Removal of iPhone 7 Headphone Jack Was Essential for Water Resistance, New Camera System

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

The Sony Xperia ZR is water resistant to IP55 and 58, and that has a headphone jack.

I'm certainly not complaining about its omission on the iPhone 7 given that a dongle's included, but I doubt very much that waterproofing was behind its removal. More likely - they did it for marketing reasons in order to make the phone appear different and more sophisticated than its predecessor. Afterall, with the exception of the antenna bands and new 'blacks', the phone essentially looks the same, especially when a case will be fitted.

 

[Sonmi451]

Your ears are analog...

Speak for yourself. I have HD 4K hearing.

 

[LinusR]

There was literally nothing wrong with the 3.5mm jack.

Well yes, there was. It was there and took place away. Phil Schiller was right when he said that new features require space and that it might be necessary to sacrifice an old port for that.

If people complain about the removal because they can't listen to music and charge at the same time, or because they have very expensive headphones they can't use without the adapter anymore, I understand that. But it appears to me that people complain just because they don't want a change.
Apple even ships the adapter with the phone. So if you don't want an iPhone 7, don't buy one. Get a 6S with twice as many gigs for the same price as last year. Including a headphone jack.

You're welome.

 

[RemE]

Oh right, so I guess Sony are frigin technical geniuses then as they managed to make water proof headphone ports YEARS AGO!!!

If Apple are that inept at technical design, I highly suggest they hire some of Sonys mobile division engineers...

Or basically Apple is talking UTTER BS to give excuses for ditching the headphone jack which is far more likely..

Apple truely really are getting more and more arrogant and treating its customers with more and more contempt as the years role on.

Agreed, TOTAL BS, Courage? Nope, Arrogance, Greed are my top two that come to mind.

Headphones weren't the only thing to use that port, external mics were pretty handy for those of us in private aircraft who wanted a simple way to record cabin chatter by popping a small mic in the aircraft headset.
Credit card readers use that port.
Air speed meters use that port.

Also, when flying commercial, we love our Bose noise cancelling earbuds. We can use the phone and charge, we can "jack-in" to other audio sources as well since the headphone jack is a simple and ubiquitous connector.

Apple touted the JBL lightning noise cancellers which look nice, since they are powered by the phone, I guess I can now arrive at my destination with a near dead phone, real progress.

My family of 4 will now skip the 7 and the watch 2.0 and live out the life of our 6s's before jumping ship.

Fanboys can enjoy Apple headsets that only work with Apple. This is sadly the last straw for me.

 

[mi7chy]

Upgrade iPhone 6 and 6S series to 7 for a fraction of the cost. Brilliant!

http://appleplugs.com/

 

[spacemnspiff]

It's actually about a 5% difference for the Exynos (international variant) but pretty impressive results for the Note 7 nonetheless since it is pushing 77% more pixels than the 6S Plus.

Note 7 = 1440 x 2560 = 3,686,400
6S plus = 1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600

I was talking about battery life, I wasn't alluding to screen resolution. Can we get back to the topic? Battery life unit is in hours/minutes, unit of time. Restate your response again with the time unit.

 

[oliversl]

a hole, sitting there consuming space... Wow, The New Apple sure can inject hate and discrimination to stuff invented in the past. Its old, so hate it and talk trash about it.

Classy

 

[manu chao]

Still don't understand why people are comparing this to things like the removal of the floppy disk and cassette players. Each of those things were replaced by better technologies. Ditching a wired technology with a wireless one isn't the same thing, but rather something that complements existing things. For example, Wi-Fi isn't a replacement for Ethernet, for without Ethernet, you generally wouldn't have Wi-Fi.

Yet WiFi has replaced Ethernet ports on all Mac laptops released in the last four years.

Except for space savings there never is an advantage in removing any kind of port or exchangeable drive system from the consumers point of view (from the manufacturer's point of view, there are also cost savings and slightly reduced technical complexity, however, which doesn't seem to count although those advantages could partially be passed on to consumer as well in the form of lower prices or additional or improved other features).

Thus if you look at it merely from the point of view of 'what do I gain from the removal of X', there's almost never a case for removing anything. However, eventually most people will accept that if usage of a feature drops below a certain threshold, removing it is ok or even beneficial (eg, built-in 56K modems or probably also VGA ports). Often that might only mean that only once person A doesn't use a feature anymore, person A finds it ok to remove it.

There are two aspects that hardly get any recognition:

1. Today 90% of users might use the headphone jack but tomorrow 80% of iPhone 7 users might not use it anymore even if the iPhone 7 still had a headphone jack (because they use the bundled earphones that use Lightning, because they use one of Apple's new wireless headphones or because they are switching to wireless regardless of which ports the new iPhone has. Thus, by the mere act of shipping Lighting headphones and better wireless headphones, the usage of the headphone feature might drop below a certain threshold. In a sense, Apple doesn't wait until usage drops, it (a) predicts that usage will drop and (b) actively causes a drop by shipping Lightning headphones with the iPhone 7 and offering better wireless headphones.
2. The decision by Apple management to ship a phone without a headphone jack (a) puts pressure on Apple to release better wireless options and (b) also incentivises third-parties to do the same (as well as releasing more Lightning headphones).

That doesn't mean that all this is reason enough to remove the headphone jack this year. But it means that saying 'Removing the headphone jack is bad because having any kind of port is always better than not having it', is not looking into the future, is refusing to accept actual benefits (eg, space savings), and is ignoring all the indirect effects.

 

[hovercroft]

People will whine about the iphone every year. Regardless of the good features it has. Everybody whined about them changing the charging cable to lightning when the iphone 5 came out. People are whining now. And people will whine in 5 years time when they do something else. It comes with lightning headphones. And a lightning to 3.5 adapter. I'll more than likely invest in the wireless headphones too. I really don't see what all the fuss is about. If you don't like it don't buy it. Get over it. I've heard samsung have made a killer explosive device you can buy. Will be pre ordering my iphone 7 plus tomorrow morning.

 

[manu chao]

a hole, sitting there consuming space... Wow, The New Apple sure can inject hate and discrimination to stuff invented in the past. Its old, so hate it and talk trash about it.

"It's old" is a placeholder for "It will be used less and less in the not very distant future".

 

[keithtae]

Or considering Samsung's latest phone is laggy and blows up, Apple DID need the extra room to enhance the iPhone with all the new features....

Or considering how much more often iOS devises crashed compared to Android as a whole?

http://www.phonearena.com/news/Repo...-first-time-during-the-second-quarter_id84528

 

[falainber]

Well yes, there was. It was there and took place away. Phil Schiller was right when he said that new features require space and that it might be necessary to sacrifice an old port for that.

If people complain about the removal because they can't listen to music and charge at the same time, or because they have very expensive headphones they can't use without the adapter anymore, I understand that. But it appears to me that people complain just because they don't want a change.
Apple even ships the adapter with the phone. So if you don't want an iPhone 7, don't buy one. Get a 6S with twice as many gigs for the same price as last year. Including a headphone jack.

You're welome.

That's just a poor engineering on the part of Apple (that is if they are not lying). Samsung phones have all these features (and more) and are just as slim, have bigger batteries AND they have 3.5mm jack.

 

[M2M]

That's why they have a case, which allows you to charge for a total of 24 hours. Or do you listen to music 11 hours straight on a flight?

Watching movies, listen to music and audio books. It doesn't cover even 50% of the flight.

 

[keithtae]

I'm with you. This is a deal breaker for me. I need the ability to charge and use a wired headset simultaneously. I will use my 6+ until it dies then switch to another brand.

Just make sure your iPhone doesn't have the almighty "touch disease" that Apple will never acknowledge it's their fault.

 

[Arminnn89]

i have never used my 3.5 mm port last 5-6 years so i dont mind it, it is phone not music device, if you want music device go for iPod

 

[keithtae]

Absolutely. After all, it's just so difficult to use the adapter that ships in the box with the new iPhones so you can use the 'phones/earbuds that you already have.

FWP

Exactly, an adaptor that will likely to get lost in 5 mins and gotta keep buying them over and over again in order to use the "ancient" Tech of the 3.5 Jack.

#ohTheIrony

 

[Otaviano]

The Sony Xperia ZR is water resistant to IP55 and 58, and that has a headphone jack.

I'm certainly not complaining about its omission on the iPhone 7 given that a dongle's included, but I doubt very much that waterproofing was behind its removal. More likely - they did it for marketing reasons in order to make the phone appear different and more sophisticated than its predecessor. Afterall, with the exception of the antenna bands and new 'blacks', the phone essentially looks the same, especially when a case will be fitted.

Marketing? That might be the dumbest thing I have read all day.

 

[RemE]

Well yes, there was. It was there and took place away. Phil Schiller was right when he said that new features require space and that it might be necessary to sacrifice an old port for that.

If people complain about the removal because they can't listen to music and charge at the same time, or because they have very expensive headphones they can't use without the adapter anymore, I understand that. But it appears to me that people complain just because they don't want a change.
Apple even ships the adapter with the phone. So if you don't want an iPhone 7, don't buy one. Get a 6S with twice as many gigs for the same price as last year. Including a headphone jack.

You're welome.

Ha Ha, Apple engineers are VERY good, if Phil had told them to keep THE worlds most standard connector, they would have found a way.

Funny, after reading all the biographies, I honestly believe that these arrogant bastards sat at a table and said, "it's time to lock down the audio side of the business". Proprietary cables, and wireless radios, only a big dog can do that, and they weren't thinking of us at all.

 

[the0pticnerve]

I guess some people, at this point, would label me an audiophile. I like to listen to my music using records on a turntable. My system isn't the highest end but it's really good. I've always thought the sound quality of digital (CD's and MP3's or other digital formats) to be inferior to analogue. However, I can't carry a turntable around with me everywhere so I'm happy to have thousands of songs in my pocket.

Digital audio has to be converted to analogue via a piece of hardware called a Digital Audio Converter, or DAC.

All previous iterations of the iPhone contained a DAC within the phone. That part, along with the headphone jack, has been removed in the iPhone 7 line (the signal output of the lighting port is pure digital). This means that the DAC will exist outside the phone. If you have lighting headphones, the DAC is somewhere between the lighting port and the actual speaker(s) inside the headphones. If you have a lightning to 3.5 adapter, the DAC is in the adapter. If you have a home stereo, you can currently purchase a dedicated DAC box that greatly improves the signal quality but the signals still pass through the device's internal DAC. Since the iPhone7 will be pure digital out via the lighting port you can get full digital from the phone and use the DAC box for the conversion (assuming the DAC manufacturer's adapt to this technology).

There is a possibility of a huge benefit here. This means that headphone and DAC box manufacturers' and the companies that will create the adapters can create their own DAC that, in theory, could be far superior to what Apple offered inside the previous iPhone models.

 

[Bregalad]

In the past the "universal" audio plug was analogue and everyone was compatible.

Today the "universal" audio plug is still analogue, but iPhone 7 users have to carry around a stupid dongle to plug into anything not designed specifically for iPhone.

In the future the "universal" audio plug will be USB-C and iPhone users will have to carry around a stupid dongle to plug into anything not designed specifically for iPhone.

Luckily Apple is still supporting Bluetooth instead of some proprietary wireless technology.

 

[kwren]

Well people use steering wheels in cars. Whoa, another 100+ years old technology! Lets dump this and build cars with joysticks steering. Just for the sake of moving on.

I used to think that, but then my 15-year-old nephew requested vinyl LPs for his birthday.

 

[teidon]

Pretty sure Apple's idea for the next "headphone connector" is not called Lightning... it's called Bluetooth. Wireless over wires any day. And for the record, during the keynote Apple mentioned one headphone with Lightning connection... and 3 headphones with Bluetooth connection (their own and 2x Beats).

 

[kwren]

In the past the "universal" audio plug was analogue and everyone was compatible.

Today the "universal" audio plug is still analogue, but iPhone 7 users have to carry around a stupid dongle to plug into anything not designed specifically for iPhone.

In the future the "universal" audio plug will be USB-C and iPhone users will have to carry around a stupid dongle to plug into anything not designed specifically for iPhone.

Luckily Apple is still supporting Bluetooth instead of some proprietary wireless technology.

Are you aware of Apple's petition to sidestep the FCC's accessibility requirement with a proprietary BT protocol?
http://www.hearingreview.com/2016/0...-aid-compatibility-re-defining-accessibility/

 

[alexgowers]

I hate the assumption that because it's been around for hundreds of years it's out of date and needs to go. Apple are wrong. Their wireless solutions are a walled garden of apple only devices and don't play with any other devices. If you can keep to lighting jack which is clearly outdated and replaced by USB type c and can Still maintain water resistance but not with a 3.5mm jack! That's called straight up lying!

 

[chagla]

Real courage would've been changing the iPhone connector to USB-C.