Apple screws us over again

The new iPhones do not have a headphone jack any more. You are supposed to use a Bluetooth wireless headphone instead of a corded unit.

Guess what - from The Verge:

The biggest winner from removing the headphone jack is Apple
If you take Apple’s word for it, removing the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 was a pure expression of its desire for technological progress. "Some people have asked why we would remove the analog headphone jack from the iPhone," Phil Schiller, Apple’s marketing chief, said yesterday. "It really comes down to one word: courage. The courage to move on to do something new that betters all of us."

Already Apple’s defenders have been echoing that sentiment. The headphone jack is century-old technology — why not get rid of it the same way Apple killed the CD drive and Ethernet port on laptops? After all, this is just another connector that can be replaced by something wireless.

But there were clear and tangible benefits to those changes (namely, much thinner and lighter laptops), whereas this change comes littered with downsides. Most headphones in existence are incompatible. You can’t charge the phone and listen to wired headphones at the same time. And if you do want to use old headphones, you need to keep a small adapter handy. And that’s just to name a few of the many drawbacks.

Waaaiiiiit for it:

More likely is that the lack of a headphone jack on the iPhone — and increasingly, on Android phones as well — will lead to an uptick in sales of Bluetooth headphones. And it just so happens that Apple owns the number one Bluetooth headphone company, Beats.

Beats brings in more revenue from Bluetooth headphones than LG, Bose, or Jaybird, according to NPD figures released in July. In terms of unit sales, it controls over a quarter of the Bluetooth headphone market.

What better way to use one product to flog another. I am firmly in the Android camp and whenever we get cell service out in our little vale, I will be going with an Android phone. Already own an Android tablet for photography apps - turns out there is quite the active development community for amateur radio apps too. Lots of apps on Android but not on iOS.