aiken

cali said:

Is Apple having a port identity crisis? Also notice these have headphone jacks. Aren't headphone jacks, like function keys, outdated technology?

Shouldn't Apple be pushing Lightning 2.0? Are problems arising with USB-C? What the hell is going on?

No, no, no, no, and I'll explain.

Apple's style of product management (like most customer-focused companies) starts by asking "what problem does this product solve? Who will use it? How will they use it?", and then determining features accordingly. This always involves tradeoffs in cost, performance, materials, and so on... but the way to solve those tradeoffs is to come back to the customer needs.

In the case of the iPhone, Apple decided that lightning headphones made more sense than keeping the headphone jack, for some combination of space, cost, waterproofing, aesthetic, sound quality, and other reasons. You may or may not agree with their assessment, but that's what they did.

Same with the new Macs: I am sure that the question of adding a lightning port in addition to, or instead of the headphone jack, came up. It had to. So again, Apple looked at how people use MacBooks, weighed similar cost/space/waterproofing factors, and decided to keep the headphone jack and not add a lightning port.

Again, you can totally disagree with either or both decisions; my point is that it is very reasonable for the decision on the MacBook to be different than the decision for the phone. Because customer usages are different, space constraints are different, price point is different, waterproofing requirements are different, and so on.

This gets lost when people see product design decisions as moral statements: if Apple removed the headphone jack from the phone, they must hate headphone jacks, and therefore it is morally hypocritical not to do the same on the laptop. But good product design doesn't work that way.  And thank God -- otherwise Ford would have had to stop offering manual transmissions in the Mustang when they stopped offering them in the F-150.

cali said:

That's not what Apple said. They said the jack was outdated and wireless was the future. Were they lying?

What a world we live in that it's not even "were they wrong?" or "did they change their mind?", but it has to be about them intentionally lying for some nefarious purpose.

That aside, it might be that they think laptops are used differently than phones, so the benefits of wireless are different and inform a different transition period. Heck, I still use a wired keyboard and mouse, it doesn't bother me. But I am glad Apple did not ship the iPhone with a mouse, wired or not.