Innovation or e-waste? Apple rumored to ditch headphone jack

[HarryT]

Are the reasons cosmetic? I thought it was more a case of not having two ports when one can serve both purposes.

If you were to do away with the Lightning connector, what would you connect peripherals to?

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Probably, yes, but you'd want that to happen. You don't want to physically damage the port on the phone by subjecting it to high levels of stress. If you physically catch the cable on an obstruction, you want the cable to detach. That's one reason that expensive headphones generally have a cable connection on the headphones themselves, so that if you catch something the cable pulls off rather than the headphones.

That was what Apple used to think when they made their headphone jacks able to release cables more and more easily back about ten or twelve years ago (pre-iPhone). Notice that this is no longer the case, and you can easily pick up an iPhone by the headphone cord and jerk on it pretty hard without the cord becoming unplugged.

For mobile devices, that failure to disconnect has saved more glass than you can possibly imagine by stopping the devices from hitting the ground. The headphone jacks can take the stress of being yanked on in all sorts of ways. The glass can't necessarily take an impact with concrete.

Besides, straight drops are the easy case. When the phone drops in a way that pulls the cord straight out, lightning will disconnect, and headphones might or might not, but either way, you aren't damaging the jack any more than you would by unplugging the device. Removal force, therefore, has almost zero bearing on the long-term reliability of the jack (assuming the jack is designed in the traditional way, with a plug going into the inside of the device).

The much harder problem is when the cord gets yanked at ninety degrees from straight. Those 1/8" connectors readily take such abuse and aren't damaged, even when you yank the cable so hard that the wire breaks internally. By contrast, if you yank a Lightning connector sideways with that much force, the blade will likely break off inside the device, and now you can't charge your phone until you find a way to dig it out with a tweezers.

And that's assuming that yanking on the connector doesn't torque the inside of the Lightning jack enough to prevent those almost microscopic connections from making reliable contact. The smaller the contacts, the more fragile the jack. Lightning, therefore, is orders of magnitude more fragile (inherently) than 1/8" connectors, because the contact surface is maybe a hundredth that of the contact surface on an 1/8" connector.

[pidgeon92]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Are the reasons cosmetic? I thought it was more a case of not having two ports when one can serve both purposes.

If you were to do away with the Lightning connector, what would you connect peripherals to?

Bluetooth/wi-fi? I think that's where we're headed.

[Phogg]

Originally Posted by pidgeon92

Bluetooth/wi-fi? I think that's where we're headed.

Or, more accurately, where the low fidelity market of occasional listeners may be headed.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by pidgeon92

Bluetooth/wi-fi? I think that's where we're headed.

There are many things that just doesn't work well for. Eg a camera adapter for transferring images from a camera's memory card.

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by HarryT

There are many things that just doesn't work well for. Eg a camera adapter for transferring images from a camera's memory card.

For some reason I don't think Apple will take such things into account... I remember devices where you cannot simply add a USB device to read memory cards because the device did not have a USB port of any form. You can buy an Apple product to do that too! (in this case, the lightning port, you can buy converters, from Apple, naturally).

So, who's stopping them to make a converter that works wirelessly instead of using the lightning port?

[GlennD]

There's already a solution in place for transferring images - iCloud. Apple's vision is all about your data existing in one place so that no matter what device is in your hand you have access to it. Sneaker-net (transferring by hand via SD card) is SO ten years ago.

Most of the peripherals are for niche markets, and Bluetooth hardware is dropping in price quickly. I could see Apple removing the headphone jack first, and then the lightning port, but it's only a matter of time before they're making a wireless device.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by GlennD

There's already a solution in place for transferring images - iCloud.

If I'm out in the field with my DSLR and I want to transfer images from my camera to my iPad to allow me to view them on a larger screen, that's really not a practical solution.

[meeera]

Originally Posted by HarryT

If I'm out in the field with my DSLR and I want to transfer images from my camera to my iPad to allow me to view them on a larger screen, that's really not a practical solution.

Doesn't everyone in the world have an unlimited mobile data plan and constant great mobile reception? C'mon.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by HarryT

If I'm out in the field with my DSLR and I want to transfer images from my camera to my iPad to allow me to view them on a larger screen, that's really not a practical solution.

Somehow I doubt that Apple cares about things like this. There'll still be plenty of non-Apple devices that'll allow you to do it.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Somehow I doubt that Apple cares about things like this. There'll still be plenty of non-Apple devices that'll allow you to do it.

I disagree. I don't see Apple removing physical connectors from the iPhone and iPad any time in the future; the peripherals market is just too lucrative - including to Apple themselves.

As always, though, time will tell.

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by GlennD

There's already a solution in place for transferring images - iCloud. Apple's vision is all about your data existing in one place so that no matter what device is in your hand you have access to it. Sneaker-net (transferring by hand via SD card) is SO ten years ago.

A single RAW file from my DSLR is about 25-30 megabytes. My home Internet connection is 3 megabits per seconds down, 600 kilobits per second up. Even if my camera could somehow upload to iCloud, transferring a single RAW file from the camera to my phone via iCloud would take 400 seconds, or almost seven minutes.

Even at the absolute maximum theoretical LTE speed possible, it would still take something like fifteen seconds, and would use a big, big chunk of your cellular data allowance for the month, too.

Apple's vision of a wireless world is a beautiful vision, but unfortunately, it is based on ivory-tower thinking that can't actually work in the real world. The cloud is not a substitute for local storage, and cannot possibly be a substitute for local storage in the near term or even medium term, simply because we don't have gigabit fiber to the curb, and we don't have 8G cellular networks or whatever.

Anybody who says otherwise hasn't watched as the photographs from a single photo shoot saturated their DSL connection's uplink for 2 weeks straight.

DSLR photos are big. Really big.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by dgatwood

DSLR photos are big. Really big.

Yep. After four days in the Louvre a few weeks ago I came away with one and a half 128GB memory cards filled. I shoot in raw and, as you say, a typical image is around 25-30MB. My Adobe Lightroom library (where I store all my images) currently occupies 3x2TB external drives.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

For some reason I don't think Apple will take such things into account... I remember devices where you cannot simply add a USB device to read memory cards because the device did not have a USB port of any form. You can buy an Apple product to do that too! (in this case, the lightning port, you can buy converters, from Apple, naturally).

So, who's stopping them to make a converter that works wirelessly instead of using the lightning port?

I've been transferring files wirelessly to and from my phone (and even from phone to phone) since I have a smartphone. One of the first things I looked for was an Android FTP-server.

It was actually called FTPServer, and I use it to this day. I've also set it up for other people, and use some shortcuts in Windows to start an FTP-session in Windows Explorer. The only thing that needs to be done is starting and stopping the server.

OK, it's somewhat technical to set up, but now I can transfer files from and to the phone wirelessly without relying on third party services or devices. When using a file explorer with FTP client on another smartphone, it obviously works from phone to phone as well.

Originally Posted by HarryT

If I'm out in the field with my DSLR and I want to transfer images from my camera to my iPad to allow me to view them on a larger screen, that's really not a practical solution.

Get a very professional camera, with integrated FTP client, and use an ad-hoc wireless connection between the phone and the camera. The Canon 1D-series can do this for some years already. (Granted, you'll paaaaaay...)

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by dgatwood

Anybody who says otherwise hasn't watched as the photographs from a single photo shoot saturated their DSL connection's uplink for 2 weeks straight.

DSLR photos are big. Really big.

I did photography as a semi-professional / freelancer. When I needed to send a huge photoshoot somewhere, I just used an external hard drive and send it by post. The receiver would send the hard drive back after taking the pictures off.