iPhone 7 May Feature Flush Camera, Stereo Speakers and Thinner Lightning Port

[Mac 128]

Battery cells are a uniform length, height, and depth for manufacturing simplicity and other concerns. Space saved from removal of the 3.5mm jack is not going to result in battery going into that space because the battery already is wider than that. See image here:Making the battery longer into the headphone jacks's space would require removing the other components in this area of the phone including the Lightning Port.

Right, because in a brand new form factor they can't move internal components around? And there's no chance they will engineer a custom battery like the one introduced with the retina MacBook (below)? But moreover, you do realize the headphone jack sticks up several millimeters above the Lightning port. At a minimum, the exact same battery in the 6s can be pushed down a few mm into the space the 3.5mm hardware is currently, without touching the Lightning hardware, and opening up an equivalent space above it to accommodate something else.

L-R: iPhone 6 - iPhone 6s

6s Headphone jack sticking above the Lightning port.

MacBook retina with custom contoured battery to make the new MacBook as thin and light as possible, with the maximum amount of battery possible.

They had to increase the thickness because of the Touch3D display. So the phone internals are really the same thickness as the 6.

What difference does that make? The thickness of the iPhone still increased, and they still had to make room inside for more hardware, to support it, like the taptic engine. In doing so they actually reduced the size of the battery without reducing battery life.

Feel like I'm reading a Red Herring here. Its not that customers don't want thin phones, but that desire only reaches to a certain point. They want good battery life and durable phones. The problem is the pursuit of thinness it compromising both of those objectives.

Well it's a double edged sword. The phones are getting thinner, so is it because the consumer doesn't have any choice, or because the customer prefers them? Without a study, who's gonna blink first? Apple? Samsung? Other Android manufacturers? Also, as has been pointed out on these forums, thinner also means lighter. Yes it's one more aspect of the phone as part of the compromise consumers have to weigh against their need, but lighter is generally a preferred asset of a mobile device.

Let's look at some specs:
iPhone: 1715 mAh battery, 7.1mm thickness
Sony Experia Z3 Compact: 2600 mAh battery, 8.6mm thickness

Specs don't equate to user experience. It doesn't matter if Sony's battery is twice as big as the iPhone if the hardware is twice as inefficient. Remember how I pointed out how Apple shrank the battery capacity in the 6S from the 6 yet still managed to get the same battery life? Also, how well does the Sony Experia Z3 Compact sell on the open market? Do you have any sales figures in relation to other phones based on how thin they are with parity of features and performance? If people are buying mostly thinner phones, I'm not sure how this matters.

And if you look at the rest of the measurements for the Z3 you'll see it's slightly shorter and narrower than an iPhone, too. So this isn't a case of a wider, flatter internal area, it's pure thickness, and how you make use of interior space. Sony didn't have to remove a headphone jack, or leave out a microSD card slot, to do that. Here's a group of 13 recent (Android 5.0 or above compatible) smartphones that all have height/width dimensions the same or lower than the iPhone, but with higher battery capacity. They all have 3.5 mm headphone jacks and user-expandable storage.

Again, are these phones spec for spec equals in hardware and performance? How do they stack up in sales? If not none of this matters.

Also, Samsung like to copy Apple -- that's common knowledge here. If most phone makers are lockstep following the one that's considered the leader, that doesn't mean the direction they're all walking in is the right way. It means they'll all trip over the same potholes.

Samsung is an example. Let me extrapolate for you: All Android manufacturers are facing the same issues as Apple. They will not eliminate a headphone port if they don't need to, in fact they will keep it and market it as a selling point. And I already said it -- Apple will not drop something as universal as a headphone port if the competition doesn't also need to in order to keep up with Apple. That would be a foolish move.

That's not what redundant means. The 3.5 mm headphone jack is the one and only such jack on the phone. There is no other analog port that can accept a miniplug connector. It's like saying the serial keyboard/mouse ports on PC are redundant with USB. Can you use both for keyboards and mice, sure. But they are completely different ports and buses and using an adapter to connect a USB keyboard to a serial port does not make them the same.

You can define it any way you want -- but redundant certainly does mean what I stated -- the 3.5mm jack does one thing -- it sends an audio signal in and out of the iPhone. There are three other ways to get audio into and out of the iPhone -- Lightning, Wifi, and Bluetooth, all three of which do much more than the 3.5mm jack. Last I checked, that makes the headphone jack redundant in function. And yes, serial keyboard and mouse ports are redundant with USB. And USB does much more. Heck even Serial does much more than the dedicated single function 3.5mm jack. If I only had room for USB or serial, I'd drop serial in a heartbeat. Maybe the decision to drop 3.5mm jack is a bit harder for you, but the end result is the same.