Originally Posted by
redsox78
Getting rid of the 3.5mm is what annoys me. If anything it is a reason to question Apple's design and engineering ability, it's lazy. A real industrial design company would not whine about not being able to fit a battery, or not being able to add water resistance because of the socket. They would design a solution that both allow the 3.5mm socket and the other stuff they want. It's also stunningly smug and insulting to call it courageous.
It is also NOTHING like dropping the floppy drive, or a DVD drive. When those things happened, the alternatives might have been expensive (the all solid state MacBook Air), but they clearly had the potential to offer improvements. I am not aware of any actual improvement wireless audio offers. It does not reduce battery consumption as any saving made in the phone is swapped for the extra power of the headphones/speakers that now need to power both an amp, dsp and wireless chip. It does not reduce the size of stuff, because the headphones are either larger, or their are more dongle / chargers to carry. All things being equal there is no way it leads to higher sound quality especially in a mobile device. Can someone show me an example of wireless audio that is inherently higher quality than wired? I don't mean in the world of 'What Hi Fi' BS, I mean as a principle of the technology; in what way are the worlds best wireless audio sources superior to the worlds best wired, in other words...where is Apple going with this? Also, if Apple wants stuff to be wireless, why are they having such a struggle to figuring out wireless charging on the iPhone?
By the way, I have owned bluetooth headphone, and use bluetooth in my car. Every pair of bt headphones has been returned as after a few days I got sick of losing the charger / plugging them in. In the car if I could get around to buying a plug-in (wired) dock I wold buy one, because I could just plug my phone in, rather than having to chose 'share audio' every time I want to play stuff. At home airplay/bluetooth is cool but that's because the speakers are already plugged in so the wireless is in the other direction, so that's very different.
Having said that, you just know it will become a trend, and in two/three years time when my iPhone 6s is too slow for the latest iOS I'll need to carry a dongle for my earphones. Sigh.