jdiamond

> Beyond that, how would Apple achieve growth? While true, you are again missing the point. Apple is a *COMPANY*, which is about generating profits, not about their change in rate of generating profits. They currently make the most profit ($20 billion in the last quarter) of any company in the world. Any year they do not actually lose money, they are successful. This "growth" you speak of is a personal choice, fraught with risks. "Growth" has killed many companies. Apple could just go on eeking out a meager existence at $200 billion in sales per year with their small following of 1.3 billion users and just enjoy their boutique business. The only people focused on this question would be stock investors wondering if Apple stock will quadruple in the next 4 years, or if they just have to settle for dividends. At which point, Apple could simply take the company private, if such complaints started to cause bad PR for them. I can just see 5 years from now: "All people on Earth have an iPhone, Apple has no room for growth, must start selling cereal."

I wish the committee gave any forum at all for public comment, but it seems that they don't. I just wanted to tell them they need to alter the art for the breastfeeding emoticon. Once you know what it is, you get it, but when I first saw it, I was staring at it, and staring at it, and I just couldn't tell what I was looking at. First I thought "is that the giraffe?" (with its head down.) Then I thought, "Is that the Zombie"? (Because its head was chopped off). The Vampire? It took me a LONG, long time to finally figure out what it was - I literally had to rule out every other emoticon by hand. Clearly, they need to alter the art - either make the mother's skin a different color than the baby's head, or (far simpler and much more important), just show the mother's head as well. But what I learned from this experience is this truly seems like a closed, private system: Anyone can suggest an emoticon, but then a special group of people decides whether to accept it and what it looks like: then that's it - no one else can say anything about it. And this is completely supported by the Unicode standardization organization.

As a side note, if Apple opens up their MFI program to allow a good audio jack + lightning port adapter (not dock) without artificially degrading audio quality, then I'm OK dealing with the adapter.  I'm not quite ready to go with that kickstart project that extends the iPhone a few mm with a custom case, but if that ends up being the only way...  Then it's only a drop in convenience.

As a comparison, when Apple switched from Magsafe to Magsafe2, they freely sold $9.99 adapters so you could use your old Magsafe plugs with the new ports.  That didn't hurt anyone and allowed Apple to move on without inconveniencing people.

nolamacguy said:

who's "forcing" anybody? sounds like you and Woz need to look that word up. 

Apple removed the choice of wired audio.  The lightning adapter is acceptable, but then you can't charge.  Sure, we can choose to stop using Apple devices instead, but that's asking a lot.  So we are being "forced" to (1) give up on high quality audio, or (2) leave the Apple eco-system.  That sounds like a force to me.  In fact, modern Apple is acting like Microsoft - changing their products in a way that further's their own ambitions instead of actually making life better for users.  Steve Jobs didn't have to think that way - he knew that if you make a good product that people like, it sells well and you make profits.

Your arguement is like saying US laws don't "force" anyone to do anything because in theory you can always leave the US and go somewhere else.  Well, the "force" is saying "if you want to stay in the US, you HAVE to do this."

I really don't understand the people rushing to defend Apple in this - how is getting a device with no headphone jack improving your life?  Every poll I've seen online shows around 70% of iPhone owners have an issue with this.  Just because you don't care about audio quality doesn't mean that no one does.

I'm perfectly willing to turn my habits upside and buy all new equipment just to stay in the Apple Eco-system, but only when Apple can provide something that isn't a step down in quality or convenience.

Personally, I love the ATH-M50x headphones, and have a pair myself, but they aren't wireless, so I'm not sure why they're included in this article.

I also did many tests on my awesome car stereo and iPhone of wired vs bluetooth, and the bluetooth quality was horrible!  It was like throwing away the entire stereo and replacing it by a small boom box.  So I did some Googling and found out that there are many reasons you won't even get the 350 kbit/sec max of bluetooth 4.  First, the receiver and sender must support identical codecs.  And second, they must negotiate a minimum compatible transfer rate.  Some receivers, even if they could support the full rate, may just default to the 50 kbit/sec transfer rate.  And finally, there is the quality of the codec itself, which can be extremely lossy.

I really think Woz said it best - don't FORCE people into wireless until a standard exists that has quality comparable to wired.  That's why people throwing around the floppy disk analogy are wrong - when Steve ditched the floppy disk, there were new storage mediums that had higher capacity and were faster than flash.  What bluetooth needs is a STANDARD, LOSSLESS codec that can be supported across the board.