"Free range" -> "Free reign"
"analogueue" -> !!
Analyst outfit CCS Insight issued a report about the innovation crisis in smartphones this week – and Apple has done little to address this with an iPhone update quickly labelled as incremental. At its main annual product event, Apple implicitly acknowledged the failure of the smartwatch to take off by repositioning the second …
Is it really a bad thing for new devices to feature "incremental" improvements? We've pretty much reached the point with smartphones where they do what we need and they do it reasonably well.
Except that the iPhone 7 is regressive in that they eliminated the headphone jack, and it's just an obvious money grab. Wifey and I have already decided to skip iPhones until headphone jack reappears.
An incremental change would be to make it THICKER and give a bigger battery.
I've read all this funny crap online about how since they eliminated the the headphone jack they don't need a DAC anymore. Hello? how do you think a speaker works?
I think you are going to be waiting for a very long time.
Now that Apple have done this, all the other major players will be doing the same thing so (IMHO) in less than a year it will almost be impossible to buy any model of phone that has late 2016 specs or better that also includes a headphone jack.
OTOH, if say Samsung stood firm and didn't go down this route then they might get a lot of converts from fruity devices for the very reasons you are talking about.
"Now that Apple have done this, all the other major players will be doing the same thing so (IMHO) "
Hugely doubt that tbh, for much the same reason all the other vendors have stuck with standard interchangeable USB connections while Apple have always conspicuously avoided ever releasing an iPhone that can use a cable bought form some other phone company. The market strategy of the 'droid manufacturers hinges on making it easy for users of other 'droid models to switch to them, while Apple's is all about making leaving Apple difficult. Ditching the 3.5mm jack is classic Apple but would be a bad move for, say, Sony or Samsung.
I've just spent 4 days in mobile free rural Devon where the "real" FM radio was the only thing that worked.
I guess I should have added a sarcasm tag. *sigh*
Right up until you want to listen to the football commentary while you are live at the game.
You lost me at football commentary.
and you generally cant listen to it over the net anyway because all the towers are saturated by 20k people all posting to Facebook of themselves 'at the match'.
I take a $2 AM radio to every match and have people clustered around me asking for the commentary......sometimes the old tech works best.....and I work in tech.
>Now that Apple have done this, all the other major players will be doing the same thing so (IMHO) in less than a year it will almost be impossible to buy any model of phone that has late 2016 specs or better that also includes a headphone jack.
Nah - Samsung and LG will instead release phones with two headphone jacks - citing the (very real) popularity of shared listening, cost, audio quality and the easy availability of BT cans for cable haters.
By abolishing analogue there’s now a clearer digital path to your ear, and the phones get smaller.
When it comes to things like ear buds it really doesn't matter because the most important thing that matter is how the mechanics move the air to make the sound. Focussing on digital vs analogue is a "watch the ball" trick so that the sleight of hand can be performed.
There are so many other problems associated with removing the 3.5 mm plug: if you want to stay wired, the connection is now "at the wrong end" of the phone: should always be at the top of the phone. Personally, I much prefer using Bluetooth to avoid all the cable chaos. My best were some Sennheiser things on a neck cord: easy to use, good battery life and good sound but the controls stopped working at some point. Went with a Jabra dog tag for a while but controls weren't as good, neither was battery life and it was very susceptible to interference.
Despite the poor experience with Jabra I recently bough a Halo Smart for cycling and it does the job brilliantly: excellent battery life (15 hours talk/music) and microphone out of the wind. Controls could be bigger. As for hifi: well I'm on the fucking road and I need to hear any traffic / horns / sirens, so I can just about live without the feeling of being in the Royal Albert Hall!
But there's something missing from this article, as there was indeed in the presentation: what about new Mac hardware? Lots of us have cash we're desperate to give to Apple but not for last year's models.
Will audio quality get better? By abolishing analogue there’s now a clearer digital path to your ear, and the phones get smaller.
But hold on, hold on... How is there an abolishment of analogue - if there is an adapter with Lightning on one end and a normal headphone socked on the other? Or does that flimsy piece of wire somehow magically includes a self-contained DAC and an amplifier? I wouldn't think so...
My guess is that the analogue audio stage is still there, inside the phone, they just save on the 3.5 socket (which does take a lot of space inside, indeed) and output the analogue signal through the Lightning.
I don't know the pinout on Lightning but I'm pretty sure that's what they've done...
>Or does that flimsy piece of wire somehow magically includes a self-contained DAC and an amplifier? I wouldn't think so.
No need, analogue out is supported by Lightning - and the iPhone requires both anyway for its (finally stereo) speakers!
They've always hated the jack - requires a 'large' ugly flattened edge for the socket and so even the stumpy Apple jacks leave that awkward looking angled gap when plugged into most iDevices.
'Air Buds' are too much temptation for wags - I predict that launching them from unsuspecting ears with an artistic finger flick will be the new 'happy slap' by Xmas.
An illustrative example?
My other half came home with a replacement for her iphone 5, an iphone SE.
"It didn't cost me anything" she says. Which was rather overlooking that as she had come to end of contract she would stop paying off the current phone and the amount of spare money she had at end of month would go up. (in fairness she will sell on the old phone and recoup some cash)
She may have more storage, given Apple's vice-like control on the heresy of removable storage the previous was a little tight by now. Though now I think on it, she could have just cleared off some photos, and messages. Or those apps she didn't use that were contributing to the red circled notification on the iTunes store icon.
Anyway, a modest upgrade that delivered exactly what she wanted. But could have been solved by the 'innovation' of a SD slot.
I fear that in 2-3 years and like the Headphone jack, for most people this will be a thing of the past.
Samsung seem to have given is a reprieve with the S7 but IMHO, the writing is on the wall for the removable SD card and then the SIM tray will be done away with as well.
Thet leaves markets like the Middle East with a problem. Many phones sold there have dual sims. How will those users manage in the future.
Why?
Costs. pure and simple. Mechanical trays cost money and are a PITA when it comes to reliability.
It is a shame but I just get the feeling that both are on borrowed time. This will cause a lot of teeth gnashing for some commentards here but really... aren't you supposed to put everything into the cloud???
I am joking ok but that what the marketing people want us to think and do.
>>>Costs. pure and simple. Mechanical trays cost money and are a PITA when it comes to reliability.
This, this here, one of the most moronic arguments ever.
Samsung saving .50p on a mechanical connector saves nothing to you or to Samsung.
Shall I remind you that you are who pays for the phone?
This is the same logic that drive moronic decisions at companies, my favorite is the moron at Commodore who removed one serial line from the motherboard of the C64 to save a few pennies, destroying the speed of the serial bus in the process.
And so on.
The customer pays for the product, and no one buys a product >100 pounds because it is .50p cheaper!
@John Sanders
You make the fatal mistake of assuming these products are made for the benefit of the customer or the planet! :)
A quick google search tells me Apple sold 231.22 million phones in 2015. At 50p the sd card tray would have cost them £115 million in materials alone. Further add development, test, repairs, and so on.
So unless the tray brings in enough *profits* to offset £115 million, what's good for the customer or the planet is irrelevant.
And it is fair to say given the iphone SE "free" replacement tale, it is actually even more profitable not to put in the tray, because it generates an almost guaranteed future sale. I swear I think that is why they price their storage upgrades so high. You're paying for the lost future sale too.
Do enough to make them return to your newer product, and make sure they don't realise you're actually screwing them.
It's not just the material cost here, it's the value Apple have attached to having more storage on the iPhone.
Current cost of an iPhone SE SIM-free on Carphone Warehouse:
16GB model - £359
64GB model - £439
iPhone 6S SIM-free:
16GB model - £529
64GB model - £599
Apple seem to attach a value of £70 to a 48GB memory upgrade - whereas a 64GB SanDisk MicroSD XC1 is £14.38* or a 128GB is £34.99** on Amazon.co.uk. So it's worth a lot more to them than simply losing 50p, they're actually losing £70.50 per phone that might have been upgraded, as 16GB is very restrictive in terms of what can be stored on the phone and is often regarded as just present in the price list so they can say the iPhone cost is "from" a particular price. This is the only thing that's good about the iPhone 7 as far as I can see - they've removed the 16GB option from the lineup.
* https://www.amazon.co.uk/SanDisk-Android-microSDXC-Frustration-Packaging/dp/B013UDL58E/
** https://www.amazon.co.uk/SanDisk-Android-MicroSDXC-Frustration-Packaging/dp/B013UDL5HU/
>The customer pays for the product, and no one buys a product >100 pounds because it is .50p cheaper!
True, but they aren't going to drop the price by 50p are they. Imagine you're a manufacturer making & selling 10M phones per year. Saving 50p per phone means you make £5M more profit. The customer pays for the product, but the manufacturer specifies it.