I have non-anecdotal evidence that people definitely buy the Lightning to headphone adapter. We sell them in our stores and it's one of our biggest accessory sales.<p>You know why people buy them all the time, though? Because, frankly, it's a terrible design. It's tiny, easy to lose or forget, and they break easily. <i>That's</i> why it has such terrible reviews in the Apple store site--it's not a good product for what it is.<p>I deal with Apple products on the daily, and the removal of the headphone jack is still one of the things that irritates me most about Apple.<p>The others would be: the whole battery scandal where Apple slowed down older phones without explaining that the battery, a replaceable component, was the issue. And the 2016-2018 MacBook keyboards, which are an absolute travesty.<p>The headphone to Lightning adapter may be a "marvel of engineering", but it was a completely unnecessary one. It doesn't create more room inside the phone, and Samsung had water-resistant phones with headphone jacks. It's basically designed to force you on to more expensive wireless headphones.
It is an impressive engineering feat, and certainly better than the Android ones that just pass analog through the USB-C jack, but it's worth noting that this DAC performs worse than what it replaced [1]. Dynamics have less range, there's more THD, and output impedance is lower, so it's harder to drive heavier headphones. I noticed a difference in clarity using Audio-Technica ATH-M50s and Beyerdynamic DT 990 250Ω. Specifically, the Beyerdynamics could be driven "good enough" for me with the iPhone SE jack, but I wasn't happy with how they sounded on the Lightning dongle.<p>[1] <a href="https://ifixit.org/blog/8448/apple-audio-adapter-teardown/" rel="nofollow">https://ifixit.org/blog/8448/apple-audio-adapter-teardown/</a>
An engineering marvel necessary because of product design stupidity.<p>One can neither use the same headphones for a Mac and iPhone, nor charge an iPhone from a Mac using the cables that come with the devices.<p>I barely use that crap adapter because it's inconvenient. Thank goodness Macs still support headphone jacks.
Not everybody agrees about the sound quality, compared to the jacks on iDevices:<p>- [German] <a href="https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/iPhone-7-nachgemessen-Audio-Adapter-liefert-schlechteren-Sound-3325932.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/iPhone-7-nachgemessen-Audio-...</a><p>- [Summarising the above] <a href="https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/256241/45492" rel="nofollow">https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/256241/45492</a><p>- Another test: <a href="http://soundexpert.org/articles/-/blogs/audio-quality-of-lightning-to-3-5mm-headphone-jack-adapter" rel="nofollow">http://soundexpert.org/articles/-/blogs/audio-quality-of-lig...</a><p>- <a href="https://ifixit.org/blog/8448/apple-audio-adapter-teardown/" rel="nofollow">https://ifixit.org/blog/8448/apple-audio-adapter-teardown/</a>
I've been using Mac products since I was a child (thanks, dad) more or less happily and the removal of the headphone jack and the requirement that you have these adaptors has been the first thing to make me seriously consider going elsewhere. I probably won't, due to years of lock-in, but to rephrase it's the worst experience I've had with anything Apple in my lifetime. I've had three adaptors, two Apple ones that broke in separate ways (one would keep firing commands randomly from the control buttons on my headphones, the other lost the right channel entirely) and a crappy third party one that just fell apart. Even when the adaptor works, having a dongle sticking out of your pants pocket is a total pain that nobody really asked for. It solves no problem, it's in no way better than the previous alternative, and it really just reads like a massive "fuck you, pay me" from Apple to their customers.<p>I settled on non-Apple bluetooth headphones, which have their own set of problems but at least I can reliably listen to music during my commute (for the most part).
HN hug of death?
"503 Service Unavailable"<p>Here's the Google Cache link:
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This doesn't replace the fact that I never wanted my headphone jack taken away in the first place. They broke a perfectly good thing in the name of $200 wireless earbuds.
> Personally, I’m amazed whenever I use it but I always wonder for a moment, “what if Apple just made what people wanted?”<p>"What people want" is pretty slippery. For every person I've heard complain about needing the dongle, I've known at least one or two others who exclusively use the wireless ear buds and wouldn't go back. YMMV.
This is just another entry in the "Apple: a Dongle Company" narrative. Apple has long had a philosophy of designing things their way and making the consumer adapt to their whims, rather than accepting standards or designing for the way people like to use things.<p>If you're charitable, you can say that they design with the future in mind. If you're not, you can say they know they can squeeze out more revenue via dongles and be indifferent to consumer wants because they have the size and market loyalty to get away with it. Depends on how you feel about Apple, I suppose
I have one. I had to buy it as my 8 didn't come with it.<p>I think the louder supporters of the 3.5mm jack removal are a bit disingenuous with how simple BT is. I have several iDevices. As does my wife. If we turn on a BT speaker, we don't know which device it will connect to. Sometimes the last one, sometime whichever one responds to the speaker faster[0]. My BT headphones? Same thing; will it connect to my work phone? My personal phone? My iPad? My laptop? Who knows? Here's what I <i>do</i> know, A 3.5mm jack with always[1] connect to the device I want it to connect to.<p>[0] I'm sure someone will tell me I'm doing it wrong. Whatever, a 3.5mm jack still wins here.<p>[1] For most definitions of always.
Wired headphones have better sound quality, are cheaper and easier to repair (considering the same headphones wired vs wireless), do not need to be charged, and the battery does not degrade over time.<p>Really, what is the mobile industry thinking? Apple was the first but everyone else is following.
From the comments I've read here, I guess a contrarian take:<p>If the purpose of the decision was to get people to move to wireless headphones, then specifically for myself and my network of folks, this seems to have worked.<p>Initially I had the Oppo Wired headphones. Soon after removing-3.5mm-gate (and dealing with the adapter), I'm exclusively on wireless: the Airpods and the latest Sony over ear headphones.<p>Honestly, at the cost of sound quality (which used to be important to me), but gaining noise-cancelling and not having to wrangle with wires, it's such a convenience. Apple was right, and I imagine the trend will largely be towards wireless. That being said, experience still has a ways to go (connect, battery), and die-hard audiophiles will never be satiated.
In the years that have passed since switching to an iPhone without a headphone jack, I have never once needed to use that dongle. Bluetooth more than covers my use cases. So the article is correct, I don't want it, but I also don't need it.
It wasn’t “free” in terms of money. Neither were the tires that came with my car.<p>It’s also not free in terms of time spent thinking about them. Like all dongles, I have to remember to bring them wherever I go in case I need them.<p>They’re an engineering marvel, no doubt about it. I just wish I didn’t maybe need it.
As an Android user, I am still regularly annoyed by Apple removing the headphone jack because it gave Google the "courage" to do it. And that has negatively impacted my life regularly in the past couple of years.<p>The main problem I have with Bluetooth headphones is that it's so much effort to switch them between devices. I have 3-4 things that I regularly listen to headphones on, and after repeatedly loosing my dongle, I just gave up and bought a separate set of Bluetooth earbuds for my phone.<p>It's the same in reverse with shared Bluetooth outputs like Amazon Echos and my wife and I's car. They always want to connect to whichever phone was <i>last</i> rather than whichever phone I'm trying to connect it to right now. I literally turn off Bluetooth on my phone whenever my wife wants to connect hers to the echo.<p>With the car, I previously used the aux input and let Bluetooth be exclusively for her. Now I just listen to audio through the phone speakers and don't use the car speakers at all. My car audio experience is significantly shittier than when I had a phone with an headphone jack. Thankfully, I don't drive very much.<p>I know there are workarounds for this, but they're all significantly more complex and expensive than a simple headphones jack.<p>That and, of course, it's one more battery to charge.
I am pretty convinced that this greatly degrades audio quality on my aux headphones. Bluetooth quality is normal, but with this cable, I can hear the difference. When plugged into an amp/speaker the grain is so abundantly obvious (compared to a BT or AUX connection)
> But guess what? No one wants it<p>With 794 reviews, clearly some people want it. The bad reviews tell us more accurately that; "no one likes it".
It's weird that this much quality went into the guts, but they couldn't make the cable on it a little more sturdy. I use mine sparingly, but it feels like it's going to break if I look at it the wrong way, and I've read that some people have to replace it every couple months.
It's Apple's Thunderbolt to FireWire adapter that amazes me. That little $29 thing is a full PCI-e device --- there is a PCI-e interface and a FireWire chipset built into the housing. And the little cable has a huge number of individual cables inside of it.<p><a href="https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD464LL/A/apple-thunderbolt-to-firewire-adapter" rel="nofollow">https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD464LL/A/apple-thunderbo...</a>
If only Apple had put that phenomenal technology in their actual phones instead of making it a $9 dongle.<p>Like, I'd be more tolerant of Apple's decision to drop the 3.5mm jack if it had coincided with Apple migrating iPhones to USB-C connectors, since at least that has the opportunity to play nicely with the rest of the USB-C ecosystem (which is growing pretty extensively) and could be a good way to push USB-C as "the" new standard for audio device connectivity (especially since USB-C directly supports analog <i>and</i> digital audio; the standard seems to advise rather strongly against using USB-C as a 3.5mm replacement outright, but a bit of "Courage™" from Apple could shift the tides such that such a prohibition is excluded from USB-C implementations). Their failure to do so makes it clear that Apple would rather make money on accessories tied to proprietary connectors than actually make good and useful products.
A related tip - if you've got a ThinkPad X1 Yoga with its awful internal headphone audio, try Apple's USB-C To Headphone dongle. It's a cheap but effective audio upgrade, and the competition (like the M-Audio Micro-DAC) is about 4x the price. It even adds support for Apple inline headphone volume controls too.
For the lazy:
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I curse Apple every time they make me pull out a dongle for something that used to just work. I used to love Apple before they became a dongle company. Don't get me started on them killing off MagSafe.
Why hasn't Apple just switched to USB-C already? Then we can have a wealth of DAC/amp options. To make iPhones thinner still or keep the garden walled.
I always enable the "product improvement" analytics for companies I trust. And as it happens, I don't care about losing TRRS audio jack, losing the SD slot on Macs (I only have micro SD-using devices these days anyway), Type C (yay! -- and I don't carry <i>any</i> dongles), etc. Since I happen to be happy with these changes I obviously never complain about them.<p>Apple is famous for not doing market research (though I know they do a lot) and I wonder really if they don't probably know what they are doing with a lot of these changes. As far as demographics go, my kid (20) and my gf's kids and their friends (11-16 yo) don't seem dismayed by <i>any</i> of these changes.<p>I'm not saying that these are "get off my lawn" complaints, but the phone is the most mass market of mass market devices and every design decision affects some subculture positively or negatively. As for headphones specifically: iphone volume is high enough that the fact that lightning headphones haven't taken off suggests the headphone market isn't as big as one might think.<p>There are no shortages of boneheaded moves by Apple (I happen to like the feel of the butterfly keyboards but am <i>not</i> happy about how many I've had replaced: <i>4</i> since 2016) so this is no apology for a big company that can defend itself!
I've learnt it has a DAC after watching Strange Parts take 1 apart and put the components inside the iPhone 7 so he could have the 3.5 jack: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA</a>
I use it almost every day, to listen to my iPhone at work with the studio-grade headphones I've trusted for years (Beyerdynamic DT770). It works great and hasn't failed yet.<p>Marvel indeed!
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