Intro -
No sooner than Apple’s market capitalization broke one-trillion dollars did the ridicule begin: pictures of dongles, often in disrepair, posted by customers on social media wryly suspecting that the interminable cycle of losing and replacing an object with a tendency to regularly vanish into other dimensions had catapulted the company’s worth into the 10 figures.
Since it debuted in 2016 to accommodate users who refused to capitulate to the company’s new jack-less iPhone 7 (its removal was proclaimed by Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller as an act of “courage”), the dongle has absorbed more ire than perhaps any other product in the Apple lineup. People hated the dongle precisely because Apple achieved its one trillion dollar valuation in part by loading products with proprietary technology, like its all-purpose Lightning port, and making those products inextricable from users’ lives. “It is awful, this interrupted piece of ghost spaghetti, this limp aberration of tech,” Jeremy Larson wrote in The Outline this May. And yet like Larson, those of us who refuse to surrender to Apple’s anti-analog blueprint for the future find ourselves shelling out nine dollars so regularly that we have signed up for a de facto subscription service.
Until the latter half of 2017, another dongle, the one-meter Lightning-to-USB adapter that allows a MacBook to connect to basically anything else, was the best-selling Apple product at Best Buy according to sales-rank data tracked by Thinknum. Upon the iPhone 7’s release, the headphone jack adapter took the top spot almost instantly, and only last quarter has it been replaced by the wireless AirPod headphones people suspect the jack’s removal was trying to steer us towards in the first place.
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Inside
the
Drooping
Rubber
NO JACK
CITY - - -
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In Defense of the Dongle
Is all this warranted? Apple’s justifications for removing the jack and spawning a dongle sub-industry are steeped in marketing buzzwords and innovation jargon. In a 2016 interview with Buzzfeed News, Apple’s VP of marketing Greg Joswiak declared the headphone jack “a dinosaur” and insisted that it was “time to move on.” Designed in the 1800s and redesigned only once in the ‘60s—when it was it was reduced from 6.35 to 3.5 millimeters—the headphone jack has been a universal constant in the world of audio, connecting disparate brands and devices for over a hundred years. So, aside from eliminating the dongle from what Apple felt was a mandate to courageously propel technological history forward, what’s the technical reason for its abolition?
According to Apple, the headphone jack was a space monopolizer, occupying prime real estate and compromising the integrity of iPhone builds. Apple’s senior VP of hardware engineering, Dan Riccio, said that the headphone jack was “just a hole filled with air” taking up “valuable space” in the quest to build phones with better cameras, faster processors, and longer battery life. It was also hindering Apple’s chances of building a waterproof phone—even though Samsung did just that with the Galaxy S7. And so, the engineering argument for the banishment of the space-hogging, water-accepting air hole stands.
Apple’s dongles are breakable, losable, and unlovable. And we’ve made them some of the company’s best-selling products.
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1970s: Parallel and serial port copy-protection dongles
In the late 1970s, software company Audiogenic released Wordcraft, a word processor for the Commodore Pet personal computer. In order to keep people from copying the program (via tape backup deck), the program came with a dongle that attached to the Commodore’s tape cassette port. It included a “shift register” that generated a random number to verify with the software that the user had paid up. These kinds of copy-protection dongles lasted throughout the 90s; in the early PC days, people had to daisy-chain copy-protection dongles in order for all of their software to work.
The iPhone dongle is not like the others, most of which perform the simple, geometric task of changing a port from one shape to another. Instead, the Lighting-to-3.5mm adapter is a miniscule complex of technology. First, it converts a digital signal—the music being played—into an analog one. Second, it amplifies that analog signal so your headphones can hear the sound (just like a tiny stereo amplifier). This means it has a tiny digital-to-analog converter and an equally small headphone amplifier on board.
Such is the extent to which Apple felt compelled to travel in order to remove the headphone jack—it had to invent something new so that we could use something old. Which means that along with a small size that almost seems designed to be lost, it’s a flimsy, fragile object, and its tiny wires, connectors and circuits are hardly proofed against the endless pushing and tugging it inevitably endures when used as designed.
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1980s: Car stereo tape-deck adapters
In the 80s, if you didn’t have a rad car with an even radder auto-return tape deck, you weren’t rad. But then CD players came along with their crystal-clear sound and supercool laser technology, and all the rad kids just had to have one. At first, in-dash CD players were rare and expensive, so everyone ran to their local Circuit City to buy a tape-to-3.5mm jack adapter.
They were ubiquitous, cheaply made, and they were made to break.
You can still buy one for about $6 from Walmart.
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1990s: Videogame steroids
In the 1990s, videogame consoles were on their last legs. The Sony PlayStation hadn’t yet revitalized the industry, and Sega was looking for ways to milk just a little bit more cash out of its popular Genesis console. So it released the 32X, a tumor-like add-on that beefed up the Genesis’ processing and graphics capabilities. It was released in 1994 and was discontinued by 1996 when the company refocused on its next console, the Sega Saturn.
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2000s: Enter Apple
In 2001, Apple changed the way people listened to music forever by introducing the iPod. It was a beautiful device that did one thing simply. It wasn’t the first of its kind — MP3 players were already popular — but like Apple does, the iPod came in a package that reeked of design and style. It also created the need for a dongle. that’s right, the original iPod gave rise to the iPod remote: The Apple A1018 wired iPod remote. Apple would go on to sell multiple iterations of its wired remote controls for the iPod.
don·gle
noun
a small device able to be connected to and used with a computer, especially to allow access to wireless broadband or use of protected software.
Bloggers and scholars can argue over their own readings of the graph. One interpretation is that the the dongle’s dominance is an irrefutable vote against the company’s patronizing insistence that it knows what its consumers want—that in fact the company is so oblivious to their desires that they will buy dongle after dongle to avoid the very way Apple wants them to use its own products. Another is that it does know what its customers want; that it is downright clairvoyant, and that after the the consumer spends enough time rebelling against the company’s wisdom—in this case, making do with the dongle—they return prodigal and contrite, admitting that Bluetooth headphones were best all along.
Yet another is that Apple is wrong, but that we all have a limit—for some it might be five dongles, for others 50—and once we hit it, we simply give up.
iPad
MacBook Air
(8GB memory)*
MacBook Air
(4GB memory)*
MacBook Air
(8GB memory)*
$100 iTunes
Gift Card
Apple
Watch
Apple TV*
Apple TV*
Apple TV*
Apple TV*
EarPods
(Lightning Plug)
AirPod
Earpods with Remote and Mic
3.3' Lightning-to-USB 2.0 Cable
6.6' Lightning-to-
USB Cable
Lightning-to-3.5mm Headphone Adapter
Top 5
best-selling Apple products at Best Buy,
by quarter -
Sales Rank among Apple products
Quarter
Dongles
Headphones
TVs
Watches
Gift Cards
MacBooks
iPads
source: Thinknum
q1 2016
q2 2016
q3 2016
q4 2016
q1 2017
q2 2017
q1 2018
q2 2018
q3 2017
q4 2017
1st
2nd
3rd
4th
5th
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Adapt or Die
Apple isn’t guilty of inventing the very concept of the dongle—they’ve existed since at least the 1970s, when software makers forced users to plug small devices containing encryption keys into ports to prevent piracy. And the dongle isn’t unique to computers. Those tape decks you plugged into your car in the pre-Bluetooth days that let you play a CD were a type of dongle. So long as we exist in a world in which a single manufacturer doesn’t dictate our entire universe of products, different device standards will exist at different places and times, and we’ll need dongles to make them work together. As of August 14, of the top-20 products Best Buy sells of its house brand, Insignia, 11 were dongles or cables that changed one sort of connection to another.
Even Apple’s own lineup is disproportionately made up of adapters, comprising four of its ten best-selling products as of August 14.
Adapters have been an unspoken necessity for the use of Apple products since the Macbook became a one-port device, and people turned apoplectic then, too. But even it didn’t seem to stoke the rancor caused by the flap of drooping rubber we attach to our iPhones every day.
AirPods
Lightning-to-3.5mm Headphone Adapter
MacBook Air - 13.3" Display - Intel Core i5 - 8GB Memory - 128GB Flash Storage
3.3' Lightning to USB Cable
EarPods with Lightning Connector
6.6' Lightning-to-USB 2.0 Cable
AppleCare+ for Apple Watch - 2 Year Plan
Lightning Digital A/V Adapter
EarPods with Remote and Mic
USB-C-to-USB Adapter
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3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Best-selling Apple products on August 14, 2018
by Joshua Fruhlinger and Andrew Thompson
Design by Peter Carlson
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I hate you, don’t leave me
Regardless of the removal’s potential merits, people hated it, or at least they said they did. Reaction to the removal of the 3.5mm jack was swift and unforgiving, and it has endured. Samsung, Apple’s biggest competitor, mocked the object in a recent commercial in which a Genius Bar technician explains the reality of dongles to a hapless customer.
But despite protestation after protestation, customers hardly defected. (Did we mention Apple is worth a trillion dollars?) Even Google folded on the issue in October 2017 when it released the Pixel 2, a no-jack, single-port device. The next iPhone is rumored to ship without a dongle as Apple prepares us for an utterly port-less future about which we will continue to tweet angrily on our 100% wireless devices.
“For all the blogs and fury that clouded Apple's decision to ditch the old audio port roughly one year ago, the iPhone 7 has sold as well as ever,” Jeff Dunn wrote at the beginning of a Business Insider article last September, one year into our new dongle normal. “If people care, they don't care that much.”
The rest of the piece was a litany of arguments against the headphone jack’s removal.
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/ˈdäNGɡəl/
* Best Buy does not classify different generations of products, and some products are given slightly different product name. These products may or may not be redundant.
endured.
a recent commercial
iPhones are categorized differently based both on color and carrier, which may explain their absence in the chart.