New Apple Lust Objects for 2010 and onward

my macbook pro is 1 year old and i'm already ready to sell it, which is weird, but true

AirPods will be useless without the pairing/charging box so I reckon theft won't be a huge thing.

true, but it'd be very easy for some kid to grab one and fling it out the train window just to be an arsehole. harder to do with clip-on bluetooth earpieces etc.

my macbook pro is 1 year old and i'm already ready to sell it, which is weird, but true

― F♯ A♯ (∞), Wednesday, September 7, 2016 3:50 PM (two minutes ago)

mine is 2 weeks old and I'll be selling it in Nov when the new ones come out.

My next laptop gonna be the ARM MacBook tbh

when i was into gaming (a very long time ago) i would keep my laptops/desktops much longer

i guess macs at least hold their value right?

xp

AirPods will be useless without the pairing/charging box so I reckon theft won't be a huge thing. Hate not having somewhere to put them when eg at the checkout. Watch pocket on jeans I guess

― stet, Wednesday, September 7, 2016 6:47 PM (thirteen minutes ago) Bookmark

apple removes headphone port and increases slimness of iphone 7 and in the process forces users to carry around a cigaratte pack-sized case as well

mine has passed 6 years, but it's got new ram and a new hdd, and the disc slot is hosed

xp

Wow, the Music UI in the iOS 10 GM is even more clusterfucked.

they're actually in league with Treeship. next iPhone has no screen.

would Jobs be absolutely raging at this? i'd guess so.

apple have huge amounts of creatives working - we've all seen the soon to be completed massive spaceship campus - is there no one in there that is allowed to say to ives & cook "this is not a good idea"? people like battery life? like their phones not to slip put of their hands? maybe even have a phone you don't need to buy a case for that hides the admittedly beautiful object they've been sold?

when you eventually make the car will that be so beautiful and fragile that it needs a case - a case for a car?

what are they all doing? they produce so few actual products.

the spaceship campus itself seems a ridiculous triumph of form over function. if you're on the 3rd floor of that and have to meet someone at the opposite end of the circle, maybe on a different floor you have to walk much further in a circle to see them. maybe they'll add an architectural equivalent to the ridiculous battery hump after the thing's finished.

I'd assume the circle idea is rooted in the Pixar HQ design principle of locating the restrooms and cafeteria in locations that demanded significant travel time, so that people are forced into hallway interactions that could be potentially beneficial i.e. "hey are you the guy that is working on that thing? I have idea!" So basically every day at work is like being at a conference at a hotel. Most other big "campus" corporate HQs have tried to emulate this to different extents.

I think they're right that headsets (headphones are dedicated hardware for listening, no longer a thing most people need) are all going to be wireless soon.

Ppl thought they were nuts for leaving floppy drives out of the iMac too. Not that the comparison is entirely apt.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/johnpaczkowski/inside-iphone-7-why-apple-killed-the-headphone-jack

“The audio connector is more than 100 years old,” Joswiak says. “It had its last big innovation about 50 years ago. You know what that was? They made it smaller. It hasn’t been touched since then. It’s a dinosaur. It’s time to move on.”

i take issue with apple doing this whole "our way or the highway" thing, not because they're enforcing change but because they act like nothing else exists. this "dinosaur" plug is in everything i use, including the next phone i'll buy (which won't be an iphone). apple doesn't have a monopoly on phones, they're hardly in a position to ~decide~ when a standard should die.

this feels like a genuine jump-the-shark moment for apple, not immediately — in years to come i think people will see this as the moment apple's creepy pr arrogance started to distract attention from its product decisions rather than explain them, and the moment a lot of apple users just stopped listening and bought something else. unless you really want dual cameras and waterproofing, it's hard to see an argument for choosing this over a 6s or 6se (or just a better-value android).

I'd love for Apple to get rid of paper too.

I hate those comparisons, because pretty much everything they've yanked historically has been ultimately crappy or an obvious stop-gap. The floppy was pretty brave but only because there was literally no other way to get data out of those early iMacs, but it was still obvious by the time that a 1mb disk was a crappy thing. The headphone jack is pretty good, though. It has outlasted format after format, for good reason.

To me the better comparison is Ethernet. Removed purely for space, replaced with something less-good, and with people who need it forced into an adapter.

I guess their bet is that just as few people need Ethernet really, most will find they get on fine without the jack. I think they're wrong. People will hate not being able to charge, despite Apple pretending that battery life is good enough, and they'll hate not being able to stick their headphones into other devices and it's just going to be endless friction and irritation — the opposite of what Apple was supposed to be about.

Ppl thought they were nuts for leaving floppy drives out of the iMac too. Not that the comparison is entirely apt.

― slathered in cream and covered with stickers (silby), Thursday, 8 September 2016 10:50 (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, they've done a heap of this type of thing over the years (with mixed results), but this time they've taken away something that's very widely used very abruptly. at least with floppy disks you could get data off them and not need them anymore. headphone plugs and ports still exist in loads of things, including fairly expensive headphones people have invested in; you can't just migrate away from headphone jacks, and people will still need to use the headphone ports in their laptops, tvs, car stereos etc for a really long time.

apple's figureheads have pretty much said themselves that the only practical reason to remove the headphone port is to get more stuff into the phone, which to my mind is not an excuse at all. do people need a haptic home button more than a headphone jack? really?

xp tl;dr stet otm

They could have still added the new wireless audio chip and kept the hp jack. We didn't need dual speakers more than a hp jack. I use my phone for music making, and now I'm not sure how it's all going to work.

I've noticed a comment or two that other phone manufacturers are ditching their jacks too. So are you all sure this is solely an Apple thing and uniquely damaging?

you guys are gonna go ape when you see that the apple car doesn't have axles.

is it the mac pro of phones, is the question

probably not because they won't wait a handful of years to release another phone

ned: leeco made a couple as a feature differentiation iirc, but it wasn't a whole ecosystem saying "you're shit out of luck". you can always stay on android and just get a different phone. in this case apple's saying ios users are losing a choice.

Guys this is 10% about Jonny Ive jerking off to "simple" design, 10% about saving a teeny bit more space for other shit, and 80% about selling proprietary headphones.

otm. greed has defined the cook era imo.

The Home button is now force sensitive. Instead of knowing you pressed the button because it clicked, it will vibrate. Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller said the revolutionary new button is "creating new feelings and experiences that could not have been created before."

Ooooooh......

I'm not sure i'll prefer a buzzing home button to the clicking one we have now, whose tactile feedback I find perfect. But i'm all for new feelings and experiences, so we shall see....

Or trying to anyway, because I think the Airpods will be the biggest apple product flop in years.

I'm not sure i'll prefer a buzzing home button to the clicking one we have now, whose tactile feedback I find perfect. But i'm all for new feelings and experiences, so we shall see....

imo it's more about cutting apple's in-warranty repair costs than anything.

also a heap of android phones have a non-mechanical wake-up function, also i don't see why the iphone home button needs to vibrate. you know when it registers because something happens on the screen.

haptic feedback on a trackpad makes sense because a click does all sorts of things. a home button on an iphone goes home, and you know when it worked because you're in the home screen. so they took away a headphone port just for a vibration that tells you what the screen is telling you anyway.

I've never found Android haptic home (and other) buttons as intuitive as the iPhone dedicated clicking home button

Also, removing the headphone jack is not like removing the floppy drive from the first iMac or other numerous times Apple has dropped widely-used but aging technologies. The things that replaced the floppy and CD drives were not proprietary Apple tecnologies as the Lightning jack and Airplay are. Also, will there be any way to split the audio and power functions of the lightning jack so I can listen to music in my car and charge the phone at the same time? Bluetooth audio drains the battery fast, and anyway my old car doesn't have bluetooth, just an aux-in jack.

true, but nine years on we all know what a home button does, so haptic feedback at the expense of headphones is a bit over the top imo xp

new iOS wakes up when you pick up the phone iirc, and the unlocking and clicking to open the home screen are two separate actions, although you can default to the old behavior. I am not sure if the separate unlock lets you mess with secured notifications on the home screen or what. separating "open" and "unlock" might mean other ways to unlock than touchid, or some other thing I can only wildly guess at

I guess their bet is that just as few people need Ethernet really, most will find they get on fine without the jack. I think they're wrong. People will hate not being able to charge, despite Apple pretending that battery life is good enough, and they'll hate not being able to stick their headphones into other devices and it's just going to be endless friction and irritation — the opposite of what Apple was supposed to be about.

― stet, Wednesday, September 7, 2016 9:00 PM (forty-three minutes ago) Bookmark

i like how the lightning earbuds (with wires) won't work with any macs, only iphone

odds on they'll work with the new macs though. so all you need to do is buy the following affordable accessories with your new headphones:

- a mac

(i'm only half joking)

potential for fuckery seems high - imagine taking a usb-lightning cable and plugging both ends into a mac with a usb and lightning ports

Even better, removing the audio jack also eliminated a key point of ingress that Riccio says helped the new iPhone finally meet the IP7 water resistance spec Apple has been after for years (resistant when immersed under 1 meter of water for 30 minutes).

suspected as much

samsung managed decent waterproofing with a headphone port though, right?

Usually when a tech sticks around for 100+ years it's because it's really good and nothing better has come along. Apple has yet to make the case that this expensive proprietary technology is, on the whole, better than the inexpensive and universal analog jack. I guess we will see. The early Airpod reviews are pretty meh at best. It's possible that I the long run we will come to feel like this is more good than harm. I still miss analog keyboards but having more screen space seems worth the irritation of touch screens and autocorrect.

Wait so how is the Apple Watch "swim proof" if the iPhone it has to be paired with is only "water resistant"?

samsung managed decent waterproofing with a headphone port though, right?

yes, somehow the Galaxy S7 received a higher water-resistance certification than the iPhone 7 despite having a headphone jack (although independent testing has shown the Samsung is still easily damaged by water)

(although independent testing has shown the Samsung is still easily damaged by water)

wow i didn't know that. not good for a key feature.

http://www.cnet.com/news/samsung-galaxy-s7-not-quite-waterproof-torture-tests-reveal/

http://www.consumerreports.org/smartphones/samsung-galaxy-s7-active-fails-consumer-reports-water-resistance-test/

hmm

Even the iPhone 6s/6s+ had better water resistance in the CNet/Squaretrade test

due for upgrade in a couple months, but eh i might just skip this year and see how this all shakes out. just as likely I give into consumer hype get a 7 or 7+ for that stupid new camera, though

the watch does a lot of shit on its own, they are really bad at explaining how the watch works. no one I've met with one plays music directly from it, but you can do that. with gps it'd play music and keep your running route or a/e with the phone nowhere nearby

you can use Apple Pay without the phone in range, which is nice

obviously posting on iPad with my awesome caps and weird autocorrect here

it's another of those "internet of things" objects that doesn't really work how you want but does stuff you don't realize or utilize. constricted by implementation details so you get things that are neat but not what you want. pretty much all the HomeKit stuff works the same way

we're going to get an entirely different and potentially better set of personal area network interfaces out of Apple in about 10 years they are just selling a ton of marketable prototypes in the meantime because even after they pay $13B back to Ireland they have more cash than most sovereign states and still make a profit on every unit

Like Apple can either take itself almost completely private so it can focus on making money from its current businesses or it can spend the iPhone money trying to design and build (say) autonomous vehicles or some other basically new multi-billion-dollar market