I seriously wanted to like the Pixel, I think Apple's business model is entirely harmful, but the lack of a headphone jack on the flagship Google phone is really the last straw. We've lost so much good tech over the years to reduce costs, that I just can't accept a premium phone dropping such a global standard for no good reason at all. Next time I buy a phone I'll vote with my wallet and go with more consumer friendly options.
Everyone lamenting the loss of the headphone jack reminds me of the same people lamenting the loss of the CD-ROM drive in the MacBooks.
The headphone jack is a legacy, bulky port. I would not be surprised to see a port-less phone in the next few years.
Apple has a really good track record of dropping things at the right time: floppy, CD-ROM, Flash, etc.
At each of those steps there were people decrying the loss of these things. Today however, most people don’t miss any of them. They made the right choice then and I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt now.
The problem is, the alternative to dropped techs were better to some extent:
- CD-ROM -> Bigger hard drives, faster internet connections.
- Floppy -> CD-ROMs And BIOS upgrade
- Flash -> Better browser security, and faster javascript
Now for headphone jack, we have bluetooth. Slow, unreliable, requires to charge an extra device, when you run out of earphone battery, you are done listening. If you use the USB/Lightning to AUX, you can't charge your phone at the same time.
If lose the earpiece, you pay premium to replace it.
Also: I can't watch a video with a half-second audio delay. Half a second is being generous.
Bluetooth is slow and unreliable unless you're using Airpods (due to the W1 chip), which I think is the more subtle move by Apple in this case. I was not a happy camper when I first read about Apple removing the headphone jack, but I won't lie, I'm an Airpod convert. They work flawlessly for me and I haven't traveled with or used normal headphones since I got them (other than a nicer pair of over-the-ears when I'm working on my desktop).
I'm not saying this excuses the removal of the headphone jack, but from a business perspective it does add up.
I've said it multiple times now but I was exactly the same way. I was a little bit annoyed at the removal of the headphone jack but then ended up getting the iPhone 7 because I wanted the newer features. I didn't have wireless headphones, so I went all in and got the AirPods along with it and, holy hell, this is the closest that any technology has come to really feeling like magic to me. The pairing process was awesome, the range is great, the sound quality is great (after breaking them in hard for a week or two), and I literally forget that I'm wearing them sometimes to the point where it feels like the music is coming from inside my head. They're just so convenient and nice that I'm ok with doubting Apple initially but relieved that they proved me wrong. Forget the headphone jack. If this works the way these AirPods do going forward, I'm a convert.
Personally I really do find the sound quality to be quite good on the AirPods. When I'm at home I'm often using a much more expensive pair of open Beyerdynamic headphones so it's not like I haven't experienced high quality sound, though I wouldn't consider myself an audiophile.
This is another good point. Quality headphones are rarely bluetooth. I have a nice pair of Sennheisers. They do not come in bluetooth. And yes, I use them with my phone at work.
I thought the AirPods sounded like ass when I first started using them but after 2 weeks of using them every day for hours on end, they've really broken in and they have great range and separation. They don't have a great seal but I don't consider that a negative for what I use them for.
This is exactly what I feel: music coming from inside my head. The AirPod is a very under-hyped product. Its beauty is that you can wear it and completely forget about it and focus on whatever the hell you want to do. You actually feel that rare freedom. This freedom and focus it gives you is the most precious quality that 99.9% gadgets lack these days.
> I literally forget that I'm wearing them sometimes to the point where it feels like the music is coming from inside my head.
I see I'm not the only one :D I've also noticed other people and their wires hanging out more and more. I'm thinking wires are probably going to go out of fashion in the future and will look weird.
In addition to it being magical, it's really incredibly useful and handy for driving and for work. Great to be on a phone call in a crowded server room, without extra wires being in the way. Great for commuting. And super-extra-great at the gym.
I'm not trying to push buttons. I use Jaybird X3s and feel comfort from the corded nature of the headphones. Here on the streets of NYC, I see AirPods more as fashion statements over an actual audio solution.
The instantaneous pairing sounds lovely, but I'm concerned most concerned with audio quality, bluetooth connection in a busy city, and general practical logistics both in and out of the gym.
I play basketball in AirPods. That should tell you all you need to know. Running, jumping, trick shots, drills, 1:1, and they've never fallen out even once.
I used to have JayBird X2s. They were fine but they definitely fell out from time to time and I'd always have to subconsciously "manage" the cord.
AirPods are my primary gym headphones and I'm never going back. I will pay double or even triple to replace them if I had to. That's how much value they deliver in my day to day life.
Yes, even going hard. I can't dislodge AirPods even if I shake my head around as hard as I can and try to dislodge them. My wife is on the treadmill almost every day with hers, running fast; she has no issues with them falling out, either. I do get that the security of a cord is preferable for some, but I've had a really great user experience. I don't wear them because they are fashionable; I think they look rather dorky, to be honest. But I love how they work.
I tried wearing them at the gym, but I sweat too much.
I've also had one fall out when I was out shopping. I was on an escalator and managed to pick it up, but now I'm super paranoid whenever I walk near a sewer grating.
I fear anything involving putting on/taking off a helmet could dislodge these suckers. And any activity the helmet is used for: mountain biking/climbing/mountaineering, is not the right venue for them. Too bad, since the iPhone's water resistance would be a major upgrade over my current phone.
Wearing in-ear headphones while biking is a bad idea anyway.
I've switched to bone conducting headphones for my daily commute by bicycle and they're great for listening to podcasts while still hearing the surrounding traffic.
> Wearing in-ear headphones while biking is a bad idea anyway.
On roads? Yes. Mountain biking? Depends on where I am.
> I've switched to bone conducting headphones for my daily commute by bicycle and they're great for listening to podcasts while still hearing the surrounding traffic.
You should try it if you can. Yes, helmet removal can and likely will dislodge, but it's not obvious that just the act of using them with a helmet on will cause problems.
I've worn them with a helmet and they only fell out when I tried to take the helmet off. As long as I look for them when taking the helmet off, they're no different from checking my regular headphones.
Most things I bring mountaineering - especially - most especially electronics are tethered in some ways. It may be too risky to buy an iPhone just to try this out, and I'm doubting anyone's gonna let me borrow a phone and a pair of these. regular earbuds are inexpensive, and if you lose/break them, it's not the end of the world. Airbuds are... $150. For something that can be easily lost.. yikes.
The X3s were not terrible, but, the AirPods are more comfortable and stay in my ears more firmly. I can wear them for hours and hours without them bothering me and I only dislodge them if I physically knock them out of my ear.
I own AirPods and Jaybird X3s, and the sound quality of AirPods crushes that of the Jaybirds. I completely switched over to AirPods a few months ago and have never looked back.
I disagree completely. You either don't own a pair or you only tried a fresh pair. You gotta break those bad boys in. It took me 2 weeks before they broke in and I noticed a huge difference.
Bluetooth audio quality is subpar to a wired port in my experience. A good example is the Q35, when paired via bluetooth the audio quality is worse than when plugged directly into the headphone port.
IIRC there are multiple audio codecs in the standard (and of course different versions of standard), some of them really old. So with certain device combinations you may get better result than with others.
I once looked into these and got the impression that main goal is to make it possible to produce standard compliant devices as cheaply as possible.
Waterproof AirPods would be the one thing I would pay stupid amounts of money for. My biggest complaint with the AirPods (and it's a really tiny one) is that they don't have a great seal. Waterproof AirPods would have to have a good seal to the ear.
And that’s exactly why Apple is so often so great at innovation: they make bold trade-off decisions on behalf of the users knowing the public will beat them initially, but that it’ll pay off in the long run - for everyone. Which other company does that?
I don't see what AirPods do that any other, more affordable, Bluetooth headsets don't. I get the wireless appeal, I like using my cheap 20€ Bluetooth headphones with build in microphone/remote. I mostly got them for the remote, their 7 hour running time lasts me for like 3 days of commuting.
But I also still carry around my wired UE triple.fi because I like having the option for going wired, better sound quality, less latency and especially less drain on my iPhone SE's battery due to disabled Bluetooth.
Even when nothing is paired/active just having Bluetooth enabled seems to drain phones batteries so much faster.
The thing AirPods do is work better than other, more affordable, Bluetooth headsets. There’s no lag, you painlessly pair once and can use on all your Apple devices, they’re so light you can easily forget they’re in your ears, etc etc. I have a Plus which has a much bigger battery, but I don’t notice any difference with Bluetooth on or off.
There is no latency or battery drain with the AirPods. That's exactly why I can't compare them to any of the other Bluetooth headphones I've tried. They are significantly better.
I never pay attention to the absolute time, but when they need a charge they make a sound to indicate it and then you can easily put one in the case/charger and then put it back in your ear when it’s charged and then charge the other one, all without pausing your call. This duty cycling means you are effectively limited by the case battery size not the bud battery size.
I agree with the others upthread that I’m not going back to wires after getting my AirPods.
If you're on a call (and I do some marathon calls), I get a small ding in my ear and pop out one airpod, charge it, in 10-15m put it back in and charge the other one and with ~30m of completely uninterrupted conversation (swapping airpods does not cause drops) I'm good for another 2 hours.
I think it's very often the reverse – a disruptive replacement has to really blow past the incumbent in some respect, but it's quite hard for something new to be up to par with the old, polished thing in all respects.
PCs were less powerful than mainframes, MP3 is lower quality than CD, etc. etc.
They all solved problems. For example you can't carry 10000 cds with you everywhere you go. I can't see what problem Bluetooth is solving apart from allowing companies sell more consumer grade junk. I'm not even a die hard audiophile but Bluetooth headphones take the biscuit. Shittier quality audio (and generally build too) for double the price and you have to charge them too.
If there was ever proof that we are brainwashed by consumerism in the same way the North Koreans are by the Kim's, Bluetooth headphones is it. Total worthless junk yet people still drop non-inconsequential amounts cash on it and rave about it.
The problem Bluetooth is solving is wires. It’s really something you don’t recognize how annoying it is until you don’t have to deal with it anymore. With aptX the audio quality isn’t bad either. Over time all of those issues (price, build quality, audio quality, battery life, etc.) will only get better, while wired headphones will by definition always have that wire...
I should add that the portable Bluetooth speaker he was demoing sounded great compared to other offerings in the market that I have heard. I wasn't sure if this was more due to the codec or the general quality of the components. The speaker in question is the Dali Kaitch https://www.dali-speakers.com/loudspeakers/active/dali-katch... for those who are curious.
Apple doesn't support aptX so it's irrelevant to cableless iPhone users.
> It’s really something you don’t recognize how annoying it is until you don’t have to deal with it anymore.
I definitely recognised it while still using them! When I'm not wearing the headphones, the wires are always getting tangled. When I am wearing the headphones, the wires are always getting caught on things.
> The problem Bluetooth is solving is wires. It’s really something you don’t recognize how annoying it is until you don’t have to deal with it anymore.
I bought an iP6S instead of a 7 just for the jack because I wasn't a fan at all. Then in the span of four months, three jacks died on me in a row. I had a spare cable for my over-ear Momentum but the two intras are dead, and having to look for a replacement suddenly brought back to my mind the whole OMTP vs CTIA mess, if they have remote volume control at all. I'm seriously considering wireless for the next ones without even having used any.
That is something you have to enable, if you need to respect some bandwidth restriction.
> The codec optionally permits a "hybrid" coding scheme for applications where average and/or peak compressed data rates must be capped at a constrained level. This involves the dynamic application of a form of "near lossless" coding – but only for those short sections of audio where completely lossless coding cannot respect the bandwidth constraints. Even for those short periods while the "near lossless" coding is active, high-definition audio quality is maintained, retaining audio frequencies up to 20 kHz and a dynamic range of at least 120 dB.
Phone DACs aren't very good. I use a very expensive DAC when I listen to music at home because I actually care. I also own a pair of AirPods because in a noisy city environment walking around it doesn't actually matter that I'm losing fidelity.
As I commented elsewhere the problem with Bluetooth is fatigue related not listening pleasure related.
Edit: As a side note the only positive I can see out of removing the headphone jack is the potential proliferation of quality DAC/preamp dongles. Still annoying though.
Analog headphones are lossy, I trust compression algorithms to improve more than I believe manufacturers will use more expensive, higher quality materials and connections at the same price point.
My Sennheiser HD25s are still going strong after ~18 years service. You cannot find Bluetooth anything that sound remotely as good. Not even for 3 times the price and I can guarantee you that each and every Bluetooth headphone in circulation today will be in landfill in 18 years.
> You cannot find Bluetooth anything that sound remotely as good.
In absolute terms, you are certainly right. However, for most people, Bluetooth headphones sound good enough. I'll gladly give up some fidelity if it means I can lose wires.
Yes, usage longevity is another factor to consider besides sound quality. However, I was replying to OP, who specifically was talking about the signal loss due to BT encoding. I countered with the fact that analog lines also experience loss, and only the latter has little chance of improving moving forward.
Bluetooth was never designed for audio usage. Revisions over the years have shoehorned functionality into what is effectively an FTP protocol. There's also the compression and audio mangling that bluetooth does. You do not get this with a straight through audio cable (or some other wireless technologies that don't compress)
How easy is it to move your Airpods from your phone to your tablet to your desktop to your non-Apple work PC? Don't get me wrong, I think Airpods are pretty amazing for what they are. But they're still hampered by what they are. For someone whose primary concern is "I hate wires" they're great. They sound 'pretty good for earbuds' as multiple friends, some of whom bought them, can attest.
Personally, I can't stand the sound quality of earbuds. My closed-back Audio Technica over-ear headphones can be unplugged from one device and plugged into another in seconds (no pairing/unpairing, turning bluetooth on and off, etc) and are always 'charged'. Plus they sound lightyears better than any bluetooth anything.
my airpods are unreliable. I could not connect them to my MacBook Pro the other night. tried changing rooms thinking maybe there is interference. tried re-pairing from scratch. they'd pair but not connect. after 15 minutes of trying various things I switched to wired headphones.
I haven't tried again since then. Had to re-pair them to get them to connect to my iPhone.
this is the first time I haven't been able to get them to connect but I've had several times where they won't say connected for more than 30 seconds
As with troubleshooting most hardware issues - experiment, restart, reset. It can either be an issue with the driver in which case a simple restart (maybe a “hard” smc reset as well) fixes the problem, or a hardware problem with the bluetooth antenna which would require a swap of the chip itself, but is usually on the macbook/iphone side, not the airpods and would affect all of your bluetooth connectivity. I’ve had both types of issues and it sure sucks. Had to replace an antenna cable in an iphone 6 to be able to connect to my airpods again.
Moving the airpods between devices is still a huge pain. Even just switching from my iPhone to my iPad sometimes requires turning bluetooth off and on, and other superstitious pairing rituals.
If I only use them with my phone (which I do almost all of the time), they will connect automatically quickly. But pairing between devices will probably always be more painful than a simple wire.
I noticed this thing with my old acer transformer 2-in-1 laptop if you enable bluetooth for audio streaming and have wifi running it slows to a crawl (watching youtube for example) actually won't buffer. I'm wondering if the bluetooth/wifi is on the same chip and can't run simultaneously.
Not just 'close to'. The wifi channels are very fat, and every channel extends .01GHz in either direction from its center. But more importantly bluetooth uses the exact same 2.40-2.48 range. It tries to minimize interference by frequency-hopping, but it's guaranteed to overlap 2.4GHz wifi.
So it's probably okay to use for a wireless mouse/keyboard but continuous sound output is a no go? Just seems like a bad design I mean the computer doesn't even have an ethernet port so to have wifi + bluetooth as a suggested combo/function and it doesn't work... haha
Same here. I have a pair of AirPods and the whole setup is so much more elegant now. I really don't miss them wired headphones, or the headphone jack. Now, I just pull the AirPods case out of my pocket, pop up the lid, insert the headphones in my ears, and everything just works.
Don't Bluetooth devices start lossily compressing audio when either the sender or receiver can't keep up? I listen to flac files, so I'm not interested in that, no matter how much space you lose with a 3.5mm socket.
Which makes everyone else's decision to drop the audio jack that much more stupid. Virtually all other OEMs tend to do things so much more superficially than Apple. Like face authentication for instance. It's been and still is a joke for years in the Android world. Perhaps Apple's will be a joke, too, but at least it looks like they put a good amount of effort into making it secure even if they had to add some extra hardware components in there.
Another reason why it's stupid for everyone else to follow Apple on this like sheep is because Apple also did it to sell their expensive Beats Bluetooth headphones. The other OEMs don't have a billion-dollar headphone division...
Half second delay? what Bluetooth are you using? I suggest you to buy something better, my 3 years old bluetooth headset doesn't have any noticeable delay.
The other examples are not really good examples:
- bigger drives and faster internet connections? I don't think most of the countries where Apple sells had those things at that time. But, hey, it is a premium product, so they expect you to pay premium for other stuff too (read their new bluetooth earplugs)
- faster javascript and better browser? Chrome had those things, not safary, and it did had flash too.
He's not making things up. I experience massive delay with bluetooth headphones, and speakers. The delay is not one second, but it's enough to make it useless for watching video.
What is the delay? For me it is imperceptible (it means it is below 50ms).
I see here a lot of people talking about delays and how $2 wired earphones solve the problem. So I get people buy cheap and wants quality with their new iPhones. Cheap earphones with or without wire are always crap, the sound is horrible and the quality follows. It might be the reason of the delays: cheap stuff
Apple has mastered hiding any delay with AirPods and perfectly syncs things up. No small feat because it has to sync up both left and right in addition to what’s on the screen.
I've never seen bluetooth audio devices that were capable of syncing video and audio in 10 years of using bluetooth audio devices. My most recent tao tronics BT headphones were great for podcasts and audio, but useless for watching video from my Moto X. Have also tested this with Anker portable speakers, Amazon Echo in BT mode, and Creative BT speakers. All are useless for video. I replaced them with a set of $9 Panasonic wired Earbuds that sound just fine and never run out of batteries.
It also depends on the device (and software) you're watching video with - some are smart enough to compensate for the lag. iOS is decent at it when something uses the system APIs to play video (so not VLC), but I never had any luck back when I used Android. On that Mac I get really bad sync issues sometimes (seconds!).
I use Bluetooth and never had issues with delays. I had couple of computers, couple of mobiles and 3 different Bluetooth headset during this time. My Bluetooth headsets weren't the cheapest ones either.
No thanks, I don't feel like spending more money. With my current phone I can buy compatible earphones with zero delay for as low as $1.50 a pop. Bluetooth headphones just can't beat that.
(And, actually, dollar store headphones are surprisingly decent these days. I use them to listen to podcasts in the pool, without worrying too much about whether they get wet.)
An average quality headphones are in the price range of bluetooth headphones. So I don't understand your point.
I couldn't find anything below 10€ with decent sound quality, and it was hard to find something at that price that was good. Moreover, they lasted around 3-6 months for me, while a 25€ Bluetooth headset I bought 3 years ago is still working and the sound is better.
I have bluetooth headphones (AOSO G18) that cost around 11€ (while on sale at Amazon) and they don't have a perceivable delay. They even show the battery level in iOS. Great for working out.
Looks like "AOSO" is a fantasy brand, they are also sold as "EarTime", "Dacom", "GranVela", ...
Wires are a major inconvenience though. Sure, at work I use a big pair of wired headphones and connect my laptop to a dock.
But when I am on the move every cable stinks. I have caught the headphones wire on doorknobs and bus ticket validators so many times that now I gladly suffer through the unreliable bluetooth to avoid that.
I can see how wires can sometimes be problematic and I don't disagree with you. You can easily avoid most issues by having the cable under some of your clothes though.
My point is I don't think people can have an extreme opinion on the issue and still be objective, like I have seen so much online lately. Sometimes wires are better, sometimes wireless is better.
I use heavily earphones. They usually last between 3 and 9 months because of the fucking wire. When I am working I cannot type comfortable because of the wire, it is in the middle. When I move I always pull the wire. If I am walking with my mobile in my pocket I also pull the wire from time to time. So they always broke in the connector because of the wire. Even with a lot of care they always break in the same place. So it is around 15€ every 6 months. You can buy them cheaper but the sound is crap. My Bluetooth headset was 30€ and have been working like charm for more than 3 years now. They have 8 hours of battery life and I need to charge them less than the smartphone. So I don't get the inconvenience of charging something than last more than an smartphone.
Modern Bluetooth is nowhere close to a half-second audio delay. I was concerned with this in the past, but with modern headphones and codecs it is not an issue anymore, there is virtually no delay.
When they removed the CD-ROM Drive, a lot of people complained how they could possible do that, because apparently so many people used CDs a lot because in the real world internet connections often are not that fast etc. You will always get these kind of complaints but the majority will accept eventually and in a few years nobody cares anymore. I think it's better that way because modern bluetooth is really good (despite charging) and enables innovation in other areas.
I consider myself an "audiophile" and have spent way too much money on nice equipment. That being said, once I started hanging out with people that call themselves audiophiles and have way more money that I do, I realized that most of these people can't even tell the difference in the sound quality and, frankly, there is no loss. One of the meetups I went to even had a contest for anyone that could tell which DAC was being used and another for anyone that could tell a FLAC apart from a 320kbps MP3. No one won the prize money. "Audiophiles" are, for the most part, full of shit, in my opinion and just need to justify spending ridiculous amounts of money on great looking audio equipment.
Mind you, I'm also probably full of shit because everyone tells me that I can get exactly the same computer for half the cost of what I paid for my MacBook Pro and I'm yet to find anything that comes close. At least with the Apple stuff, there are objective things I can point to that justify the more expensive costs. With audio equipment, there's a slow curve up and then it just drops off once you get past a certain point.
I don't buy into a lot of audiophile nonsense (and personally I don't think I can tell the difference between a 192kbps MP3 and uncompressed), however there is a clear and obvious quality issue with some Bluetooth devices, in addition to how terrible the pairing experience is.
The Pareto principle is alive and thriving in the audiophile community. Anything beyond midrange is pure wank IMO (although I'll happily listen to 160kbps MP3 so you can probably disregard what I say. :P But this does seem to be borne out by a lot of double-blind testing, as you mention.)
As for Apple products, you might get the same spec computer for half the cost but Apple has really nice build quality and integration (or at least did when I got my MacBook). It's the same spec but it's just nicer.
> I'll happily listen to 160kbps MP3 so you can probably disregard what I say.
I'm with you several hundred percent.
Didn't a serious of fairly rigorous tests way back conclude that nobody could tell the difference between a ~160kbps VBR MP3 and an uncompressed source (as long as a good MP3 encoder was used)? I think it was the Hydrogen Audio people behind it.
I think they decided ~192kbs was the point where there wasn't any statistically significant evidence that anyone could tell the difference.
And that's in ideal listening conditions when people are being asked specifically to listen out for differences. I think the margin for realistic listening situations is probably much wider.
> Didn't a serious of fairly rigorous tests way back conclude that nobody could tell the difference between a ~160kbps VBR MP3 and an uncompressed source (as long as a good MP3 encoder was used)?
No, the conclusion was that most people couldn't tell the difference above 192kbps, but to a trained ear many people could still tell the difference in 192 to 256, or 256 to 320.
It was 320 and above where there was basically nobody who could tell the difference unless they were using recording studio grade gear, which most people don't have.
Agreed 100%. I've owned so many different computers over the years that I'm 100% willing to pay what most consider to be an "Apple tax" when, in my mind, I'm paying a little bit extra for an overall better product. You're totally right... it's just nicer.
While I get what you're saying, I only find this drop in quality on really cheap Bluetooth headphones/headsets. I have tried 2 "high-end" wireless headphones (1 of which are my AirPods that I own) and I find no downsampling or quality loss that's noticeable.
If you can't hear the difference between 320kbps and lossless you're either not using equipment capable of the response and the frequencies where the cutoff for 320kbps and resulting compression artifacts are noticeable or you just aren't able to hear the artifacts, either because of unfamiliarity or bad hearing especially as you get older. I've done blind a/b tests with my equipment and over 20 samples proven that I can tell a difference with a high degree of statistical certainty between 320kbps and FLAC (try http://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html) Lossless vs 192kbps or lower is just too obvious, I think most "audiophiles" like yourself should be able to tell the difference with a high-end set of headphones or speakers. 320kbps really only makes a difference for me for classical recordings as a violinist who can hear every detail with audio equipment thats pricier then what 99% of people are willing to pay for that extra 0.1% of audio fidelity. Alot of enthusiasts are also audio engineers who are very familiar with compression artifacts and audio mastering
I'm also a musician and can hear the difference between plenty of blind tests but I'm going to call bullshit on your claims. There have been several tests done like this and some of the most prominent musicians and engineers couldn't tell the difference. Neil Young and his engineer couldn't even tell the difference when bloggers trolled them with their own Pono format files. You may very well be one of the 0.00001% of people that can tell the difference but I highly doubt it.
Do you have references? As I pointed out in another comment, I would be interested in tests conducted on trained musicians with classical (or at least acoustic) music.
Often, claims that 320kpbs is indistinguishable from lossless are based on tests conducted on regular people (as opposed to trained musicians) and with pop music (as opposed to classical recordings). I would like to see a test conducted on classical musicians with well-recorded classical music. I honestly don't know what the outcome would be, but it would be instructive.
I don't really have a problem with DACs on PCs, but the amount of noise present on most motherboards is terrible. (I can usually tell when my machine is compiling).
A few years ago I bought some USB DACs and separate headphone amplifiers and it made a world of difference, even to my relatively ancient ears.
At least the iPhone's DACs are absolutely audiophile quality, especially because the idea that "an audiophile quality DAC costs 20x what you see in smartphones" is patently ridiculous. There's no evidence at all that any good as in not flawed DAC will sound the same on nearly any, if not any system.
At the very least, the audio quality degradation of most bluetooth devices has a worse impact than even your average middle tier Android phone's dac.
Typically a DAC has two components, the digital to analog part and an analog amplifier. So while the D2A won't typically be different, the audio amplification can vastly be different depending upon what you're trying to drive.
Unfortunately you can't remove the audio amplification and replace it with another, unless you're willing to do surgery on your macbook, say.
The best option is to buy a DAC with an amp that drives what you want it to. I have one that drives headphones that works like a charm, and I can hear not just the instruments clearer, but the location of the instruments recorded in stereo space better.
I lucked out when I decided to upgrade my main system to a Ryzen 7. Not really considering audio, I had decided on an Asrock X370 Taichi board mainly because it was known to work with ECC RAM (and it indeed does according to dmesg), and was quite pleasantly surprised when I plugged my headphones into it for a listen. It sounded every bit as good as what I get from a Focusrite Saffire on another system, and even better, the headphone amp has much more power, making it much better for live, uncompressed classical choral recordings than the Focusrite. I can play them at concert volume and not get clipping in the loudest passages. No complaints from me about the DAC or amplifier stage on this motherboard. On the other hand, I haven't tried any recording with it, and for stereo recording my first thought would still be to reach for the Focusrite or my portable recorder and mic preamp, since I'd need 48V phantom power anyway.
I bought an external audio interface to connect a condenser microphone and was shocked at how much better it sounded compared with the audio output at the back of my desktop (Realtek 24 bit...).
I noticed that audio interfaces tend to have a lot of big condensers on the inside. The kind which don't fit in a laptop, and especially in a phone. Now I'm not an electronics expert to comment on this, but I would guess that the big condensers are not in there just for the fun of it. Note that I'm talking about professional audio interfaces (the kind used by music producers, in the $100-$400 range), not audiophile ones (kilo$, buzz words)
The interior of most PCs (and phones) are very noisy from an RF standpoint. I get hiss on my USB headphones (!!!) from just out poorly shielded the case on my computer is.
That said, Apple had traditionally put very well isolated low noise DACs in their products. I'm not sure if that is still the case.
Isn't the story that they don't put any DACs in their products anymore? Or, more accurately, that the DACs have moved to the output devices (headphones, speakers).
I don’t know any audiophiles period. Hence the lack of knowledge on the subject.
I have a couple different sets of speakers and know that my larger ones sound better than the smaller ones (more “tinny” sound), but figured the core difference isn’t the quality of analog output on the source. Rather it’s the larger amplifier and larger size for bass generation.
For Bluetooth the problem is different. While most people will probably not consciously notice the poor audio quality after long hours of listening they will experience fatigue. This is less likely with lossless audio.
I have a 2015 rMBP and its audio sounds as good as through my CEntrance DACport Slim. Maybe my headphones aren't audiophile quality (Grado SR80i, Sony MDR-7506)?
It's possible. I haven't used the CEntrance DACport Slim, but it looks promising. After looking it up I would set the DAC to the high gain setting and drop the volume lower.
And the Grado's look like a good set of headphones.
I would try listening to The King's Singers, which is an A Capella voice group that sings classical music. I can pick out individual voices in space from recordings that were recorded in the late 1980's. A good DAC won't smear them in space, and you can "lock on" to a voice and hear the tonal quality of it individually as if they were standing in front of you.
My Aiepoda replaces a pair of $20 Sony over the ear headphones. They mostly sound better, the only difference being that the Sonys has bigger drivers and could do a better job on the low end.
I never spend more than $60 on headphones (ignoring my noise cancelling Bose).
Quality isn’t an issue. For something so small they sound quite good. For something so convenient they sound fantastic.
I use the airpods and these are the future. I'm always wearing them and they are the least intrusing earbuds I ever wore. Now I always carry a wired one with me for two reasons:
1. The battery doesn't always last. the benefits are huge so I'm OK with it though. I don't think I'll ever go full airpods just because I'm always going to be in situations where I have no battery in these.
2. My Nintendo switch and some other devices don't have bluetooth :(
I saw the other day that no other game consoles use bluetooth headsets. However a recent Switch update enabled USB audio, either through the dock or with an adapter on the port (although for handheld you might as well just use a wire).
I remember reading that the Bluetooth spec has about 300ms of latency. Far too much for games, which is why no current console uses Bluetooth for their headsets.
Apple computers come with SSDs only on the macbooks, so losing the DVD drive due to bigger hard drives isn't the case here because the hard drives are MUCH MUCH MUCH smaller now. I have tons of customers that face serious issues because they didn't know about this and they don't know much about computers.
Flash might be garbage, but its still super important.
Now lets talk about regular USB.... Apple dropped it without including a free adapter. They could have EASILY added one USB 3.0/3.1 port on the motherboard. There's plenty of space for it, but they would rather have you pay them tons of money for an adapter.
You can't be seriously suggesting that Apple did all the work to put only USB-C ports on the computer so that people would pay them "tons of money" for adapters. For starters, the adapters are cheap and can be purchased from any number of retailers that aren't Apple but, secondly, I have had to purchase 1 single adapter that has given me all the functionality of having these multiple ports and I've literally used it twice (once for the VGA out and once for USB). They didn't remove the old ports to get money out of people just like they didn't remove the headphone jack from the iPhone to get money from people. They did it because they feel that USB-C and wireless devices are the future and they're not wrong.
Lol I got the first 12” macbook and was sad about ports. Bought the dongle so I could hook it up to a monitor for a week while on business. Fast forward till today and I don’t where the dongle is cos I never use it.
Yup. Same here. Bought one of those "all-in-one VGA/DVI/USB/etc" dongles and have literally used it twice just because I was lazy and didn't want to unplug something else that was behind the desk.
And a hack's all that is needed if you accept the premise, which is that wired headphones for mobile devices are hideously inconvenient and about to be rightly obsoleted.
I'm not saying they are, but phone connectors.. aka "Aux ports" were designed in 1878, with the 3.5mm rendition dating back to the 1960's. It's obsolete tech. We can easily be making headphones with connectors that are a fraction the size. There's no reason USB-C and lightning ports shouldn't be multi-use. One port, many applications.
We have gone from one standard interface, to now three interfaces (headphone jack, USB-C and lightning), and one of them is proprietary.
We move from a world where you can buy any set of headphones, and use them with any device, to a world where... nothing is compatible with anything else. Either you use a permanently connected dongle, or you buy multiple sets of headphones.
The future is stupid and I don't want to live in it.
BT headphones also have the massive downside of insufficient control over volume. Minimum volume is too loud == hearing loss. Strikes me as a market oppty for someone to develop BT headphones/earbuds that solve this.
It does hark back quite strongly to when Apple removed the floppy drive from the original iMacs. And not having a floppy drive sucked at that point. Just because something's the way of the future doesn't mean the old option is instantly obsolete.
Bluetooth 5.0 has none of the issues you've mentioned. Alternatively, you can run audio over usb-c if you want to continue using wired headphones. The selection is small at this point but will grow over time.
with regards to charging while using the "charging port", with my 8+ I simply leave it on a wireless charger and it gains charge while making a call. I have a Plesson charger.
I did move to air pods so I have that option as well, but the wireless charge ability and the fact they are cheap removed my concerns. plus with apple providing both adapter for old headphone to charge adapter as well as new head phones with that same connector I am in the camp of, don't matter anymore.
The headphone jack was emphatically NOT replaced by Bluetooth. It was replaced by a combination of Apple's W1-enhanced Bluetooth, which is not slow, not unreliable, etc., and also Lightning-based headphones.
You're also wrong about charging the phone while using Lightning headphones; there are already adapters that can do that. Plus, it's not necessary to charge your phone all the time; that's what having better battery life is about. And better battery life is made more possible by freeing up precious internal space that the outmoded, single-use headphone jack used to occupy.
If you can't watch a video without an audio delay, that means you're using really crappy headphones. Fix that. Don't blame Apple.
> The headphone jack was emphatically NOT replaced by Bluetooth. It was replaced by a combination of Apple's W1-enhanced Bluetooth, which is not slow, not unreliable, etc., and also Lightning-based headphones.
That cost $160. Let's not dance around that. Airpods are extraordinarily expensive compared to the headphones everyone used to be able to use.
>The headphone jack was emphatically NOT replaced by Bluetooth. It was replaced by a combination of Apple's W1-enhanced Bluetooth, which is not slow, not unreliable, etc., and also Lightning-based headphones.
Let's make a comparison.
Is the alternative faster or more reliable than the original that it's replacing?
A $150 pair of in ear monitors will have a huge impact on sound quality and the average person will continue to notice improvement into the $300 (dual driver) range before significant diminishing returns. Air pods don't come close to that quality for the same price.
Power usage matters much more in wireless headphones. Bluetooth takes power. DACs take power (better ones and better algorithms use even more power). Better drivers use more power (without considering the big response boost you get with multiple drivers at the cost of additional power usage). With super limited battery size, all of these are cut with a corresponding decrease in quality.
The USB and lightning ports tend to get a lot of interference from the dozens of digital signals mere hundredths of an inch away. The size of the 3.5mm seems to ensure that it's more isolated.
> Apple has a really good track record of dropping things at the right time: floppy, CD-ROM, Flash, etc.
Counterexamples to your claim: Thunderbolt? Magsafe? Magsafe2? The physical escape key?
All of your examples were actually significant improvements: floppy / CD-ROM took up immense physical space and removing them caused a significant improvement in space and weight. SSDs initially had less capacity, but at least they had way better performance and also improved upon space and weight.
> The headphone jack is a legacy, bulky port
The headphone jack doesn't save on weight, its alternatives aren't an improvement. It does save on space, and I understand that space is tight on a phone, but honestly, we've already had so many brilliant and slim phones that have headphone jacks that I don't really buy this as an excuse. Do we /really/ need ever so slightly slimmer phones every year? Remember the bent iphone 6es?
I'd be willing to buy this if there was something amazingly novel that USB-C provides for headphones, or if wireless earbuds lasted more than 5-6 hours.
Here's what it comes down to: my 2013 macbook pro is fantastic, and none of the new stuff regarding ports is a genuine improvement to my experience, but all of it adds to potential frustration when I eventually have to make the switch when the hardware can't keep up anymore. I feel similarly with my iphone SE.
I really wish they'd stop futzing around with everything just for trivial improvements.
One more counterexample: nano SIM cards. The move to micro SIM cards was wonderful and well-timed, everyone followed Apple within a year or two because the spacing savings were obvious.
In contrast, the nano SIM card has been around since the iPhone 5 came out in 2012, but cheap smart phone (think Samsung J-something[1]) still use micro SIM cards. Pointless fragmentation to save a millimeter.
If Apple wants to drop legacy cruft, how about they start with 5400rpm hard drives??!
Power: Magsafe 1 being incompatible with Magsafe 2, which is in turn incompatible with USB-C. No drastic improvement in either.
Data: Thunderbolt 1 and 2 were at least port compatible. Thunderbolt 3 is the same thing as USB-C, so the cable won't fit and you have to buy an adapter, so in effect thunderbolt was dropped. I get that it's a different story internally, but from my perspective, it's again frustrating.
Anyway, at face value, I'm happy that they /finally/ decided to collaborate with everyone else and agreed on an industry-standardized connector, but damn. Even then, I keep reading horror stories re: cable compatibility for USB-C because the standard is so complex. Oh well, it'll settle eventually.
Anyway, none of this bothers me as much as headphones specifically, which cost a lot of money, last decades, and aren't a throwaway item like adaptors and cables. So if you're going to make me change them or use an annoying dongle, there had better be an excellent reason :-(
Please check your facts before using words like "finally". Thunderbolt was a collaboration as well; it just seems like it was a proprietary Apple thing because Apple pushed it earlier and harder than everyone else. The same is true of the beloved USB-A, of course, which was pushed earlier and harder by Apple than by PC makers too.
Anyway, make up your mind. Are you furious that Apple had the courage to adopt a standard like USB-C, or are you happy? Choose one. :)
As far as I understand, Intel co-developed Thunderbolt with Apple on their own. The standard was published, but this isn't the same as an open and public collaboration the way other standards are, e.g. USB has the USB Implementers Forum, which is a consortium of companies. Plus, they used to charge royalties, and only recently did intel make the standard royalty-free. Good for them for doing that.
To me it looks like they did what they wanted on their own, then eventually slapped it on top of the existing USB-C standard when it didn't get much adoption elsewhere. I don't know why Apple would care about that in the slightest, but I can imagine Intel does.
> Anyway, make up your mind. Are you furious that Apple had the courage to adopt a standard like USB-C, or are you happy? Choose one. :)
Why? Can't it be both? I'm happy that they found the "courage" now, but unhappy that they found it after floundering through a bunch of different options first. I'm also unhappy that they took away my darned headphone jack in the process :-)
However, I am very glad that I can now charge my laptop with pretty much any USB charger* and a cheap cable. I consider not having to buy $88 replacement chargers a huge win.
*Yes, even the tiny iPhone brick can charge my MacBook, albeit very, very slowly.
If you really are at risk, (thinking of when I had small kids running around the house) maybe consider one of the Belkin "BreakSafe" magnetic adapters? Yeah, you'll have a nub sitting on the outside of the machine, but it might be worthwhile.
Early on Apple shipped with a thunderbolt connector that the rest of the industry ended up not using. Any tech purchased around that connector was deprecated when the machine it was to connect to was upgraded.
IIRC there were very few devices with a hard-wired cable on the device end. So for them it was just a new cable or if not, then a permanently-attached dongle. That doesn't mean the device itself is obsolete.
Magsafe is a lifesaver if you have kids/pets. I even tripped the wire sometimes. I understand the appeal of a single cable for power/data but Magsafe was great.
I really wish people like you would stop pooh-poohing legitimate complaints about attempts to prematurely retire tech just because companies have found something more lucrative for them.
We’re not luddites. We’re not short sighted. We understand tech moves on. That’s all fine and also irrelevant, because the situation here is that real tech used be lots of people every day with no real replacement is being yanked out from under us in the name of profit. Stop acting like you’re woke and the rest of us just need to catch up. It’s insulting as hell.
In the age of mass production, you get what they make. Custom items of the same price & quality as those mass produced are often/usually prohibitively expensive. If they stop making what you want, you stop being able to get it. So what's Parent going to do when his current phone dies?
My current phone is rapidly disintegrating. If I had the time, I could argue that the current method of production and rapid obsolescence did, in fact, take both my current phone away, and my ability to easily transition to the new model being offered without having to rethink how I listen to music.
Apple and others should have only considered removing the headphone jack if they were prepared to do all of the following at the same time:
1. Abandon all proprietary connectors and adopt USB-C only on the phone. Keeping the Lightning port while moving MacBook Pros to USB-C-only was incredibly dumb because it immediately made the new products less useful than ANY older and less-expensive combination. Let’s see: older iPhone with charge cable and earphones that seamlessly plug into both the phone and the computer, or new-and-expensive-for-no-reason computer that can’t do any of that!?
2. Put multiple ports on the phone to avoid port-unavailable issues during charging; or, make sure that so-called “wireless” charging is working first so it can be a viable alternative. Instead they just broke a bunch of things and figured at some unspecified point in the future it would all work out. Well, what exactly is the point of buying the product in the meantime?
3. Assume that people will still want wired earphones. Wireless is NOT automatically better, for any number of reasons (risk of loss, sound cutting out, constant recharge, worse sound quality).
I have wireless headphones and I basically hate them; seems that every other time I want to use them they’re already out of battery, or they just STOP working halfway through some music. And it’s one of those products that can’t be used while it’s being recharged. As a result, I just use them way less, and it is a step backwards in every conceivable way. All I want is a wire.
I also don't see why they didn't go full USB-C with their phones. Maybe they didn't want to put out too many changes at once. Still, iPhone 8 seemed a great time to pair USB-C.
I don't remember where I read it, but apparently Apple committed to the Lightning port for a certain number of years when speaking to accessory manufacturers.
After owning every iPhone since 3G up to 5s, I ditched Apple, and bought a new phone last week specifically because it had a headphone jack.
My WHOLE PHONE cost only a little bit more than Airpods alone. It's a Chinese phone that offers incredible value for money and I can't be happier(Xiaomi Note 4, for those interested).
Sure, it's specs don't quite match up to the flagship models from A and G, but it had what I wanted - a headphone jack(cheap, good, battery-less and reliable audio), a large-enough screen, lots of ram and a fast-enough processor.
I believe the dropping of the headphone jack was not meant as a way of herding users to better tech, like the CD-ROM ect. They could have left the jack in the iPhone 7 and released the AirPods anyway, as a cross-over test. The market would've decided on the winner. But they didn't do that. They didn't do that because they knew AirPods would not have sold as well.
It was just a blunt move of trying to increase profits. Just like the death-by-a-thousand-dongles decision.
I picked up a Xiaomi Mi A1 for ~$325 last week when my Nexus 5X died of sudden bootloop. I think it's very similar to the Note 4 but is part of the Android One initiative which means it runs stock Android and should get updates more regularly. I think it's marked up a bit in my market but it was still cheap enough and is a great device—awesome build quality, fast enough, and has a headphone jack!
LG V30 is a flagship that instead of taking the port away, made improvements to actually take advantage of it, offering a Hi-Fi Quad DAC built-in. It means I can use my studio-quality headphones and enjoy crisper sounding music on my phone and on the go.
All in all, all four of my headphones use the 3.5mm jack. Don’t see myself paying premium now for half-thought solutions, thank you.
Apple is not a god when deciding what ports to drop, alright? Just because they practically indoctrinate an industry to follow in their footsteps doesn’t mean it’s always right. I’m all for leaving really old or badly designed ports IF there are better alternatives. What’s currently out there is buggy at best.
I'll copy what I said to a similar comment a long time ago:
> Well the major difference is that optical drives were becoming more and more obsolete with the increase in streaming and download services. With spotify, netflix, amazon prime, itunes, etc, the main uses of optical drives for dvds and music disks were decreasing in popularity pretty rapidly. The only uses I ever have these days for my optical drive is to install drivers for new hardware in my PC, which in most cases can be found online anyway. And even this isn't needed on Macs because, unlike customisable PCs, you'll never need to install drivers for a fancy new PCIE wifi card.
> The headphone jack is different, because it isn't being replaced by convenient online services. Sure there are wireless alternatives, but the cost increases, difficulty of pairing, and the fact that 3.5mm is a standard across a huge range of devices from simple headphones to complex audio recording/mixing/playback setups means it just cannot be replaced. They could remove the optical drive without including the external drive because most people wouldn't need it, they definitely could not have removed the headphone jack without including an adapter in the box because of how popular the jack still is.
I rented a Hyundai over the summer and to play music from my iPhone, I had to Bluetooth pair with the car.
Guess what? It started syncing my entire contacts list. I just wanted to pipe audio from my phone to the car speakers, not share my life with a rental car.
So for those of us who value compartmentalising our lives, we'd very much like that bulky 3.5mm headphone jack, in addition to Bluetooth. Thanks.
On Android, there's a prompt when a paired device requests access to your contacts/call history/messages, and you can deny the request. It's irrelevant to play audio but it allows the car to give you a built-in interface to use your phone for calling and such.
I didn't know that iOS didn't prompt you for that.
You didn't have to do that, though. You can connect Bluetooth audio without syncing your contact list. Additionally, just because your phone is showing your contacts in the car's interface, that doesn't mean anything was synced to the car. It may have just been reading your contacts from the phone via Bluetooth. As soon you as unpair the device, those contacts would be gone, if that's the case...
Thanks for pointing that out possibility because I couldn't find it. I wonder if it's an option for Hyundais because it's not included in their quick start guide either:
My Ford does this (sync contacts) by default too. Yes it's an inexpensive car but you have explicitly turn this off and it's not intuitive. Not quite a dark pattern per se but I prefer to not connect BT to rentals for that reason alone.
Bluetooth is a merely adequate replacement, though. It regularly has dropouts depending on radio interference, and it means another peripheral that needs charging.
I don't know about you, but I regularly - at least 5 times a year - find the battery drained in my Bluetooth peripheral when I wanted to play audio, typically before or during a long trip. I keep wired headphones in my jacket pocket for these times, as a backup. I use three different peripherals often, and I don't track their charge state - the first I know about low battery is when they start giving warnings, usually about 10 minutes before they shut down, leaving me in silence. I don't have the time or patience to be checking their charge statuses constantly, or continually plugging them in to charge up, meaning disconnecting them from their home locations and needing retrieval before use.
I'm usually ready to embrace the next step, but the loss of the headphone jack was what made switch to the Pixel.
Call it what you will, but the headphone jack is superior to its predecessor, unlike the floppy, cd-rom, etc. When I heard they were discontinuing it, it felt wrong - it felt intentionally radical. And I knew there was no way I was going to pay extra for some Bluetooth earbuds I will definitely lose on my morning runs.
1) floppy was not big loss at the time -- not even close to the same thing
2) CDROM -- was just about as obsolete at the time it was removed -- also not even close to the same thing
3) flash -- well that did cause some people problems, but I didn't really care at the time, and it isn't really the same thing either.
The headphone jack may be old, but it is still way more useful than either a floppy disk or a CDROM were at the time they were removed. In the case of the floppy drive -- they were already on the way out, and the CDROM drive was there to replace them. When they ditched the CDROM drive, it could easily be replaced by a USB thumb drive or similar device -- which was still standard hardware, didn't have to be made by Apple, and was a reasonable replacement for the device removed. Having to have a separate adapter in order to use a standard set of headphones is, IMHO, NOT a reasonable replacement for just having the jack. And, yes, I DO believe that at least part of Apple's motivation was to make money by selling you Apple-branded headphones with their proprietary connector on it.
It's a legitimate gripe by paying customers. Apple is welcome to make whatever decisions they want on the hardware they sell, and we should not be essentially told to shut up when we (very reasonably) disagree with their decision.
CD-ROM was not the only removable storage medium, and it had an enormous cost in space (and sometimes power, if not implemented correctly). A good consumer-grade headphone amplifier has a minuscule cost in terms of space, even relative to a smartphone. The only reason to remove it is if you want your phone to be thinner than can support a 3.5mm receptacle, but as a smartphone consumer I don't really see the point in making a phone thinner than that, I figure it makes it hard to grasp the phone without touching the screen inadvertently. The iPhone 8 is about as thin as a phone should ever be, in my humble opinion, and at 7.3mm deep, there is definitely room for a 3.5mm receptacle, and there is already an audio chipset and opamp bank in the handset.
In short, the marginal cost in space, power, and BOM is negligible; and the value is high. I can't see myself buying a smartphone without a 3.5mm jack until wireless earbuds don't need to be charged more than once a month, and I can forget to put them back in the case for a couple days in a row without losing the ability to listen to audio.
I know you think you believe all that, but as an AirPods user and addict, I am at least somewhat confident in saying that you'd believe it a lot less after 48 hours using AirPods. Until you use them, you can't grasp just how rapidly they charge, just how easy it is to keep them topped off without even thinking about it, just by putting them back in the case, and the fact that you can't and don't "forget" to put them back in the case. Because the case is always with you, and because they're just a pain to carry without the case, and because of the penalty if you lose one.
AirPods are a miracle; a true "wow" product. And as an aside, the audio is really surprisingly decent. I'm a professional classical musician, so my ears aren't terrible.
Without being an Apple product buyer myself, I feel I can get a good pretty read on Apple products' success by the degree of condescension / stridency in reviewers' language. Like some Garner hype curve for fanboyism.
Judging by your tone, Airpod is still rising in popularity, yet to break through to mainstream, but may still do so.
Yes I would go with that and I hate Apple and have never tried airpods. I have tried normal Bluetooth headphones in Android world though and am prepared to believe that the Apple audio experience is better than what I am used to.
However, if you could go back in time by a short amount of years to show anyone the current iteration of music player and air pods then I think they would find the technology to be tantamount to magic and therefore a bonafide miracle.
At the other end of the scale you have the Apple fan and if they find these Airpods things to be miraculous then I think they are only being fair about what has been achieved here technologically to bring music to the consumer.
The recharging story is made even better by the ability to put one at a time in the case. That's particularly important for long phone calls/web conferences/etc, when the microphone tends to drain the battery faster.
With my wired headphones I don't have to do any hacks or workarounds to use them as long as the host device is turned on, I get better audio, they will outlast AirPods if I'm not rough with them, I can (and do, probably several times a day) move them quickly between my workstation, my laptop, and my two phones, they cost about the same, they're more comfortable, they have a better seal, they work where RF is not allowed, they work just as well with every device I own.
If I ever need a replacement in a pinch, almost every convenience store has an inexpensive pair of compatible headphones, good ones can be bought online or at audio stores.
Headphone jacks also double as line-out jacks, allowing you to play audio through any of the billions (!) of compatible systems without noticeable RF interference even in congested conditions.
I'm just sick of all of this "I know you think that" condescension. I'm not even telling people "The massive sucking sound you're hearing is a fad, you just haven't noticed yet.", I'm not telling people that wireless headphones aren't great sometimes.
I'm just saying: keep the jack there, it's cheap, it's convenient, it costs next to nothing in any way (BOM, water resistance, space), it gives customers good and valid options, even if they ultimately want to shove a little plug in the hole and forget about it.
It is not like a CD-ROM drive at all, because it is ubiquitous and common in use (unlike optical media at the time of the superdrive removal), and removing it does not notably improve the device in any way. It doesn't hinder form factor, it doesn't hinder any selling point of the device, and it makes hundreds of millions of people happy.
Four years ago, when Apple started removing laptops with optical drives — they only finished this time last year —
from their lineup, very few people were still using optical media on a regular basis. Today, almost everyone who uses headphones uses wired ones when they have the option to.
There's a difference between avant-garde, and jumping the gun.
Apple did not drop the floppy drive at the right time. They did in in 1998 which was at least 4 years before widely available USB flash drives. I remember every computer in the labs at school having a external floppy drive or even worse a Zip drive as there was no easy way for students to save their work and bring it with them. They also weren't responsible for the death of the Floppy disk as their marketshare then was low single digits.
Removing USB A from laptops for "professionals" and removing 3.5mm headphone jack is not really helping anything. USB C adoption will continue but there so many USB A products out there that it is inconvenient to the customer with zero advantage. Yeah I'd really like less ports on here for no decrease in price or increase in portability and would like to carry dongles said no one ever.
I still have CDs / DVDs I love, so I have to get a portable. My friend loves vinyl, so she has to get a vinyl machine. The latter example is probably a stretch, but there is a value in using and appreciating old technology.
The drop of headphone jack comes with one problem: I can't charge and listen to music at the same time unless I pay for the earbuds, or get a third-party thunderbolt hub which has serious quality issue...
P.S: Mr. Robot saves whatever he wants to store away on discs. Kinda interesting. He probably doesn't trust hard drive as much as discs, and thinks discs will survive longer.
I believe that discs do survive longer. I remember reading some article describing the decay of data over time. As long as the discs aren't horribly scratched up they will retain data for a very long time without decay.
> Apple has a really good track record of dropping things at the right time: floppy, CD-ROM, Flash, etc.
> At each of those steps there were people decrying the loss of these things. Today however, most people don’t miss any of them.
Those statements don't really support each other. There's no particular evidence that Apple's timing was good, just that they dropped it and eventually nobody cared. But if they dropped it years before everyone moved on, then their timing was awful, not great, even though the end-state was the same.
Flash is a particularly weird example since Flash on mobile largely never existed, so claims to "drop" it are nonsensical. You can't drop that which didn't exist. Yes there was a brief attempt at Flash on Android, but that came long after the iPhone.
Dropping flash on desktop would have been a better example, but Apple didn't actually have the courage to do that, at least not on their own. It was more a unified push by all the browser vendors combined with Adobe themselves dropping support for Flash.
I spent a good amount of money on decent headphones and if I can't use them with my phone without a dongle that's a no-no. I get that "the future is portless" but the future hasn't arrived yet and until then I'm not gonna hand out 800EUR for something I can't use with my headphones with.
But if you're the type of person that has one good pair of headphones then attach the adapter to them all the time and just pretend that the port on your phone is a weird shape.
I get that it's not ideal and that adapters are awkward but it seems like it's such a minor inconvenience for your use case. I would expect that audiophiles are used to adapters to go between 2.5mm, 3.5mm, and 1/4" stereo already. What's one more?
I get where you're coming from but the "What's one more?" idea is what led to this whole donglemania. Dongles are conceived of bridges into a brighter future but no thanks I'll happily live in the past for now.
This is exactly what I've done. I have one pair of $250 headphones I've had for years that I use when I want to sit in a dark room and just listen to music. Now the dongle lives on them and there is no inconvenience at all.
I just wanted to say that this is a really great point and, inevitably, the answer from people with these objections is always the same - they just prefer what they already have and are comfortable with. It's such a mild inconvenience that they're already ok with in every other scenario but, for some reason, this time it's completely different. It doesn't make sense.
Im not ok with it in every other scenario, I just swallow it often times because e.g. making a switch away from my MacBook would be prohibitively costly for me and I'll rather endure these "mild inconveniences" (dongle for Cinema Display, USB, Ethernet).
And yes, I really do prefer what I already have (my headphones working without a dongle).
So what do you do when you need to plug those headphones into a DAC with a stereo input? You need an adapter. What do you do when you need to plug them into a TV or game system? You need an adapter. You are definitely ok with it in other scenarios, just not this very specific one.
>need to plug those headphones into a DAC with a stereo input
Don't have one.
>need to plug them into a TV or game system
Don't have either.
You're completely right that I need adapters but that doesn't mean I'm ok with getting increasingly more of them. Especially when I get nothing out of them except backwards-compat for hardware that is simply not of the legacy type.
Adapters are easy to forget at home, lose on the go, break, etc. pp. They're detrimental to the user experience and hence should be restricted to support of legacy hardware.
> I spent a good amount of money on decent headphones and if I can't use them with my phone without a dongle that's a no-no. I get that "the future is portless" but the future hasn't arrived yet
What's your criteria for when that future will have arrived?
This isn’t about making phones smaller- they didn’t get smaller. This is about upselling some wireless earbuds. It made more sense to me when apple did it, owning beats, so even if you don’t go for the AirPods they win, but it looks like Google wants some of that upsell with the pixel buds.
Actually I agree that this is just like a CD drive but reach the opposite conclusion. Removing the CD drive was mostly worse for the consumer of the MBA at the time. Sure, almost no one wants a CD drive now, but that gives little credence to the idea that it should have been removed while still best for the consumer.
> Apple has a really good track record of dropping things at the right time: floppy, CD-ROM, Flash, etc
They have a good track record of dropping technologies in order to push their own proprietary technology instead. And failing most of the time, resulting in ultimately adopting the standard that everybody else is using.
The only proprietary port on today's Macs and iDevices is the lightning connector, which is quite obviously better than the abomination that is microUSB, which the competition uses.
I can't fathom how people can delude themselves into believing such easily disproven myths.
The headphone jack’s legacy-ness is purely marketing-driven. There are alternatives with tradeoffs, but no replacements. Barring some technical miracle, you will never be able to use BT headphones to play games, make music, or play guitar.
I was recently listening to a podcast (embedded fm) regarding paypal and this triangular BLE block that had no ports. Would be funny if your phone was bricked and you had no way to interface with it. Maybe by display at the very least.
I set up the equivalent Square card-reader device for my kids' school parents group, together with a dedicated iPad with cell connection. It's magic... even the most technophobic mum can operate it.
Sure, would be a problem if (or when) the iPad died, but it is stupidly cheap (and contract-free!) compared to a dedicated payment machine.
I don't know if this tech was released yet, it was something to do with wireless payments if I recall right.
I think I bricked my phone once when I was messing with rooting/overclocking. I don't do that anymore, I bought a pretty solid LG phone for like $80 (new) from a lower end mobile provider it functions better than this other phone by ZTE that had a finger print sensor, it kept freezing after running say more than 4 apps.
I don't know about other people, but I get a lot of interference on 2.4GHz between WiFi and Bluetooth at home. It doesn't matter whether its Bose Soundlink IIs or on-ear headphones.
We have a UniFi access point that is brilliant. However, I don't use 5GHz because the signal can't penetrate though more than 2 brick walls, which is an issue in some of the bedrooms.
I use a tiny dongle that allows me to use any headphones I want. It's really not that big of a deal. It's about 2" in length that looks exactly like my apple headphone jack - so no one's the wiser really.
I thought it would be a big deal - I was wrong. It's fine. If you still want to use your cheap/expensive wired headphones, you can.
I rarely see mentioned the fact that the mini jack port ends up broken (connect /disconnect) a lot after a while. It always happens to me, no matter the cost of the device (except for my first gen gameboy).
I just checked now and there is a very slight lag, maybe on the order of 100-200ms. It's pretty subtle though and I definitely did not notice it before you mentioned it. I can imagine that it would be maddeningly slow if it were something like a rhythm game or a musical instrument app though.
Yeah that's what I was referring to. At one point, I thought I was going to wirelessly connect my electric keyboard at home to my stereo through a bluetooth transmitter. I soon found out that there's a delay associated with audio transmission through bluetooth. I don't think anyone's really solved this problem for these kinds of applications because most people use bluetooth audio for passive tasks like listening to music.
What do people map control to then? The fundamental problem for this era of computing seems to be that people's needs/workflows are fragmenting while devices are converging, becoming more proprietary and one-size-fits-all.
Will there be a backlash to this? Possibly, but if dealing with a shitty keyboard is the cost of getting a high-end machine with great build quality, maybe not. People will come up with more and more workarounds to fix something which wasn't a problem a few years ago.
Let me let you in on a big mac daddy secret sauce:
Map both ctrl and esc to caps lock key: when it's pressed and released on its own, it sends an Esc; when it's used as a modifier key (pressed together with another key), it sends a Ctrl.
I mean... Dell and PC still have plenty of options. My Pixel has a headphone Jack. My laptop can be upgradeable...
I am not sure I buy the one size fits all argument. That is mostly an Apple thing.
Also, while it's true Apple quality was higher the last few generations are much worse. We have had numerous service issues come up, keyboards now break... I can't see Apple quality being what it once was.
I don't think it'll matter? I think it will just drive adoption of Ctrl + [ for vim users which is arguably better anyway since it's closer to the home row
I preemptively remapped escape to caps lock since my next laptop probably won't have an escape key. It took about a day to adjust to. Now, I can't see how I ever used escape in the first place, it's so far to reach.
Although now, I keep turning on caps lock when I use other people's computers.
The home row isn’t magic, I don’t get the obsession with it. Our fingers don’t lie in a naturally perfectly straight line—each finger has its natural zone, it tends to stray vertically from the home row.
Well I suppose my fingers normally stay around the home row because that's how I was taught. I suppose it's my mistake for assuming that's how others type!
Nevertheless, esc is still super far away from all the letters which is presumably what you are likely to be pressing.
A lot of people make this point but I just don't think the analogy works. For one, you use the headphones with the phone as well as other devices, and those things might not grow a Lightning port.
You joke but this has already been suggested by several airplane manufacturers. They want to build in lightning and USB-C ports to replace/add to the power outlets. Most airports already have the extra USB ports now next to the power block.
Precisely this. We see this crying and beating of chests whenever some obsolete legacy interface is finally deprecated to the dustbin of history. "You can pry my 3.5mm headphone jack out of my cold dead hands!" the knee-jerk reactionaries foam at the mouth in mock outrage, and then they go and buy a good set of bluetooth headphones or earbuds a few months later.
I have an iphone and the airpods and I haven't missed the tangled mess of the old earbuds at all.
Actually you're wrong. They dropped the standard USB ports and EVERYONE is pissed off about that. And if someone isn't, they're a retard.
Flash is still important even though its written like garbage.
Your last argument is as dumb as can be too. You're trying to say because people have forgotten what they were made about, it doesn't matter. So since people forgot that the iMac they had was USB only and couldn't use older devices, its not important. It may not be now, but it was important then.
> I think Apple's business model is entirely harmful
Between Apple and Google, you think APPLE'S business model is the harmful one?! We're talking about (1) actually charging for their products vs. (2) tracking your every move and collecting all the personal information about you they possibly can so they can sell you ads better, right? I'm actually not sure I can even name a tech company with a business model as simple and honest as Apple's.
I reluctantly agree. Apple has a bunch of dirty practices that makes me thing twice about buying their products, but their market position does incentivize them to protect my privacy. In contrast, Google is incentivized to provide a thick pipe between the highest bidder and the screen in my hand.
Honestly, I feel like this is an argument for watching HBO vs NBC, say. HBO makes a "honest" product and charges for it, while NBC uses the platform to sell advertising.
NBC must therefore be "dishonest" because they're showing you 30 second ads. Despite the fact the business model of serving content for with ads has been a successful (and accepted) business model for decades.
Google's privacy policy is open. No one is forcing you to use it, just as no one is forcing you to watch NBC.
It is a similar argument, but I think there is an important qualitative difference between TVs and smartphones. One is inherently passive, I interact with it on my own terms. The worst case is they show too many ads and I get pissed and cancel my service. I have some power in the relationship, they need my money month to month.
The other is an integral part of my daily life and knows virtually everything about me, who I communicate with, where I go, and is almost mandatory in modern society. I have no control over the software that runs on it, and the organization that does control it already has my money. If I want to exit the relationship, there are maybe one or two serious competitors (depending on if you include non-google android).
> One is inherently passive, I interact with it on my own terms.
No one is forcing you to interact with Google. You choose to interact with them because they have the content that you want, or they provide a service that you like.
And more importantly, you've accepted their privacy terms by using their service. In other words, you have interacted with them on your terms.
Legally, possibly, but ethically and from the position of most consumers? No. Google (and many other web services) do all sorts of tracking, even if you aren't using their services directly, particularly with Web ads, tracking via social integration buttons, etc, which I would argue is much less than consensual. This can even happen without their having to agree to having a Google account, let alone reading (and understanding the legalese in) their privacy policy (and all of its implications for what they can do with their data). I highly doubt the vast majority of Internet users know how much information and value is being extracted by private companies from their just being on the web.
> but ethically and from the position of most consumers? No.
I once had a friend frequent this record store, because every time he walked in the store, the owner would tell him, "You need to listen to this." And my friend would walk out of the store with a fresh vinyl pressed record with songs that he would spend hours listening to.
Was my friend be tracked? Yes. Did he experience targeted advertising? Yes. Was he subjected to unethical or immoral behavior? I don't know, but he kept coming back.
If you are the one opening up the browser and going to websites that do such unsavory things, such as trying to understand their customers to provide better content, then isn't the onus on you to not visit those sites?
> then isn't the onus on you to not visit those sites?
Not what the discussion was about. The question was which business model was more 'honest'. And I'm not sure you can fairly say that bulk data collection across most parts of the Web which most people are unaware of, is an honest way of conducting business (Not to mention shit like [1] and [2]).
And my argument is that content and advertising and consumer tracking has been accepted behavior by corporations for a long time now. You may not like it, may think it's kind of "Nazi"-ish. But it's been a valid business model for decades.
But if you feel Apple's business model is truly more honest, here's a wikipedia page you should go read:
I don't really see why you're comparing them both, they are both in essential 2 big companies that wants to control their customers in certain ways, sell them products and keep them in their ecosystem.
If Apple could actually take advantage of the potential customer information they have access to in the same way I'm pretty sure they would.
It was OP who compared them by calling out Apple, I just highlighted the absurdity of it. And no, Apple specifically highlights at every event that they have no interest in collecting such customer data and it’s a differentiating factor of their products. That has been a key point of theirs for the past few years.
> Between Apple and Google, you think APPLE'S business model is the harmful one?!
Google provides services to everyone in the world. Apple provides services to the social elite, and only them. A person of moderate means living in Ghana? Apple doesn't care about you; you may as well be invisible.
> I'm actually not sure I can even name a tech company with a business model as simple and honest as Apple's.
Because sending in the swat team when you think a journalist has a preview model of your doohickey is "simple" and "honest"? Apple does the same sort of shady stuff as any other BigCorp, they're just better at making things look fashionable, so people tend to give them a pass on it. After all, this is the same corp that patented the black oblong with rounded corners. There is nothing 'simple' about Apple's business model.
Is Apple obliged to sell a product that a Ghanaian of moderate income is able to buy? I don't think they are, if you extend that argument to other products categories you end up criticizing BMW / Audi / Mercedes for producing cars that are out of the reach of others, when other cars are available at lower costs.
I think the best evidence of Apple having an honest business model was the FBI V Apple encryption case. Have you seen any cases where Google has done this? I haven't. Either Android is not as secure and the FBI can get into any Android phone they want or Google has complied with a similar order...
On top of that, premium brands are the opposite of harmful. They push non-premium brands to iterate. The features that were in BMW/Audi/Mercedes in 90s are now in affordable cars. If nobody made premium cars back then, most that technology would have never made it to market. Same about Apple and cheap laptops. Cheap laptops nowadays are times better than what was available a decade ago. If there were no Macbooks to look up to, why abandon flimsy plastic laptops?
I didn't say Apple was obliged. I said Apple didn't care about that user.
> Have you seen any cases where Google has done this?
I haven't seen any case where Google has sent in the police to raid someone's house and confiscate their stuff. I haven't seen any case where Google has manipulated the legal system to claim rights over "black oblong with curved corners". Google doesn't have a history of taking things other people have done and then claiming that they were first to market. I haven't heard people complaining of Google designing planned obsolescence to drive future sales. I haven't heard of a case where Google designed their antenna incorrectly, and then blamed the users for "holding it wrong".
Apple is a very successful company and has broken a lot of ground, but calling them "honest" is horseshit. Don't mistake "a greater focus on user privacy" for "an honest business model". They're orthogonal things.
Honest in the sense that they are upfront about how they make the majority of their money - through phone/computer sales, and not through the sale of your personal data to 3rd parties, or targeting adverts at you.
Having a greater focus on user privacy adds to their honesty in this regard in my opinion, as they are protecting our personal data and not selling it, and even defending access to it.
When has google misled about how it makes its money? It's been pretty upfront about the tradeoffs and how googlestuff is paid for.
This kind of argument has been going on for well over a decade at this point - to suggest that google isn't honest and open about its business model at this point is simply choosing to be willfully ignorant.
I've given you plenty of well-known examples of Apple behaving badly. This isn't to say "Apple is the Devil", but that they're not this shining knight that some people paint them as. They behave dishonestly when it suits them as well.
Here's another example: tax evasion. Apple is the doyen of tax evasion. Is it legal? Yes, but stretched to the limit. Is it honest? Nope; it requires fiscal shennanigans, and they're not afraid to throw their weight around to keep things cosy for themselves. If they truly were honest, they'd pay their taxes, like the general public expects of good citizens.
I do not agree that google are upfront with the users of their services that they collect their data and use it to target ads at them.
How many regular consumers are aware that their android phone tracks their location and stores this data on googles servers nearly continuously? And that every single google assistant query is recorded and saved on googles servers? And that all this data is used to target ads and refine google services?
I don't disagree that Apple has unpalatable aspects to their business, as do all business of that size, but in my opinion they are more honest and upfront about how they make their money when they are compared to Google.
> Google provides services to everyone in the world. Apple provides services to the social elite, and only them. A person of moderate means living in Ghana? Apple doesn't care about you; you may as well be invisible.
If Google wasn't dumping prices, there would be a local cheaper alternative. Now it's impossible to compete with them. Ad-supported will always be cheaper than pro-privacy and there is no enough people to pay little premium to have cheap-but-pro-privacy device/service. The only way to stay afloat is to sell with hefty premium like Apple does. But then it's not really affordable to poor people.
Apple doesn't care about "elite". They charge price they see fair and provide their services to anyone who can pay that price.
> If Google wasn't dumping prices, there would be a local cheaper alternative
Apple's not dumping prices. Where is Ghana's local cheaper alternative to Apple?
> The only way to stay afloat is to sell with hefty premium like Apple does
There are plenty of other companies that are surviving without the hefty premium Apple charges. Apple managed to reach $200B in liquid cash assets; clearly their path is not "the only way".
> Apple doesn't care about "elite". They charge price they see fair and provide their services to anyone who can pay that price.
... how do you think elitism works?
s/Apple/High-priced lawyers/, to see how empty that argument is against elitism.
> Apple's not dumping prices. Where is Ghana's local cheaper alternative to Apple?
Google is the cheaper alternative.
> There are plenty of other companies that are surviving without the hefty premium Apple charges. Apple managed to reach $200B in liquid cash assets; clearly their path is not "the only way".
Of course Apple could go a wee lower. But they won't be able to compete with $50 Android anyway. Very few people will pay even little extra for Apple's privacy-oriented devices if they didn't have premium style&hardware. Once they produce that style&hardware, they get to today's price. $50 or even $100 won't change much in terms of reachability.
> ... how do you think elitism works?
And how do you think elitism works? Elitism is working with select clientele based on some subjective criteria.
High-priced lawyer who charges premium is not elitist. Lawyer who works only for celebrities is elitist.
Google and Apple charge the same amount for maps, music, apps, mail, and operating systems. Google isn't seriously in the hardware game - it had a couple of smartphone handsets, but mostly left it to other manufacturers. Google does not make miniservers, desktops, general-purpose laptops, all-in-ones and so forth. Other companies do, and google does not set their prices. Google does not dictate that a smartphone must sell for $X.
So no, Google is not the "cheaper alternative". Their software sells for the same price, and for the most part other companies sell the hardware.
So, where is Ghana's local cheaper alternative to Apple? Come on, you started this free-market claptrap that every locale has the ability to make a Silicon-Valley-quality giant, so where is Ghana's?
> Very few people will pay even little extra for Apple's privacy-oriented devices
This whole 'privacy' angle is a very recent development in Apple's history. It wasn't much of a notable issue before.
Huh? We were talking phones. Modern phone is a bundle of hardware and software. Apple charges very specific fee for their bundle. Google is pouring a shit ton of resources into their bundle as well, which they basically re-sell as franchise to hardware makers.
I could start listing all the super cheap Android phones as Apple competitors. But that'd be very simplified story, because they'd be nothing without Google's software and promotion. And if Google charged for the software as well Android brand, those phones wouldn't be as cheap. Now end users pay that fee with their eyeballs.
I never said that every locale has ability to make a quality giant or whatever. I said that Google dumping prices make someone else hard to enter. Especially at the cheap end of the market.
Apple's 'privacy' angle was very clear for at least a decade. They didn't pay as much lip service to it, but they products are clearly very different from Google. And been that way for a looooooong time.
I really want/need a new phone but the whole headphone situation has left a really bad taste in my mouth. Not usually one to get worked up over the minor details of smartphones but it actually makes me angry thinking of buying one of these phones and then dealing with fucking dongles for the next 3 years.
There's a reason "pass me the aux" is a meme and not "pair your phone with my bluetooth speaker, oh wait it's not connecting, let me try disconnecting, do you see it? Yeah it's GHS-9013 I think, okay, I hit the pair button, do you see it now?"
so true. actually the whole phone market is dogshit right now
it sure seems like things are getting worse, when all my phone upgrades have been forced:
1. original iphone wipes itself when i connect it to a new computer. ouch. my own itunes account, but somehow not recognized, and zap. went to android after this.
2. first android was the nexus. it had a known hardware bug where the soft buttons were being triggered randomly without being touched. started to drive me insane.
3. enter a unibody aluminum HTC. owned it for 3 years. i missed the sdcard slot but grew to love it anyway because it was durable as hell. it fell down a flight of concrete stairs. then carried on about its day. eventually the camera died on it (all pics started coming out hazy and red). i still see people using htc 7s even now.
4. enter nexus 6p. decent phone. screen was not very bright which was annoying outside but otherwise checks all the boxes. and it still gets the latest updates-- thing runs on oreo! but now its falling apart. the glass at the back broke twice, the sim is loose, gps works half the time, the plastic bottom fell off..
5. and so here we are today. cannot find another 6p. the pixel looks worse in many ways (fugly and bezels are even bigger while the software is the same). the v2 with no headphone jack?? and all these phones with glass backs that are actually even thicker than their predecessors that are obviously not going to last very long (anyone out there have a screen shatter?? lets double those odds). everyone using their own bloatware and not updating anything... android ones only really available in eurasia... ugh. do not want to crawl back to apple. someone help? blackberry, where are you?? lol
Sadly, there's no phone that has great software and great hardware. Pixels and iPhones have great software and quick updates, but they have no jacks, and the screens aren't very good, etc.
Samsung S8 or LG V30 have probably the best hardware (great AMOLED screens, jacks, SD card slots, etc), but the software might be lacking - there's some bloatware, some "me too" apps, and updates aren't quick. Although I have been told that the software situation is much better this year.
I think something like OnePlus 5 sits in the middle, almost a Nexus replacement - good (but not great) hardware for reasonable price, almost stock software, and it's kind of enthusiast phone, so it will very likely get working LineageOS for years to come.
I've been using the Moto Z Play for 6 months and it's my favorite phone yet.
The battery life is insane, easily can make it 2 days and I'm an extremely heavy user. I love the plain vanilla Android stock and I got a deal where I got the Hassleblad camera Moto mod for free which is a great addition.
Absolutely. Bluetooth is not there yet. I still get stuttering and low quality all the time when using Bluetooth. I want a headphone jack, and I'll find someone who will provide one and vote with my dollars.
> I still get stuttering and low quality all the time when using Bluetooth.
Bluetooth works great for me (good enough quality, no stuttering) - what kills it is latency. Latency makes watching videos very uncomfortable. There's also faint static in nearly every pair of bluetooth earbuds I've tried (and not just cheap ones, $100+ ones do this too).
I had barely any issues with Airpods on iOS 10, but iOS 11 absolutely made them terrible. Constant stuttering, disconnecting randomly, falling to connect. Shame. I'll be moving to an Android now.
Have you considered that the problem (static, etc.) might not be on part of the bluetooth earphones, but rather on your phone's bluetooth hardware? I use an iPhone with bluetooth earphones all day and it's a great experience.
This is exactly how I plan on acting too. I wish I had a way to tell these companies to attribute the lack of sale they normally would have gotten, to their decision to remove the headphone jack. I'm worried they'll attribute sales difficulties to some other reason.
I think bluetooth is absolutely there now... I've used bluetooth headsets for a number of years now and they are fantastic. You just need to buy a decent product! Currently I am using QC35s and there is no lag, no hiss, amazing quality all round.
Sometimes it is unavoidable though... for example my car's bluetooth implementation however is horrible - very laggy and sometimes unresponsive.
Your last paragraph hits the problem: it’s possible that a car exists with a release-quality Bluetooth stack but I’ve yet to use one. The same is true of most of the non-current or expensive devises, which turns quality into something you need to carefully seek out rather than a given.
In contrast, $2 throwaway headphones work 100% of the time. Sure, the audio quality isn’t great but it’ll be better than any phone speaker and you can drop only a little more for a big improvement.
This annoys me because I like the Bluetooth concept – and have since I bought my first BT-equipped phone around 2004 – but the tragedy of the commons has hit really hard. It’s 2017 and turning Bluetooth off and back on is still a useful way to fix problems FFS!
If Apple and followers want to make this switch, they need to start blacklisting or warning for buggy devices (“x is unable to play back reliably; contact VENDOR support” or “sound quality will be low due to …”) — after fixing anything hokey they’re still shipping, of course. Trying to paper over the skimping just tarnishes the entire industry.
I'm not an audiophile, but I can hear a difference between a good DAC through an headphone cable and a bluetooth set of headphones.
I was also just in an airline lounge last weekend and got a huge amount of drop outs on my bluetooth headphones. I'm guessing because of a strong wi-fi signal to the point where the music was stuttering badly.
And there's the issue, the 3.5mm works with something I can buy for a couple of dollars in the supermarket and it just works. A good bluetooth headset costs an order of magnitude or two more and I can't find out if it's good until I take it home and open the packaging.
Even streaming from my phone to my PC is something I've found to be incredibly laggy.
True - but the similar issues people complain about with BT audio are going to be present with $5 cabled headphones... crackly audio, dodgy cables might cut in/out with movement etc...
Complexity has its price — it’s hard to get right and corner cases continue creeping in with wider use.
If there’s a popular example of over engineering, the replacement of a dirt cheap 3 foot cable that works perfectly 100% of the time, with zero lag and zero signal loss, with an expensive, battery powered wireless signal solution which lags, cuts out, creates security issues and dies after a few hours of use must be it.
In at least one of the cases, this was because of stuff (some sort of gunk) getting into the port. Before anyone says that wasn't a problem with the port itself, having a physical port allows problems like that to happen. Problems of that sort don't exist with wireless technologies.
Heh I know it's technically possible if you jam a candy bar into it, or spill coke on your phone, etc. It's much less pervasive than Bluetooth cutting in and out because you put your hand over the antenna and similar problems, though.
I got what you meant, I just meant that if you had a 3.5 mm jack, you wouldn't have these problems, it would just work. We've replaced a very simple, cheap solution that works very well and has very high fidelity with an unreliable, expensive, complicated one that has worse sound quality when it works. Your problem could very easily be avoided with very old tech.
And we've just got Bluetooth 5.0, which doesn't seem to address any of those issues. Instead it focuses on range, likely because that benefits local stores' advertising.
The headphone jack is one of those things no one should ever remove. I despise having to charge an additional set of hardware, namely bluetooth headsets ...
I had the Pixel 2 in my cart thinking I could convince myself of a no 3.5 mm future, and like hell I could so I aborted the checkout. At this rate, if they do not bring it back, I will wait until I can get superb USB-C headsets inexpensively... or most likely, Samsung S9 is going to be my next upgrade.
Loved Google's Nexus and even the Pixel 1, but they have gotten complacent, do not listen anymore and actually believe that copying Apple in any way shape or form makes them look better.
Can't wait for that Librem phone either. That one sounds better than anything else Google has to offer at least for the HN crowd, if not wider...
The number of "but AirPods are great" comments on this entire thread is hilarious. Not relevant. The article is about Google's phone, not the iPhone.
Google have arguably made their BT stack worse in Oreo. Since it got the upgrade at the start of the summer, my Pixel XL v1 no longer plays nicely with my car, and is pretty poor with my BT headphones. Even if I bought the fabled AirPods, they wouldn't use the W1 magic to talk to my phone, so I sincerely doubt they'd fix any problems I have.
Luckily, I have the fallback of the 3.5mm jack, and so largely the impact of these BT issues are small for me. But the article mentions that the Pixel 2s are also suffering BT issues, and Google won't even comment on them. If I buy one and find the same issues with it, then I have to rely on the dongle to get music from my phone to my car, and I can't charge it at the same time any more.
> The number of "but AirPods are great" comments on this entire thread is hilarious. Not relevant. The article is about Google's phone, not the iPhone.
Except that a lot of the complaints are not specific to the Google phone. They're about removing the headphone jack, and what people claim are inherent problems with doing so. If AirPods can be used to counter such claims then they're definitely relevant.
Do the blue tooth headfone proponents ONLY use headfones on phones? How do you use them on laptops and computers with no bluetooth capability? or on Roku remote? or on flights without buying some other crap dongle or adapter? I run out of charge on my gym blutooths soo often, who are these folks who only have to charge their headphones once in 3 months on daily use? Bluetooth could be an addon feature to a headfone if you wanna go cordless but why shut the effin gate on the device side by removing the jack altogether? (hyperventilating now)
That's the nature of change. It's awkward, and never smooth.
I'm one of those people who believe that eventually all consumer devices will use wireless headphones. It's not going to happen instantaneously, and the transition will be awkward, but eventually it will be complete and issues like you're talking about will be non-issues. This kind of thing has happened many times before.
Did USB stick proponents ONLY use USB sticks? What about computers that only use 3.5 inch floppy disks?
Check out mid-range stuff. There's an absolute treasure trove. I've been using a Moto G5 Plus (the 4GB RAM model) for some time now and it's an absolute treat.
LG Stylo 2 Plus here, and I heartily agree on going with mid-range (and I prefer phablets as well). There's a Stylo 3 Plus now, which fortunately still has the headphone jack, bumps the SOC from a 430 to a 435, and the display to 1920x1080. Neither have the fastest SOC out there, but still plenty for my needs, and both have an SD slot.
So far, I've been very happy with my Stylo 2 Plus. Battery life is amazing (the battery is usually at about 75% when I plug it in for the night), the screen is sharp in spite of being 720p, and plenty bright. I can't see spending more than $250 on a phone these days, except for bragging rights.
Pretty regular, I will say they haven't seemed to put forth a patch for WPA2 yet, but I'm also unsure how fully vulnerable it is mostly because Android can be such a customized beast.
I know it's universally hated here on HN, but Samsung. Their top-end models just work; they have some UI bloat but some of that is also useful. They look good, are generally well-supported, good cameras, great screens, good battery.
(This applies to S8 and above, S7 and below were bad.)
The problem with the S8 and S8+ is finding glass screen protectors for it. The only one I can find locally is $40, and the curved edges means it cracks really easily.
Yes, I tried it for a day without a screen protector and ended up with scratches on the screen.
I've had my GS8 since its release and there are zero scratches on it. I have it in a case, but otherwise no screen protector, and no issue. I've dropped it several times, and today had the scariest incident yet -- set it on the counter and opened the cupboard to have a big can of split pea soup fall and smack right off the screen. No problem.
Scratching definitely isn't a problem. Cracking is a risk, but a basic case dramatically reduces the odds of that.
How's the display on that? I'm on a Note 3, and I really like the fact that I've always been able to see Samsung's AMOLED display in the sunlight. I also have bad eyes, so I tend to keep the display pretty bright in the dark. It's always seemed so much more vivid than other phones I've compared it to, but that's been a while.
EDIT: And where the heck do you get one in the US?
Oneplus 3T (exact same panel as in 5) has good legibility in sunlight, I had no issues with it. As for vivid, you can configure display calibration on Oneplus to suit your taste. Unfortunately there are no gamma sliders for fine grained control, only 3 or 4 predefined settings.
OnePlus phones are a great Nexus replacement - they have good hardware (but not the best one) and near-stock system for reasonable price, and as enthusiast phone, they get a lot of community support from like LineageOS and stuff.
I’ll have to check that out. I’m stuck in the odd position of being tired of Apple’s “you can play in our sandbox”’approach, but I’m loathe to move to Android and give google what remnants of privacy I’ve managed to retain.
an iPhone 6s, most likely. i am in a similar camp of wanting to have certain ‘legacy’ tech wrt my laptop. my 2011 17” mpb will be my daily driver until it is pried from my cold dead hands (well hopefully its cold dead shell is pried from my living hands). i, however, didn’t feel the need to cry about it when the computers didn’t perfectly align with my desires though. maybe people just like complaining?
Pixel is my last big brand phone. Next one needs to run Linux and not be tied to Apple or Google. It has all gotten a little too controlled and walled.
Pixel is an amazing phone and aside from the privacy aspects... I can't see needing more phone. The camera is better than any phone camera I have ever used.
We need to get away from the Android / iOS duopoly
Heh. Will do. Sony Xperia runs Jolla, that is something. We will see. I am guessing it means sacrificing a little hardware quality, but we are all kind of spoiled as it is.
> ... but the lack of a headphone jack on the flagship Google phone is really the last straw.
Look, this is inevitable. The titans have decided this thing is dead, so it's going to happen. The thing that pissed me off most about the iPhone 7 and convinced me to leave wasn't the lack of a headphone jack, it's that Apple was/is confused about what to do about it. You can't go making USB-C only computers and then have all of your phones using something different. I get that this is shitty, but at least if we decide that USB-C is the way forward we can end the Great Dongle Wars.
Apple is not confused. Lightning is a better and much smaller port for phone use. And there are over a billion Lightning devices out there. There's no compelling reason to switch to anything else, certainly not to USB-C.
And no, moving iPhone to USB-C would of course not end the Great Dongle Wars, nor even get rid of a significant chunk of them. Most dongles are necessitated by all kinds of old ports, mostly video, on laptops.
Absolutely. I'll be totally fine with the lack of headphone jack when wireless headphones last 72+ hours on a single charge, or they charge wirelessly from the bag when I walk into my flat. Until then, wireless headphones are something terrible I have to put up with to make the gym easier, and absolutely not something I want to consider using as I work during the day.
Really? I found losing the wires (that snagged, pulled them out of my ears, etc) to be a fantastic advantage that far outweighs the inconvenience of having to charge them.
Lack of headphone jack on Pixel XL 2 is what drove me from my Pixel XL into the loving embrace of my new Samsung Note8. There's no excuse to drop headphone jack.
Unfortunately, it's a cheap DAC/amp dongle as, unlike some other phones, the Pixel 2 doesn't output analog audio via USB-C using the phone's built-in DAC/amp. And the Pixel 2 XL has its gain set really low for said dongle, meaning you're going to have difficulty driving lots of headphones.
> This tiny adapter houses a microscopic stereo digital-to-analog converter (DAC), a stereo headphone amplifier, a microphone preamplifier and monophonic analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and power converters to run this all.
OK what the hell, I thought they were just outputting analog through Lightning from the internal DAC but instead they put a second conversion chain in the adapter? Damn.
> You need iOS 10 for the adapter to work on older devices. iOS 9 and before predate the headphone-jack-less iPhones, but if you have iOS 10 it works great on my old iPhone 5S — not that you'd need it to.
And it works just fine on older lightning devices too, that's really impressive.
I honestly don't care about a headphone jack on a phone, I do care about the wireless charging...which the Pixel 2 lacks. Now that every phone has it (including the iPhone now,) it's baffling that Google felt it necessary to leave it out.
I'm at the point where I'd be happy to see Microsoft make their own Android phone, use the Arrow launcher to hook into Windows.
I ordered one. It came with an adapter. It's not a bad adapter, really. It's no larger than the plugs to make the connections, and connects firmly.
What I lament is the inability to charge and use headphones at the same time with this adapter. They have another adapter "coming soon" in their store which will do both.
That said, it's been 25 hours since my last charge and I'm still at 71% battery, so it's less impactful than I thought it would be.
I'm a little concerned about the reports of screen burn-in I've seen on reddit, but the other rumors about discoloration did not impact my model, so it's just 'wait and see' now for me.
I love headphone jack and I do not like very much bluetooth (except Hands-Free Car Kit). But I also watch many TV series where the characters are always using tiny earbuds. People want to be as cool as their idols. The first generation of bluetooth headset was cumbersome. With the Apple touch and some technical improvements, this can be a success.
Because even if manufacturers did really save some money (which is debatable) it doesn't make sense to save some cents on an $800 product.
For example in terms of parts all phones already have a DA conversor and an amp to be able to send analog audio to the speakers. The actual headphone jack costs close to nothing.
It might even be more expensive for Apple to manufacture the lightning to headphone adapter...
Yikes, I thought the anti-headphone jack movement would have died by now.
Get rid of it, all of it, along with plastic media drives and plastic media, game cartridges, magnetic hard drives, SIM cards, full size USB ports...all this crap, go away already, please.
The Pixel 2 XL checks all of my boxes, which really aren't much: runs Android, has a large screen, is fast, has a good camera, is fast, is supported with updates for a few years, and is fast. My S7 Edge has made me truly understand the life pain and suffering that even minor lag can cause.
I implicitly assumed that any phone which would fit those criteria and be in the $700-$800 price range would also have a flawless screen. I'm not even talking about a Note8-level "holy shit that's amazing" screen - more like an S7 level of "nice screen" screen.
A speedy Android UI is so important to me though that I'm at least going to give the phone a shot when I receive it. "Maybe it's just a bad batch," I'm telling myself. And promptly RMA it or return it if there's any issues.
Part of me feels bad that I'm still willing to part with my money to try this phone out. Does that make me a sucker?
The Android one version of Moto x4 is shaping up to be nice. I've been using moto since the first G variant (back when Google acquired the phone division of Motorola) and I am currently on X2 (by Lenovo, but still a good and very well-rounded phone). The only issue is X2 no longer receives updates, so an Android one version may be as close as you can get to the original. It's really a shame Google sold Moto only to struggle with hardware manufacturing of their "premium" phone for two generations now.
No notification LED and No fingerprint reader on the back is why I decided to delay going to the x4. I do like that it has a working FM radio and headphone jack though. :(
I thought the same (about the fingerprint reader), but in 2 days I was converted. I love it on the front. I use my thumb to unlock and it's flawless. Nice bonus: you can use a fingerprint to lock, too.
I upgraded from a 5x because I need more storage, and I've never adapted to a new phone so quick.
After my S7 Edge almost made me cry, I sold it after 12 months of usage and bought the Xiaomi Mi 6.
Best Android I've ever used and seen. The software isn't exactly Apple or Google level but it's very solid and EXTREMELY SNAPPY. The whole thing flies like there's no tomorrow.
I will buy the iPhone X and make it a secondary device but holy hell that device is much better than I expected.
Yeah Xiaomi phones are extremely good. They are not really popular in the west but not hard to get one either through Aliexpress or any other reseller.
The lacklustre cameras and LTE band support are my main issues with those. You'll also want to reflash the phone when you get it - this may require asking Xiaomi for "permission" to unlock the phone (what happens when that server goes away?)
I agree the camera is not great. No Android so far was able to compare against my former S7 Edge (I guess S8/Plus and Note 8 are better though). And that's not okay. I have to admit though, the Mi 6 is a filler device for me until the iPhone X comes out.
The LTE band support problem is weird and I guess it comes from Xiaomi not pulling the right strings in the USA. We can only speculate though.
Yes, I realize that and it's a real shame. It seems Xiaomi can't pull certain strings -- it's hilarious that one has to pull strings to be able to sell phones in USA but hey. Your carriers are a pretty strong mafia. ;)
Jokes aside, again, it's a shame and you guys are missing out. Xiaomi makes the most no-bullshit phones on the planet right after the iPhones.
There are European versions of Xiaomi working on all European frequencies now in Poland. You can grab a nice Xiaomi phone for $150 with a fingerprint sensor and 3/32 memory.
I bought the mi5, installed Lineage on it and holy shit! I don't want this phone to become old and obsolete. Everything has been near perfect if not perfect. Everything. The battery life, screen size, the speed!
Me too. After Google left us Nexus 6P (and 5X) users out to rot, I won't be buying into their next hobby.
To be honest, if the battery on my (already-replaced) 6P wasn't laughably bad, I'd be happy to use it for another year or two. Everything else about it is fine.
As it stands, my next phone is likely to be a Nokia 9.
> After Google left us Nexus 6P (and 5X) users out to rot, I won't be buying into their next hobby
Are there any phones that are actually supporting by Google or any Android maker that actually are suppported for several years? Seems like they all get abandoned after a year.
Nexus/Pixel phones got two years support, although the 6P/5X was soured when we got support but didn't get the new Pixel-only features (which weren't at all limited by the hardware).
I don't know of any Android manufacturer with support that lasts for more than two years, though.
It will only get software updates for another year and security updates for 2 more years, it's 1/3 of the way through it's effective lifespan. The supported lifetimes are far too short when you buy in release day, let alone a year later.
You should be able to manually update it to newer android versions after the official updates end since it has treble. The kernel as of now is still stuck on 3.18. Unless the blob makers update to 4.4, that will be the limiting factor regarding security updates.
Forget about headphones or not for a second. Removing the jack is about killing the last analog hole for good. It's about control. Yes there are adapters for now but they're transitional and we can expect them to eventually go away.
Once the output is locked down, expect to see the equivalent of HDCP show up. Only music you have purchased through your phone's marketplace may be played, and only to an authorized device.
That's the broader issue here, and it shows one more step in the long path to removing your ownership of your devices.
>Only music you have purchased through your phone's marketplace may be played, and only to an authorized device.
Is music piracy still a hot button issue that would motivate Google/Apple to remove the headphone jack? I'd imagine that most people that care about ownership are in the shrinking minority - the rest already don't own their music and streaming it via Spotify/Apple/Play.
Well, aside from that, it was the only interface that used a standard connector and an unobtrusive driver library. You could run data in and out through the jack. But now all that's left is the proprietary lightning port and the wifi stack which could have all sorts of undocumented filtering or restrictive behavior in its driver. So it also locks the phone down further in that regard.
Only Apple could design something like that. Have fun reverse engineering such a monster. If good crypto got applied to something like this... ouch.
That's one possibility, at least.
The other possibility is this. Shhhhhh, but Encrypted Media Extensions can't really stop you from, uhh, tinkering with PulseAudio on Linux, maybe doing a little rerouting, and et voila, who ordered PCM?
Obviously everyone's interested in making such systems be full-stack all the way down to the hardware level in the very long term, but for now, Spotify's entire DRM model is based (very successfully!) on this status quo.
It could be argued that this is why they're actually delivering Ogg audio (I'm not sure of the bitrate) but the more logical explanation is that it requires much less diskspace. But I'm sure everyone in the industry is aware of the above, and it's factored in somehow.
So the cyberpunk distopian worst case scenario is speakers with SoC DACs woven into the acuator coil in the speaker itself, but I strongly (and with much relief) suspect this is objectively quite unlikely.
While somewhat meta, ME actually runs on Minix, which is a UNIX-like too, so...
Linux isn't going anywhere on servers at least. If anything, Linux's problem is that it's edging uncomfortably close to the point of being too big to fail, in many sectors.
But I can unfortunately concede your point with consumer devices. I've come to the conclusion that Android will be doing a quiet Linux->Fuschia switcharoo in the future (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15506377), for example.
> Yes there are adapters for now but they're transitional and we can expect them to eventually go away.
Unlikely. The headphone market is huge and these devices are expected to work with everything, from mobile devices to AV Receivers, DACs, amps and studio equipment. The headphone jack isn't going anywhere.
> Only music you have purchased through your phone's marketplace may be played, and only to an authorized device.
I doubt it. The music industry is pretty open these days and has given up on DRM for a long time - you can buy DRM-free, lossless music from countless places and while I understand that purchasing music has become rare, your scenario would be a dealbreaker for anyone that still does and truly owns their music. That might be a small share, but still a significant crowd. It would render the device close to useless for people like me. This is a whole other level compared to the compromise of an adapter.
> > Yes there are adapters for now but they're transitional and we can expect them to eventually go away.
> Unlikely. The headphone market is huge and these devices are expected to work with everything, from mobile devices to AV Receivers, DACs, amps and studio equipment. The headphone jack isn't going anywhere.
> > Only music you have purchased through your phone's marketplace may be played, and only to an authorized device.
> I doubt it. The music industry is pretty open these days and has given up on DRM for a long time - you can buy DRM-free, lossless music from countless places and while I understand that purchasing music has become rare, your scenario would be a dealbreaker for anyone that still does and truly owns their music. That might be a small share, but still a significant crowd. It would render the device close to useless for people like me. This is a whole other level compared to the compromise of an adapter.
For how long, until they come up with a new report that shows the margins are decreasing and they new ways to earn money?
What do you mean it isn't going anywhere? It's already gone. People who have discrete equipment are vastly in the minority and won't have any choices left anyway once every phone maker has dropped the jack. Plus, how often do you see an iPhone plugged into an AVR?
I mean that the jack will remain the default connector headphones regardless of what the iPhone or any other phone does, since headphones have other devices to consider. Will there be Apple-only headphones with lightning conenctor? Sure. But any pair of serious cans will be expected to work on any device and that means it will use the headphone jack. You'll simply need an adapter to use them with mobile devices.
> Plus, how often do you see an iPhone plugged into an AVR?
I think that’s a problem, but I don’t think it was done for DRM or to prevent the next square- more done to upsell Wireless earbuds. The cost of the iPhone can only go up so many hundreds of dollars per year, so they do things like offer exponentially more storage and fancy wireless earbuds as high-margin upsells to keep growing revenue on the same user base.
Why not both? Apple makes a killing from selling media on iTunes and with a healthy profit margin. A better DRM helps protect that golden goose just a little more.
That was a marketing strategy, not something that was necessarily important to Apple. Apple did that to enter a market dominated by downloaded mp3s. Now it doesn't need that position. And besides many people have left the company since then, so a decision change wouldn't be strange.
More recently, the Movies and Apps parts of iTunes are very much DRM encumbered.
They already could've done that if they wanted to. . The analogue hole is still digitally controlled, that's why it takes a second for audio to come through your headphones when you plug them in, your alarm plays through the speakers even with headphones plugged in, etc. The reason they don't do that is because they are obviously aware it would be commercial suicide.
I'm not sure people understand quite the level of investment Apple puts into 1) quality-control and 2) supply-chain management. These take years to build up and maintain.
HTC at least has long had issues. A few years ago, my much-anticipated HTC One was a huge disappointment when the camera went purple. I'm curious to know what their defect rate on the Pixel 2 is (not that there's any chance of that ever being public)
While my 5x never suffered the dreaded bootloop, I will never buy another LG phone. In the time I used it, Google replaced it 3 times. And hang out on the 5x subreddit, it's filled with unhappy people.
The Nexus 9 (tablet) was the only htc-made Nexus. And it was a piece of garbage. The first-gen pixel phones were both htc-made through, and seemed to be well made.
OLED screens are lovely in many ways but after having a Galaxy S6 that I had to return twice due to burn in I avoid it now. It just isn't worth the hassle of having to get the phone repaired/replaced. It took Samsung over a week each time to replace the phone (for free) which was a royal pain in the ass.
I know OLED tech is getting better and maybe with Apple putting an OLED in the iPhone X it means they (well Samsung as that is who makes the screen in the iPhone X) have "cracked it". However I am going to wait a couple of months to see how things play out before I jump on the OLED bandwagon again.
Anecdote for anecdote: I've been enjoying OLED screens on my Android phones since the Galaxy Nexus (2011), and I've never had burn-in or any other display-specific issue.
Same here. My Note 4 is three years old, with hours of screen-on time per day at a fairly high brightness. (I use it primarily as a tablet, not a phone.) Not the slightest hint of burn-in or any display problems.
My Nexus 6 screen still looks fantastic. Wish I could get a new one with an updated CPU, fingerprint reader, faster storage, better camera, and the same screen + form factor.
Hell I'd take, nay, I'd pay premium for a Nexus 5 (pre-X) updated with new components. In fact, I reverted to my Nexus 5 when I found that it's still working fine after 2 upgrades, and it is a pleasure. Sturdy, light, perfect form factor, solid battery life 5 years on, and gets all the new Android goodies.
I miss the good ol' days when smartphone form factor wasn't expected to accommodate portable video playback as a first-class citizen. Honestly if I want to spend extended time watching a video on the go I'll carry my tablet with me =/
The Nexus 5 came out late 2013, the iPhone 4 in mid 2011, so a little over 2 years. Also I believe newer devices tend to be less snappy, as the tendencies for grand flourishes of OS animations and hardware performance optimization seems to be moving at different paces.
I find the Nexus 5 snappier than every other Android device I have used since then including powerhouses like the 5X, 6P, Note 7, and snappier than many modern iPhones I've used in my dev shop work (5S onwards, haven't tried the X).
It's only technical downside is a lower max screen brightness than other devices, but I personally prefer my screens not overpowering my eyes anyway.
I just bought three 5x's on eBay refurbished for my family, each for $160-200, to run Google Fi. They'd all boot-looped-to-death on their previous owners, who had sent back to Google/LG under warranty but then moved on to new phones.
So far so good for me. Their screens have minor scratches, but they have new batteries and logic boards. One has a non-working headphone jack but is otherwise fine. Wait, actually that was the fourth one, that we sent back under warranty.
Interesting, my Note II lasted almost 5 years and there was never any ghosting effect, so I thought Samsung controlled this technology quite well. Then again we can see what happened to batteries...
I'm wondering if it can be done, or isn't already done, like plasma TVs that rotate pixels and other trickery to keep burn-in at bay. I had a Panasonic plasma for a good ten years that saw its fair share of video games, with health bars and the like, and never saw burn-in. I did see ghosting toward the end of its life, but never burned-in images. The new plasma (Samsung, because I missed the last of the Panasonics) is only a few years old, but no problems with that one yet, either.
I had some trouble with burn in on an OLED TV that was being left on all the time. I did some research and found out that the effect goes away by leaving the screen off for a few hours every day. I set the TV to turn off every evening, and the burn in problem went away and less electricity was wasted.
I wonder if this is happening from very heavy use or something else that's not allowing the screen to recover.
Auto brightness can help when it comes to avoiding burn-in. Using max brightness all the time with static things on the screen is a recipe for burn-in even on IPS displays.
On both Samsung phones and tablets, I've found Auto Brightness to be unreadably low at first and had to shut it off. (With Auto off, you can set whatever fixed brightness you want, it's not a binary Auto vs. Max choice).
I have the GS3, GS5, GS6, GS6 Edge, GS7, GS7 Edge, and a Tab A.
Does Samsung change how brightness works in Android? I think since 7.x both Auto and fixed are adjustable. On my pixel, I have Auto brightness, but at the same time I can choose the baseline brightness level - it gets corrected from that point.
So the switch is really "fixed at point" / "floating around that point".
I just tried it on my GS7... sliding Auto Brightness from Off to On always bounces the setting bar down to baseline (about 40%) initially regardless of prior setting.
That's either old Android or Samsung breaks the behaviour then. You can have adjustable auto-brightness on stock Android. (Called adaptive brightness in settings)
Samsung still offers a flagship with a stylus, which everyone else stopped doing about the time of the first iPhone, and they recently went back to including support for additional storage on their flagships.
They might drop the headphone jack soon, but I wouldn't bet on it.
It's obvious Google has miscalculated when the their billboards show off the back of the device while Apple is advertising the edge-to-edge display of the iPhone X.
a very ugly notch, no front facing speakers, the need for a really great palm rejection algorithm (and even in this case, the bottom of the screen might be a bit unwieldy to reach).
It does look cool, but it is 'just' a different compromise than the one made on the pixel.
"Meanwhile, market research firm Consumer Intelligence Research Partners told The Wall Street Journal that the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus only accounted for 16 percent of iPhone sales in the September quarter, compared to 43 percent for the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus last year. The iPhone 8 models constituted 2.4 percent of iPhones in use one month after shipments began—predecessors managed more than twice that share in the same time period. A survey of carrier stores showed the cheaper iPhone 7 outselling the iPhone 8 in the US and UK, though customers who shop at carrier stores may generally have different preferences than those who buy their phones directly from Apple or from other types of retailers." [1]
Where there is smoke there is fire. Just like most rumors/leaks are true, just how everyone knew Travis was getting canned from Uber weeks before it was announced... all speculation but is rarely wrong. I guess we'll see at the earnings report.
But this is the first time in the history that we haven't heard of the new iPhone flying off the shelfs, about serious back orders, etc...
It would not be a horrible decision for Apple to make, because they embrace a solution to the Innovator's Dilemma.
The Innovator's Dilemma [1] is something that Steve Jobs seemed to have solved. How? Selling one product that cannibalizes sales of another from the same company was A-OK on his watch.
The iPod Mini was a perfectly fine device, yet Apple introduced the iPod Nano at the height of the Mini's popularity. The Nano had less storage [2], but it had solid state flash memory, and therefore was thinner yet.
How'd that work out for Apple? Just fine [3] - they kept about 80% marketshare for the entire life of dedicated digital music players in the market, and that market only went away when Apple brought out a phone so good that it made carrying a dedicated digital music player unnecessary.
Competing with themselves is a key piece in Apple's sustained success in a few markets. The iPhone 8 / X matchup shows they continue to not be afraid to do that with their phone, and I think that's a very healthy thing for their continued success... which also feeds into continued success of their ecosystem, including app developers (like myself!).
> yet Apple introduced the iPod Nano at the height of the Mini's popularity
So they introduced the X right at the iPhone8's peak? I can believe that.
Apple has certainly done that in the past, used to be the best at it but this is the new Apple, not a technology company anymore but a lifestyle company and the product has suffered as a result.
There has been a guess at the reason: people want the X. Thought is after the reviews come out and say it’s not that great, or people try to preorder and get told they have to wait until March they may give up and buy the 8.
We’ve never had a situation where there are two dates the iPhone comes out on before so we don’t know how much thats effecting demand for the 8.
I decided to upgrade to the 8+ from a 6 and it hits nearly all my points except for the slight negative that the form-factor is relatively the same (irrespective of size).
It's a great upgrade so far. The UI is snappy quick, the cameras on the back take amazing photos due to one having both OIS and digital stabilization, and the second also having digital stabilization. The resolution still looks good, etc.
I'm pleased with not needing to wait for the X, especially with the (supposedly) low supply at launch.
Thanks to T-Mobile JUMP, I was able to get the 8 and will get the X next week or as soon as they are avaialable. I presume that many are doing the same
I happily went for an 8, though I had been holding on to my 6+ for awhile. I suspect the X is the way of the future but I'm betting that the first iteration of the tech (including FaceID) might be rough. The better camera and processor in the 8 was justification already. Maybe the 7 is cheaper but may be slowing down with near-future OS upgrades.
I suspect not, since the X will only be available in limited quantities.
My guess is that it was a mistake to not release both at the same time. If they had done that, people that couldn’t immediately order the X are likely to just go ahead and order the 8 if it isn’t that big a deal to them. But now with the 8 having been out for a month, I think a lot more people are likely to just decide to wait. Net result will be a huge drop in sales (though higher ASP).
I guess we’ll see if I’m wrong many months from now, but this just seems like a huge error on their part to me.
> I think a lot more people are likely to just decide to wait.
Not going to happen. I think the X is going trigger its own super cycle. People who have the 6s are waiting for it along with people who have 7 and normally would have waited. The only question is if Apple can make enough phones. They gave themselves an extra month to build supply so we'll see. Current rumors are they are already shifting iPhone 8 production over the iPhone X. My guess is every X made for the next 6 mos. (maybe more?) will be sold before it even comes off the assembly line.
You agree with me, but I don't think you realize it. I absolutely agree that many people with the iPhone 6 and 7 are likely to hold out for the iPhone X, and that is a serious problem for Apple.
The entire existence of the X is predicated on the fact that it's an ultra-premium phone that they can only manufacture in limited quantities — quantities that would not be able to match expected demand for this generation of iPhone. If demand for the iPhone 8 is lagging and they literally cannot manufacture the iPhone X fast enough (even having shifted production away from the iPhone 8), the iPhone X may end up being a tactical disaster for Apple, even if every single one of them is spoken for the moment it leaves the assembly line.
Apple might only be able to manufacture enough iPhone Xs to satisfy 20% of projected demand for this generation. Shifting production capacity around doesn't help much if their supply of critical components is limited (e.g., OLED displays). If they were expecting the iPhone 8 to satisfy the remaining 80% of demand but half of potential iPhone 8 buyers decide to simply wait it out, this could be an absolutely disastrous year for Apple even if their ASP shoots up by a few hundred dollars.
I understand your point, but I'm not sure Apple ever presumed more iPhone8s would sell over the X.
Rumors are that the early manufacturing issues were around one of the face recognition modules, but those issues have since been fixed. Apple knows supply chain, they know how to get millions of units made, and I think they get it done. I'll make a bold HN prediction ;) and say the iPhone X will be the best selling item over Christmas and the best selling iPhone of all time.
I sincerely hope you're right, even though I fear that I am! We'll likely know in 6 months time.
That said, why do you think they spent so much effort to develop, manufacture, and release the iPhone 8 if they projected that they would be able to ramp up production enough to satisfy demand for the X within a reasonable time-frame Everything I've seen points to the X being their attempt at making a phone that they simply wouldn't be able to manufacture at typical iPhone scale. So if not that, then what was the strategy behind the 8/X split?
Good question. Another part of that question is why still sell the 7 or 6s at all? I think what we are seeing is Apple slowly filling all of the price points. There is a large group of people who want the latest, but also a group who traditionally were priced out of iPhones.
A question I really want answered is what will they call next years phone? Will they have 9 and XI? :P
As soon as I saw no headphone jack I immediately stopped considering an upgrade. I still love my Pixel v1 but when it comes time to replace it I will be looking elsewhere now. It's not a feature I'm willing to give up.
Because if you are a company that "eats the world" via automatic selling of the ads your leadership and your engineers are delusional enough to think that everything you touch turns into gold not because of hundreds of thousands of hours spent on testing and tweaking but because of your new amazing phone orchestration software.
There's got to be a word for the attitude you are running here.. I can't think of it.
Anyway, as an owner of wireless headphones and wired headphones I definitely wouldn't choose a phone without an aux in. My wireless headphones have stayed uncharged for months - i'm not yet ready to be responsible for charging two devices every night.
> There's got to be a word for the attitude you are running here.. I can't think of it.
"Fatalism"? It's the same attitude that leads some people to roll over and agree that "privacy is dead -- get used to it." The replacement of the headphone jack by a port that is worse in every way, by wireless 'phones that are unreliable and need to be charged every few hours, or by an expensive dongle makes life worse for everyone except headphone and dongle salesmen. The rest of us should not simply roll over and take it.
I agree. The issue is, as a longtime iPhone user, I'm being forced into a no-headphone-jack phone. I need to get a new phone in the next month or so, and my major options are:
1. iphone SE - seems great, but given its internals are 6S, it will be updated into slow performance sooner than my other options.
2. iphone SE 2 - rumored to come out in the next 4-6 months, but who's to say it will have a headphone jack?
3. iphone 7/8/X - dongle land
4. Switch to android - apart from standard friction of using a new OS (probably not a very big deal), I may need to re-buy a number of apps. And the one android phone I was counting on, the Pixel 2, now also doesn't have a headphone jack. Thanks google.
I'm actually tempted to just buy an android phone by Blu or something; this overpriced hardware seemed almost worth it when it was at least not taking away features that I use everyday.
Is that the best version of not rolling over and taking it? Ugh. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd appreciate them.
I'd buy a few iPhone SEs as spares. In a similar vein, I currently use an iPod Shuffle on runs and hikes, because it's cheap, light, and durable. They retailed for $50 from Apple, and now that they're discontinued, they seem to be selling for $80+ on Amazon. I wish I had invested in a stockpile, so I could sell most at a profit, and keep a few for personal use.
I don't know how you use your phone, but I don't forsee my 6s becoming unusable in the next year or two for my use cases (WhatsApp, maps, taking photos, checking email). Granted iOS 11 (and High Sierra) have been notoriously buggy. :\
It'll probably be outdated sooner, but I love the SE. I actually just got a new one to replace the one I lost and it was, compared to the new ones, cheap. It just has the right form factor and as of yet I haven't noticed any slowness.
Stockholm Syndrome. Defeatism implies that these people feel defeated and have given up. Instead, I get the feeling people are trying to spin this as "progress"
Agreed. Removing obsolete features is advancing. There was a time to remove floppy drives and such. And it would be time to remove the headphone jack if there were a replacement that was at least as good.
Wireless headphones suck. They're expensive, inconvenient, and don't work with most of the things I want to use headphones with.
When someone figures out how to make wireless earbuds that cost $20 or less, never need charging, and won't fall out of my ears and down a sewer grate, I'll think about buying them.
It would be nice if they were engineering problems created by actual user demand, though, not a combination of slick marketing and fear of media piracy.
Right now, I'm dealing with it by preferentially buying phones that come with a headphone jack. And internally stowed stylus. And a slot for a memory card. Fortunately, the Note 8 has all three.
Sure all of those may be on the way out in long term trend—the others for longer than the headphone jack.
But as long as I have a choice, I'll vote with my wallet for the things I prefer.
My own opinion has shifted along with the availability of my Bluetooth headphones. Before I owned Bluetooth headphones I thought getting rid of the headphone jack was a bad idea. After I bought a nice pair that does noise canceling as well, I became a Bluetooth headphone evangelist. After my girlfriend discovered how nice my (or as she calls them "the") Bluetooth headphones are, I find I'm dreading having to pay another 300-400 dollars for another pair of headphones now that my pixel is arriving in a few days.
Google has been having a hard time getting their phones up to standards. Although I've been lucky having bought my phones from Google directly. My Nexus 5 was replaced for free when it cracked on falling (apparently the phone had a problem of the screen breaking too easy). Recently they replaced my well out of warranty Nexus 6P with a Pixel XL 128Gb for free (because of the battery issues). People who didn't buy these from Google directly in the US have a whole other story.
After my Nexus 5X bootloop problem, this about puts the nail in the coffin of LG phones, for me.
By the way, what's wrong with this scenario?
= Lots of people want a headphone jack. "You can't have one."
= Lots of people want limits on tracking -- and on incessant nagging to enable settings that track. 'Wall of deafening silence.'
= People want some semblance of privacy. Sign on Chicago Apple Store door, to the effect of: 'By entering, you agree to let us collect and use your image for [non-security purposes].'
Gee, it's almost as if we aren't even customers. Certainly not customers who are listened to and respected.
But of course! I should simple sit back and let Google/Apple/X's AI tell me what I want!
P.S. Bluetooth is still significantly suck-y. And, on my "temporary" two and a half month old current-generation Motorola phone that I bought to tide me over after the Nexus 5X bootlooped, I've not yet received a patch for the recent Bluetooth vulnerability (not to mention the current WPA fiasco). Fortunately, if somewhat inconveniently, that Motorola G5+ has a headphone jack.
SO... Am I going to go from that "tide me over" Motorola to the Pixel 2, that I was waiting for?
> Gee, it's almost as if we aren't even customers. Certainly not customers who are listened to and respected.
For any product that is shipped at large enough scale:
* The barriers to entry to replace that product at similar cost and apparent feature set get necessarily higher
* The share of overall demand which is de facto inelastic increases, and therefore decreases in quality have a disproportionately low effect on overall demand
Regulation is a necessary tool to fight this phenomenon.
Well maybe one day they will stop refusing to sell them in Denmark. Small market yeah, but Apple seems to have no problems selling expensive phones...always on the same day as US.
That first picture is embarassing - my Nexus 5 looks better than that. I never liked Samsung, but their S8 is miles ahead if the point is "looking modern".
All the laptops, desktops and their chipsets They all sport 3.5mm jacks with SPDIF optical + mic and headset. Dedicated soundcards like ASUS Xonar, Creative SoundBlaster X RGB they ship with gold caps and high grade chips with proper 7.1 Dolby and Surround certification + THX Audio and even MSI uses Nahimic DSP + ESS Sabre chips in their high end gaming GT series, Even the latest trashbook pro's with USB C have a jack which is meh with Apple's Cirrus Logic used across all their devices, My Samsung Galaxy S with Wolfson chip + Linux kernel level driver (Voodoo mod) offering huge control options for user trumps most of the devices, Also the iPod5.5G of mine with a more superior Wolfson chip.
The Audio is always Analog, Digital is in your computer or streamed as data but the audio is only audible in Analog. And every phone has an DAC chip to convert all the data you feed to the mic to the chip and mobo and OS, the DAC converts its so that you can listen to it.
Going digital will make things complicated, Like for eg in every dongle you have to rewire the DAC to the USB to the chipset and SoC to make sure that the Audio dongle works. The 3.5mm is still standard across, your Passenger jets, Fighter Jets, Professional Audio, Casual user, Audiophile community. Why ? Because it just works, the mechanical strength of the 3.5mm port is robust plus the 360 degree freedom and the USB C using the Digital line needs another circuitry and breaks standard. Ultimately this 3.5mm port is the de-facto standard deployed on ALL systems across the world.
Apple did for 3 reasons.
1) Apple has two different lines of wireless devices that sell for premium prices. Beats and Airpods (Which are literal trash grade sounding, using an W1 chip is to bridge that steps one takes to pair them and accelerometer + gyro aren't ground breaking when coming to the purpose, ofc one wont buy them for audio but for convenience while they still work with the iPhones which have the 3.5mm adapter)
2) Each and every lightning to 3.5 needs MFi certification that will give them continuous stream of revenue on all audio gear and including the people who use the 3.5mm old headsets + those dongle money, Apple became a dongle company from tech company all the innovation and brave policy of Apple is gone with Steve, Tim is nothing but Ballmer at M$, who ruined Nokia and M$ both..
3) Strong DRM control, Closing analog will make then have control over the I/O, A thoroughly made 100% business focused decision.
3a) Please don't bring the space waste B$ to here, see Note 8 PCB design and a hint, check the MXM GPUs on MSI GT83VR and Titan and Clevo P870DM3 which are sporting a 1080 GPU which is socketed and has power to beat the Desktop chips. PCB design is to adhere by OEMs standards don't spout what Coolaid corporate Orwellians demand showing that Taptic engine and missing space...
This Apple's CEO is a beancounter and a disease to the innovation as they keep in raising the walls of their utopia where ignorance is bliss.
Next up thinking about the USB C Audio, that standard barely materialized and lacks proper standard, Pixel for eg doesn't have Video out and iPhone's old 40 pin has dedicated Audio line, the new 3.5mm adapter has only DAC while the AMP works from the Phone, for Apple it's easy but for the people it's complicated on multiple stages.
a - No proper audio quality, the DAC chips which will be used in the dongles are undocumented, forget the phones which are offering dedicated DAC/AMP in theirs - Axon 7's DAC HiFi works on LineageOS too a unique one, HTC 10, Vivo is famous for their HiFi. Cheap knockoff ones will sound worse, If you add a DAC inside a headphone that ruins the purchase for many as not all will like that sound signature where as Analog 3.5mm ones can have clear audio tuned for that IEM/Headset.
b - Dongles - More space waste inside your pocket and no standard, perhaps iPhone ecosystem is standard, can't match tot he 3.5mm spectrum but on USB C it's worse doesn't and doesn't have any AMP or any Analog line, it's 100% digital so you MUST ship one with a proper circuit with no cross compatibility (Try to use U11 dongle on the HTC 10, btw 10 beats U11 in audio since the AMP is not powerful enough vs the 10)
c - BT and Wireless ? they existed since Nokia and work the same, Perhaps the LDAC and APTX but they need licensing and even with 3.5mm jack wireless works the same, Waterproofing also exists the same, Note 8 is a perfect answer it has a full silo for S-Pen + an always on Home button like apple's taptic gimmick and retains IP68 and has multiple Biometric security with the 3.5mm port under water with S-Pen removed too. LG v30 does, v20 did with HiFi Audio. AND the batteries go dead in these wireless sets, make drain more and eventually go to garbage with the planned obsolescence device of yours. Where as normal 3.5mm ones last until they die
d - High quality Audio is existing, HiFi gear is widely available without any complications, in the end everyone uses it, The wear and tear resistance is higher on the jack vs the USB C which often breaks and the 2 degree possibility vs the 360 degree beats this greedy decision of Apple, Plus the wea
So I don't see any advantage plus Unfortunately due to the stupid CEOs who is following the blind lead of Apple, M$ is shifted to Apple type marketing, UWP going against .exe Win32 apps, idk why all companies are obsessed with this company Apple while their whole ecosystem is limited and not deployed across multiple HW, for eg - Windows works in Govt, Military and critical mission control systems, Apple can't match that but unfortunately the people just chose form over function and made Apple that huge, look where are we. Soon the eSIM will come in the iPhones (I called it first) & planned obsolescence push further, Draconian controls, How much further you will bend, we said okay to the dedicated video ports to wireless, IR blasters, Now removable batteries also gone and now next is this ?? Question yourselves to believe what they say or the real facts which base on liberty and choice, an essential aspect for humans.
Funnily enough I switched from an iPhone 6 to a Nexus 6P, and found Android (now on Oreo) to have both the better UI and being more snappy in its handling.
That snappiness was surprising to me since according to some people on twitter nobody should ever buy an Android phone because of the relatively shitty CPU. IME the superior CPU of the iPhone doesn't make much of a difference, except if you're benchmarking CPU-heavy javascript I guess.
Considering you feeling Android being cheap: To give some perspective, in my country(Germany) people regularly forgo iPhones for the newest Samsung flagship, even though they are more or less priced the same. I don't think they would choose the cheap feeling one.
And nobody cares to give you a good adblocking solution out of the box. Google makes money by ads so I guess they'll never change that.
I agree with everything else said. Android is just a half-done OS in any regard I can think of. My Xiaomi Mi 6 is awesome, beautiful and very snappy but Android's idiosyncrasies are visible everywhere:
- I have a gigabit internet that gives me 50 MB/s (yes, megabytes, not megabits) to USA which is halfway around the globe but the Play Store still manages to lag.
- My GPS can find my location in 1.5 secs max (there are dedicated apps to test that) yet most apps that go through Google's Location Services consistently need 10+ seconds (a full minute is not a rarity as well) to report a location back to the apps.
- Still no native themes. If you don't like white or if it's hurting your eyes, well, tough luck. Pray your OEM offers them. Luckily Xiaomi does. (Objectively, iOS is at fault here as well; they're trying with the Smart Invert Colors feature and it's decent, by the way, but still long way to go)
- Still no good support for volume controls; if you want to decrease media volume, most of the time you end up decreasing phone call volume. Like, seriously. It's 2017.
- Idle battery life. Damn it, why the hell must I lose 20-30% of battery when out and about with 90-98% cell signal and never unlocking my phone? Why? I had a work iPhone 5s around a year and a half ago and it was full of apps I used for work -- at least 20. I go out, do real-life stuff for 3 hours, come back home. Android lost 25% battery. iOS lost 3%. And then people wonder why iPhone fans love their phones. It's not only about being fans. There are real, measurable reasons.
- ...There are others but let's not make this a book.
After installing a VPN app that filters traffic I was just astounded. I use my smartphone on average 2.5 hours a day and holy shit, that's ~17000 ad/tracker requests blocked a day!
Android is overhyped and clumsy. And the efforts of Google lately are laughable, incomplete and are coming too late. And oh yes, they absolutely are a desperate reaction to the inevitable huge success of the iPhone X.
> 50 MB/s (yes, megabytes, not megabits) to USA which is halfway around the globe but the Play Store still manages to lag.
Bandwidth is not latency. If you're in APAC, the only thing that will help you is if Google opens a mirror of play store nearby. (Unless it's software latency and everybody gets the same behaviour)
> Still no native themes.
Version 8 opened some new possibilities over adb. Hopefully fully accessible by v.9.
> if you want to decrease media volume, most of the time you end up decreasing phone call volume
> I use my smartphone on average 2.5 hours a day and holy shit, that's ~17000 ad/tracker requests blocked a day!
If you think that's os dependent - it's not.
I get that there are various issues people spot and they can be annoying. But a lot of that is familiarity with the system. Use iPhone for a few months and you'll find a lot of issues as well - it's not like it's flawless.
> You're pointing me at apps. But I keep hearing Nexus/Pixel folk praise "the pure experience". Something doesn't add up.
Yes, you're bringing up "Nexus/Pixel folk" like some kind of homogenous group thinking of the same ideas and think I belong to it. Neither one is true - you're projecting your ideas.
The volume controls used to be better; they didn't try guessing which volume you wanted to change by context. They've changed things for the worse since then.
My battery's pretty small (2150 mAh), and I've spent about half an hour today playing games. Pulled the phone off the charger at about 8:30, and it's 16:00 now. Power's at 81%. The iPhone 6 would be a little higher, granted.
I wish Android were better, but out of the available options, it suits my needs the closest.
You're using a Xiaomi Mi 6, a heavily hacked up and forked Android. Why are you hoisting all the blame on Android instead of on Xiaomi? You're running a completely different OS from AOSP, so why are you pretending your critiques are globally applicable to all builds of Android?
Most of them certainly aren't true on my Pixel XL. Play store loads immediately, GPS locks immediately, idle battery life is excellent, volume controls consistently adjust whatever is playing, etc...
GP's list of complaints also don't apply. My AOSP Pixel XL never lags, has no malware, the UI is great, and it doesn't feel cheap at all. Reviews all match my experience as well, so I don't have any reason to believe I somehow got a golden lucky device. It seems far more likely that Xiaomi's implementation is just garbage, particularly since OEMs have a well established history of fucking this up.
The only complaints that match my experience are no native themes and no good ad block solution, but I also think native themes are a terrible idea. It seems op just wants dark mode instead of native themes anyway, but Android sort of has that it's just called night mode instead.
I forgot to mention I used 13 Androids over the last 5 years, of several brands. The Mi 6 is actually the best experience I had so far, by the way.
I see you lean heavily towards Google's take on devices which is okay. But right in this thread people recommend apps to fix things that are missing from the pure Android. That is... not very okay.
When I used Samsung, they had a mini app for everything. Even their clock / alarm / stopwatch / timer app was extremely easy and convenient to use. It's hard to quantify, it's a feeling that adds up over time.
I also happen to think the Pixels take away too many features. microSD slots used to be one of the differentiating features of Android devices over iPhones, for example. Now we don't have that and we also no longer have a headphone jack, a decision that was widely frowned upon even by iPhone fans.
To me, as a mostly neutral side observer who never was fanboying on neither platform, it looks like Google is trying to emulate Apple, and is failing.
> When I used Samsung, they had a mini app for everything. Even their clock / alarm / stopwatch / timer app was extremely easy and convenient to use. It's hard to quantify, it's a feeling that adds up over time.
But you pay for that in the form of a bad core system. Samsung's kernel tuning is bad. Their low level services are bad. Their system UI is bad. I'd much rather have a healthy core system since I can't replace that than a few fancy apps that are trivially replaced via play store. It's a night & day difference between a Samsung & a Google device when you systrace them and look at how the core device is actually responding. Benchmarks don't capture this, which is why most OEMs don't bother getting it right.
If you still need microSD for some reason great, but honestly with 128gb phones I can't say I have any use for it. The phone's internal storage is more than plenty, especially with large things like photos being offloaded to cloud storage (with many providers to choose from if you don't like Google Photos for some reason). microSD was necessary when devices still had a base of 16GB, but that's not the world we live in anymore. Pixel 2's base storage is 64GB.
Google is aiming for a wider audience now and not only for techies. The average Joe and Jane don't give a damn about a healthy core system, that's not a selling point for them. They'll play with the phone and say "WTF? Google's clock app sucks!" or "Can't find anything in these settings" and will walk away. In fact, a friend of mine working in a mobile devices shop told me those exact two examples. People were baffled what was the hype about the first Pixel (or Nexus 6P) and were like "meh, show me the Samsung / iPhone". It is what it is. Call them what you want, but good UX is good UX.
Pixel is not an improved Nexus. It has aspirations for audience as wide as iPhone's and Google's marketing efforts prove it, IMO. It's time for Google's UX team to grow up and stop thinking like a bunch of nerds patting themselves on the back in the dorm room. This phase of Android development is over and won't ever come back.
> If you still need microSD for some reason great, but honestly with 128gb phones I can't say I have any use for it.
I personally agree, plus UFS 2.0 internal storage can put some laptop SSDs to shame. I am actually quite happy with a 128GB UFS 2.0 storage Android (Mi 6). I kept hearing in the past that the microSD controller introduces slowdowns in the overall system -- don't ask me how, I don't know.
Still, I knew people who claimed they needed the feature daily. I just don't see why the choice must be taken away if it didn't do any damage (if it did indeed slow down the kernel in some way then I can see a case against it though).
And why was the headphone jack removed? The device doesn't even have IP67 rating. My former S7 Edge survived falls in 5cm deep potholes full of water with its headphone jack wide open.
Dunno, man. It seems to me like Google is trying to emulate Apple and is doing a bad job at it.
"Healthy core system" and "apps for every possible quality of life improvement" aren't mutually exclusive ideas. I've heard many people pull out the "bloatware" card which is just laughable. Yeah, 0.5 - 3.0 more GB on a 128GB is bloatware... sure! Some imaginary concept of "pure OS" which never really happened and is still not happening, having in mind all the AI-related benefits Google is pitching for the Pixels.
> The average Joe and Jane don't give a damn about a healthy core system, that's not a selling point for them.
That's not true at all. Do they look for that feature on the box? No, of course not. Do they get pissed off when instagram suddenly fails to launch quickly or the device hangs randomly? Abso-fucking-lutely.
> They'll play with the phone and say "WTF? Google's clock app sucks!" or "Can't find anything in these settings" and will walk away. In fact, a friend of mine working in a mobile devices shop told me those exact two examples. People were baffled what was the hype about the first Pixel (or Nexus 6P) and were like "meh, show me the Samsung / iPhone". It is what it is. Call them what you want, but good UX is good UX.
Sounds like you haven't ever touched a Pixel phone. Bad apps or confusing settings are not accurate descriptions at all. Nor is a bad UX. The phones are superb for an average user. It's the previous Nexus owners, the ones used to settings out the wazoo and customizations for days, those are the people that are pissed off about Pixel. Not the average user.
> The device doesn't even have IP67 rating.
Pixel 2? Yes it does. It's IP67. It's not IP68, though, like the S8 is.
> That's not true at all. Do they look for that feature on the box? No, of course not. Do they get pissed off when instagram suddenly fails to launch quickly or the device hangs randomly? Abso-fucking-lutely.
That I fully agree with. :)
> Sounds like you haven't ever touched a Pixel phone. Bad apps or confusing settings are not accurate descriptions at all. Nor is a bad UX. The phones are superb for an average user. It's the previous Nexus owners, the ones used to settings out the wazoo and customizations for days, those are the people that are pissed off about Pixel. Not the average user.
I haven't owned it, yes. I got a lot of acquaintances who do. Very mixed feelings from 15+ people. Most of us felt alienated by Google's take; barely any improvements over the AOSP except the all-encompassing Google Play Services. It's quite funny how my ancient S4 had 9 quick-access setting buttons which I could customize and put on the top of the settings panel and Nexii / Pixels never had those.
Again, it's a feeling that builds up over time. At certain point you can't help but conclude "well, I guess they don't care much".
If people tell me 3 years later that the first Pixel still doesn't lag on them, I'll be very impressed. Because 99% of all Androids -- including some of the Nexii devices -- inevitably start to lag horribly after 12-18 months. That's one of the reasons I am moving away to an iPhone X. I can't play this guessing game anymore. As much as I loved Samsung devices, they were huge offenders in this regard.
> Pixel 2? Yes it does. It's IP67. It's not IP68, though, like the S8 is.
Sorry, forgot to say I was talking about the first Pixel. Good thing that the 2 finally added it, though, I am glad!
> It's quite funny how my ancient S4 had 9 quick-access setting buttons which I could customize and put on the top of the settings panel and Nexii / Pixels never had those.
Nexii/Pixels have had user-configurable quick settings for a long time now? Maybe you're referring to something else?
> Sorry, forgot to say I was talking about the first Pixel.
There are features that both Android and iOS are missing that old pre-2007 phones had as well, e.g.
- Profiles where you can set custom volume, vibrate, and sometimes other settings. e.g. "Home", "Vibrate", "Silent". And easily customise + switch between them.
- Alarms that work when the phone is off. Set your alarm to wake you up, turn your phone off, and the alarm sounds in the morning. Lots of old phones had this feature. My Nokia N9 and Jolla smartphone had it too.
> Profiles where you can set custom volume, vibrate, and sometimes other settings. e.g. "Home", "Vibrate", "Silent". And easily customise + switch between them.
There are many Android apps which provide this functionality. It doesn't need to be a part of the system.
That's okay but I see too many people evangelizing "the pure Android experience", yet they have to compensate for a lack of certain features with apps.
We can also treat this as Google not giving much fucks, I think. Not only as "the pure experience". Let's be objective to the both sides of the argument.
IMO though, everything that adds everyday convenience must be a part of the system. Did you forget these phones are sold to people who have trouble tying their shoe laces? All the casual quality of life improving apps MUST STARE THESE PEOPLE IN THE FACE from the get go. They shouldn't jump through hoops.
Maybe you shouldn't look at the Pixels as improved Nexii. Google is aiming for a wider audience now.
> All the casual quality of life improving apps MUST STARE THESE PEOPLE IN THE FACE from the get go.
The issue you'll run into is that everybody has a different idea of a life improving app. You can't cater to everybody and make their choice the default. Google does a pretty decent job elevating the truly popular apps to the default status: see flashlight, night mode, hotspotting, photo filters, etc. But your life quality app is not my life quality app - and that's ok. That's the place where apps step in.
This is absurd. I can't count how many times I had to do 1-4 more hours of work somewhere outside an office with my phone already being at 10-15%. Your device should have enough juice to help you go through an abnormal day as well.
Optimizing your life for inferior battery life is absurd.
My former work iPhone could last two days. I'll take that over strange justifications of awful idle battery life, any day.
Nowhere did I say that it’s because the phone doesn’t last. I was pointing out how having alarms work when the phone is off at night doesn’t matter anymore.
It's a nice way to make sure you won't get any notifications etc as well. I realise there are Do Not Disturb modes and so on though that achieve the same result.
>And nobody cares to give you a good adblocking solution out of the box. Google makes money by ads so I guess they'll never change that.
I've never used an apple device, but does apple give you that ? The problem you are describing is a general one due to overlapping roles of all hardware and software makers. Everyone wants ad and data money.
Yes they don't do it as well. However, Safari claims to block some trackers by default which is still a win for the average consumer who won't ever fiddle with settings.
Safari allows you to use an adblocker (Firefox Focus). Chrome on Android doesn't have such settings and I suspect it won't ever have them. They plan to add adblocking but knowing Google, they'll use that feature to axe their competition, not to protect their users.
As for me, I'll just setup a VPN in my Mikrotik router and will add all widely known DNS blacklists to it (~53000 hosts). As mentioned above, I am not too keen of my devices doing 17000 ad/tracking requests a day, Android or iOS.
So yes, sadly to this day people have to jump through hoops to take back some (most?) or their privacy and not donate their internet traffic to corps who only want to farm your data.
I am not impressed by the Pixels. They take away key differentiators that made Android the better choice in the past -- microSD slot, and now the headphone jack -- and are pitched mostly on their "AI" apps.
Add to this the current drama with the XL 2 having burn-in screen issues on week one and IMO Google shot themselves in the foot.
Eh I find the voice assistant to be much better than Siri, and their preemptive AI assistance to be pretty spot on. Given the strengths of the two company, I think this gap will grow. Conversely, Apple is obviously much better at hardware and they have better taste when it comes to design. It depends on what you care about.
Voice assistants, hm. Knowing Google and Amazon and having in mind their history, I won't trust them not eavesdropping on me and my wife having sex, ever.
I do care about privacy. Google and Amazon care about data collection and ad dollars. They'll do absolutely anything to get those, including stuff we find amoral. Most businesses are like this: "it ain't illegal if you don't get caught". Please deny it! ;) I think we all know it's true. History has shown it time and again.
Simple math, really. I am not losing anything in my life if I spend 20 seconds typing a query in a browser. I don't need to order goods with my voice. Voice assistants have a few good uses but in 90% of the time they are a solution looking for a problem.
I get that some folks feel special and living in the future but that's hardly worth giving up your privacy at your own home.
FWIW, I'm on a Nexus running the latest Android O and most of his criticisms mirror my experience. As someone who came from iOS, Android is simply not nearly as polished and I have a lot more frustrations than I used to have. I don't think you can blame it on a cheap Chinese phone.
As an example, in close to a decade of iOS use, I never once had a problem answering my phone or making calls. The phone app (though not the cell coverage) was 100% reliable. I'm currently having an issue where my Android phone can't answer calls. The phone rings, but there's no UI displayed that lets me pickup. It's been reported by many people in forums online and when I've posted here about it, I've had other people say they've experienced the same problem. The only known "solution" is to wipe the phone and start from scratch. It's ridiculous that they can't fix something so basic and essential to being a phone with an OS update, let alone that something like that made it past QA.
I've never heard of the phone app not working. But, it does sound like your issue is isolated. Since you do use a Nexus I would recommend you boot into safe mode and see if the problem persists. It could be a third party app or background service causing issues.
FWIW, I forgot to mention I used 13 Androids in total over 5 years -- of 6 brands.
My complaints were almost mirrored on every single device I had.
Still, my forgetting to mention this past experience is no excuse for your dismissive message. My "attitude towards Google" is well-founded in reality and is well-documented even on Google-leaning news outlets like Android Central or Android Police. The articles are out there, look them up. Editors who praised Google for years are now disappointed.
EDIT: The Mi 6 is not a cheap phone at all. And it's really good otherwise.
Windows phone: I liked the UI. It feels well thought out, clean, and generally smooth.
But: Updates that put the phone in a boot loop? Yep. Core functionality disabled without explanation for hours after an update? Yep. Silently dropped text messages? Yep. Paid more for the phone than for my last laptop and expected more? Yep. Tumbleweeds rolling through the app store? When has that not been true on a Windows phone? Abandoned because even Microsoft couldn't justify it as a viable system any more? Double yep.
It's hard to feel cheap when it feels so overpriced for what you get.
> Never in my life have I used a shitty OS like Android.
This is pretty much what it comes down to. The latest iPhone models aren't really that far beyond any decent Android phone in terms of hardware at this point.The real secret sauce is iOS. Google is well aware of this, which explains the existence of Fuchsia. Once they have a full mobile OS based off of that, Apple will finally see competition in the high end market.
https://twitter.com/damanr/status/922321678868160513 - Gruber retweet. It's actually hardware that Apple is far beyond not software - there's nothing in Android land that touches the A11. Android really has been doing close to iOS for a while now as far as performance goes.
Which version of Android are you talking about on what phone. I use an android phone and an iOS tablet nearly everyday and your complaints sound like you haven't used it since eclair
The Samsung Android experience has improved significantly since I tried it on GS6. Very smooth and everything works as expected. The biggest issue I had, and the reason why I returned my S8, is Bluetooth Audio. Oreo supports streaming over AAC now but whether Samsung will adopt it remains to be seen, and SBC sounds like shit on the Samsung stack and nobody seems to care
You'll get downvoted by Android fanboys but this is unequivocally true. Android hardware and software feels cheap, chintzy, and, I hate to use this Jobs-ism, it just lacks good taste.
I can only speculate at the root cause here, but fragmentation of the ecosystem probably plays a large role.
> Android hardware and software feels cheap, chintzy, and, I hate to use this Jobs-ism, it just lacks good taste.
Feel is highly subjective and de gustibus non est disputandum; to me, iOS clearly has a much stronger design aesthetic (not just visual, but especially there), but also a much less appealing one, even after it abandoned it's older, all-in skeumorphism aesthetic to follow the trend (which Apple did not lead) of cleaner, flatter design.
Don't really agree. I've had a Nexus 5 for years and it's been great. I think the old Google phones were the best kept secret (not really secret) out there. They came packaged with vanilla Android which is perfectly usable and the designs were usually very reserved and tasteful in my opinion.
Even though you can't get the simple Google phones any more, any Android device still has the "feature" that you can use it as a general purpose computer and not something that you are only permitted to use insofar as the manufacturer approves.
Definitely fragmentation: every vendor wants to pretend they’re Apple but they aren’t willing to invest in a serious team, plus the fact that nobody makes money after the initial sale means there’s no effort to ship improvements. Any iPhone will get half a decade of UI improvements but with Android you have to hope you get a model which sells well enough that the vendor & carrier actually ship anything more than critical security updates. The recent releases from Google aren’t bad but only a fraction of the market will see them without buying a new phone and then only if they buy the right phone.
Windows has the same shitty tastes. Graphic design is very poor on many versions of Windows, namely those accessible to students and others not running the latest version on the latest hardware. Mac has had beautiful design that is visually clean for years, but windows has been cluttered and frustrating.
I agree Windows desktop isn't much better visually but Windows Phone was very orderly, clean, fast even on potato phones, and had an astounding idle battery life.
It's an OS ruined by lack of developer interest which was caused by no small amount of mistakes from Microsoft. But it has (had) a very solid foundation.
Lol Which versions of Android are you using? The last couple of generations of stock Android have been quite polished.
Regarding software, it's the iPhone that looks like a phone from last decade. Bezelless screens are the future, and they appeared on Android devices much before the iPhone X
Let's wait and see if Apple has similar issues when the iPhone X comes out. We already know they're facing supply chain issues, perhaps the bottleneck is due to low yield on the OLED component.
The supply issues Apple has with the X are due to the scale of their global sales machine. If they were dealing with a few million of phones like Google is with the Pixel, instead of tens of millions of phones like they are with the X, there wouldn't be any supply chain issues.
Apple have stuck to LCD for all their iPhone's. The iPhone X will be the first with an OLED panel so it will be interesting to see if after a few months it also suffers from burn in.
Apple tends to be willing to pay more for the parts and they have very high quality standards.
That said they’re not immune. There have been a number of displays Apple used in the last few years with retention issues (I think the original rMBP has issues) so it’s perfectly possible.
If they made the gamble they must think it’s ok but as someone who plans to buy an X I can say it does worry me a bit.
Edit: another comment points out their keyboards. That obviously hasn’t been going well either.
The problem with the Pixel 2 XL screens seems to be attributable to LG. LG's own V30 phone has similar screen issues. Meanwhile Samsung's OLED panels are doing great so far - and Apple is sourcing from Samsung.
I've never seen a 1st gen apple watch with burn in, even. Mine is a bit over two years old. Apple seems to buy the absolute best quality displays, and have good control logic/orbiting/etc to prevent it. I use mine heavily, although i guess not as much as a phone. I've never heard of one getting burn in/retention though.
I have an iPhone7 from work and it is abysmally bad. It keeps stalling when I browse internet and file management is not an option. I miss my old motorola android that just worked every day.
If you’re having network hangs, does your IT department install a proxy or VPN? That doesn’t happen on normal devices but when enterprise IT is involved it’s common.
To be honest, it's substantially more than I expected as an iOS user. I've barely begun to deliberately use it, but find it nice that my drawing apps can import from the Files folder as well as directly from each other.
