“A new alleged leak claims that the new iPad Pro 2018 will not have a standard 3.5-millimeter headphone jack — but it may be thinner than any phone,” Jesus Diaz writes for Laptop Mag.
“After eradicating the headphone jack from all its phones, Apple may drop the audio port from its new 2018 iPad Pro tablets,” Diaz writes. “This latest round comes from a leaker on Twitter named @CoinCoin (reported by PocketNow) noting that the slate’s thinness will make a headphone jack hard to include.”
“The rumor says that the 2018 iPad Pro 12.9 will be thinner than the current version: 5.9 millimeters vs the current 6.9 millimeters. In fact, it’s way thinner than the 7.7-millimeter thick iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max,” Diaz writes. “I wonder when the jack will drop from the Macbook and iMac lines. I can’t imagine it surviving past 2019.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If true, so be it. As we wrote last month:
Our sympathies to Luddites the world over.
Time marches on. You can’t leap forward when you’re bogged down with anachronisms.
Get yourself a pair of AirPods already.
SEE ALSO:
Apple kills iPhones with headphone jacks, nixes free adapters – September 12, 2018
MDN’s take is total BS. Having interoperability with non-Apple electronics is a valuable feature that Apple idiot designers keep taking away. They think that deleting audio out will sell more of their stupid Beats wireless crap and AirPods. Not from me.
FYI: Apple deleted optical digital audio out from MacBooks but retained the analog minijack. Classic case of Apple not knowing what a Pro is, and not caring.
When buying Apple gear today, be sure to tack on 3rd party adapters and dongles and docks into your Apple Tax calculation.
Mike, absolutely spot on and agree with everything in your post — you nailed my prime beef with Apple as well. “Not from me” either, no way am I going to shamed and called names to throw my previous purchases in the bin forever, then go out and pay more money to Apple for expensive AirPods and also pay more for an iPad that offers LESS. This is madness dissing loyal customers and all about blind greed. Shameless, indeed…
MDN’s rant about Luddites misses one significant aspect. The mini jack is not solely a headphone jack, it’s also an audio input jack. The 4 pole jack has other uses beyond listening to music or making phone calls.
I made simple, compact and cheap adaptor cables which allow me to use my iPhone as a timecode reader, a signal generator and an audio analyser. In part of one pocket of my work jacket, I’m carrying around some powerful diagnostic audio equipment which is always available for immediate tests and checks in the field.
Without a simple and compact means to feed audio in to IOS devices, I lose a great deal of functionality which I have come to rely upon.
So in other words, you agree with me and have illustrated another point that I clearly stated above, “interoperability with non-Apple electronics is a valuable feature”.
It is not a rant when we see Apple taking away value from its formerly versatile products in a vain attempt to prop up its accessories sales.
Would be nice if they considered such flexibility when upgrading their their thinking on such matters. Don’t mind the jack going but something truly better and more flexible as well as more compact would be nice rather than excuses I have to say.
The long term trend at Apple is clear. One by one they are dropping connectors until Ive reaches the holy grail of designing a thin billet of aluminum with no openings on it at all.
Ive has the unfortunate myopia to believe that wireless data connections and wireless charging is somehow better, and that we should burn through Apple’s meagre batteries in an attempt to Bluetooth and Airdrop stuff over flaky and insecure wireless networks. Yeah, because in the real world we don’t live in a donut office with a locked down Apple wireless network. The real word is messy. Most people in the real world prefer the simplicity and reliability and efficiency and security of wires. The world has legacy headphones and microphones and mice and trackballs and keyboards and printers and memory sticks and cameras and so forth all of which work very well, in most cases better than the wireless Apple kludge solution. Of course, Cook’s next task will be to break iTunes so you cannot back up your iOS device to a Mac. You will just have to have an iCloud subscription in order to own an iPhone. Big Brother wants to know where you are for your own safety.
I wouldn’t be complaining about the loss of the jack if Apple offered a dongle which allows an external audio input through the Lightning port or via BlueTooth, but they don’t make one.
The Lightning headphone adaptor could have been made to offer a true replacement for the jack with input and output, but it only allows audio output.
So we won’t be able to use Garage Band without latency in the headphones. Sure makes a iPad Pro semi-Pro.
Nobody said you can’t continue to use wired headphones. You just can’t use analog headphones with 3.5mm connectors.
In my opinion iOS is only good for consumer devices. Mostly just lightweight clerking and communications. It disn have to be this way. Apple has made what could be an awesome Swiss Army knife into a platform to do two things only: push more apps, and rent icloud servers. Apple is tone deaf on all the possibilities for hardware extensions and accessories. Other than overpriced cases, of course. I will not invest a dime in an ipad for work.
This Pro uses the Mac. With each year less happy about paying more to get less. Apple is tone deaf to hardware flexibility so we get to tote around Thunderbolt docks and adapters. Shitty keyboards are useless for someone who really knows how to type. It’d be awesome if we could connect our legacy audio consoles to the MacBook Pro without multiple adapters, but Apple can’t figure that out. We like to keep our audio away from noisy power circuits. Can’t do that with todays Macs. Thanks Apple.
How long before the first “IPad-Pro bends in half with little force” post comes out, after launch… something so thin and that large is bound to have stability issues..
Star Trek clearly laid out the ideal Apple devices and features and is inexorably moving there. It’s leaving out the anachronistic devices and features used in such movies as the French “Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A Trip to the Moon)” (1902) and later the US’s Destination Moon (1950).
Check out Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A Trip to the Moon)” (1902)
Here’s a scenario where the lack of a 3.5mm jack will suck: using guitar amplifier simulators with the iPad. The input device uses the lightning port. Bluetooth introduces too much latency for the Airpods (which I do own and like) to be used – just not a possibility.
So if the new iPads nix the 3.5mm connector I’d be forced to also purchase a dongle to give me a Lightning AND 3.5mm jack. A NON NECESSARY additional expense for the privilege of purchasing and using an already pricey new Apple device.
Time to consider the customer; something that always came first with Steve – not so much with Pipeline.
I solved the 3.5mm jack problem a long time ago. It is gone. I don’t have to look at the unsightly hole in the iPad ever again. After a couple years of persuasive frustration, the iPad was donated to Goodwill. Good riddance. When it comes to audio and just about anything else creative, EVERYTHING is faster and easier on a Mac.