Apple announcement triggered some weird flashbacks...

[Dark Jaguar]

It's official, Apple's new phone won't have a headphone jack. It's opted for a proprietary format, but they are making a little accessory that'll convert the old standard to lightning. While they made that announcement, I kept thinking back to Nintendo's exclusion of the audio jack from the GBA SP, with a similar adapter made for it, and the similar restriction of not being able to charge the GBA while using headphones.

Then Miyamoto suddenly showed up on stage.

I think it all makes sense now.



Apple is asserting this is just progress, and it was brave of them to do this. I just have to ask why it's progress now and it wasn't back then. We've had USB headsets for years after all, and I've yet to notice any real quality difference between an analog and a digital signal. This is probably because no matter how that attachment works, in the end it has to turn into an analog signal anyway before it reaches your ears. The signal, in all modern computers, also always starts out as a digital one. What difference does it make, ultimately, whether the signal turns to analog at the phone end or by your ears? It's a pretty short distance to travel after all, and not really much to degrade it. I suppose if nothing else, it'll prevent their own designs from adding noise before it's even left the phone. So... there's that.

Really though, even if there was a good reason to make the signal digital for longer (for example, Ultra HD just isn't doable over a VGA connection, at least not without some ridiculously expensive signal tuning hardware and an incredibly high gauge cable, though I don't see anyone introducing Ultra High Def sound equipment pushing out those frequencies fast enough to need a digital solution), the biggest issue is they made it proprietary. I'm not buying two headsets just so I can use one with Apple products and another with everything else (everything else opting for USB-C, as it happens).

The real reason for all this has been leaking out all over the place. Digital signals can be encoded, and encoded signals mean DRM schemes, and there's already an active push to implement DRM into the upcoming USB-C audio standard. The music industry has relented and current online music stores sell their music in DRM-free forms. There's simply no point in trying any sort of DRM when anyone that knows how to connect an output jack to an input jack can circumvent it. If it's protected though, well, the music industry is going to start encoding their new releases and advertising them as "lightning/USB-C connector exclusive", making ridiculous claims about how this "new music standard" sounds way too good to work correctly on old analog connectors.

There's reason to hope though. The switch to HDMI made logical sense and brought with it substantial upgrades, but this switch is so pointless any claims about music quality would be exposed as lies almost immediately. It's just a matter of us getting out there and making sure they don't get a chance to get their message out ANYWHERE without it being immediately challenged.

[A Black Falcon]

Nintendo gave up and put a headphone jack in their next handheld. I hope Apple is forced to do the same, but with their success and influence it's probably not going to happen, sadly enough. I don't think their reasons for getting rid of a headphone jack are very convincing, but Apple always has been overly obsessed with simplifying the form of things in ways which damage their function, so this is right up Apple's wheelhouse! Think of the one-button mouse, the iMac not having a floppy drive, Apple's concepts of (overly simplified) OS design, Steve Jobs always wanting to get rid of every possible button from Apple's portable devices, etc etc. These are all exactly the kinds of things that have always made me dislike Apple.

[Dark Jaguar]

The iMac ditching the floppy drive is the one choice I was actually in total agreement about. Floppy drives had already been replaced with better options when that decision came along. These days, ditching optical drives even makes sense in light of how incredibly cheap reusable USB flash drives are.

The key difference is that the replacement was both already established and had clear advantages over the previous status quo. No such advantages or standards exist to replace audio jacks.

[A Black Falcon]

Better options, in the late '90s? Like what? Zip drives hold more data, but are also magnetic media so unfortunately they're just as unreliable as regular floppies. USB did exist (I presume that the iMac had a USB port?), but flash drives were not a thing yet, not really. And CD-Rs or CD-RWs are definitely not any kind of replacement, they're too limited in writes, media, etc. Even today people often want things on some physical format and not just the internet, and in the iMac's time that was even more true... Apple got rid of the floppy drive a good 5-8 years too early. I would say that only once flashdrives became cheap and affordable did getting rid of floppy drives make sense.

[Dark Jaguar]

MAYBE 1998 might have been too soon, maybe. (I was already using rewritable CDs at the time, actually, and while they weren't AS rewritable as floppies, they certainly had more capacity, and they were cheap enough, even then, that I considered the tradeoff worth it. Seriously, the space on a floppy disk just wasn't enough for ANY files I actually cared to transfer, and if it was just text, e-mail had already replaced physical media of ANY sort for my data transfer needs.) However, seriously, 5 to 8 years? USB enclosures for hard drives would come along pretty early on, but are you honestly suggesting that they shouldn't have removed floppy support until 2006? No, that's ridiculous.

[A Black Falcon]

Rewritable CDs are unreliable and take quite some time to burn. They also can take some time to burn. I've never thought of CD-RWs as being a decent replacement for floppies, they're better for longer-term storage. And anyway, I don't think we had one. I certainly didn't have a CD-R drive in the computer I got in fall '01; I chose a DVD drive instead of a CD-R drive. I wouldn't have a writer (DVD-RW drive) in that machine until 2005 or 2006. The computer we had at home may have had a CD-R drive well before that, I think it did actually, but I didn't use it that much.

So what was I using in '98? Zip disks. The things fail all the time, sure, but at least it doesn't take forever to write to the disk, unlike a CD, and 100MB (or more for later models) is plenty for most things I could have needed it for. That computer I got in '01 may not have had a CD writer when I got it, but it did, and still does, have a Zip 250 drive.

In college though, I mostly used email and printouts for school purposes, yeah. But in high school before that (I graduated in spring '01), it was mostly printouts and floppy disks. But in general, while their usefulness dropped rapidly over the first half of the '00s, I really do think that it was flash drives that ended the usefulness of floppy disks. Zip disks and CD-Rs both have significant drawbacks that kept them from becoming the major format, either the hassle of burning a disk, the reliability problems for both formats, media costs, or what have you. Flash drives have none of those drawbacks, except for cost but that is alleviated by how much they can hold and how reliable they are (provided you don't break them of course). There are a lot of reasons people would want files on physical media and not only email or some other digital file transfer protocol, and it's flash drives that succeeded in the market bigtime in a way nothing had since floppies.

(Of course, me being me the computer I got in 2007 still had (and has) a floppy drive in it, but that was mostly for compatibility with my floppy disk game collection, not because I expected to use it much for storage purposes. And it's never had a Zip drive, since flash drives rendered those irrelevant.)

[Dark Jaguar]

Your points about the drawbacks of CDs are all true, and noted, but nothing negates the singular capacity advantage that CDs had over floppy disks. The choice basically comes down to "will this file actually fit on this disk?". Yes, backup programs let you spread an archive across multiple floppies, but now you've just replaced my choice between one CD and 30 or so floppy disks. All in all though, both decay too fast. Bit rot is pretty bad in both formats, neither one ever even being meant to use for archiving for as long as people have. I mean, there are very expensive "archival" writable optical discs, but there's that "very expensive" part. Frankly, for archival purposes, Flash wins once again. Eventually, flash can be written to enough for it to die, but if you just use it for storage after writing to it once, it'll last longer than I will.

Also, initial reviews say the lightning to audio jack adapter actually makes the audio quality worse than before. (This is subject to revision, because audiophiles and their madness exist.)

This highlights the main difference between the audio jack removal and the floppy drive removal.

Incidentally, I've had access to bluetooth wireless headsets for years now. If I really wanted to, I could simply go that route, and even use that solution on my current consoles and PC (just stuck a wireless card in there, which among other things enables bluetooth). I have very good reason not to. For one, all the convenience of carrying around wireless headphones is instantly negated by the additional need to carry around a charging station for said wireless headphones. Secondly, no one has ever actually been inconvenienced by headphone wires. If anything, all it did was make sharing the same song between two people a bit tougher, but in an adorable match-making kind of way. At worst, the cords get tangled. At least that issue has a clear and present solution most functional adults can manage, unlike bluetooth synching issues, which require your entire family to bug you at ungodly hours for a solution you probably won't be able to find, let alone explain, over the phone.

In short, everything was fine. There was nothing that needed fixing. Just stick the audio jack in there and eat the costs for all eternity like you're supposed to. You can afford it, you're Apple. You regularly charge twice the price for the same hardware sold by others because you get to charge the Apple tax.

Additional observation: The lightning jack is "reversible" in exactly one way, a binary flip. The audio jack was "omnireversible", and could be inserted at literally any rotation. Additionally, the added wires the audio jack has obtained over the years (first to make it stereo, then to add a line for microphone and a line for button input) mean digital signals can just be added to that standard. Heck, add a bunch of really tiny "rings" near the very top meant entirely for USB C compatible connections. No signal would be sent down the cable (garbling the audio in incompatible headphones) unless the headphones first send a negotiating signal up the line to the device. Combine that with the smallest form factor of that jack, you have a space saver, and heck, the USB C connector might as well just BE on the old aux connector at that point. Wouldn't that be something?

[A Black Falcon]

Apple's next challenge will presumably to get rid of the lightning port (and replace it with only capacitive support or something?), so their phones will have no ugly holes in them at all...

... Yes, I know that would break innumerable things, but so did this. Form always matters more than function after all!

Your points about the drawbacks of CDs are all true, and noted, but nothing negates the singular capacity advantage that CDs had over floppy disks. The choice basically comes down to "will this file actually fit on this disk?". Yes, backup programs let you spread an archive across multiple floppies, but now you've just replaced my choice between one CD and 30 or so floppy disks. All in all though, both decay too fast. Bit rot is pretty bad in both formats, neither one ever even being meant to use for archiving for as long as people have. I mean, there are very expensive "archival" writable optical discs, but there's that "very expensive" part. Frankly, for archival purposes, Flash wins once again. Eventually, flash can be written to enough for it to die, but if you just use it for storage after writing to it once, it'll last longer than I will.

As bad as CD-Rs or CD-RWs are for moving files from one computer to another or short-term storage, for longer term storage, they will surely last longer than floppies! Floppies are terrible and fail all the time. CD-Rs do fail, often, but I don't think discs are quite as unreliable as magnetic media is. You're right though, both are terrible for longer-term archival purposes, use something better for that.