I don’t like Apple products and I’ve never really been quiet about this. This column is typed on a Mac, and always has been, apart from the one time in 2014 when I typed the entire thing in the woods. The end result of this long-term Mac usage has been an undying, possibly irrational hatred of their products.
This means I have an inherent bias, which is that I generally am not inclined to view Apple themselves as the innovative, forward thinking company they believe themselves to be. This also means that I’m going to run afoul of their loyal and equally irrational customer base, which will defend anything the company does. But it’s important to look at what the company is doing, lest their competitors ruin their own products by copying them.
What Apple happens to be doing is removing ports all over the place. The iPhone has had the headphone jack removed. The MacBook Pro, a computer that is marketed as a work machine, does not have a regular USB port, completely switching to the new USB-C standard. It also doesn’t have an SD card slot. It is removing ports that I use daily, and that plenty of others use daily as well.
Apple, for their part, claims this is an attempt to push the industry forward, introducing new standards and dropping old ones. Consumers, meanwhile, have a large number of products that use the old standards – USB-C was introduced very recently, and is used on almost nothing. The previous USB standard has been used for nearly 20 years, which means everyone else has a ton of things which use it. The previous 3.5mm headphone jack has been the standard for audio connections for over a century, because it works well. The company wants people to use wireless connections more and are designing their products around that idea.
If a better connection comes along, people adopt it. Take HDMI, the video and audio cable became the standard relatively quickly. There were no televisions that dropped other ports, forcing people to use it. It was adopted because consumers were convinced it was necessary. It wasn’t a smooth process, overpriced cables at its introduction did it no favors, but now it’s the standard. And yet the old style ports are still on my TV, allowing me to use older stuff that I already own.
It’s possible that USB-C will soon be used by everything. If it is, it will be because consumers will have been convinced that it’s better than the alternative. Wireless headphones are popular because people have been convinced of their value, and it is happening without anyone trying to change the standard. Apple’s product designs are just being unkind to consumers rather than pushing the state of the art.
