Thread: AirPods (2019)
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chucker
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: near Bremen, Germany
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2019-08-13, 16:25

Quote:
Originally Posted by PB PM View Post
I love how Apple fanboys call this innovation, as if Apple did something great. It was a cash grab made in collusion with headphone manufacturers who wanted to find a way to increase margins,
I… don't buy that at all.

First, because this idea of "we're gonna remove a port and then make people buy headphones they wouldn't otherwise have bought" doesn't make sense in several ways. The iPhone shipped with EarPods before and continues to ship with EarPods now — just with Lightning instead of line-out. If you wanted fancier headphones than that, you would have bought them regardless of what the port is. (And for AirPods in particular, I just don't see that. Nobody says "well I would have stuck to headphones I already have, but now that they don't work, I'm going to get $159 ones I don't actually want". They'll either, again, stick with the bundled EarPods or just get cheap headphones — not ones from Apple.)

And second, we already know what motivated this. It was a drive to make the device thinner and simpler. Was it in part misguided? Maybe, but that's a discussion for the Jony Ive leaving thread. And maybe it really wasn't that off, since other vendors are following suit.

(Or they're in on the conspiracy, too. Dun dun dun DUNNNNNN)

Quote:
Originally Posted by PB PM View Post
it sure wasn’t done to improve anything for consumers.
Well, no. Not every engineering change directly benefits the user. And yet, at some point, that jack was gonna go, just like any other plug has. We don't still have SCSI on the iPhone.

Quote:
Originally Posted by PB PM View Post
Did Apple make some half decent wireless headphones? Yes. They could have done so without removing the plug and forcing users to buy toss away items that will be in a landfill in two years because the batteries are dead.
I'm not even sure what you're arguing here. You're saying they're "half decent"? Well, AirPods would have been a far worse product if they had been designed to be thick, heavy and clunky enough to support removable batteries (and still fit in the average ear). Part of what makes them "half decent" is precisely the same engineering trade-off that also makes them problematic on environment and repairability concerns.
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