Hit the road, jack: iPhone 7 makes Apple look like its imitators

Yes, this is about the headphone jack thing. Yes, I’m late to the party. Yes, I should have made this an item last week. No, I haven’t seen the first part of this headline elsewhere, but it stands to reason somebody already used it.

I will be the first to admit that taking away things you got for free and then selling it back to you is a classic Apple business move. In that sense, the decision makes sense.

Apple also has a history for the past 20 years of killing old technology. In this sense, the decision also makes sense.

But those are very broad strokes. And the devil, as they say, is in the details.

Removing of the headphone jack on the iPhone 7 has been compared (by Apple itself) to removing the floppy drive from the original iMac all those many years ago.

When Apple made previous “courageous” kills in the past, like the floppy, they never closed a door without opening a window. You know, just to make Steve Jobs’ aspirations of Godhood more obvious than Jesus symbolism in a Superman movie.

So here is where that comparison fails: When Apple removed the floppy from the iMac, it ADDED CD-RW drives as a built-to-order option (before they were industry-standard equipment) as well as USB ports just ahead of the now ubiquitous USB thumb drives hitting the market.

Not to mention that with that USB port, you had access to a wide array of inexpensive drives that didn’t need Apple’s say-so to work: Floppy drives, ZIP drives, external CD-RWs, USB hard drives… whatever anybody wanted to connect to an iMac, they could.

The bottom line? When Apple killed the floppy, they replaced it with the new industry-wide standard, and did so ahead of the industry. It’s a good example of why people used to call Apple “visionary” and “agile” ; their small market was useful for introducing new features faster than the PC market, which sometimes had to wait years for everybody to get on board.

But if one still insists on comparing the iPhone 7’s design choices to the iMac, as Apple does, let’s get real: It would require an iMac that had ONLY Firewire ports. No USB nor ADB to be had (Apple was not “courageous” enough to kill it’s old, S-Video-like peripheral connector on the first run of iMacs).

So, let’s say you want to get that floppy drive back anyway. You have a lot of old floppies that you’ll at least need to back up on another medium, and you have other things in your life that take floppy disks, so interoperability is important to you.

But with only Firewire? You have an Apple-built spec that was more expensive to support out of the gate by virtue of its controller design. It wasn’t proprietary, but nobody in the greater industry rushed to adapt it for anything but camcorders (until USB 2.0, which was fast enough for HD streaming), so you would be excused if you mistook it for a proprietary Apple port.

Few manufacturers see a reason to build to a spec that is more expensive and outright overkill for the needs of the product, and late-’90s external floppy drives were no exception. USB’s throughput was more than enough to instantly transfer the entire contents of a 1.44 MB floppy — not that any drive would be able to read the disk that quickly.

This alternate-universe Firewire floppy drive would be made in small numbers and only by the couple manufacturers that targeted the Apple market. They would be super-expensive as a result, not just because of the pricey Firewire guts, but also because nobody using a competing product could use it.

This is what Apple did with the headphone jack in the iPhone 7.

What is the audio auxiliary jack replaced with? Are we going to start seeing Lightning connectors on our handheld game systems, stereos and other audio-producing equipment? What about their new not-Bluetooth wireless chip?

The door is closed. There is no window.

Post-mortem

Apple killed the headphone jack for three reasons, and “courageousness” isn’t one of them:

1. Much like the new, trash-can like Mac Pro (which hasn’t received so much as a processor speed bump since launch back in 2012; when/if the next MacBook lineup lands, it’ll run circles around this desktop), this was to pay lip service to innovation without actually innovating.

2. Apple now has total control over the headphone and peripheral market for the iPhone. All manufacturers that want to make headphones that work with iPhones have to pay Apple royalties to use their not-Bluetooth wireless or Thunderbolt. They must be built exactly to Apple’s spec, and cannot allow any other use that Apple chooses not to permit.

3. Reduce competition for Apple Pay.

The headphone jack had a number of creative reuses. One of the most popular of is the various brands of credit card readers you may have seen all over the dealers’ rooms at conventions. Heck, my local comic shop uses one because its’ more affordable for them to run credit and debit cards through a Square than to get hooked up traditionally.

I can’t help but scratch my head at all this. Apple seems to be pretty lost under the reign of Tim Cook. The further the company is from Jobs’ last plans, the more the company seems to be acting like Dell trying to beat Apple to a punch Apple wasn’t going to throw.

The computer product lines, like the aforementioned Mac Pro, have been largely left to languish. While the laptops and iMacs have been updated more recently than the ridiculously underpowered flagship computer (which they should update regularly just to serve as the flagship; and aspirational model with nothing but the latest and greatest to match its appearance as a pedestal), their guts are still lagging years behind the regularly updating competition. The company no longer pushes the envelope on prowess, no longer makes early adoptions of the latest and greatest components and technologies.

This is no longer the Apple that took risks to do it first and do it best. Sure, it didn’t always win those bets — early adoption of PCI-X was quickly rendered moot by PCIe — but there was a strong commitment to excellence in every aspect of a product. Today’s Apple is the Apple is instead all about taking no risks to do it second (or third) and look nice.

I have no desire whatsoever to see a car or HDTV from this Apple.

Another odd difference is that they do not decisively end product lines, and certainly don’t have clear transition plans. A great example of this is the Apple Thunderbolt HD Display in all its thick glory.

When the iMacs got the super-slim treatment, it was thought Apple’s only external monitor would be updated to match the new ascetic as it had each time before. No change.

When Thunderbolt 2 hit, the so-called Thunderbolt Display would surely incorporate it. No change. Likewise with Thunderbolt 3.

When the 5K iMac launched, many also believed that a 4K or 5K refresh of the Thunderbolt display was inevitable. No change.

Finally, the venerable product was quietly end-of-life’d, running out of stock in June after more than 5 stagnant years on the market. No fanfare, no successor, no plan for a successor. Just plain over.

Under Jobs, when Apple killed a product, there was no mistaking it. You’d find its head on a spike next to the decomposing remains of a dogcow. Under Cook, products just seem to fade away into obscurity. Apple will have to live on iPhone hype forever, because they’ve shown time and again the past few years that the iPhone is the only product they can deliver.

And one more thing…

Jony Ive needs to be kept on a tighter leash. How thin is thin enough for you, man? Do we not stop until iPhones are printed on paper, hardware features and battery be damned? I don’t think anybody cares that you shaved an extra 1 mm off the iPhone 7 when they’re just going to stuff it in a protective case anyway.

All that focus on making the phone beautiful is wasted when it a) is made too fragile to ever dare leave out of a case that completely covers up the aesthetics, and b) looks butt-ass ugly with a port-doubling dongle sticking out of it. Did you learn NOTHING from the MacBook’s single USB-C connector?

I mean seriously, Apple just did the single-port MacBook to show off. It jettisoned one of their best-ever innovations in the MagSafe charger just to prove a point. Another great example of Apple acting more like a desperate manufacturer trying to capture the Apple appeal.

Frankly, Apple really has become no better than an Apple imitator. The secret sauce is gone, and everybody still there seems to be falling over themselves trying to recreate it. The company would be served well by recognising that what’s past is past, and moving on in a new direction that plays to their actual strengths… whatever those might be now.