" They took out the headphone jack, like tech journalists rumored for years and years, and are now selling you a $9 dongle or forcing you to get Bluetooth earbuds,"
Perhaps as a followup, bullshit.ist could do an article on the difference between "selling an adapter" and "including one in the box" and the sloppy journalistic malpractice that is deliberately confusing the two for the sake of whining...
The issue is not that they got rid of the headphone jack. The issue is they went with a solution that is not industry standard. In the past, when they got rid of something it was either in decline (e.g. floppy) or something industry standard was taking off (e.g. SSD).
The wired headphones are not industry standard. That leaves you buying expensive bluetooth headphones. For me it s a big problem, because sometimes I unplug my headphones from my phone then plug it into my laptop or into another device. Now we have no solid industry accepted wired headphone connection socket. That is a shame.
The real truth here is Apple makes solid revenue of dongles, wires, docks, and now headphones. By creating their own walled ecosystem for headphones, they gain more revenue. If this wasn't the case, they would have a regular old USB jack at the bottom of the phone. They don't.
My phone aside, none of my sound sources or speakers take either Lighting or USB-C. I would be in wired dongle hell either way. But all of my devices take bluetooth and I already use it for everything but my headphones...
Apple does not want you to use wired audio with iPhone 7, that's all there is to it. All wired options will be inconvenient _by design_ because Apple does not want you to use them. Apple wants you to use wireless headphones (over Bluetooth, an industry standard). If you don't want that experience then buy a different phone. That is the situation with iPhone 7. Framing it by quickly dismissing Bluetooth and griping about how inconvenient the wired options are misses the point.
If it's included in the box, they're still selling the adapter: it's just that they're selling it as part of the purchase price of the phone+adapter combination.
And now I have a tiny adapter I have to keep track of that will get lost, bent, and need replaced, and probably damage the port and I have an extra long fulcrum sticking out into a tiny little shallow port that when pressed will either snap or snap the port internally from it's soldering, requiring a trip to the Apple store for repair.
This is just bad design/engineering based on Apple wanting to sell licensed headphone adapaters/headphones that only work with the iPhone or maybe Mac's in the future.
It's because everyone understands two simple things:
* All dongles get lost
* All Apple lightning/usb cables have horrible build quality and don't last. This will not be the exception, especially since it will be frequently crimped at weird angles.
I understand this is a rant. But the writer comes over as a desperate bully who can't stand the fact that his childhood future fantasies didn't come true.
I like cyberpunk. I like the aesthetic. But it's not how the future looks like.
There's more to the future than what people envisioned in Gattaca on the one hand, and Blade Runner, on the other.
I guess. I just read it as a reasonably understandable cry out in the wilderness for someone else to make products that are as awesome and well engineered as Apple but don't follow the same minimalist "clean" aesthetic that everything seems to be converging on. Basically a cry out for someone to put some art (or art of a different style) into everyday objects.
Y'see, I don't think the writer "really" cares what the devices look like. I think the article attempts to hide a very serious, terrified, heart-felt objection to the f*ing horror of the Western military-industrial complex' relentless pseudo-enslavement of those it claims to protect from those it funds/equips to attack them, in some drivel about 80s futurism and design aesthetic. For that, I find it rather clever. That you (and several others commenting here) missed its point suggests it did its intended job quite well (as I see it).
I think the article attempts to hide a very serious, terrified, heart-felt objection to the f-ing horror of the Western military-industrial complex' relentless pseudo-enslavement
I sorta skimmed over that bit because it seemed like a throwaway remark. It's not actually thinking about how and why the material consumption culture exists, just a statement about one of the purposes it serves him. So I didn't give it a second thought.
Is there anything particularly special about militarism that means people are looking to fill the void in their souls should choose consumer products designed to broadcast an identity? Could such consumption exist without the military dystopia the author paints? Is there another frantic activity that could distract us from the dystopia he posits we use tech as an escape from?
Or am I a just a philistine that can't appreciate why jumping on a 2-year upgrade train for more computing power in a network bound device is the perfectly remedy? Crafted exactly to distract me from the horrors of contemplating the intractable problems in the Middle East. Has product evolution found existential answers that climbing a mountain at daybreak never possibly could?
There's something terrifying about this, yes. But the article doesn't "attempt" to hide it's authors terror, it simply fails to verbalize it – if that's the authors underlying worry.
> Unlike the blank oppressiveness of modern tech aesthetics, it was this brilliantly anti-minimalist statement that said “let’s make it obnoxious, and before you can put it away, you have to slide down the earpiece like you’re reloading a freakin gun,” and it even had all the ringtones that were used by the characters in the movie, because why not go all-out?
Alright, I personally like more minimalist aesthetics, but I'll hear you out.
> The truth is that we live in ridiculous times, where our reality is fiction manufactured to forward the interests of an elite few, much like the fiction that has largely become the reality of our shared world. The dystopia we were promised by Gibson, Scott, Dick, and so on has come to fruition: wealth disparity turning poverty into a death sentence, neverending war in faraway lands killing millions as the “Leader of the Free World” arms tyrants to the teeth, and an inevitable destruction of human civilization as we know it are the cornerstones of our modern reality.
I'm not pointing out anything about the truth (or falsity) of those statements. What I don't understand is why that paragraph ended up in a rant about minamalist aesthetics. Is the author trying to implicate some sort of conspiracy in the design of devices?
Somewhat? I don't think he's positing conspiracy, but this certainly seems to be about a larger breakdown than some shitty earbuds.
The piece repeatedly admits that all of the old movie tech he's lauding is still bulky and impractical and terrible. It certainly doesn't seem to be endorsing Blade Runner and The Matrix as actual, human-friendly design. So what I got from it was an indictment of blankness more than minimalism. The feeling, broadly, that something is terribly wrong and that this is reflected in enforced-aesthetic devices as well as larger society.
Regardless of whether the rant is good or not, I agree that the "airpods" make you look like a huge dork, just as google glass did. I expect the SV tech types to wear them around as a badge of honor, but I doubt the urban fashionistas are going to embrace it.
I remember people saying that about the original white headphones when the iPod first came out. Apple did lots of clever advertising to make them look normal. They might be able to pull off the same trick here, though it doesn't look like it at the moment.
The white cables were seen as uber-pretentious back in the day, and were a big target for muggers.[0] The very same way, 'hipsters' and techies are going to get mocked (and probably mugged) for wearing AirPods until — shock-horror — they become ubiquitous.
there's a huge difference between an ugly peripheral that's bundled with a ubiquitous device (ipods/iphones) and one that is overpriced and sold separately.
add to this difference apple's declining market share, and all the reasonable outrage over ditching the headphone jack, and good luck with ubiquity
When the iPod first came out, Apple had zero market share for MP3 players and just about everything else. This was the time when a big NYT journalist said Apple was close to going bankrupt because they couldn't design anything cool any more, and the iPod would be the failure which finally sank them as a company. So, no, I'm not going to write them off just yet.
Glass's utility was too small to overcome the initial awkwardness & etiquette adjustment. When it comes to AR I think Magic Leap is going to offer enough utility to overcome these problems.
With those first perceived-as-awkward sony headphones, the utility of personal music everywhere was very high.
The victim of minimalism I mourn the most: phones with physical keyboards. On-screen keyboards suck and no, I don't want to talk to my phone instead. I was so much more efficient on my LG Rumor dumbphone back in ~2008.
The thing that bothers me about on-screen keyboards and speech rec is that they are imprecise, statistical replacements for a precise, tactile device. It's hard to type on touch screen keyboards because there is no texture and tactile feedback so we rely on autocorrect to guess what we're trying to say, and speech rec is just a statistical system by its very nature. I rely on the computer to guess what I want when my fingers know exactly what needs to be done.
Not sure how much that is minimalism in design and how much is relentless cost cutting. One SKU that can be sold globally thanks to all inputs being implemented in software is much cheaper than 30+ SKUs for smaller regional differences.
Heck, these days you can't get a pure Norwegian, Danish or Swedish keyboard. They are all "nordic", meaning they have 3 different letters printed on the same keycap on a couple of keys.
>Not sure how much that is minimalism in design and how much is relentless cost cutting.
Perhaps some of column A, some of column B. On the minimalism axis, you could never have a super thin phone if it had a slide-out keyboard on it. I'm OK with that trade-off, but the market isn't, apparently.
My local anecdata: most people I know have 3rd party headphones if they actually listen to music. The people that use the in-the-box headphones from Apple tend to be the forever-on-a-call types. I struggle to see people buying these at this price point since there are plenty of bluetooth earbuds that are equal quality to Apple^, sub-$50, and won't instantly disappear in the couch. At Apple's price-point, you can already get a high-quality bluetooth earbud/mic from Audio-Technica. I would guess you'll have Beyerdynamic, AKG, Shure, and Senheiser all pop out a similar pair soon enough (Some may consider themselves 'above' bluetooth, though). I really don't understand their pricing. I could understand it if the equivalent Beats were $30 cheaper so they could create some tier pricing, however they are pretty much the same price.
^ Assuming they continue their trend of mediocre sound quality.
I know how I want my tech to look, with f-ing screws so I can open stuff up. I want my tech's look to follow function and I find repairability and expandability to be important functions. I get the feeling the author feels the same.
I think we need to see more people making their own hardware to make a statement against mainstream technology. The "open source hardware" movement is a good start. I'm a software guy, but I've recently begun learning more about electronics for this purpose.
> I've recently begun learning more about electronics for this purpose.
Out of curiosity, where did you start? Any recommendations? The extent of my hardware is custom PC and raspberry pi. I'd love to mess with more than just plug and play.
I got one of those Arduino starter kits that comes with a bunch of jumper wires, LEDs, resistors, push buttons, etc. (there's tons of kits, check adafruit.com for some) and learned enough to make an LED blink and went from there. Arduino makes it easy to get your feet wet and you can get more sophisticated once you're comfortable with the basics. Being a software person, the next step I took was ditching the Arduino IDE and writing my firmware in C using avr-gcc to compiler and avrdude to flash. I have an interest in custom USB input devices (game controllers and keyboards) so I've also starting using the LUFA[0] library which is very satisfying once you get it to work (pressing a push button on a breadboard and seeing a character typed on your computer for the first time is great!) So far I've focused on digital circuits, but I'd like to make an amplifier or something to learn more about analog circuitry. As you can see, I'm not too far past the starting line but I feel like I've learned a lot thus far. It's definitely a satisfying hobby.
I'm still in search of good textbooks on the topic (SICP is to CS as ____ is to EE? Recommendations anyone?) but I've gotten some value out of "Make: Electronics"[1] as a non-academic, beginners guide.
'It's really simple. We come up with a product. We try to tell everybody about it. Customer tell us by how they vote with their wallets whether we're on track or not. If enough of them say 'yes,' we get to come to work tomorrow.' — SJ
That's a model that works a lot better when you're a relative nobody than when you're the biggest company in the world. The reality is that people will buy whatever Apple sells them, within reason. They're not going to come out with an iPhone that's so bad that no one will buy it. That doesn't mean the customer has voted that that particular iPhone was exactly what they wanted. Success hides problems.
But surely the lesson from Microsoft is that Apple won't stay forever the biggest company in the world if they keep making products people don't want. On the other hand, if they keep making products that they think people want and we think they don't, and if they keep being successful, then maybe it's we the pundits, rather than Apple the company or its satisfied customers (which is not all of them!), who are wrong?
(I say this as someone who would like his phone to have a headphone jack, and doesn't personally want a new iPhone—and, on a more personal note (I'm a several-generations-out-of-date Android user not much affected by current iPhone trends), who hates the direction of macOS and wishes it were possible to live in the land of Snow Leopard forever—but also has reluctantly to concede that Apple has a better track record than I do for predicting and shaping the tech marketplace.)
Well, Microsoft's primary products are still completely dominant in the markets they're in. Windows and Office are still the 800-pound gorillas (though of course mac OS has narrowed the gap). What happened to Microsoft is more that everyone shifted to a new market (mobile) that they weren't prepared for or strong in.
Eventually, sure. If they made poor decisions for a long enough period of time, their customers would probably go elsewhere. But what I'm talking about here are the odd one-off poor decisions here and there. It may be true that 90% of Apple's customers really want a headphone jack. If that were true, I'd say removing it was a poor move, even if that entire 90% collectively goes, "Well shit. I guess I'll have to live with this overpriced and clunky wireless crap." No product is perfect. You can make a good product worse and still have people say, "Well, it's still good enough I guess."
Perhaps, but this is a quote from 2011 when Apple was definitely not a relative nobody. Jobs was discussing his frustrations with selling to the enterprise vs. consumer market.
I realize Apple still treats it as a truth that if people buy their products, then they must be on the right track. I'm just saying that I don't necessarily agree. When you accrue enough market power, there start to be other factors you have to account for that could be driving strong sales while hiding the fact that your customers are increasingly unhappy. By the time that unhappiness hits your profits appreciably, it may already be too late to do anything about it.
I don't really think the headphone jack is the start of some grand decline or anything. I'm just saying you can't wait a year, look at strong sales of the iPhone 7, and conclude that it was good decision to remove the jack or that you were particularly visionary to have done so.
> They're not going to come out with an iPhone that's so bad that no one will buy it.
yet i know a 2-decade-long apple user who has felt the final nail in the switching away from the walled garden coffin from the removal of the headphone jack, and i'm sure he is far from alone.
eventually, gradually, incrementally, apple will convince people to leave their walled garden, and they certainly aren't winning many converts with these moves.
I guess the issue comes when the whole industry has lost its imagination. Apple comes out with whatever they come out with, everyone follows Apple, and there's no ground shaking new ideas anymore.
You know what I'm interested in? Innovations in radio technology. Why can't I get a phone with built in mesh networking? No some weird bastard wifi hack, but an honest to goodness mesh networking solution maybe with a STANDARD interface? Some way for my phone to talk directly to a friend's phone without any need for a central authority to regulate our communications.
> Why can't I get a phone with built in mesh networking? No some weird bastard wifi hack, but an honest to goodness mesh networking solution maybe with a STANDARD interface?
Like Bluetooth? Like wifi ad hoc (what's the hack involved)? There are chat/file transfer apps for both of these "mesh" networks on the App Store. They are reasonably popular amongst K12 students when school districts get overzealous with filtering.
What do you realistically want that these don't provide?
I'm sure it has come up in product discussions, I bet it's just getting into significant security-concern territory where no one wants to risk being THAT company.
I'd assume they'd be able to manage pricing. 99.9% of people don't root/jailbreak their phones. I'm sure they'd be able to track the data plans/prevent apps that circumvent it.
Exactly. It is my understanding that minimalism is an effort to blend into the background, to become a blank slate, so that our own personalities, tastes etc can live in the foreground. It's an effort to not share the stage with you, the owner.
All those other examples the author shows are SCREAMING for attention. They demand the limelight. and like all things that scream for attention, soon they will get none.
And on top of that, items like that have to have SOME aesthetic, which means they become fashionable, which means they have a "shelf life" of acceptability. No one wants to be seen dead with one of those god-awful matrix phones, yet an iPhone 4 still looks relevant today...
Apply this logic to clothes. If we all wore the same minimalistic clothes, it would allow our individuality to shine through more because the clothes wouldn't "distract" from our personalities?
It's possible, I suppose, but there's something frankly terrifying about everyone looking the same. It's a staple of dystopian fiction, and I think one of the authors' points is that we get the same effect, albeit smaller, when everyone's devices look the same.
Actually, I spent a couple of years in precisely such an environment. While I can't say with certainty that there's causation to account for the most interesting and worthy people I knew in any school being those at the one which enforced a uniform policy, I certainly can say that it wasn't terrifying to see, or to participate in.
Such a policy existing in society at large, whether de facto or de jure, would of course be a different matter entirely. But I don't know that it is reasonable to argue that this is the case with devices, either. While there are certainly places to be found where uniformity of style in personal electronics is the norm, my experience suggests that they are actually quite rare, and hardly approaching any degree of prevalence that would make this a reasonable concern. Perhaps it would simply do the author good to get out more.
I used to wish Apple had more variety in their laptop styles. Then I realized that people are decorating their laptops, giving them more individuality and a stronger statement than a manufacturer ever could.
By making their devices generic, Apple has (perhaps inadvertently) encouraged individualism.
Aspirationally speaking: I agree. Practically speaking: everyone is already buying it.
It might even be a paradox of Apple's success that the author is writing what he is. Apple's popularity is, in no small part, due to selling people a statement to make.
The appetite for buying the branding of individuality has existed for ages. Apple was the first to master using that style of marketing for their tech. But Apple is a default choice now, everyone uses it and everyone copies their style (or even when Apple is following a trend, everyone else follows it because Apple does).
Apple sold people the high of a luxury product everyone could have and show off. Now everyone has it, and we're all coming down. Apple is bland now, GIVE ME SOMETHING NEW!
That's what I kept thinking, doesn't minimalism in product design give people more freedom to express themselves in a more unique way that is separate from their "devices"?
It seems like the author just wants to be able to buy his own self-expression through his devices.
I hadn't seen these before this article, and while I agree that they aren't super stylish, I don't think any headphones are stylish. They're always something in or on your ear and often with a lame cord hanging from it. And they all look as dumb as each other.
So I don't really see the point of ranting about these ones.
The author even points out that there's a point for their shape and size, so it's not some dumb design decision. Form was guided by function. (And I'm betting they stay in better by being longer like that, and not just centering over the ear, but that's a guess.)
I got the strong feeling that the the headphone complaint here was just a topical tie-in, or at best a final straw provoking the article.
It's not a piece that's asking for functional products (obviously: who wants antennas back?), so it seems like a larger indictment of the aesthetic sense regardless of how specific headphones look.
Some of you might disagree, but there's this thing happening right now with the younger generation: they don't seem to worship technology like we do.
Which is to say, for them - it's not something 'wow cool', it just is.
My 6-year old is fascinated by bugs and trees a lot more than she is by her iPad.
I mean, the iPad she just uses. A lot. Like the lightbulb.
But she's quite neutral about all the things that we care about - the cool minimalistic design, the powerful chip inside it, the version of the OS.
Like it should be.
As a programmer, I feel very strongly about my machines, but in the grand scheme of things - especially in the time dimension - our gadgets are just tools which we use to achieve stuff, which are always getting worse as time passes.
Now this sounds more like the future, where devices are all standard and common.
I don't really care about the brand of my lightbulb. I also barely care about the brand of my fridge. Maybe in 30 years a phone will be just a phone, not an Android phone, or an iphone.
I like minimalism, but I think we desperately need some competing aesthetics. Everyone has copied apple to such an extent that it's getting boring. I don't really agree with his notion of garish video game phones, but I think something like the old-school Thinkpads is an awesome aesthetic that got kind of lost. Like, a device that is very industrial and practical, it's not trying hard to be ugly, but they don't hide the screws either. Something like that. Basically a device that instead of trying to be a hermetically sealed box of magic, is super comfortable with its own device-ness. Something that looks like you could open it, if you knew what you were doing.
I love the old Thinkpad design. Not everyone agrees, of course, but I think it's stylish while still being rugged and functional. And I prefer dark, matte colors to brushed aluminum.
I'll admit that I went with a Thinkpad T430 over a Macbook Pro partially for this reason (I was also planning to run Linux on either, and I could get all-Intel on the Thinkpad). I still personalize it, but it's refreshing being even just one differing aesthetic at work. I've never known where to begin, but for years I've been cataloguing aesthetic & functional features I want in my "perfect laptop" and "perfect OS" which I doubt I'll ever get to see.
If I could put into as few words as possible, I still want some (initial) cleanliness in my aesthetic, but I don't want my devices to evoke safety and invitation -- I want them to look capable and daring. I want them to say "I'm a weapon against your obstacles. I will help you achieve whatever it is you do -- faster, better, more completely." My intuition tells me, however, that this might not be well received by a market, even if I knew how to cause such a thing.
Of course I'm a big fan of the cyberpunk aesthetic(s) as well. I would occasionally feel a dull sadness that the world doesn't seem to be turning out to be nearly as colorful as I'd hoped for as a kid, that when it comes to everyday objects, the world had apparently just "given up" and accepted a fate of bland uniformity. There is little market for deviant design.
There are some interesting ideas in here, but the argument could be stronger and more clear. A writer has to be at the top of their game if they're going after something as many people have a soft spot for as Apple.
This is moronic. I'm not even going to get into the stupidity of the author's argument, but since modern devices have been paired down into the minimum combination of processor and screen, the author could conceivably buy a case with all the idiotic cyberpunk dongles he wants. The fact that nobody sells such a monstrosity speaks for itself.
Yeah I basically agree. There's some good arguments to be made against Apple's decision making process but this is basically how the media responds whenever they change anything? So maybe this article is actually just really deep satire?
As a footnote: My first impression of Airpods was: Of course! These are not smaller earbuds, they are an iteration towards implants or patches or invisible computing devices in general. From that perspective they seem make more sense: Condition the user to a world with less wires, where machines get real dialog systems. The outrage over the earbuds comes from people comparing things to the past, not the future.
"You have an entire generation of what looks like cheap plastic toys with screens on them when we were promised a future with risk, innovation, the fantasies of Trek and Inspector Gadget laid out in front of us"
Er? Current Apple devices have a distinctly TNG Federation feel to them to me. Now borg on the other hand...
I got excited starting this article when he mentioned cyberpunk I thought he was going to make a much more interesting point than "I wish tech looked like what I think is cooler". Instead, I really would have enjoyed a discussion about what kind of things may be possible if we dropped the constraints of minimalism. Ideas about what amazing functionality and experiences technology could deliver for those whom don't mind their technology not being as invisible as possible and instead being more, well, large clunky cyberpunky. I would have enjoyed this specifically because with my limited imagination I can't think of a whole lot of additional /exciting/ functionality such an unbounding would enable.
This article does feel like a missed opportunity. I hate the minimal design trend for a lot of reasons, but they aren't the ones listed.
I grimace every time another HN article explains that menus are evil, minimalism is great, and every product should do one thing well. Because in practice, that means downloading 50 apps where 10 would do. It means calendars that don't communicate with alarm clocks, because mobile apps are 'minimal' in an environment where cross-app integration is completely impossible. It means that because no one did my "one thing well", there isn't even a way to do that one thing poorly.
There's a missing discussion about power-user tools, and what non-minimal products should look like. There are places where we should embrace flexibility, and choose good design and clear menus over removing features. This wasn't that discussion.
While I refuse to have the things I own to communicate say something about who I am and what I do, I do think that there is a fine line between doing something brave and bad in design.
Standard earbuds don't fit in my ears very well, cause headaches and are constantly falling out. The image of the pen charging and pointing directly at your crotch or chest while using the device is, to say the least, non-optimal.
It seems to me that the past Apple, perfect aesthetic with great functionality (even as a non-user of Apple products, except for a macbook supplied by my company for work purposes, I must admit this is true) is slowly losing it's way in an attempt to constantly prove that they are moving in some forward direction. Whether or not forward means over a cliff has yet to be seen, but I won't suggest that there is a false dichotomy between absolute success and absolute failure either. I think that this step will lose them further market share, but they'll still make a ton of money.
As appears to be the case with all design & aesthetic concepts, minimalism taken to a logical extreme becomes self-defeating and ridiculous. This is why the ideological fads and throw-it-all-out anti-historical rhetoric that sweep the various design professions with depressing regularity are so damaging.
Exactly. Text that's actually a button, without anything that would signify it as such, but it's like a fun game for you just to poke at your apps and see if anything happens.
I just don't trust bluetooth connections that much. If I'm on a plane listening to something I don't want the bluetooth connection to drop off and then have my music/podcast blasting out of the phone speakers. With a headphone jack I know that what I am listening to is private to me.
That doesn't happen with bluetooth headphones on an iPhone. If the connection cuts out the music pauses. I doubt it's a problem on Android as it's trivial to prevent that behaviour.
If the music pauses you don't necessarily know why and might press Play, which will then start playing from the device speakers.
This happens to me all the time when I walk too far away from a bluetooth speaker in my house. Or when I have paused playback for too long and it automatically disconnects. Albeit this is on Android.
Unless there is a giant visible indicator that you are connected to the bluetooth device, there is always going to be a level of uncertainty that is bad, imo. You just can't beat a physical plug.
I see what you mean, I suppose a physical plug is more or less 100%. However I still think diligently written software can solve this.
The headphones I use say "connected" and "disconnected" so it's not happened to me personally. iOS also has an indicator of what output it's going to use right next to the play/pause on the lock screen.
Also to be honest I'm not that considerate a person and don't really care if I accidentally disturb the people next to me for a few moments.
Regarding wires, I've got the opposite problem now to where I'm so used to wireless headphones that if I used wired ones I'm liable to try and walk away from the device without unplugging.
I kind of stopped reading after he said Apple is selling a $9 adapter when it's including it. I guess you'd have to buy it if you lost it tho, but then you'd likely lose your fancy headphones too.
The adapter included lets you listen to music. If you want to charge and listen to music simultaneously though, like you can do out of the box with an iphone 6, you need a $49 dock that isn't included afaik. http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MNN62AM/A/iphone-lightning...
The dock doesn't let you charge and listen to music simultaneously, the iPhone headphones use lightning, the charger uses lightning, the dock has a single lightning port like the phone.
To charge and listen to music simultaneously I need the dock AND a pair of headphones with the "antiquated 100 year old so obsolete" headphone jack.
So how do you charge your phone when you're using a pair of lightning headphones?
Also, I think you misspelled "ubiquitous, universal standard" headphone jack. The idea that it's a step forward to have headphones that only work in a single company's products is really interesting.
Maybe they are trying to add a cordless charger soon. (Whatever happened to those? They were all hyped up a couple of years ago but I never see them. Is it because normal cables are easier to carry around?)
I don't really want to defend Apple's decision to remove the 3.5mm jack, but I think if we're going to criticize the decision, it's better to just focus on the fact that there really wasn't anything wrong with the jack for consumers and lightning audio solutions don't provide consumers with many benefits. The "charge and listen" argument has been brought up so many times that I'm not sure the people saying it really think about the practicality of it.
What I mean is, how often is the scenario where you need to be charging the phone AND listening to music a major need? Like, between iPods, iPhones, and Android devices, for me it's almost always been a one or the other scenario. The phone charges at night when I sleep, and it's music during the day. Or I charge while at work where I use the computer for music. Charging tethers me to an object that cannot shift with me (computer, wall, etc) and I rarely am in a sitution where it's a necessity for me to be able to do both at once.
Truth is the only time I have ever wanted to charge and listen to music, I just used a bluetooth headset while I was cooking in the kitchen.
Now, I understand the purpose behind the argument - it's not so much the practicality as it is that user choice has been removed needlessly. But argue that - this idea that a huge major feature was removed and it spites users is ridiculous. Yes, so is Apple removing the 3.5mm audio jack, but I don't really see the value in trumpeting an absurd scenario as a major reason you need to have both ports.
I'm not all that invested in this since I likely can't afford a new iPhone anyways - maybe once they're on the iphone 9 I can afford to be upset about not having a 3.5 mm jack. But I would imagine Apple isn't making this decision blind. I'm sure they have numbers to show that the majority of iDevice users just use the provided headphones, and the 3.5mm dongle is pretty much a half-assed solution for those outside of the majority. But I don't think that Apple is really worried about the "obsoleteness" of the 3.5mm, and I'm gonna guess they have the data to show their users aren't en masse worried about it either.
I think the author may have missed the point of the Matrix design aesthetic. The heros of the movie all wear sleek minimalist monochrome outfits. With similar sunglasses, and remember that the cool phone from that movie was actually the Nokia 8110 not the one pictured there. The design of the Matrix was almost a minimalist reaction to the bulky steampunkish aesthetic of the 90s. In many ways the Matrix ushered in the move towards minimalist design that we have now.
> Our devices should be making a statement about who we are and what we do
No, fuck no.
You take as an example a movie based philosophically on the works of Jean Baudrillard and almost three thousand years of eastern thought and what you take away from it is that we should aspire to the opinion held by Jack in the opening scenes of Fight Club.
Also that Samsung phone he likes so much looks like utter crap, and I promise that spring mechanism isn't going to last a year.
There's a reason those designs aren't in the real world: every single moving part is a new exciting point of failure, and our current devices with nearly no moving parts fail enough.
I won't lie and say I didn't think it looked cool when I saw it in the movie. But, in the movie, it was surrounded by an entire artificial reality which had been painstakingly constructed around a single aesthetic. No other reality is the same. That seems like an important distinction to keep in mind.
And you're right about spring and slider mechanisms. There were a couple of Palm designs (the Zire 71 and Tungsten T3) which used them. They were nifty, to be sure. They were also plagued by issues revolving around mechanical failure of the Kapton ribbon cables used to connect the electronics in the two halves of the device. There's a reason beyond aesthetics why nobody really makes anything like that any more, and why moving parts in general are less and less frequently encountered in hardware that's expected to withstand its owner's lifestyle rather than being cosseted as in the past.
"Stuff doesn't look the way I want it too! I'm not sure how I want it to look, maybe like the Matrix? But not like the Matrix. I dunno. GIVE ME MONEY ON PATREON."
Oh, there is one really good quote that offsets the Medium-ness: "I want VR applications that don’t seek to simply recreate ordinary videogames, but instead drive the user into an existential crisis that challenges their mortality."
You forgot "political writer for hire" paired with terrible writing ("Point being, is that Apple [...]" FFS) and a pretentious photo.
I usually stay away from personal attacks but this guy clearly likes to hear himself talk, and clearly has a highly-inflated opinion of himelf. The result is something that feels like equal parts scummy marketing and impoliteness.
I know I shouldn't be making a big deal out of this but the patreon bit really ticked me off.
I don't think that's what it is. I think it's pandering thinly disguised as gratitude and pedigree. Otherwise stated, I think he wants us to believe that the market values his work, but I don't believe it actually does. That's the "scummy marketing" bit.
And to be clear this is all intuitive. I can't point to a single thing and say "see? that's proof positive.", but the overall impression I'm left with is very, very negative. Taken in the context of his shoddy writing and "fronting" in the photograph, it suggests a kind of person I truly have trouble appreciating.
I'd love to be wrong about this, though. The point is that the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts, and my visceral reaction is quite strong and quite negative. At the very least, this guy presents poorly, which is problematic for someone in his line of work.
> but instead drive the user into an existential crisis that challenges their mortality
So something like Total Perspective Vortex? [0]
Quote [1]:
> The most horrifying form of torture/punishment in the known Universe. The Total Perspective
> Vortex (it's so mind bogglingly terrifying it even gets Capital Letters) is a small,
> featureless steel box, barely big enough for one man to stand in.
> The hopeless victims stand in the Vortex, and are suddenly shown, for the merest instant,
> the whole of the Universe: the whole infinity of creation, spanning over several trillion
> light years, and countless millennia, with an insignificant dot saying "You Are Here".
> The victims, totally demoralised by their experience, fall dead from the vortex, wherupon
> they become the burden of the Vortex' custodian, Pizpot Gargravarr.
I'd say that sort-of loosely fits "that challenges their mortality" :)
PS: That name of the custodian... never noticed it before, guess I was too young and not yet as comfortable with English.
>"Stuff doesn't look the way I want it too! I'm not sure how I want it to look, maybe like the Matrix? But not like the Matrix. I dunno. GIVE ME MONEY ON PATREON."
Articles like this have always existed, and sometimes people listen too.
Author complains about minimalism, uses Medium to do it: a platform that doesn't support footnotes, colored text, or really anything other than a minimal set of features.
Doesn't anyone else find it a small irony that the website this post is hosted on is so clean, polished, and generally reflective of the very thing he's railing against?
Maybe this should be hosted on a more 'rude' website. Or maybe the way tech looks and feels is partly also dictated by ease of use and not just 'because big brother said so'.
yeah, my next phone will be an Android again. I've tried both ecosystems, and the iPhone world is just too locked-down and anal for me. Others will undoubtedly disagree, and that's a good thing.
I'd be interested in how the costs work out for designing and manufacturing a phone. Are we near the point yet where we can get them built cheaply to spec? Are the parts commodity enough now that putting one together in the shed is do-able?
> You have an entire generation of what looks like cheap plastic toys with screens on them when we were promised a future with risk, innovation, the fantasies of Trek and Inspector Gadget laid out in front of us, and instead we’re left with… well, I can put a “TIME TO FUCK” .jpg as the background of this watch and use it to harass women wearing headphones
Some what off topic, but this isn't really a funny joke.
I don't personally like the AirPods but a lot of people do. There's a number of articles fawning over them.
This post is absolutely terrible. Inspector Gadget as a fantasy? Inspector Gadget was a dork, that was part of his charm, there was nothing cool about him.
I'm not exactly pleased with the decision regarding the jack, but this misinformation has become a meme unto itself:
> They took out the headphone jack, like tech journalists rumored for years and years, and are now selling you a $9 dongle or forcing you to get Bluetooth earbuds, which are… bad, to anybody who cares about audio quality or battery life or actually use their phone to listen to music.
No, they didn't. You get a set of lightning earbuds with the phone, and you get the dongle for free. If your objective is to buy an iPhone and listen to things with it, you do not need to buy shit other than the iPhone.
And if your argument is quality and you know ANYTHING about it, then you already figured out that the dongle contains the same hardware that the phone did prior to turn the digital signal into analog audio, and that the headphones do more or less the same thing just packaged inside the buds instead of being in the phone.
As if any real audiophile would use the stock Apple headphones anyway.
I have a really hard time taking journalists seriously when they make a factual error in paragraph 1. Pressing on...
That's my other beef: 5 hours of battery life on the Airpods, are you kidding me? I was interested until they got to that dopey box you charge them in and told us they only ran for 5 hours of listening. That's pathetic.
Honestly, 5 hours is quite impressive for such a small thing. And it certainly goes beyond my need for casual use. Would anyone listening to music more than 5 hours in a stretch really use the airpods anyway?
Hopefully iPhone 7 will be forward compatible with Bluetooth 5, and will really spark the market for good quality Bluetooth 5 headphones with longer battery life.
Although the box is dopey, it's probably quite important to keep people from loosing the airpods, and to make it easier and quicker to charge them. You know that the box also contains a battery right? There's 24 hours of capacity there.
Wireless just isn't worth it for these peripherals - earphones, headsets, keyboards, mice. Even if the battery life is a year, it will still go flat at some annoying time when you want to type/listen/make a call.
He also claims "and you have to wear two of them!", which is factually wrong as well. It was explicitly mentioned in the keynote that you can also use only one, e.g. if you just want to make a quick call.
> It was explicitly mentioned in the keynote that you can also use only one
Oh, good! Thank you for mentioning this - I haven't found time to watch the full keynote and probably will not do so, and I did wonder how annoying it would be to use just one AirPod at a time, so's not to block both ears and severely hamper my situational awareness. It sounds from what you say like this is a use case they've put some thought into, and that's good to know.
Perhaps as a followup, bullshit.ist could do an article on the difference between "selling an adapter" and "including one in the box" and the sloppy journalistic malpractice that is deliberately confusing the two for the sake of whining...