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The Walled Garden Closes In

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Deozaan:
I'm not sure that this necessarily has something to do with DRM though. I mean, I can't see an explanation as to why it would.
-IainB (September 08, 2016, 09:58 PM)
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Did you read the linked article?

mwb1100:
they're dropping the venerable 3.5mm stereo jack in favor of forcing people to go with the newer-fangled Bluetooth device$.
-Stoic Joker (September 08, 2016, 06:48 PM)
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or a set of headphones that plug into the Apple-proprietary Lightning connector.

Josh:
My $30 pair of bluetooth headphones have never caused me any issues. I have a more expensive pair but that is because I wanted another set designed for running so they don't fall out. Both work fine and neither requires any further investment should I choose to move to the iPhone 7. I really don't see the issues here. The audio jack had a good run and it was always going to be met with resistance regardless of when they decided to remove it or what they decided to replace it with. This same thing can be said for any technology that is changed.

To me, this really is a non-issue as wireless is the way of the future. Bluetooth/<insert wireless tech here> will not receive due attention until a major player in the industry forces innovation to fix the shortcomings of the protocol. How long was it before we received the bluetooth 4.0 spec with low power mode?

I appear to be in the minority given the recent backlash against Apple, but something tells me this will wash over in 3-4 months as folks forget about it and move on.

IainB:
I'm not sure that this necessarily has something to do with DRM though. I mean, I can't see an explanation as to why it would.
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-IainB (September 08, 2016, 09:58 PM)
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Did you read the linked article?
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-Deozaan (September 09, 2016, 05:42 AM)
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Well, yes, but I only gave it a cursory skim. However I went back and reread it properly after you made the comment, thinking that I might have missed something, but, as I said, I don't see an explanation as to why this would necessarily have something to do with DRM. Whilst it might not be unreasonable to suppose that it might be turned into something to do with DRM - given the past machinations of the RIAA/MPAA/DMCA corporates - neither would it seem unreasonable to suppose that it may simply be the LCD thing, for example, or, as @mwb1100 puts it:
they're dropping the venerable 3.5mm stereo jack in favor of forcing people to go with the newer-fangled Bluetooth device$.
_______________________
-Stoic Joker (September 08, 2016, 06:48 PM)
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...or a set of headphones that plug into the Apple-proprietary Lightning connector.
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-mwb1100 (September 09, 2016, 04:25 PM)
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I suppose it could work towards several objectives:

* (a) Improve Apple's market-leadership position and market-share dominance, by setting their product as a new de facto proprietary standard as the new/raised LCD for audio output.
* (b) Improve Apple's market dominance and increase sales/profitability by creating/forcing a new niche market and expanding it, forcing consumers to accept the proprietary "new-fangled Bluetooth device$".
* (c) Position Apple as a new and possibly the new de facto DRM gatekeeper for the DMCA corporates (said position having apparently been taken previously, years ago, by a farsighted and opportunistic Micro$oft with their various embedded-DRM Windows Media Player software products).
From experience of marketing in IT companies, I would suggest that (a) and (b) could be highly likely and conventional corporate objectives, and that (c) could be a distinct possibility. Microsoft has ruled the roost for a long time in that regard.

Only time will tell whether Cory Doctorow's predictions (referred to in the article) were right, or (say) @Josh's predictions (above) were right. The history of the IT landscape is littered with predictions that were invariably well wide of the mark, for the simple reason that nobody can predict the future.

@Josh makes the valid argument about a change/improvement being overdue for the technology in devices for getting "A2E"  (Audio-to-Eardrum). In much the same way, HiFi audio became ubiquitous with the advent of the (Phillips?) digital sampling technology of audio CDs, transforming the ease and cost of delivering consistently high quality HiFi. It became a ubiquitous and affordable commodity, though the cost - to the audiophile - arguably included a loss of audio "ambiance".
However the LCD bar/standard had been inexorably raised, and yes, passive DRM control was able to be further embedded in audio CD products.

Similarly, low power, short range wireless A2E does make sense, but I discounted the Bluetooth technology some years back, at which time I gave it up as being full of potential, but pretty useless for my purposes as it was then poorly-developed, kludgy and unreliable wifi and it was too dependent on expensive and unreliable battery technology.
If those limitations have now been overcome with newer technology (as one suspected they probably inevitably would, given time) - by the likes of Apple and others - then one also suspects that this new Bluetooth A2E technology will not be a flash in the pan and the market will thus take up the technology with alacrity, and it will raise the bar and become ubiquitous and the new LCD, though the tinfoil hat brigade might persist in objecting (and they might be right to do so).

However, this (from the article) is pretty cogent, and I suspect that it is more than likely that Cory Doctorow, The EFF and techdirt will be proven right and the DMCA tax-gatherers and the NSA will be embedding their mandatory requirements into the Lightning connection, and they and the consumers/taxpayers will be paying Apple handsomely for it:
The Lightning port works differently. Manufacturers must apply and pay a licensing fee to create a Lightning-compatible device. When rumors were circulating about an iPhone 7 with no headphone jack, our colleague Cory Doctorow predicted that big content companies would try to take advantage of that control: “Right now, an insistence on DRM would simply invite the people who wanted to bypass it for legal reasons to use that 3.5mm headphone jack to get at it. Once that jack is gone, there's no legal way to get around the DRM.”

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Greedy corporate and DMCA rent-seekers and tax-gatherers and the NSA are like rust- they never sleep.
"The Lightning connection" could be aptly-named in that it may well give the consumer quite a shock when/if they wake up to realise what has been done to them by these parasites whilst they were sleeping. We shall see, as we certainly have no control (QED) over what these mostly US-created parasites are up to - which, whatever it is, is certainly not going to be "looking after the consumers' best interests'', hah-hah.  Far from it. Maybe they should rename the technology to "the Tesla connection" to make it sound much cooler and more attractive. "Tesla" has gotta be good - right?

wraith808:
My $30 pair of bluetooth headphones have never caused me any issues. I have a more expensive pair but that is because I wanted another set designed for running so they don't fall out. Both work fine and neither requires any further investment should I choose to move to the iPhone 7. I really don't see the issues here. The audio jack had a good run and it was always going to be met with resistance regardless of when they decided to remove it or what they decided to replace it with. This same thing can be said for any technology that is changed.

To me, this really is a non-issue as wireless is the way of the future. Bluetooth/<insert wireless tech here> will not receive due attention until a major player in the industry forces innovation to fix the shortcomings of the protocol. How long was it before we received the bluetooth 4.0 spec with low power mode?

I appear to be in the minority given the recent backlash against Apple, but something tells me this will wash over in 3-4 months as folks forget about it and move on.
-Josh (September 09, 2016, 07:01 PM)
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The 3.5 is analog.  All other manners that they are conveying your music is digital.  To break it down for those that don't know the difference:

Bluetooth audio protocol is lossy, meaning that some of the data is lost. However, it is digital, meaning that the audio reproduction in the headset is bit-exact the same data that was transmitted.
The data is encoded to a digital format that is compressed in a way that loses some of the source data (but hopefully not enough that you can perceive it); but the data stream is much more resilient to interruption, due to buffering, which means that you are unlikely to notice even if some other electromagnetic frequency transmission interferes with your bluetooth (temporarily).

Analog audio over a standard 3.5mm headphone jack (technically called a "TRS" connector) can be very high quality if the audio playback device has a good DAC. An amplifier (separate or built-in) can make the signal sound even better. A good pair headphones can sound amazing with this dated analog mode of transmitting audio down a cable. If you are using a very high quality DAC on the source audio device, chances are it's better than the DAC that has to be in the bluetooth headphones to convert the bluetooth digital data to analog, because the in-headphones DAC is limited by battery power and size constraints -- but a sound card in a computer is much less constrained. Even sound chips in smartphones are great these days.

All analog audio is subject to interference with the audio cable. Most audio cables are not shielded from external electromagnetic interference, and certain models of computers (especially Core 2 Duo era CPUs with on-board graphics) have been known to spew electromagnetic frequencies that are picked up as a "grinding" or "buzzing" noise on the analog headphone wire, if it is near enough to the computer. Some LCDs can do the same. Depending on your situation, this interference can be even worse than the loss of audio quality of bluetooth's lossy encoding.

So to people that care about quality, and download/want to have access to WAV, FLAC, and ALAC because they aren't lossy. 

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