“Over the last few months, we’ve heard a variety of theories about how Apple plans to handle the dispensing of the 3.5mm headphone jack for the iPhone 7 Chris Smith reports for Trusted Reviews. “Will there be bundled Lightning EarPods? Wireless EarPods? Or 3.5mm EarPods with an adapter?”
“New reports on Friday have suggested one of the options – bundling a set of EarPods with a Lightning cable – is off the table,” Smith reports.
“A Deutsche Bank research note claims Apple will stick with the 3.5mm jack on the EarPods and instead saddle iPhone 7 buyers with an adapter,” Smith reports.
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: So, if you want Lightning Earphones sans adaptor, buy your own. Ostensibly, if true, this would mean that Apple won’t move to shipping Lightning headphones until the vast majority of their shipping products only offer Lightning audio (iPad, iPod, Mac, etc.)
Or maybe only “iPhone 7 Pro” gets Apple’s Lightning EarPods included in the box to start?
Smart move by Apple…
Yeah. Dandy.
Well if you dont like it …you always have the choice of throwing the dongle away.. …
Or how about if Apple offers everything for free…. Dandy^2
If that’s true, that’s ridiculous. Hey here’s a new technology from our phones, but not from our headphones.
Apple will HAVE to include the EarPods with the 3.5mm jack and an adaptor. Why? Because people are such crybabies…..arn’t they? They want to be able to connect their “expensive” third party ear pods (from B&O or whatnot) for which they paid $500 dollars.
Would be nice though for Apple to give you a choice.
“Would you like the box with the 3.5mm jack and adaptor or the box with lightning EarPods?”
Ahh….that would be music to the ears. Pardon the pun.
Nope… does NOT hate its customers NO WAY they would remove the jack and then give you a dongle to plug in headphones I would believe they would provide BOTH before I believe that is their solution.
First the “setup”…..
Then the punch to the gut.
Am I right?
If true the thinking at Apple may be this:
– Providing a dongle enables ALL existing “jacked” headphone/earbuds to connect to a Lightning port, whereas supplying a new Lightning port earbuds set leaves all those with 3rd party devices needing to go out an buy either a new set if earphone or an adaptor for the ones they have.
If true, Apple is serving most of its customers in the best way.
*** Note: I still haven’t seen a compelling reason for Apple to remove the jack at this time. If they go all-in on the Lightning port with the iPhone 7, they better be ready to demonstrate all the cool stuff that’s going to happen by dumping the jack.
You are clearly a petluant 12-year-old troll.
What’s the difference? Lightning EarPods, or regular EarPods with a dongle? No, there won’t be any new features enabled, but this actually does seem like the most elagant, Apple-like way to do this. They get rid of a port, and we are still able to use any 3.5mm accessories out of the box without having to buy a $19 or $29 adapter. They’ve never shied away from requiring adapters for video output. This would be no different.
Why get rid of the connector? It is a frequently used connector, does its job and works. It just works. By headphones of varying cost all work. The connector can be used to put some great sound into headphones/earbuds.
I know there is probably some music industry scheme to eliminate yet another analog device. Perhaps in the future there can be some DRM system similar to HDMI were only allowed devices can be used on the data stream.
“Why get rid of the connector?” Besjim asks.
Because it is the single most offensive port of liquid entry, is very hard to waterproof and takes up an inordinate amount of internal space for the limited function it provides. The lightning connector can pass power, audio, video and data in both directions, is easier to seal and delves less deeply into the internals of the iPhone/iPad, thus allowing more room for other internals, such as a larger battery. Those are only a few of the advantages that I can think of. I’m sure Apple has thought of other advantages, too.
People today can buy Lightning or Bluetooth headphones. Would anyone care to guess on how popular these expensive and less user-friendly headphones are compared to traditional analog headphones? Very small percentage of people choose the expensive ones. If Apple tries to force the change, the backlash will be predictable. Of course, it’s all speculation until we see the real thing.
It’s not just because everyone’s cheap either. There is a significant percentage of customers who simply don’t like dongles and have a long list of legitimate reasons they prefer to have an analog audio output for their portable electronics.
Has anyone been able to identify a single legitimate reason that removal of the analog audio jack would make the iPhone a better product, or a better selling product? No, except perhaps Jony who thinks that total thickness of an iPhone must be reduced with each generation, regardless of the negative tradeoffs in other product characteristics. Or maybe the Apple beancounter/salesman who thinks he will save money by forcing the buyer to pay over and over again for lost dongles and adapters that Apple overprices with its anti-consumer licensing arrangements.
What is also clear (to me at least) is that today these salesmen, beancounters, and artists who now dominate decision making at Apple are making crap products. Beats is hailed as a huge success because Iovine and Dre gave out free headphones to all their celebrity friends and the free advertising spurred dumb consumers to rush out and overpay for crappy headphones. Headphones that are more about image projection than they are about music fidelity.
That is a problem. Once Apple wouldn’t have chosen this path. But this is now Cook’s Apple. No longer does Apple wow us with polished creations from product experts who are directly informed by user feedback, who care first about the user and less about the free advertising. Seriously, just look at Apple’s progress in the last 5 years: lots of image management, very little product improvement. Many of the recent hardware moves by Apple shows how Apple seems more interested in making sealed boxes with a single port, obviously hamstrung in usability, than they are in offering the most versatile, user-friendly devices possible. Software quality, features, and GUI has reached new lows. Subscription services seems like the big focus, but it’s all dreck.
I believe it was Steve Jobs himself who warned about letting salesmen run a company. You can see it happening now to Apple.
You are wrong in so many ways…
1. Apple is NOT forcing you to use Bluetooth
2. The lightening port will provide ANALOG out.
3. The wired headphones are ALREADY A “DONGLE”.
4. The adaptor is not an additional “dongle”. You click it on once and forget about it.
5. Removing jack make iPhone better to waterproof. You also get better analog sound output from the lightening port. The phone becomes more reliable too.
You’re absolutely right. And very well said.
We hate Ethernet and usb dongles for legitimate reasons. We use USB and Ethernet ports, each for a variety of different peripherals and cables, many of which we don’t cary with us. For those ports/cables we would need to cary the dongle and we’d need to find it every time we plug a different cable in.
Otoh, if the audio dongle is thin and always attached to the end of our earplugs, it will be no more inconvenient than the flat in-line volume control on the current headphones. It will wrap up and go in the earplug case just as easily. 99% of us use just one pair of earplugs all year long.
The up side is that in exchange for that we’ll get significantly better be iPhone speakers.
The only downside that I can think of is that you can’t charge your device and listen to earplugs at the same time, which i suspect is not all that common. And Apple could solve that problem by including a lighting port in the dongle.
Gee, thanks Apple. Was it really that difficult to do the right thing?
To all the fanboys that lauded Apple’s progressive move to eliminate the 3.5 mm jack, how ya feelin?
What do you mean? I have no problem with a an adaptor and 3.5mm headphones. Why would I? And why do you?
Come on, Paul! Don’t you see the problem!? Forget terrorism, poverty, rape and everything else. This is practically the end of Western civilization.
Dongles are easily misplaced. Dongles cost money. Dongles, are generally, irrelevant and unnecessary.
Just dont unplug it from your earphones!
“A bla bla bla research note claims . . .”
That story will change 20 more times before Apple announces (and has already changed 200 times) what the new iPhone will or won’t have.
As for Apple taking off the headphone jack and not offering a dedicated Lightning earpod?
That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.
Likely will have an adapter, otherwise the EU will ban them. EU doesn’t like anything proprietary.
I wish apple would prioritize battery life and function over device thinness. I have incredible headphones, I’m not willing to use a dongle to listen to them.
If these hardware rumors are true and the changes in iOS 10 make it through to production, we are headed into a dark chapter for apple…
“I’m not willing to use a dongle…”
“we are headed into a dark chapter for apple”
Gawd! The melodrama! First world problem. If only we had a running count of all pronouncements of doom and horror.
An adapter is not an elegant solution to the problem. Had Apple begun to build an ecosystem around support for lightning headphones it would be a different story.
I don’t purchase all of the latest tech, as it’s released, to deal with first world problems… if I was looking to buy shoddy piecemealed junk I’d be using android and windows, not Apple.
I expect the best from Apple and hold them to the same high standards that Steve set before his untimely passing.
“An adapter is not an elegant solution to the problem.”
I would suggest that is a sensible statement that can be discussed logically. And I would suggest “we are headed into a dark chapter” is not.
“I expect the best from Apple and hold them to the same high standards that Steve set”
You must have seen that written before — and the replies where people detail the mistakes Steve made… hockey puck mouse and much more.
This is apple throwing everyone a bone for one more year. It serves to purposes:,The adaptor will then work with all the other 3.5″ headphones that everyone already has. And allows the EarPods to work with all other products that do have a 3.5″ jack.
This is Apple being cheap. Lightning earbuds would cut into their margins. It would be easy peasy for Apple to include lightning earbuds AND an adapter for those that use 3rd party headphones… but Apple wants to upsell you.
Ugly move, Apple.
I do not believe Apple would be that stupid
Guys, wires are old tech. No plug at all please. I hate the Lightning connector. If we need a connector then make it like the magnet iPad Pro connector. That should be the only thing on the iPhones and iPads.
I sooooo wish we were in the era of decent Bluetooth bandwidth. But we’re NOT. Quality audio over Bluetooth is such an incredibly obvious demand by the computer community. And yet, where the hell is it? Decent Bluetooth headphones always use a second method of gathering bandwidth in order to provide full spectrum audio quality. It’s silly that they have to do that. Stupid Bluetooth! 😛
WHY this may be a great idea:
Charging your iPhone and listening to it At-The-Same-Time. Oops, not enough ports. I’d need an hub adapter anyway if I was attempting this with a Lightening port-only iPhone. I often burn through the battery on my iOS devices and have them plugged into a portable battery while using headphones. Not being able to do that would be a big PITA.
So just a question, if they go to lightning ear buds, how do I listed when my battery is low and I need to charge the iPhone but also want to listen to music?
Adapter……. WTF
Here you go, add this to every iOS unit.
.
Why not just put two lightning ports on the bottom. Problem solved for charging and listening.