I do praise Apple for its history of kicking Microsoft in the gut. It’s one of the few companies that has managed to do this (albeit never directly) and get away with it, the results being better technology for end users and ultimately that is all that is important. Yet this latest trend of taking design shortcuts by essentially outsourcing interconnectivity to external peripherals is, interesting. Immediately other forms of outsourcing come to mind.

Outsourcing is largely done to offload risks, cost and externalities onto a third party. This is a core global business logic with disastrous effects on the planet and on people. Outsourcing makes it possible for Apple to claim ethical business practices while Foxconn workers commit suicide and the horrors of coltan mining in Congo happen, elsewhere.

image from wikipedia

Apple is not really innovating here, they are merely outsourcing the physical hassles of digital to analogue conversion (DAC). The audio jack hasn’t changed in a century because sound is created by way of physical vibrations in speakers and its design is good enough. Apple would have innovated had they delivered a new approach to transmitting the digital information in an audio file, by inventing a connector reduced in size with equal or better analogue audio fidelity characteristics, or by inventing new ways of using digital audio information to make speakers vibrate just the right way to create higher quality sound. Instead they just externalised/outsourced the problem.

This is outsourcing with a thin veneer of innovation marketing as cover. I write this on a 2015 Macbook with only one USB-C port. I need another device (at my cost of course) to connect anything to it. Apple and Microsoft. Trump and Hillary.