| | | I'm happy to see Apple putting it there, on the same shelf as SCSI, floppies, VGA, S-Video, Serial, Parallel...
It just seems premature to me. 3.5mm is a standard that is more popular than ever. There were 300 million 3.5mm headphones sold last year, not including the 230 million that came with iPhones and probably 500 million that came with Android phones. All told, well over 1 billion new headphones with standard 3.5 mm jacks found their way to consumers in the last year alone. Compare that to maybe 60 million bluetooth and lightning headphones combined. These other options are just not ready for mass market. Apple has a distinguished history for forcing consumer change, but their recent track record is spotty (TouchID may be their most recent success story?). And at a time when Apple is having a hard time convincing iPhone users to upgrade, an iPhone that looks indistinguishable from an iPhone 6, whose biggest talking point appears to be the removal of a beloved and widely used standard port, will be bad news for shareholders. Obviously, Apple will attempt to change the narrative. It will be critical for Apple to tell a compelling story how removing the jack enabled features that benefited their users (thinner, better battery life, extra speaker, waterproofing?). I'm sure Apple isn't doing this simply for change's sake, but personally, I don't see any potential reasoning that would be preferable to just having a headphone jack. I have bluetooth headphones that I use occassionally, but I use the 3.5mm jack far more often. |
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