An interesting story with rather absurd moral conclusions drawn from it. I think this is a fantastic workaround against one of the world's largest corporations extracting revenue from everything, and there should be more of this energy in the world.
OTOH, taking the position that Apple is the baddie here is just as absurd. These are all big companies out to make a buck.
Without taking sides, I'd say the fundamental problem in this case is the deception. They are pretending to sell one thing and delivering another. If they told you what you were buying, I'd call it clever and totally reasonable.
> taking the position that Apple is the baddie here is just as absurd. These are all big companies out to make a buck.
I see this logic often, and I don't understand it.
If I did something people considered unethical, arguing that I did it out of greed wouldn't change people's minds. It would probably hurt my argument.
When a big company does something people consider unethical, there's almost always someone who mentions that the point of a business is to make money, as if that's a excuse for their behavior.
It's like there's a separate set of ethics for business, and the worst sin of all is not being profitable.
I'm not totally clear on what you are getting at here -- are you saying that yes, we can call Apple bad here? Because they made a choice to prioritize profit, which made other companies deceive customers with inexpensive workarounds, the real problem is back to being Apple? They forced these other companies to be deceptive?
> I see this logic often, and I don't understand it.
You may be reading more into what I said than I intended. I am merely suggesting that big companies are in no way deserving of our sympathy. In this case, Apple is looking out for their best interests, and so are the manufacturers selling bogus products. Nobody forced those manufacturers to choose this route, and as big faceless corporations out to make a buck, why let them off the hook and blame Apple?
At least you know what you're spending top dollar for when you buy something from Apple. It's entirely your choice if it's worth it.
I'm clearly not doing a great job of conveying my thoughts today. I should probably spend more time reading what I've written before I hit the reply button.
I get what you're saying, in a particular ingroup this is *the* gospel riposte to a particular lawsuit involving a epic corporation and Apple. And everyone understands it there.
For whatever reason, that's the only place in tech I've seen a group of people nodding along to "complaining about bad thing is bad because the person complaining also is bad generally." It's a specious argument, so it sounds odd, and outside that context, people aren't likely to steelman it.
"Until finally back home, I do some research and figure out what's going on: A scourge of cheap "lightning" headphones and lightning accessories is flooding certain markets, unleashed by unscrupulous Chinese manufacturers who have discovered an unholy recipe: True Apple lightning devices are more expensive to make."
Why are they more expensive to make. Is it for the good of humanity?
Computers as "art", according to preferences of one person, versus computers as machines for the benefit of everyone.
Closed systems to extract maximum profits for Apple versus open systems that can be modified and expanded to benefit everyone.
"I wish @Apple would devote an employee or two to cracking down on such a technological, psychological abomination as this."
How about lowering the cost of making "lightening" devices. How about offering the option to use a non-proprietary protocol?
"And I wish humanity would use its engineering prowess for good, and not opportunistic deception."
No doubt that's what people is rural Chile want, too. They do not mind paying higher prices. As long as the products are "Apple-certified". /s
This person tweeting seems to be having a hallucination where Apple is neither opportunistic nor deceptive. Nevermind its deliberate attempts to make its computers incompatible (preventing interoperability) and needlessly expensive.
This could need a better title: Losing earbuds has nothing to do with the actual (interesting!) discovery.
> I wish @Apple would devote an employee or two to cracking down on such a technological, psychological abomination as this.
Why blame these manufacturers for finding a clever workaround and not Apple for requiring hardware DRM and extracting royalties out of accessory manufacturers in the first place?
What's the upside in me paying for a DRM chip in every damn dongle that Apple can get away with putting one into, and clever manufacturers still inevitably defeating the scheme and flooding the market with poor quality fakes (that Amazon will gladly distribute for them stateside)?
I'm so glad we're mostly past this bullshit with Apple's move to USB-C.
hmm, maybe if there was some kind of way to just directly connect earphones with some kind of new fangled direct analogue technology, then "wired bluetooth" wouldn't be the most economical way to get wired earphones.
It would only require a port supporting 3 wires and a miniscule onboard amplifier. I'm sure Apple have the courage to invent a new port for the good of humanity, maybe they can even pave the way for a new standard.
I know this is a popular opinion and I might or might not be in the minority here, but I don't miss the headphone jack on my phone at all, and every gram of battery or other functionality that has taken its place is worth it for me. Water proofing one connector (USB-C) is probably also easier than two.
For the increasingly unlikely case in which I really do need wired headphones, I just carry them with an adapter permanently plugged into them.
> a miniscule onboard amplifier
That amplifier would be dead weight for me! (To be fair, it would be in good company with all the power amplifiers for 5G bands not available in my country, but I get the point of unifying SKUs globally and I can hardly plug one of these in with an adapter when traveling.)
This is becoming less and less common for me as phone battery life gets better, but on long flights it's annoying to have to choose between charging your phone and using your headphones.
There are USB-C-to-3.5mm adapters that have an additional USB-C power input! They are a bit more clunky obviously, but if that's a common problem for you, that might be a solution.
Have you looked at an x-ray or disassembly video of an iPhone? There isn't a lot of empty space in there.
And what have Google and Samsung won by people having to buy a USB-C adapter, most likely for them? They also removed the headphone jack, and have never had a proprietary adapter standard to replace them.
Google, Samsung, and Apple all have lucrative wireless earphone businesses, or would like to. Simpler design with less components is also a win for them.
I’d pay quite a sum for such a service. The value of a lossless, universally compatible port is hard to overstate. At the very least they could give us a second USB-C port on top-end phones.
They removed it so they could sell overpriced airpods and dongles, and simultaneously kill the 3rd party headphone market.
You think the literal few cents that a headphone jack costs would be more of an incentive than being able to force their victims to buy $300 disposable headphones?
How anyone could claim in good faith to not understand this, I can't even.
They even purposely gimp the USBC port they were reluctantly forced to add so it doesn't support headset microphones.
Why should any manufacturer include components in a device that customers clearly don’t value enough for it to make a difference to them?
I get the objection to Apple artificially creating demand for proprietary adapters; I dislike that too.
But what good would it do me if they make me pay for a component I don’t need? I don’t get gratification out of reducing (nor increasing) their bottom line.
>Why should any manufacturer include components in a device that customers clearly don’t value enough for it to make a difference to them?
If Apple sold a model with a headphone jack and a model without, then we could compare sales numbers between the two models and you could make that claim.
Of course, Apple doesn't sell a model with a headphone jack.
What they do sell however, coincidentally enough, is $300 wireless headphones.
They also sell $19 lightning and USB-C EarPods, which were/are exactly the same price as the mini-jack EarPods. Or if you want to use different headphones, a $10 lightning/USB-C to jack adapter. They must be getting rich of those $19 headphones :p.
People in tech circles also lambasted Apple for removing DVD drives and a lot of other things. Yet a lot of non-tech people prefer Bluetooth ANC buds or headphones.
Also, if they were so intent on killing the jack for money, why do they still have it on MacBooks and even upgraded it with an amplifier that supports high-impedance headphones?
Better waterproofing and re-using the space sound like perfectly valid reasons.
>They must be getting rich of those $19 headphones :p.
Artificially limiting the available options coincidentally encourages some to buy the $300 headphones.
Selling some $300 headphones is better than none.
>Also, if they were so intent on killing the jack for money, why do they still have it on MacBooks and even upgraded it with an amplifier that supports high-impedance headphones?
They will remove it when they can. The laptop frog is not yet boiled enough.
>Better waterproofing and re-using the space sound like perfectly valid reasons.
Phones haven't gotten thinner or more waterproof despite removing the headphone jack.
My Samsung S10 5G from 2019 is the same thickness and has IP68 waterproofing just like the iPhone 15, but does have a headphone jack.
Coincidentally, it's the last flagship Samsung with a headphone jack.
Phone companies are just regurgitating the same shit year over year.
The SOCs take up the same space and batteries should be improving, so I don't accept space saving as a valid reason, especially when they haven't become slimmer.
I wish all the companies would just make the best phone they could instead of nickel and diming their customers.
But Apple is definitely the worst offender, and does their best to normalize so much anti-consumer stuff.
I believe that it should be obvious that the headphone jack was removed purely as a self-serving business decision because Apple wanted to sell more overpriced accessories, and not because customers didn't want it.
I'd also like to make the comment that almost all high-quality headphones are made for analog jacks.
So as a person who values high-quality audio, I am not interested in wireless headphones of any kind, cheap shitty USBC headphones, or needing to use an ugly inconvenient dongle to use my good headphones.
Lucky for me I'm not an Apple customer anyway for a myriad of reasons, but I'd argue there are no good alternatives for what would be my use case.
That's why I specified cheap shitty USBC headphones.
I also note that those need a large ugly USBA to USBC adapter.
If I'm honest, the design of those also doesn't personally appeal to me, and I've tried AT headphones before and I didn't find them comfortable and didn't like the sound. For phone use I'd be looking for IEMs and not over the ear models too.
I am aware that there are good USBC headphones out there, but the available options are so much fewer than analog headphones.
If you don't want cheap, shitty USB-C headphones... don't get them? I really don't get your point.
3.5mm to USB-C adapters are tiny and can include a much higher quality DAC than most phones reasonably will. Into those, you can then plug any headphone your heart or ears desire.
Audiophiles are such a niche market all things considered, and on top of that they seem to prefer their own DACs and/or headphone pre-amplifiers anyway – why waste space and money for a headphone jack that most users wouldn't use, and the ones that do would augment with external dongles anyway?
And for users that just don't want to deal with charging and pairing Bluetooth headphones, cheap headphones and adapters do just fine as well.
Now I need to buy three dongles, one for my car, one for home, and one for my go-bag, and do a silly scramble when I misplace the tiny. Plus buy USB-C replacements now that Lightning is dead. The dongle is also ugly (doesn’t match my phone or earphones) and easily broken, with an incredibly thin wire.
It’s just a worse situation all around. The DAC and amp built into the iPhone previously was of similar quality. Now life - especially working with audio gear - is more complicated and annoying, so that Tim could sell more e-waste.
> I wish @Apple would devote an employee or two to cracking down on such a technological, psychological abomination as this.
What can Apple do though? Any change that cracks down on this will render these devices unusable for thousands of people, generate tons of e-waste, and create a huge backlash towards Apple.
It reminds me of when FTDI permanently bricked FTDI clones [0].
Further, I'm not sure I agree with the OP's vitriol against these manufacturers. They're using an open standard to bypass Apple's MFi tax. It's a hack for sure, but if it leads to cheaper devices -- which is the ultimate goal for this segment of product -- I don't see the problem. I could see the problem if they're advertised as wired headphones without mentioning Bluetooth though.
What can Apple do? They could make standards-compliant USB-C audio adapters work on the iPhone 15 and up, with no NDAs, magic chips, or Apple-specific standards. (Maybe the already do?)
They _almost_ do. I can use a USBC-headphone dongle that came with some Pixel phone with my iPhone, but only for listening to music and videos. For video calls (at least Google Meet), the phone just plays the audio out its speakers like normal, and doesn't offer the option to use the headphone dongle. I thought this was a bug in Google Meet until I plugged in a first-party Apple dongle and it worked perfectly.
Since these adapters are active, I wonder if there's a slight mismatch in what the Pixel adapter advertises and what the iPhone expects. Maybe the iPhone identifies it as a USB speaker (i.e. output only)?
I also wonder who's out of spec here: My guess would be Apple (especially Google's history of pushing USB-C and even producing some open-hardware debugging tools for it), but then again I've had my Macbook struggle with a Chromebook charger, and only that charger in the past.
Would be curious to see a USB-knowledgeable person run a logic analyzer on the Pixel dongle to see what's going on.
So from the observation "a Google USB-C device does not work properly on an Apple phone", you immediately arrive at "Apple must be out of spec"?
I'd also be really curious what's going on here, but you just seem to have an axe to grind. In my experience, Apple has been pretty ok at complying with standards (assuming they even implement a given one, anyway).
For example, I've had a USB-C Chromebook charger that would cycle on and off when connected to my Macbook, while several other USB-C chargers (including very particular ones like the Nintendo Switch one) were able to charge it without any problem. From my point of view, the one Google product I used was the outlier, but I wouldn't go as far as saying "Google's USB-C implementations are crap and a money grab".
I also have a coworker who is an Apple victim who had previously complained to me that he couldn't get the microphone on his headset working with his iPhone, but I don't know what brand the headset was.
So that made me even more inclined to think Apple has gimped their USBC ports to sell more dongles and airpods.
> I wish @Apple would devote an employee or two to cracking down on such a technological, psychological abomination as this.
OP wants want Apple to crack down on open standards?
What tyrant king declared that Bluetooth devices need to be powered by separate batteries? I think this is an ingenious solution, to a problem Apple created in a way that should be illegal, no less. And one less battery in the landfill on top of it!
Interestingly, Apple’s own keyboards and mice pair to Bluetooth automatically using lighting cables.
I think this is a case where the first world perspective is blind to the burdens that big multinational corporations put on poorer countries. A $4 Apple lightning license may seem like no big deal to a high income country’s citizen but the rest of the world is used to electronics like this costing less ~$5 or less.
Wow, this is such a better experience with longer form content on twitter than I've seen before. I don't know if this is multiple tweets crammed together somehow, or just tweets can be long now? And also have italics?
Anyway, I'm accustomed to twitter links being an incomprehensible mess of UI showing people responding to stuff without showing what it is or how to get to it. This is remarkably sane and coherent. Do I... like twitter now?
Wireless earbuds being that cheap isn't bad. What's bad is that the price of real wired headphones is artifically inflated by the licensing terms, to the extent they can't compete.
The article was about headphones using a Lightning port, which suggests a phone without a 3.5mm jack or USB-C. (It must be an iPhone, so no 3.5mm port if it's newer than 8 years; and Lightning and USB-C are mutually exclusive).
Wireless costs more because suddenly you need to deal with antennas and RF and whatever. Adding a wire back on top of that doesn't magically make it cost less again.
I inadvertently bought a pair just like this from Amazon - I knew they were knockoffs, but I didn’t think they would be Bluetooth. Hilariously they also identify as “Baets“ (not “Beats”) when connecting.
Confusion can be avoided by correctly labelling the headphones. If these devices are sold in France, one could ask the French language police for guidance on accurate names.
For hacker points, there could be an open-source logo for the bizmodel workaround, borrowing from the mythologies of Halt and Catch Fire, HBO Silicon Valley, Wild West, Sherwood Forest, or the Silk Road of Marco Polo's travels.
I accidentally bought one of these pieces of garbage from Amazon a few years ago. I had no idea why my wired headphones needed Bluetooth. They broke after a few months and Amazon gave me a refund.
In some parts of the world, wired lightning headphones are actually cheap bluetooth headphones that only use the lightning port for power (to avoid Apple licensing fees). For the author this was baffling, as everyone else took it as normal that bluetooth needed to be enabled to use wired headphones.
> A scourge of cheap "lightning" headphones and lightning accessories is flooding certain markets, unleashed by unscrupulous Chinese manufacturers who have discovered an unholy recipe:
> True Apple lightning devices are more expensive to make. So instead of conforming to the Apple standard, these companies have made headphones that receive audio via bluetooth — avoiding the Apple specification — while powering the bluetooth chip via a wired cable, thereby avoiding any need for a battery.
Ditto for minijack to lightning adapters.
Wonder if this will be fixed now that Apple uses usb-c like they should have been doing all along.
USB-C wasn't a thing when Lightning was created. And Lightning was way, way, way better than Micro-USB. Apple has been converting their iDevices to USB-C for years, they held out on the iPhone because it is a high-impact switch that would affect a lot of customers with purchased accessories (some of which are quite expensive).
> Lightning is a proprietary computer bus and power connector, created and designed by Apple Inc. It was introduced on September 12, 2012, in conjunction with the iPhone 5, to replace its predecessor, the 30-pin dock connector.
The design may have been started in 2012, but the first hardware to come to market was in 2014. Apple wanted to ditch the dock connector, and Micro-USB is awful. Lightning may have stuck around a little longer than I'd have liked, but it was pretty solid technologically.
A crazy experience — I lost my earbuds in a remote town in Chile, so tried buying a new pair at the airport before flying out. But the new wired, iPhone, lightning-cable headphones didn't work. Strange.
So I went back and swapped them for another pair, from a different brand. But those headphones didn't work either. We tried a third brand, which also didn't work.
By now the gift shop people and their manager and all the people in line behind me are super annoyed, until one of the girls says in Spanish, "You need to have bluetooth on." Oh yes, everyone else nods in agreement. Wired headphones for iPhones definitely need bluetooth.
What? That makes no sense. The entire point of wired headphones is to not need bluetooth.
So I turn Bluetooth on with the headphones plugged into the lightning port and sure enough my phone offers to "pair" my wired headphones. "See," they all say in Spanish, like I must be the dumbest person in the world.
With a little back and forth I realize that they don't even conceptually know what bluetooth is, while I have actually programmed for the bluetooth stack before. I was submitting low-level bugs to Ericsson back in the early 2000's! Yet somehow, I with my computer science degree, am wrong, and they, having no idea what bluetooth even is, are right.
My mind is boggled, I'm outnumbered, and my plane is boarding. I don't want wireless headphones. And especially not wired/wireless headphones or whatever the hell these things are. So I convince them, with my last ounce of sanity, to let me try one last thing, a full-proof solution:
I buy a normal wired, old-school pair of mini-stereo headphones and a lightning adapter. We plug it all in. It doesn't work.
"Bluetooth on", they tell me.
NO! By all that is sacred my wired lightning adapter cannot require Bluetooth. "It does," they assure me.
So I turn my Bluetooth on and sure enough my phone offers to pair my new wired, lightning adapter with my phone.
Unbelievable.
I return it all, run to catch my plane, and spend half the flight wondering what planet I'm on. Until finally back home, I do some research and figure out what's going on:
A scourge of cheap "lightning" headphones and lightning accessories is flooding certain markets, unleashed by unscrupulous Chinese manufacturers who have discovered an unholy recipe:
True Apple lightning devices are more expensive to make. So instead of conforming to the Apple standard, these companies have made headphones that receive audio via bluetooth — avoiding the Apple specification — while powering the bluetooth chip via a wired cable, thereby avoiding any need for a battery.
They have even made lightning adapters using the same recipe: plug-in power a fake lightning dongle that uses bluetooth to transmit the audio signal literally 1.5 inches from the phone to the other end of the adapter.
In these remote markets, these manufacturers have no qualms with slapping a Lightning / iPhone logo on the box while never mentioning bluetooth, knowing that Apple will never do anything.
From a moral or even engineering perspective, this strikes me as a kind of evil. These companies have made the cheapest iPhone earbuds known to humankind, while still charging $12 or $15 per set, pocketing the profits, while preying on the technical ignorance of people in remote towns.
Perhaps worst of all, there are now thousands or even millions of people in the world who simply believe that wired iPhone headphones use bluetooth (whatever that is), leaving them with an utterly incoherent understanding of the technologies involved.
I wish @Apple
would devote an employee or two to cracking down on such a technological, psychological abomination as this. And I wish humanity would use its engineering prowess for good, and not opportunistic deception.
this makes you wonder if apple specs where designed to enhance the user experience or just to gate-keep the access to thier lucrative market. If the later, and I highly believe so, then can we blame others to come up with workarounds?
No matter what we think of Apple, we can absolutely blame others for being deceitful and claiming they are selling one thing while actually providing something inferior.
Bluetooth audio is decidedly, objectively inferior, unless they’re using one of the fancy codecs (can’t remember which ones iPhones support), which they probably don’t.
