<story><title>The End of Headphone Jacks, the Rise of DRM</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/end-headphone-jacks-rise-drm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dTal</author><text>&amp;gt;If you&amp;#x27;re old enough to have used a floppy disk drive you do not miss them.&lt;p&gt;I am, and I do. Floppies were ubiquitous, durable, reusable, and cheap enough to give away. There&amp;#x27;s no replacement today - flash drives are the closest thing but when was the last time someone handed you one with no expectation of getting it back? Or bought a box of 50?&lt;p&gt;Sneakernet became much less vibrant with the death of the floppy.</text></item><item><author>stinkytaco</author><text>Floppy disks, optical disks, ethernet were all replaced by unencumbered standards and they all lead to a superior experience (well, maybe not ethernet, but there are definitly advantages to wireless). If you&amp;#x27;re old enough to have used a floppy disk drive you do not miss them.&lt;p&gt;Any time you introduce two way communication, you introduce the possibility of DRM, but that does not guarantee it. I can still use my HDMI with my linux PC. DRM is exclusive of the technology and I see no reason to hold back the technology because we are worried about DRM.&lt;p&gt;There are lots of compelling reasons to dislike this change. Among them the fact that I have a large investment in traditional headphones and devices that work well with them (my iPod, my HTC Phone, my stereo, TV, piano, guitar amp, etc etc etc), a decrease in quality, convenience and weight of wireless headsets (how long do they work? How much do they weigh? Can I swim or workout with them?). But DRM is not automatic.</text></item><item><author>wfo</author><text>Apple has been very good at predicting (or perhaps directly causing) the demise of certain technologies: the disk drive, the CD drive, the ethernet port. They removed them much to the chagrin of many a loyal customer, and a few years later they nearly ceased to exist across the entire industry (we&amp;#x27;re still waiting on the ethernet port to go away but give it time).&lt;p&gt;How many times will it take you forgetting your dongle to just pony up and buy the apple approved headphones? How long will it take you using the non-default, non-apple, non-sleek, clunky dongle as you show off your fancy new iPhone 7 to your friends before you decide it&amp;#x27;s got to go? What if they&amp;#x27;re using it the apple-intended way?&lt;p&gt;How long will it take before nobody buys headphones anymore? A few generations until they deprecate the dongle since nobody is using it? Where you can no longer buy a $10 set of headphones at a drugstore and plug them in? Where &amp;#x27;every audio device must provide analog audio output in a universal format that every device has been able to read since audio was invented or it is functionally useless&amp;#x27; is no longer a maxim?&lt;p&gt;Long-term, we are giving up a universal and open protocol that all devices work with for a proprietary one. If you don&amp;#x27;t expect companies to abuse this to make money and to stop you from doing what you want with your equipment, well, I&amp;#x27;ve got a bridge to sell you.</text></item><item><author>mead5432</author><text>I understand the argument that forcing content through a proprietary jack opens the door for controlling said content and has huge implications for hardware manufacturers and the way people use their stuff.&lt;p&gt;What I am having a hard time understanding is why is that any different than the OS influencing what gets sent to the 3.5mm jack?  It isn&amp;#x27;t like apps running in iOS had to interact with APIs to do all the other things (e.g. camera) but not the jack.  Is it?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>astrodust</author><text>Flash drives cost almost nothing. I&amp;#x27;m not going to lose any sleep over a $4 flash drive being given to someone and never getting it back. In terms of inflation that&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;cheaper&lt;/i&gt; than giving someone a floppy that cost $1.&lt;p&gt;Floppy disks were always terrible. Slow, unreliable, prone to failure at the worst possible time. A simple magnet could trash them beyond repair. A bit of water could render them unreadable. Leave it loose in your bag and it gets bent? The thing was toast.&lt;p&gt;In the dying days of the floppy disk, around the time Apple introduced the iMac with no floppy drive, they were already obsolete. 1.44MB could barely hold anything useful at that time, most people doing any serious exchange had already moved on to Zip drives because they held a more reasonable 100MB, or CD-R since you could burn six times more than that onto them. If you had tiny WordPerfect files then floppies were adequate, barely, but what kind of a market is that?&lt;p&gt;So long floppy. You won&amp;#x27;t be missed.</text></comment>
<story><title>The End of Headphone Jacks, the Rise of DRM</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/end-headphone-jacks-rise-drm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dTal</author><text>&amp;gt;If you&amp;#x27;re old enough to have used a floppy disk drive you do not miss them.&lt;p&gt;I am, and I do. Floppies were ubiquitous, durable, reusable, and cheap enough to give away. There&amp;#x27;s no replacement today - flash drives are the closest thing but when was the last time someone handed you one with no expectation of getting it back? Or bought a box of 50?&lt;p&gt;Sneakernet became much less vibrant with the death of the floppy.</text></item><item><author>stinkytaco</author><text>Floppy disks, optical disks, ethernet were all replaced by unencumbered standards and they all lead to a superior experience (well, maybe not ethernet, but there are definitly advantages to wireless). If you&amp;#x27;re old enough to have used a floppy disk drive you do not miss them.&lt;p&gt;Any time you introduce two way communication, you introduce the possibility of DRM, but that does not guarantee it. I can still use my HDMI with my linux PC. DRM is exclusive of the technology and I see no reason to hold back the technology because we are worried about DRM.&lt;p&gt;There are lots of compelling reasons to dislike this change. Among them the fact that I have a large investment in traditional headphones and devices that work well with them (my iPod, my HTC Phone, my stereo, TV, piano, guitar amp, etc etc etc), a decrease in quality, convenience and weight of wireless headsets (how long do they work? How much do they weigh? Can I swim or workout with them?). But DRM is not automatic.</text></item><item><author>wfo</author><text>Apple has been very good at predicting (or perhaps directly causing) the demise of certain technologies: the disk drive, the CD drive, the ethernet port. They removed them much to the chagrin of many a loyal customer, and a few years later they nearly ceased to exist across the entire industry (we&amp;#x27;re still waiting on the ethernet port to go away but give it time).&lt;p&gt;How many times will it take you forgetting your dongle to just pony up and buy the apple approved headphones? How long will it take you using the non-default, non-apple, non-sleek, clunky dongle as you show off your fancy new iPhone 7 to your friends before you decide it&amp;#x27;s got to go? What if they&amp;#x27;re using it the apple-intended way?&lt;p&gt;How long will it take before nobody buys headphones anymore? A few generations until they deprecate the dongle since nobody is using it? Where you can no longer buy a $10 set of headphones at a drugstore and plug them in? Where &amp;#x27;every audio device must provide analog audio output in a universal format that every device has been able to read since audio was invented or it is functionally useless&amp;#x27; is no longer a maxim?&lt;p&gt;Long-term, we are giving up a universal and open protocol that all devices work with for a proprietary one. If you don&amp;#x27;t expect companies to abuse this to make money and to stop you from doing what you want with your equipment, well, I&amp;#x27;ve got a bridge to sell you.</text></item><item><author>mead5432</author><text>I understand the argument that forcing content through a proprietary jack opens the door for controlling said content and has huge implications for hardware manufacturers and the way people use their stuff.&lt;p&gt;What I am having a hard time understanding is why is that any different than the OS influencing what gets sent to the 3.5mm jack?  It isn&amp;#x27;t like apps running in iOS had to interact with APIs to do all the other things (e.g. camera) but not the jack.  Is it?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thomnottom</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ll give you 3 of those points, but definitely not durable. Some of them lasted a long time, and some of them stopped working before I could finish writing to them. And since writing to them was painfully slow, something frequently went wrong.&lt;p&gt;Of course with flash drives we can wait the short time it typically takes someone to copy the contents off to get it back. And since they can hold significantly more data, they are also far more reusable.</text></comment>