietary about Bluetooth headphones?
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My crappy Samsung Galaxy J has both a headphone jack and a removable battery. You need to go ghetto if you want the best features.
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The fact that they were able to waterproof the phone does not mean that they were able to do so without any cost or engineering tradeoffs.
You absolutely need to put a high-quality amp in the dongle or bluetooth module - but it saves you from needing to put it in the phone, saving cost and potentially space. In principle, only people with "golden ears" would need to buy the nice amp. Or they could buy one with a tube in it or some other such nonsense. In practice, it sounds like audiophiles shun both bluetoo
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How many people have you heard having to fix their phone jack before?
I've had two fail recently - one on an Amazon Fire tablet and one on a Samsung phone. Over my life, I've lost innumerable walkmen and headphones to that shitty connection design. I just soldered the connector back on my Sennheisers.
I have also tried both Google and Apple's bluetooth ear-buds and I am not impressed.
This is a completely legitimate complaint. I don't have golden ears and so I'm fine with even cheap bluetooth adaptors - but audiophiles seem to be universally negative about them. Now the circuitry needs to be duplicated in every device. On the plus side, if manufacturers could
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You don't seem to understand Samsung's marketing division.
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You got a phone with a SCSI port? Where can I get one?
I can't even get my USB DAT drive to work from the OTG port!
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We also need a trusty XKCD universal connector box.
https://xkcd.com/1406/ [xkcd.com]
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That's why... (Score:2)
Mac Pros, same thing. The trashcan is... well, trash.
But I could get a good 12/24 core Mac Pro with proper slots and storage facilities and so on on EBay. So that's what I did.
Still waiting to see if all that hot air about "we made a mistake" with the trashcan design is going to turn into anything worthwhile.
Not everyone can afford bluetooth headphones (Score:5, Insightful)
Ear buds on a jack are 15-20 bones compared to 40-70 for a decent bluetooth headphones. There's also the matter of bluetooth interference for audiophiles where a line-jack will be preferred (pending environment).
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Bluetooth headphones are down to $13 a pair for decent sound. At that price anyone who can afford a smartphone can afford bluetooth headphones.
When Apple first nixed the jack I was a bit dubious but then I realized I hadn't been using thee jack for a while because my jack had died, or rather gotten very unreliable, so I had gotten bluetooth headphones. At this point all the headphones in our family are bluetooth. The cords and jacks were the major fail points so not having those two weaknesses has been nice
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Amazon, of course. In fact since I looked a couple of weeks ago and found the $13 pair (over the ear) I see they now have a _LOT_ of even less expensive ones. See:
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=s... [amazon.com]
Slightly more for over the ear:
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=s... [amazon.com]
Pricing seems to fluctuate as I saw some of these for $13 a couple of weeks ago.
For sleeping I got these:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/prod... [amazon.com]
which initially I didn't like due to a charging problem but that resolved through full discharge and recharge cycl
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That's what I love about the reviews. I find that by reading the reviews I can learn more about the product than if I handled it in the store.
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I have Bluetooth headphones but they are annoying for travel. Yet another battery to charge, different connector to my phone (USB micro vs. C), can't use them on some airlines that don't allow any wireless stuff and even when allowed the 2.4ghz spectrum is often saturated inside the plane... And Bluetooth drains your phone battery much faster too.
I put up with then because I use the headphone socket for a Pluggy Lock to hold a strap, so I don't drop the phone.
To me removing the headphone jack is just anothe
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Early bluetooth headphones had more problems with this but the new standards have vastly improved it and are available at reasonable prices that you can afford if you can already afford a smartphone. It's about choices and priorities. Skip the phones without jacks if it offends you.
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You just changed the topic. The topic under discussion was Bluetooth and price. You've changed it to quality and your opinion. Stick with the subject on hand. If you want to discuss the quality of bluetooth or be snobbish that is another thread you could start.
Also not everyone wants to watch batteries (Score:2)
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the samsung high end phones, like this S9 will be, are also too expensive for most people.
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The market of people who can afford to buy a flagship phone ($500+ more than a basic model), but not an extra 25 bucks for bluetooth headphones?
no one spends $500 on a phone. They get contracts and pay $0 down. Lotta people can afford the upfront costs of a contract and can't afford expensive bluetooth headphones not when they have so many wired headphones that are easier to use and cheaper for little to no disadvantage.
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no one spends $500 on a phone. They get contracts and pay $0 down. Lotta people can afford the upfront costs of a contract and can't afford expensive bluetooth headphones
This is part of "the cost of being poor." I'm not making a cruel joke, this is an established economic effect. And I'm saying this as someone who spent my first year post-college (1995-1996) as a VISTA Volunteer getting a $15K annual stipend. So I understand and have been there. BUT:
1.) Lots of people do in fact spend $500 or even $1000 on a smartphone. If you can do this and pay it off within your first credit card cycle, you are in the long run saving $200-$400 over the next two years.
2.) If you were li
Re:Not everyone can afford bluetooth headphones (Score:4, Insightful)
You could always part with about $10 and get a ... Dongle.
Glad to be of service.
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"Some people forget, that not everyone has a cushy job" neatly excludes your $1000 headphones. You have jumped into a discussion about the paucity of budget bluetooth headphones with irrelevant dick-strokery.
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There's also a slew of low cost android phones also sold by samsung that have a jack which is a market apple ignored. Apple is focused on the top of the market, but Samsung is targeting both high and low. The Iphone-C was a disaster, but Samsung has success on both top and bottom of the wealth brackets.
Why not a middle ground? (Score:2)
We already have TRRS 2.5mm connectors why not start using those on phones? 1mm saved right there and the adaptors are cheap as. Not as space saving as no connector at all but a reasonable compromise.
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If you're going to do that, just use the supplied Lighting to 3 mm adapter.
Re:Why not a middle ground? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now I ask you, why the hell would I need to waste my time going to the store and spending money on a replacement, which may or may not actually fix the issue, when I can buy a phone with a headphone jack and not have to worry about that particular nuisance?
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What I meant was use a 2.5mm connector and people get their own 2.5mm to 3.5mm adaptor cheaply.
2.5mm has no patents/royalties to worry about and is commonly used for corded headsets and analogue video adaptors
There is no 3mm connector.
https://www.google.com.au/sear... [google.com.au]
One way or another phone manufacturers are obsessed with making phones thinner, hence the compromise idea.
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Wallet is all queued up (Score:2)
It's also a form of self-defense in case they blow the audio (it's not just "headphone") jack off with the s10; after all, Samsung often does follow Apple into the valley of stupid: ridiculous and inconvenient levels of thin, non-replaceable batteries, flat icons, dropped IR, etc.
I'm planning the same move: s7 to s9 if there's a proper jack and there isn't some kind of other major screwup.
New Pixel 2 XL owner (Score:2)
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Adapters are annoying. Why have extras to carry around?
"Convinced" of bluetooth??? (Score:3)
It has nothing to do with being "convinced". There are tons of situations where bluetooth headphones are simply a non-option - for one, on many airplanes worldwide, Bluetooth headphones are still banned and likely will be for years and years. Secondly, if you're on an 7 or 8 hour flight and want to listen to continuous music, good luck doing that on your bluetooth earbuds.
USB-C and Lightning earphones don't make this much easier because these situations usually cause you to want your phone to be plugged in, which means silly hubs/dongles if you want to change your phone and listen to music at once.
Furthermore, if you happen to decide to want to use the in-flight entertainment - GOOD LUCK if you don't have wired headphones with a 1/8 jack! So what now - looks like you need to bring more dongles!
I swear the people who cooked up these ideas have seemingly never flown on a plane in their lives.
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for one, on many airplanes worldwide, Bluetooth headphones are still banned and likely will be for years and years.
As someone who flies about every 3 weeks and loops the globe several times a year at various countries I have *NEVER* been told I can't use my Bluetooth headphones. Not in America, not anywhere else. I have once been asked to take them off only to pay attention to the safety video. The brand I have are sold at every airport in the world, even the shit ones. They are sold as the perfect device to make your flight quieter and when the noise cancelling is on, so is the bluetooth. Mind you they do have a headph
Re: "Convinced" of bluetooth??? (Score:2)
Well you obviously never fly on smaller regional carriers inside or outside the US.
If your plane is not certified for on board wifi, it's not certified for Bluetooth. Full stop. Many regional airlines will ask you to remove your Bluetooth headphones.
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Well you obviously never fly on smaller regional carriers inside or outside the US.
If your plane is not certified for on board wifi, it's not certified for Bluetooth. Full stop. Many regional airlines will ask you to remove your Bluetooth headphones.
I fly on regionals. And I haven't been asked to turn off bluetooth devices since 2013, when the FAA rules changed.
It's somewhat common to be asked to remove headphones of any type during the safety briefing, but that's it.
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Well you obviously never fly on smaller regional carriers inside or outside the US.
Well you clearly have no idea. My work takes me from anything from a Luxurious business class Emirates intercontinental, to shitty economy class Delta / United international flights, through low cost carriers in the USA and Europe at crappy airports, all the way down to those shitty flights that even the cheap airlines outsource to local contract agencies on loud and nasty propeller planes.
I've flown aircrafts of every size and every brand on every continent except Antarctica and have worn bluetooth headpho
Brave, courageous, wild! I'm impressed (Score:2)
Honestly, I'm a Samsung fan but good god are they copying sheep. I'm very very surprised they didn't do what everyone else is and pull it, because it's the new cool thing!!!! (groan)
I am still extremely disappointed about the mandatory curved displays on all models, quite disappointed about the lack of a home button.
Sadly, no sale. Curved displays can't have protectors put on them properly, they break easier, they look bad.
No.
Still, good move on the headphone jack.
You Know Jack? (Score:5, Funny)
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Would someone PLEASE tell me when S(c)amsung is going to make the batteries replaceable again? My son broke his Galaxy phone twice by placing it in his back pocket and sitting down. They removed the plastic cover and replaced it with a glass one. First time, we thought it was a fluke. Second time, we got it fixed, sold the phone on ebay, and bought him an older HTC instead.
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Approximately never. That ship has sailed, the horse is out of the barn, the milk is all over the floor.
Embrace the USB cable. 5V forever!
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Type-C USB cable is up to 20V. Many smartphones usually support 9V and 12V
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Sometimes people realize their mistakes and choose to correct them.
This is true. A few years ago, some brand management brainiac at Post thought it would be a good idea to hop on the added-protein bandwagon, and added isolated soy protein to the hundred-year-old Grape Nuts cereal formula. Having compromised Grape Nuts' basic value proposition and the interests of the die-hards who stick with this niche product, Post rebuffed complaints for a year before fixing their mistake ("Now without soy!"). Idiots.
Read more here [fussylittleblog.com] and here [fussylittleblog.com].
Re: One Word (Score:4, Interesting)
They're afraid to get rid of a user friendly restore to try to squeeze even more cash out of consumers? Instead they opted to allow us to use our existing headphone, and provide high quality AKGs in the box too, which are excellent with Skype for Business for meetings on the go. Or I could piss around with expensive Bluetooth earbuds, hoping they're charged and I didn't lose one.
Idiot.
Re: One Word (Score:2)
Re:forethought (Score:5, Interesting)
[ sarcasm ] And HDMI? Yeah, that's a useless, antiquated standard. Don't bother with that anymore. [ /sarcasm ]
On a more immediate note, those of us who value high quality audio can now turn to Samsung to support our high quality headphones and earbuds, and not have all the disadvantages of Bluetooth batteries, charging, the higher price, that ambient microwave radiation degrades the signal, etc..
And, I've got a pair of earbuds I really like and they're probably gonna last a good few years more. There's no way I'm gonna buy a phone that doesn't let me plug them in.
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I really really wish that some manufacturer would bring back HDMI support. Almost all phones used to have it through MHL just a couple of years ago, but as they transition to USB C they've all decided to drop support for HDMI (and it's a simple choice, not a requirement as USB-C easily supports HDMI output)
To all those who say "just cast to the TV", Some of us prefer a solution that is cheap, simple, and actually works with ALL apps, ALL TVs, ALL the time. I find casting works with some TVs, some apps, some
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I think HDMI started disappearing well before USB-C got popular.
Re: forethought (Score:2, Funny)
Youâ(TM)ve got a headphone jack, now what will you replace that shitty OS with?
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[ sarcasm ] And HDMI? Yeah, that's a useless, antiquated standard. Don't bother with that anymore. [ /sarcasm ]
I'd wap HDMI for VGA but your point stands. I bought a 2017 laptop that still had one because there's no benefit to removing it (plus it means I can have two screens on my laptop). Just because it's old does not mean it's useless, likewise, just because it's new does not mean it's better.
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If you valued high quality audio you would not be listening to music on a smartphone.
You might be surprised. I don't know how good the Samsung phones sound, but I know there are a lot of audiophiles who have good things to say about the Apple products. The iPods in particular were well liked, especially the older models with the Wolfson DAC chip.
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Lordy. I'm getting pilloried in the comments here. Look, I never said anything about Apple earbuds being good; they're obviously crap. I was talking about the DAC and the pre-amp, which, when paired with a good set of headphones, sounds rather decent. Not as decent as a proper high-end setup, of course. But surprisingly good for a sub-$1000 device that you carry around in your pocket.
I'm too lazy to look up any references, but at least two audiophile magazines (I think Stereo Review was one) have done
Re: forethought (Score:2)
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You may want to google that shit. There seems to be a lot of hardware mods and use of external DACS. They see the capacity as convenience, not quality.
Well, sure, I could carry around an external DAC to use with my phone (actually I already own one-- the Apogee ONE-- which I use with my Mac for music recording/playback, and which can be connected to my iPhone if I want to do that). Or I could void my warranty by implementing some kind of DIY hardware mod. The point is, I don't want to do either! I have enough trouble not losing my phone as it is, I don't want to carry around a bunch of extra stuff!
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If you valued high quality audio you would not be listening to music on a smartphone.
Or earbuds. Over the ear headphones are the only way to go if you care about portable high quality audio.
Re:forethought (Score:5, Insightful)
My 4 year old phone had:
- HDMI output (MHL)
- IR transmitter
- User replaceable battery
- a wider screen than anything available on a smartphone today.
- a headphone jack
- SD card slot
- a textured back that looked gorgeous, and meant no case was needed because the phone wasn't so slippery it would fly out of your hand every time you tried to hold it.
Now the SD card slot and headphone jack are still available on some phones these days (though only a small handful), but basically all of the others are simply impossible to get now.
So I'm supposed to "upgrade" to what exactly? the only advantage the newer devices have is a small amount of speed. None of the new phones have any features that that one didn't have, there hasn't been a new feature added in at least 4 years. The only thing they do is increase the speed slightly while removing actual features and capabilities.
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Thing is, speed is expected. We all know that devices get more powerful and faster every year. I can't congratulate a company for doing that because it's pretty much the baseline expectation.
On the other hand, there's no expectation that every year hardware features should vanish and that the phones should be able to do less with every release. Companies often lament that they have trouble differentiating themselves from their competitors, but then they make sure to do their best to make sure all phones hav
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On the other hand, there's no expectation that every year hardware features should vanish and that the phones should be able to do less with every release.
It's really weird. Seems likely to be one of two things: not enough customers care about those features, or there aren't enough competitors in the market and they're colluding, either explicitly or implicitly, to remove features (thus reducing costs) but not drop prices accordingly. I say that since the flagship phones are - if I'm not mistaken - more expensive in real dollars than they have been in the recent past, which is weird for electronics.
(plastic can look fabulous if you texture it right, or go premium and do leather, or put a texture on your metal, or ANYTHING that allows someone to actually hold your phone!
Ceramic! Someone made a video of trying to scratch the cer
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I have similar feelings about my current MacBook Pro. It's 7 years old and better than anything Apple has to offer today.
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On offer.
I still don't understand why a site with "News for Nerds" doesn't provide an Edit button and Unicode support.
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Bochs is probably the only possibility as OS/2 used x86 features that aren't in most emulators. Be interesting to test.
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Re:forethought (Score:5, Insightful)
"Apple has a history of dropping old well established standards about 2 to 3 years before people can see they were right."
No. Apple has a history of dropping standards people are actively using, often before the new stuff has matured enough to even be usable.
everyone thought these moves were crazy at the time"
Almost everyone still had devices that that used those ports and had to buy adapters or all new devices. I had $500 serial US Robotics modems, and $300 ADB barcode scanners, for example. That all had to be replaced or adapted. (And adapting them was a PITA because Apple has always been extremely stingy with USB ports too.)
The PC carried these legacy ports for years before getting dropped, the result was that a lot of us had computers with a floppy drive that never got used. This was a much better situation to be in, than not having a floppy drive and needing one - a situation a lot of people found themselves in.
Apple wasn't right. They were irritating. Everyone could have told you USB was better than ADB and parallel ports, or that USB flash drives and networking would kill floppies, and on the PC side everyone was switching to USB as fast as they could. You didn't have have much foresight to see the writing on the wall for the legacy ports.
But it was greatly fucking appreciated by PC users that you didn't have to throw out all your peripherals and buy new ones, because old ones were generally supported until most people were finished using them.
I have a $100,000 lathe at a site, still using ISA controller boards with Windows 98. The computer died last year, and I had no trouble buying a replacement.
Meanwhile Apple frequently won't support interfaces from peripherals from 2 years ago. I recall having the original imac from 1999 and Power Mac 7600 from 1998 in the same office and having no way to get files from one to the other. No floppy on the imac, no writeable CD support on either, and no usb on the powermac. I could network them, but since that office didn't otherwise have or need a LAN and the computers weren't sitting next to eachother... Fuck you very much apple.
by requiring that any device plugged in met some higher level of service expectation they could write software that took advantage of that requirement sooner than their competition who had to have legacy support. I give you the WYSIWYG revolution as exhibit A.
That argument really doesn't have a comparable example for any of the other ports you mentioned.
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Pretty much no one was using USB-anything before the first iMac made USB popular with accessory manufacturers. I wasn't an Apple user at the time, but I do have a working memory -- Apple made USB popular. Sure, it would have replaced many other protocols and port eventually, but it happened when it did because of Apple.
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Apple wasn't right. They were irritating.
This.
USB was created by a large consortium of companies as a replacement for a myriad of ports, long before Apple picked it up. It was just an accident that they used it first. Even though it's largely supplanted a large number of ports, most motherboards you buy still have a LPT, PS2 and RS232 port or at least the provision of one. I remember for years having to use a very unreliable USB to serial connector for switches and routers for years in the early 00's.
People also forget the mistakes Apple mad
Re:forethought (Score:4, Informative)
Apple has a history of dropping old well established standards about 2 to 3 years before people can see they were right. It's actually a bit uncanny how good they have been done guessing correctly.
a few example:
floppy drives
I feel they were way too early with dropping floppy support. The iMac in 1998 was the first one to ship without a floppy. They did not ship with a CD Writer, and USB flash drives had yet to be invented. Apple said they were obsolete because Internet, yet online "cloud storage" wasn't really a thing, and even "emailing files to yourself" was difficult because most email providers at the time had ridiculously small mailbox sizes. Plus although high speed residential internet was growing in popularity, it was by no means widespread.
On the positive side, between USB floppy drives, and replacements for the abomination of the "hockey puck mouse", helped to drive the market for USB peripherals, which helped support on the PC side.
Re:forethought (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, we're almost at the three year mark now, and the majority of the industry is still saying that it was stupid, which probably is a good indication that you're wrong.
The reason you're wrong is that the way Apple did this is ridiculously un-Apple-like. Normally, when they drop something:
Quite frankly, the way Apple has done this actually encourages people to switch to Android, and that will continue to be true even if all the Android makers follow suit and drop the headphone jack. Why? Because I can use the same USB-C headphones with my Mac and my Android phone. They've actually made the Android-Mac experience better than the iPhone-Mac experience!
No, Apple screwed up badly. Maybe only a small percentage of users care—and obviously that's true, or else they'd be out of business right now—but for the users who do care, Apple needs to drop Lightning for USB-C sooner rather than later. Our iPhone 6s devices are starting to look seriously dated.
That's complete and utter crap. We had WYSIWYG on the Apple IIgs, and it printed to the ImageWriter II just fine, complete with WYSIWYG, and that printer was still supported up through... what, Mac OS 9? (And if you really want to be horrified, there's a third-party macOS driver available for the ImageWriter II that *still* works, AFAIK.)
And there has always been support for a wide range of other non-Postscript printers. Brother uses PCL for some of their laser printers, Canon and HP do their own thing for their inkjets, etc. So at what point did Apple drop support for non-Postscript printers?
ASCII-only printers, sure, but those were only ever really directly supported in any meaningful way on the Apple II series, and nobody was even still building daisy-wheel printers by the time the Apple II line fully went away in 1993. (The last ones were designed in the mid to late 1980s.) Also, I can still print to one from a MacBook Pro today with the right adapters. Nobody would do so, though, because they stopped making those printers for a good reason. Apple didn't ever really drop support; WYSIWYG software never supported them in the first place, and non-WYSIWYG software still does.
Also, the very first Apple products that actually shipped with built-in ports used serial ports. Parallel ports were only available as an add-on card. So talking about Apple dropping that (back in what, the early 1980s?) is kind of a stretch, because it was never a core part of their product line.
And AFAIK, nobody thought that dropping ADB was a bad idea. They grumbled at having to replace their devices, but moving to an industry standard was generally seen as a good thing. Also, you could buy cheap adapters to use your existing ADB devices if you really wanted to.
Finally, with the exception of the floppy drive, none of those other ports/features were used while mobile. And Apple continued to provide the internal hardware needed for third parties (VST) to provide floppy drives inside their laptops until well after USB flash drives were firmly entrenched as a replacement. That makes this the first port designed for mobile use that Apple has ever dropped without a broadly available replacement th
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Ah. My bad. Off-by-one.
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Your examples are good because:
Parallel port - Dropped by Apple both after USB printers were popular on the market and USB>Parallel port adaptors* were easy to buy.
RS-232 - Something that became useless for Apple users long before it was dropped as a standard. Outside of labs, servers, and consoles this was an antique when apple dropped it and no one complained.
Printers - Apple has always had a captured market with printer drivers and Postscript support was baked into software people used to author conte
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The Lisa could have a parallel port card installed. It did not come with one (unless they had an option for getting the card preinstalled or something).