iPhone 7: Here’s Why Apple Removed The Headphone Jack

It's Public now that there won't be a headphone jack in the iPhone 7. While Apple has historically been known to abandon legacy technologies, the 3.5mm headphone jack is another matter entirely.

If you want to play music on an iPhone 7, you'll either have to use wireless Bluetooth headphones or plug new adapter-based headphones into the port you use to charge the device. Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president said that Apple was abandoning the headphone jack because it was the only company "courageous" enough to make such a drastic and bold decision, The Verge reports.

What Apple has to say

According to Vox, almost everyone has headphones, speakers, and other gadgets based on the ubiquitous 3.5 mm headphone jack. Eliminating this connection could render these devices unusable, or at least force everyone to carry around an extra adapter.

Ditching the headphone jack is just another step in Apple's quest to make the iPhone thinner, simpler, and more reliable. They're confident that however you might hate having to buy new headphones, you're going to love the sleeker look of the new iPhone 7.

Apple also believes that the conventional headphone jack has become a bottleneck to improvements in audio quality and headphone design. Obviously, no customer is asking Apple to eliminate features from its products. But customers do like it when products are smaller, lighter, and more affordable. The healthy growth of Mac sales over the last decade suggests that Apple is on to something.

Advantages

People keep their iPhones in pockets and purses rather than backpacks and briefcases, so making each iPhone thinner than the last while increasing battery life requires Apple to be ruthless about cutting unnecessary components.

Apple is looking for ways to make the iPhone case more watertight in order to compete with Android vendors that have been touting their own phones' water resistance, according to a report made by BGR. Fewer holes in the case means fewer ways for water to seep in. The iPhone 7 is also comes with a pressure-sensitive home button, rather than the mechanical one in the iPhone 6, eliminating yet another hole in the iPhone 7 case. The result, Apple says, is that the iPhone 7 is the most water-resistant iPhone yet.

Headphones plugged into a Lightning connector can also produce better sound than ones that are plugged into a headphone jack. Of course, we shouldn't expect the Lightning earbuds Apple bundles with the iPhone to sound as good as $800 headphones.

Other Options

You can buy a Lightning-to-headphone-jack adapter allowing you to plug an old-fashioned pair of headphones into your iPhone 7. You can use wireless headphones based on the Bluetooth standard or you can also use wired headphones based on the Lightning standard. Apple will bundle a pair of these with the iPhone 7, and there are a few other options in the market already, reports The Ringer.

No one's saying that Apple is wrong about wireless being the future. But the notion that it needed to remove the headphone jack now, and in this way, to improve the iPhone isn't credible. What killing the headphone jack really does is help Bluetooth headphone companies. That makes it a business decision, and not much more. And even if Schiller was just a guy stuck with the job he had to do, his speech is proof that publicly traded companies loathe admitting their motivations are selfish.