The iPhone is a decade old today

It must be doing something, normal Bluetooth audio is shit… well, at least it used to be. But it’s getting better with every new BT spec, so maybe it’s just finally passed the threshold of shit and became more acceptable?

In theory I was very supportive of moving to just a lightning connector. In practice it has been a completely disaster for me. The lightning headphones fail for me at an incredible rate. Right after I bought my iPhone 7 I went through 3 of them in about 3 weeks and thought I had a problem with the Lightning Connector on the iPhone itself. But since then I’ve gone through about one new headphone every 2-3 months.

Best guess is the actual lightning connector section at the end of the cord is not very robust. I don’t think I do anything unusual with my iPhones. I plug the headphone in, stick it in my blue jeans front pocket, and walk around with it or sometimes sit with the iPhone in my pocket and my headphones on. That’s it.

What happens is after a while, when I sit down the headphones cuts out. There’s a little electrical clicking sound and the sound stops. Usually the phone acts as the headphones are unplugged (stopping the music), but sometimes it keeps on playing I just can’t hear anything in the headphones. Then after a while the headphones start cutting out just randomly when I’m walking. Finally it happens frequently enough I toss out the headphones and get another pair. Another oddity is initially when I unplug and plug them back in, it immediately starts working. Then at some point, I can get it so that if the iPhone is playing music though the speakers, I plug in the headphones and it ignores them and keeps on playing music through the speakers, acting as if the headphones aren’t plugged in.

Bottom line for me, Lightning-only sucks. It’s the one part of my iPhone 7 I absolutely hate with a passion. Otherwise it’s a great phone.

Dunno if you’ve already come across these, but I got one for the gym and stuffed it full of FLAC files (on the microSD card) and it’s worked out really well. They do higher end stuff too but they were chunkier and more expensive than I was looking for.

It was over for the old guard by the end of the keynote. All that remained was getting the price down(ish). The speed of the 3GS was icing on the cake, especially for early-adopters, but it would be years before anyone could realistically compete.

To be fair, the upcoming Apple high-end device’s basic characteristics (bezel-free design, advanced materials, etc.) were published back when Samsung was still on the Galaxy 6 (might have been the 5, not sure). They were much too leaky this time around, and have been very slow to bring their “magic phone” to market. Everyone making phones has known for years now what was coming, and Samsung got ahead of them on some of the key points.

That said, I loved the Samsung 8’s hardware. It’s a pity it didn’t have the fluidity of the Pixel. And that fingerprint reader location…

Actually the Xiaomi Mi Mix was the first commercially-available tiny-bezel phone. Obviously the S8 was quite a bit more popular.

The iPhone 8 was delayed because Apple didn’t want to put the fingerprint reader on the rear of the phone; it will be the first device that can read your finger through the front glass. Which is neat. It may use Sapphire crystal too.

I’m tentatively hopeful about sapphire actually making it this time around. It’s been a long time coming.

Had a friend who was one of those that paid the crazy like 700-800 price early only to see Apple do the drop to $199 a few months later. Always got a chuckle out of that.

On the first iPhone? Sounds like a straight buy-the-phone price versus a contract-required price. Generally, the math works out the same if you have a good non-contract deal. I don’t recall any iPhone (ever) costing $200, unsubsidized by the contract.

Not back in 2007, it didn’t. Phones were subsidized then and you didn’t get a discount for bringing your own.

The first iPhone (8GB) was introduced at $600 and dropped to $400 a few months later. Those who paid the original price got a refund.

Yeah I think that was the first time ever Apple dropped the price of a new product, and so quickly. Unprecedented. I wonder why they did that? Maybe sales were just too low?

Not that it matters now since the whole thing was massively successful in the medium to long term.