Look at the port closely. This is the standard for audio from time immemorial. This is the port that Sony and htc tried to kill unsuccessfully. Apple purportedly today is trying to kill it again. If any company has the scale, support and the market power to make a case against this 3.5 mm port, it is Apple. But it’s one of the few places in technology where the ecosystem connects into something much larger than Apple or computers or the tech industry. Its an ecosystem of how we listen to music in general.
Apple in the past made decisions that seemed crazy but the tradeoffs made gave people enough reasons to forgive the company. When Apple ditched 3 1/2 inch floppy, CD ROM was being widely accepted and the storage, read and write speeds made people forget the floppy fast. When Apple removed Ethernet ports, the convenience and standards allowed people to adjust to WiFi without a complaint. By the time CD ROM slot is removed from MacBook Air, people already started transitioning to USB based drives and in some cases Thunderbolt based storage options.
Now in the mentioned 3 instances, removal of a legacy port/option is traded off with a great alternative that user perceived as good enough and in some cases backed Apple with their wallets. But Headphone jack is a completely different story.
This is a port that lots of devices are connect to. There are tons of accessibility devices that plug into the headphone jack. It is great that Apple is reported to be providing the adapter bundled with iPhone but the interface would be a lot messier.
If we start talking about DRM issue that’s even more complex. Once this analog port is removed in favour of digital Lightning connector, a lot more issues are going to arise. Digitalising the signals has this knock on effects that essentially accrue control to some other entity than being open standard. For example a manufacturer of earphones essentially has to get permission from Apple to make the connector as Apple has the licensing programming for Lightning connector. In addition to this you might have to go and get the permission from some 3rd party DRM vendor to send Spotify through it or Netflix audio through it. This argument might sound insane and pessimistic but this is the history of digital signal change. So Apple should either have an open standard for audio part of lightning connector or at least should promise the manufacturers of equipment that the standards are not going to change in the future.
The other headache with having standard of your own is that if someone forgets to pack earphones on a trip, he/she can still find decent quality earphones at an affordable price. But that no longer will be the case. You should have packed the connector or the lightning compatible earphones or else you would be spending a lot to buy compatible earphones. Over time, lightning might become the standard and might be available everywhere at affordable prices but again that’s a long journey. So the biggest tradeoff here is the universalness of the jack.
I think the message from the Apple is going to be to go wireless. Bluetooth sucks when it comes to audio quality. There is a saying in the industry that bluetooth should have a slogan: “Bluetooth: It’s gonna be better next year.” So Apple might come up with their own wireless technology that can provide superior sound quality in comparison with bluetooth. And this again is going to rise issues with proprietary vs open standard debate. Now that if Apple has its own wireless technology the side effects of this will be that it might render many wireless bluetooth earphones useless and there can be a warning that says “Device not supported” analogous to the warning “Charger not supported” you get when you connect to lightning connector that didn’t acquire license from Apple. So if it’s going to be wireless Apple has to go open standard - might be Bluetooth 5!
So the only way Apple could pull this off is when the quality is so much better that one couldn’t believe how they spent half their lives listening to inferior quality audio. That’s a high order bit.
The amount of obvious risk Apple is going take by removing headphone jack vs the amount of currently available benefit is way lopsided. I don’t want to be someone to be remembered in the history on the same lines of bloggers who called iPad dumb and iPhone un-exciting. My take on this is – let’s wait and see, I don’t know where it is going to take us. Knowing Apple they might pull up a compelling use case tonight that the removal of the port is completely justified.
One more thing:
The explanation to why they are doing it is that the next year is the 10th anniversary of iPhone and it is rumoured that the plans for next year’s iPhone are grand even by Apple’s standards. The next year’s iPhone is purported to have an edge to edge display which cannot accommodate a headphone jack. They could have removed the headphone jack next year but they might not want people to perceive headphone jack as a tradeoff they need to forego for the beautiful display for the next year's Phone and they are transitioning us there! But as always only time will tell.
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