After Nilay Patel's strong piece and John Gruber's meager response, here's another one by Steve Streza:
John can argue all he wants that this is all somehow in the best interest of customers by virtue of it being great business for Apple, but it simply isn’t true. It also won’t be a hill that many customers will die on at the point of sale. People will not buy into Lightning headphones, they will put up with it. This transition will be painful and difficult because of just how thoroughly entrenched the current solution is, how little the new solution offers, and how many complications it adds for customers. Nilay is correct, it is user-hostile, and it is stupid.
But hey, it’s great for Apple.
I have very little to add here, other than dongle, and a plea: can somebody finally give me a valid reason for removing the 3.5mm jack? I've heard nonsense about waterproofing (can be done just fine with 3.5mm jack), battery life (negligible, unlikely because of the location of the assembly, entirely and utterly eclipsed by making the battery like 0.5mm thicker), cost (...seriously? That's the best you can do?), or thinness (oh come on, the iPhone 6S is 7.1mm thick - it will take a miracle for the iPhone 7 or even 8 or 9 to be thinner than 3.5mm).
Anyone?
As far as I can tell, there are only downsides.
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Member since:
2006-11-19
Yes, unfortunately the 3.5 ports on most computers, including MacBook Pro are badly designed / isolated. We recently had an issue with the buzzing at an important presentation.
However in addition to $3 USB dongles, many "gaming" motherboards isolate the audio circuits, since heatsets are assumed to be always worn at those usage scenarios. This might be true for gaming laptops as well, but they tend to be heavier.
Another alternative is getting a proper DAC, but they are usually more expensive ($100+). So if you're interested only in getting rid of the buzz, yes I would also suggest a cheap USB dongle.