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Apple is asking MacBook Pro users to envision a life without the headphone jack


Apple asks users if they use the audio jack on their MacBook Pro with Retina display

To anyone who wondered about Apple’s plans for the headphone jack, prior to the release of the iPhone 7, the big surprise has been out for a while, and yet, it is still sinking into consumers, as a concept that may be hard to get used to.

The analog headphone jack has been the only audio source for decades, and some of us remember when we learned how to listen to music CDs by jacking up a pair of crackling Creative Labs PC speakers, to play Crash Bandicoot with a Blue Oyster Cult soundtrack.

In the wake of the loud chatter about the missing jack on the iPhone, Apple is turning the volume on the chatter even louder, by asking MacBook users if they “...ever use the headphone port on [their] MacBook Pro with Retina Display...”.

While it’s too early to draw the numbers, the question has merits. How many of us use the headphone jack on a MacBook, a PC, or a Chromebook? The implications of this question become deeper when thinking of the availability of alternative audio sources, such as our smartphones, tablets, and even set top boxes that we can control with our phones, to cast music and video onto full-size HDTV screens, while working on our laptops.

A “scarier” question to consumers would be “do you believe that the headphone jack on desktop PCs has died with Winamp and RealPlayer?”. Playing music from a desktop operating system seems somewhat superfluous, and to some degree, a nuisance, if we really think about it. A laptop is a device that requires a lot more interaction than an iPhone or an iPad. On a MacBook we switch between applications a lot faster than on other devices, which makes keeping an audio player on the desktop a bulky inconvenience, especially when another application hogs system resources and makes the music freeze or stutter.

Not surprisingly, we have seen past attempts at addressing that problem from laptop manufacturers who tried to integrate front-panel controls on a laptop, to play music from a side-loading CD reader, by means of a mechanism working independently from the operating system, which was an interesting concept, if the CD too weren’t about to succumb to the crushing weight of online streaming, and innovation.

It’s very possible that should Apple get a high enough number of votes in favor of doing away with the analog jack on MacBooks, that will be precisely what will happen. This is also a strong indicator that Apple may be working on a 2017 MacBook Pro announcement. The conclusion is easy to draw, as eliminating the analog jack will allow Apple to slim down future MacBooks, in pursuit of the ever-thinner design that is Apple’s signature in all its latest products, may they be running Mac OS X or iOS, which means that Apple is still working on the MacBook Pro’s body, and organization of the internal components, both factors dependent on whether the analog audio jack will be part of the next generation MacBook Pro.


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