Ports and headphone jacks can be waterproofed. It’s more about budgeting space inside the phone. Shaving millimeters (sometimes tenths of a millimeter) here and there may not mean much to you and me, but it’s a big deal to the engineers. In the case of the headphone jack, that takes up about 700 cu.mm. of space, which is a lot when you consider that there’s very little room for circuitry inside the phone: the vast majority of a phone’s internals is allocated to the screen and the battery.
It may not be popular with everyone (see: Hawk, Hudson), and it sure as hell is annoying to not have a headphone jack when I need one (which isn’t often). But when you’re trying to miniaturize your devices as much as possible, removing a bulky analog port is a good place to start.
Of course, because there is demand for larger screens, and screen size is now the single biggest driver in the device’s overall size. I’m more referring to thickness, and the fact that they’re packing more and more power into the same or smaller form factors. The larger iPhones don’t have significantly larger circuit boards, just larger screens and batteries. This allows them to not have to make compromises on compute power in, say, the iPhone 12 mini vs. the iPhone 12. They are willing to make other compromises, though.
Wired headphones are annoying. Bluetooth earbuds charge really quickly, so it’s not like they’re out of action for more than about 10-15 mins. Plus, if it’s important (i.e. not just listening to music), say a work call or the like, you can use them individually. So one in your ear and one in the charger, swap, repeat.
It’s not ideal, but it’s really just emergency cases.
Conversely, I like not having my head tethered to my phone, and not having the buds pulled out of my ears because I turned my head, and being able to leave my phone on charge while I walk around listening to its output, and not having to have the phone strapped to my body when I work out, and being able to connect my headphones to my Apple TV to better hear i while I’m cooking.
I have a cabinet knob in my kitchen whose express purpose on this earth is to yank my wired earbuds from my ears right at the moment when it will provoke maximum outrage.
I get it. But my previous iPhones had Bluetooth in addition to the headphone jack. My Sony does too. It’s not an either/or. The headphone jack is useful for a lot of people, as evidence by other manufacturers bringing it back.
I wear some Platronics Backbeat Fit wireless headphones (which have a back strap and hook around the ear) for when I go for hikes around the neighborhood or work in the back yard. The sound quality is much better than any ear buds I’ve used and I need to be able to hear my surroundings when I’m hiking because of bicyclists and cars, so I closed headphones aren’t a solution. I just plug them into my desk top computer I have at home when I’m not using them and they hold charge about 3 hours. (I have a Google XL 2 phone, so have no idea about the iPhone usage)
I have some closed headphones for when I’m on an airplane (and use either an adapter on my phone or plug into my iPad which has a headphone jack).
I’m not much of a photographer, but the camera system introduced on the 11 Pro was a giant leap forward for the iPhone. You’ll enjoy that, as well as the speed boost and battery life.
So, 7 months on from my original post, I have just ordered a refurbished 6-core iMac. So why the reversal? Well, for one, I am now doing more Blu Ray transcoding. Mostly, though, it’s because of the deal that is currently available which will not be around forever.
The $1600 noted above was for a 2017 model iMac whereas I have just ordered a 2019 model for $1400. The 2019 model is notable in that it is the last model into which I can drop my 8TB HDD; the 2020 model is SSDs only and 8TBs is thousands of dollars to achieve. Once the 2019s are gone, they’re gone, so I pulled the trigger.
I got the base model 27" iMac, with the 3.0 GHz i5 6-core processor, a 1TB Fusion Drive and 8GB of RAM. I will swap out the HDD for the 8TB drive in the current iMac, and I have ordered an upgrade kit to boost the SSD portion of the Fusion Drive to 240GB (from 32GB). I’m adding 32GB of RAM, too. Should be quite the flyer, and I’m hoping to get 10 years out of it the same way I have the current model.
Meanwhile, the old girl does still look good, run smoothly and quietly, and still powers through whatever I throw at her - with the exception of heavy video processing, where the old processor will chew on a 2-hour movie for about 10 hours in order to produce an iTunes-friendly file. I’m going to put the 1TB HDD from the new machine back into her, do a clean reinstall of the OS and find her a new home.
PM me if you or someone you know is interested, or if there’s a good cause in need of an exceptional home PC with a TV-sized screen; keyboard and mouse included.
