Comic: ♫ Head Like a Phone / Dark as Your Soul ♫

By Rich Stevens
last updated

Ed: Welcome to this week's edition of The Pixel Project: a weekly comic from Diesel Sweeties' Rich Stevens on Apple, technology, and everything in-between. Today: ♫ Head Like a Phone / Dark as Your Soul ♫

1998 they ditched floppy disks? what the- just use a thumb drive.

2007 no physical keyboard? oh, come on. learn to type on the screen.

2012 theres no dvd? how am i supposed to- use the cloud, bro.

2016 no headphone jack? thats such a load of- just use bluetooth.

or how about i just use android?!

Read more comics from The Pixel Project.

Rich Stevens
Rich Stevens

Pixel lover and cartoonist. Still have my original Apple IIgs. See more at clango.org or follow him on Twitter @rstevens.

18 Comments
  • Sure, I'll just buy a new car that has bluetooth while I'm out.
  • Bluetooth car adapters available on Amazon for about $35. Got one for my GF and seems to work great.
  • Lame comic again and misses the point. More apologizing/rationalization before Apple makes you go wireless/buy an adapter/buy proprietary head phones. Posted from my Nexus 6P
  • Its victory on the face of haters/complainers/doubters that has made Apple the company it is today. Thanks for being part of the group that made Apple reach these heights. Its always been fun watching someone/some entity win over and over and over and over again at the face of harsh criticism.
  • Bluetooth is not responsive enough for something like smartphone games. And as far as lightning, the problem I see is that with a lightning headphone cable, Apple is not adapting a standard early, they are using one they created and do not allow others to use in their devices. So I won't be able to use the headphones I have to listen to my phone AND Mac, I'd have to buy new ones for my phone. Or I could use an adapter, but then I'd have to buy multiple adapters, or shift my adapter around among different pairs of headphones. Posted via the iMore App for Android
  • Why would you have to buy multiple adapters? You would need one to go from Lightning to 3.5mm, that's it. Your Mac and other devices still have their 3.5mm outputs that work with your current headphones. Yeah, I don't like having to buy an adapter but it's not the end of the world. I'm already used to it as my earbuds have a battery pack hanging off of them (at their input), adding an additional couple inches of cable wouldn't really matter.
  • Are you sure they phased out the floppy in 1998? I seem to remember it was a few years later
  • Apple started to phase it out in 1998, and the launch of the iMac the trigger. You could get installed options for a Zip drive, but you had to buy a USB floppy in the G3 towers because they didn't offer an internal floppy.
  • 1984 - I liked the novelty of it as I had only used DOS, Apple, and C64 command lines to that point.
    1998 - What took you so long? CDs or LAN were the way to go.
    2007 - I was a PalmOS user, so typing on the screen took me a little while.
    2012 - Echo 1998. What took you so long?
    2016 - Bluetooth is better than it used to be, but this is one that might take me a while.
  • No, 1998 didn't really have thumb drives. I got one in '04 at 32 meg and thought it was cool, so I doubt they'd really be doable 6 years earlier. Further, bluetooth is garbage for sound quality imho.
  • There was barely usb support in 1998 so the thumb drive certainly was not main stream. As usual this comic is neither accurate nor funny.
  • The first iMac didn't recognise thumb drives IIRC......
  • The Zip drive was the preferred method of "hi data" storage in '98 and it was much faster in it's parallel port variant then it's usb counterpart.
  • Love the NiN reference :) that is my take away from the comic.
  • People picking apart what year which happened and when thumb drives started but no one complains that he is wearing ear buds in 1984
    Or that he wore the same clothes for 30 years Sent from the iMore App
  • I don't think that bluetooth sound technology is up to to where we're at with the jack and also what about people who have expensive Over ear headphones and IEMs? There is no adapter or workaround for this change it's either buy from apple and get some sub par bluetooth headphones
  • Bluetooth has come a long way and really, if you conducted a blind, volume-matched listening test with the same set of headphones, there's a 99.99999999999999999999999999999999% chance that you wouldn't hear a difference between the two. Most people make negative comments regarding Bluetooth audio because they are conducting sighted listening tests and fall ill to the placebo effect. If Apple were to actually get rid of the headphone jack and go the Lightning only route, they will probably come out with an adapter. Either that or a 3rd party would. There's no way Apple is going to let 30-50% of the Beats headphones, that they just sold, not work with the new iPhone. Plus that means that Apple would have to put Lightning in their Macs for audio output and that would really shake things up.
  • It is kind of hard to put it all on placebo effect when you have the audio completely cut out regularly when on bluetooth. I am not an audiophile and would probably be fine with the actual quality of the bluetooth audio if it didn't dropout so frequently.