iPhone 7 Without Headphone Jack Continues To Cause Controversy
When the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are officially announced on September 7, both phones will not have headphone jacks. The fact that Apple was doing away with the iPhone jack was just a rumor earlier in the year, but now, all reports and leaks lead to an iPhone that will best be used with Bluetooth wireless headphones or a lightning connector. The Verge recently claimed that by taking out the headphone jack, Apple was being hostile to its iPhone customers, and one of the reasons is because although wireless speakers are fine, they aren’t fantastic yet.
“I am surrounded by wireless speaker systems. (I work at The Verge, after all.) And while they mostly work fine, sometimes they crackle out and fail. It sucks to share a wireless speaker among multiple devices. Bluetooth headphones require me to charge yet another battery. You haven’t known pain until you’ve chosen to use Bluetooth audio in a car instead of an aux jack.”
Author Nilay Patel added that getting rid of a deeply established standard will impact accessibility, and that, at worst, nobody is even asking apple to remove the headphone jack. A majority of the commenters after the article agreed with Patel.
“I have a 6s Plus and had a 6 Plus, and a Nexus 5, and Nexus 4, and Nokia 800, and Nokia 700, and HTC EVO 4G, and so on and so on. Leave the headphone jack or I go to Samsung, and I really don’t want to do that,” claimed Coach D.
“Other companies have made slimmer phones while retaining the headphone port and achieving excellent battery life. This isn’t innovation, it’s bull-headed idiocy,” complained Dave Ray.
Yahoo! Finance believes the missing headphone jack will cause a mess for Apple — at least at the beginning.
“As you’ve heard ad nauseam, Apple appears extremely likely to remove the headphone jack from its next iPhone. This hasn’t gone over well! Apart from forcing some people to buy new wired (or wireless) headphones, it’s likely to raise the cost of the average pair, and make many learn to live with dongles.”
The article adds that companies such as Samsung and LG aren’t following Apple; they’re mocking them instead in their commercials. However, the article also adds that there could be benefits to slicing off the headphone jack, such as the company adopting a digital audio connection with the Lightning connector. The article notes that noise cancelling could become standard and higher-end Lighting headphones can provide better sound.
“The truth of the matter is that the headphone jack has long been the weak link of the chain in what was otherwise a beautifully designed piece of technology. It doesn’t take much to break it, and even if it’s not broken, a little dirt can make it unusable as well. It’s a wonder such a fragile piece of mechanics works as well as it does in the first place anyway. Time for something new.”
Like the article in Business Insider, this one states that in the end, audio quality will improve and that it’s about time we have a new audio headphone standard. Owsinsky seems to believe that Apple still has the power to change how the industry operates, but sales of recent iPhones and other products say the opposite. Do you think Apple is making a huge mistake by removing the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.
[Photo by Mark Lennihan/AP Images]
