Recent rumour has it that Apple has planned to ditch the 3.5 mm audio jack in the new iPhone 7. That along with a probably larger screen is Apple’s idea of innovation. Traditionally, Apple is notorious for such events – they literally ditched the floppy drive on the iMac in 1998 (source: The Next Web). Remember, I’m 20 years old and I got my first PC in 2002 and it had (surprise, surprise) a floppy disc drive. This might sound like Apple is innovating way ahead of their time, but I should tell you that just because humans may in a few centuries ditch any solid food and directly inject glucose in their body, we should do the same now.
Now Apple fans might argue that Apple caused a revolution by ditching the floppy. Let me tell you a “NO”. Even with the level of technological development post-2000, floppy discs were well used into 2005. That’s almost a full 7 years iMac users had to do without floppies. Doesn’t sound like a revolution to me. The biggest problem with Apple devices for me has always been compatibility issues. You need to have THE latest APPLE hardware for everything to work smoothly. If you have an old Macbook which works fine but you broke the charger, too bad, bud – you’d probably need a new MacBook to fit the new charger available.
Even worse is cross-platform compatibility. Is there even such a thing? If it was even possible, Apple would have their own word files format just to spite the user. I’m not saying Apple products are bad, no. I’m saying they’re just… you know… narcissistic and pompous. I found this awesome video on YouTube:
This clearly explains how Apple’s vision has (de)progressed through the years. And for those of you who think Apple is an innovative company, I want to make it clear to you that Apple’s best innovation was in marketing.
If you want to start your own mobile manufacturing company the same way Apple, here’s a quick step by step guide:
- Take what’s best in the industry and repackage it.
- Make it shiny and beautiful.
- Tell people it’s a premium device just by having a 400% margin rate.
- Market the hell out of it.
- Watch sales skyrocket.
Quickly back to the topic at hand, Apple’s ditching the 3.5 mm jack means that the latest beats headset will not natively work on the iPhone 7. There are rumours of an adapter that can connect the traditional 3.5 mm audio jack to the new “lightning port” that ships with iPhone 7, but that’s just creating an inconvenience and later solving it.
Now, the author is not a blind accuser. What is a probable way to fight this develop-but-keep-compatibility issue? Even though I’m not very fond of Google either, Google has the right idea – Project ARA. The idea of a modular phone, with replaceable parts, is the best we could look up for in the near future. I only hope that project Ara, unlike many of Google’s projects, doesn’t get shut down. Now it’s just Google. Who knows what can be accomplished if other OSes (Microsoft fan alert) jump into the idea?
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Written by Muthu Kumar, Editor.
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