The slightly bigger body I could accommodate, the rounded edges are f* ugly but can handle that too if I must, even the dumb protruding camera may not repel me if I meditate enough but not having audio connection without some kind of adapter or adapters - considering the various use cases - is just incomprehensibly idiotic. I will never ever go for such. I rather have a granny-phone and paper+pen address book, relearn using printed maps and never carry around e-tickets than giving that amount of money for a defective product design, for an audio device without audio connection (that'd also spare me of annoying update and uninvited functionality frenzy as an extra btw.).
This functionality degradation for the sake of design mania indicates utter madness and gross incompetence!
Let's say Apple comes out with a phone with a perfect folding screen, a battery that holds a charge for a month, perfect offline speech recognition, and it costs $100. I still wouldn't buy it if it didn't have a headphone jack, because I'd consider it a bad design. Does that make me stupid? Perhaps. But as an engineer I'd find such a phone insulting: There's no valid engineering reason not to include a headphone jack. The only reason is for Apple to thumb its nose at people who actually care about good design by saying "We're Apple. See what we can get away with?"
It would be like Mercedes suddenly deciding cars didn't need air conditioners any more and refusing to build cars with that option. "We're Mercedes. We know best. You don't need an A/C. Open the window if you're too warm."
The whole premise just sounds insulting, and if it happened you'd never buy a Mercedes again.
So, just don't buy it? I dunno what to tell you -- it sounds like a lot of your identity and mental health is wrapped up in what Apple's product people want to develop.
Personally, I would never want to go back to the crappy headphone connectors. The connector always wore out on me. So while I understand why you might want a headphone port (and some people likely want an in-built parallel or ADB2 port), it's hyperbolic to call it "utter madness and gross incompetence".
In reality, it's just someone having different values than you. Why is that so difficult to accept for some people?
That was the point exactly, you do not need to analyze and put so many uninvited speculation into a simple fact that I see tings differently and doesn't like certain things. Yes, the point was not to buy the device, exactly!
I stand by the phrasing of 'utter madness and gross incompetence' when usability is degraded and things get unnecessarily complicated in an essential functionality. All of this for questionable changes (I wouldn't dare calling it improvement, I feel improper just to mention this word in this context, the whole thing is very far from improvement).
What I also need to add how strange is that certain groups of people get offended on strong and grounded opinion about some consumer product like if it was a central element of their life not a utility of an auxiliary topic.
You can stand by the phrasing, which I think most reasonable people would deem hyberbolic. It is a misuse of language to make such a strong emotional statement about a design decision where you have zero knowledge of the considerations involved, and what tradeoffs were considered.
There must be some sort of an internet rule one party intends a statement to be about the other, but it really applies to the author.
We live in an age where cars reboot while driving (Tesla). It's bizarre because we never experienced it before.
But the additional flexibility offered via software updates is the core power of software. Where we are able to replace hardware with software functionality, there's additional flexibility for improvement and iteration. That's a valuable add.
The bizarre here is squeezing in matters into things just because we can. Using techniques just for the sake of using those techniques or approaches elsewhere is not a good enough argument.
It is bad putting software into anything and everything, just because we do it frequently to other things. It should have much better reason for that. Complicating unnecessarily and many times introducing risks and troubles is a no good.
“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
That's a rather narrow view of things, one that I'm surprised to see on HN.
Automatically that view is disqualified because we are talking about Bluetooth headphones; there must be software on them to communicate efficiently with paired devices.
AirPods receive firmware updates to make adjustments to the audio, and AirPods Pro receive further updates to make adjustments to balance audio quality and the way the noise cancellation works in order to make sure that the AirPods fit properly in peoples' ears.
I don't know that (A) connectivity, (B) audio quality, and (C) fitting in peoples' ears are contrived in any way.
This functionality degradation for the sake of design mania indicates utter madness and gross incompetence!