A brief history of Apple killing standards you loved — and others you didn’t
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The iPhone 7. Notice anything missing?
Apple has officially killed the headphone jack.
Are you over it yet? It’s okay, I don’t like it either. Nevertheless, it’s worth remembering that Apple has helped lead the tech world down a path like this many times before. And in most cases, we’ve all come out alright.
So, to help you take a deep breath, let’s take a quick stroll down memory lane. In the process, you might see just how familiar our current headphone jack apocalypse actually is.
The Apple device that made the most drastic changes is also the one brought the company back to life after years of struggle: the iMac G3. That all-in-one famously ditched the floppy disk when it launched in 1998, but it also did away with the SCSI and ADB ports Mac owners used for connecting hard drives and keyboards and mice, respectively.
I’ll note that Apple, along with Sony, had previously helped shift the industry from 5-inch floppy disks to 3.5-inch floppy disks in the early 80s — though that’s not quite the same as removing them altogether.
In their place were a couple of ports using USB, a then-smallish standard that soon became the most widely accepted connector in consumer tech.
Apple got equally trigger-happy in 2008, when it launched a trio of new MacBooks, including the first-generation MacBook Air. That machine was incredibly slim for its time, but to get there, it had to lose the Ethernet port and the CD/DVD optical drive.
Those things are far from “dead” today, but Steve Jobs wasn’t necessarily wrong when he declared that most people wouldn’t miss the optical drive in the first place. The continued rise of digital media — and the many like-minded Ultrabooks that soon followed the Air — should prove that.
However, those who still wanted to watch DVDs on the MacBook Air could do so — with a $99 adapter.
One thing that applied to both the Air and that year’s regular MacBook was the lack of a FireWire port. (The MacBook Pro, meanwhile, went from two FireWire ports to one.) Apple’s speedy USB equivalent was a key feature of the first iPod, but gradually drifted away in favor of USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt. It was gone from Macs for good by 2013.
In 2012, the iPhone 5 peeved hundreds of millions of iOS users by killing Apple’s 30-pin dock connector in favor of another proprietary standard, Lightning. That thinner port seems like a worthwhile upgrade today, but watching Tim Cook decree a decade’s worth of accessories worthless with the latest iPhone wasn’t exactly easy at the time.
And again, there were dongles: a standard Lightning to 30-pin adapter for $29, and a wired one for $39.
The jury’s still out on whether or not Apple’s ultra-slim MacBook will ever gain the prestige of its predecessors, but it did cause some MacBook Air-style déjà vu when it launched last year. Like the original Air, it features one lonely USB port — only here, it’s based on the still-growing USB-C. No USB 3.1, no Thunderbolt, no HDMI, nothing else.
But, as always, there are plenty of accessories you can buy to make the MacBook more connected, from a $19 USB-C to USB adapter, to a $79 USB Digital AV Multiport adapter.
Which brings us full circle, to the iPhone 7, self-proclaimed “courage,” and our old friend the headphone jack. Is Apple correct in replacing an open, perfectly functional standard with a fragmented market, dongles, and lower-quality wireless connections? Right now, I’d say no. Does any of that matter? If history is any indication, I’d say no again.
Read more stories on Business Insider, Malaysian edition of the world’s fastest-growing business and technology news website.
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