Kevin Fox:
Bluetooth, maligned early on for sub-par connectivity and audio quality, has come a very long way, and within a few years wired headphones will be seen as much an outlier as a wired mouse or trackpad. It’s Apple’s style to predict and support this transition at the hardware level by taking away the safety net of a headphone plug that hasn’t changed fundamentally since the ¼” jack was introduced 138 years ago. Nobody alive today has ever known a world without this plug.
To put it bluntly, headphones that plug into the 3.5mm jack are dumb. Literally. At the base level, they’re just wires conducting current to tiny speaker coils, without electronics at all. Sure, some are smarter with inline controls or analog signal processing such as bass boosting or noise cancellation, but most headphones are just dumb wires. And we know how Apple feels about wires, even if they’re pretty smart.
Read the post for details on the vast improvements that will come with Lightning connected headphones and thoughts on the evolution of existing products, like the MacBook Pro, that currently ship with a 3.5mm port.
Sometimes dumb devices are better.
Most current “smart” connected devices are indeed actually inferior in quality and ease of use, and become obsolete much faster than than their non-smart predecessors. There are some compelling advantages to having headphones connected via the Lightning port mentioned in the linked blog post, though. Besides that, the option of using “dumb” headphones won’t go away, it’ll just require an adapter.
Many years ago I tried to love Bluetooth – headphones, data transfer, mouse – but they all sucked.
Changed to wired headphones, physical media and 2.4ghz mouse and life has been sweet ever since.
Perhaps I will venture again into the world of Bluetooth after Apple’s announcements.
I’m not against the death of the headphone jack but I agree with Kirk McElhearn, sometimes the simpler, cleaner solution is better.
What bugs me about these predictions a bit is at the end of the day, the sound coming out of a Lightning port-connected pair of headphones or bluetooth headphones using AAC SBC, apt-X, or something of the sorts, won’t sound better than a good pair of headphones connected to a 3.5 mm headphone jack. It might sound different but not necessarily better.
On the other hand, replacing a Lightning audio cable will be much more expensive compared to replacing a regular analogue cable.
The same goes for the Lightning-to-3.5mm-adapter.
With the rate some people break headphone cables, I can imagine many people becoming very angry.
That’s why I’m curious to see whether Apple will introduce decent bluetooth EarPods.
perhaps sometimes, but you’re forgetting — apple is a mass consumer company with products designed for use cases that are better for most people most of the time. forgetting this simple fact is what gets techies so butthurt.
id be willing to bet apple has data that shows it what most of their customers do most of the time, and that this decision will be in line with that behavior.