I have listened to tech whiners for years, and am always amused at how wrong they end up being when the rest of the world ignores all their concerns and embraces something that “can’t possibly work.” Tech whiners said the iPod was a stupid idea (I think I would have agreed – who would spend that kind of money to play music?). Tech whiners said the iPhone was a stupid idea (I disagreed on that one; I’d been using a “smart phone” PDA without a physical keyboard since 2000 and was hooked). Tech whiners said Apple Store was a stupid idea (I might have agreed on that one, but knew the other solutions – store-within-a-store at CompUSA – were stupider ideas). And the list goes on and on.
Now I have to listen to pundits bitch and moan over Apple removing the headphone jack from the iPhone 7. Well, I don’t have to, but it will be difficult to escape it. Whine whine whine about needing an adapter.
Guess what? This is nothing new. Every pair of nice “real” headphones I have — you know, the full size ones you use when music matters, or when you are doing music recording — have 1/4″ headphone jacks. Those are/were industry standard. In the olden days, they plugged directly in to my multi-track cassette recorder, then later my Roland VS-880 hard disk recorder, and anything else I had.
In modern days, my MacBook has a 1/8″ jack, and since GarageBand (was that also a stupid idea?) has killed all my old recording tech, I had to get a cheap adapter from Radio Shack (back when it still had the space in the name) to make this possible. Thus, I kept all five pair of my old headphones, and have an adapter so I can keep using them on modern equipment with the tiny, fragile (and far easier to snap/break) 1/8″ headphone jack.
And guess what? That adapter has been on the end of my big headphones for the past decade. I have never lost it. You just leave it there.
Problem solved.
Whine, whine, whine, but this is how audio folks have done things for decades. Apple gives you an adapter with the new iPhone, so just plug it in to the headphones you’d normally use and you are done. “What if I lose my headphones?” You no longer need the adapter ;-)
Yep, if you lose something, you lose it. How is that Apple’s (or Radio Shack, or Samsung, or Disney) fault?
Whiners amuse me.
BONUS: I hear so many people complain about how bulky these big phones are because they “won’t fit in my pocket.” Guess what? Years ago, all phones were big. They came with (or sold separately) cases that had belt clips. You carried your phone on your belt, and you never sat on the phone and bent it, and you never sat down and had it hurt your stomach.
This problem was solved long ago. Thing of all the phones that could have been saved from broken screens or being bent or even lost because people constantly set them down … If they just kept them on their belt.
Oh, but that would be tacky. Strange, we do a bunch of tacky things every day now, but since “everyone does it” no one seems to be bothered by it.
Millions of dollars a year of damaged and lost phones might be eliminated if folks would use the solution we had twenty years ago…
But, hey, whining is fun.
