Why phone makers are trying to kill the headphone jack
“It looks like I ruffled more than a few feathers yesterday with my post urging phone makers to stop trying to kill the headphone jack,” Abhimanyu Ghoshal writes for TNW. “Xiaomi India’s product lead, Jai Mani, got in touch to share the manufacturers’ side of the story, which is certainly worth hearing to inform yourself about why this debate even exists.”
Ghoshal writes, “As we chatted on WhatsApp at 7:30AM this morning, Mani explained: ‘Headphone jacks are actually pretty big. And the common trends in smartphone design are making other components bigger: dual cameras with bigger pixels, big front cameras, smaller bezels, and waterproofing. It’s difficult to say exactly which components benefit from the removal of the headphone jack, since mechanical design starts after you define the product – but in general, we can certainly use the space it takes up nowadays.'”
“Right now, this may not be a huge problem for Android consumers, who have plenty of phones to choose from at every price point,” Ghoshal writes. “It could be an issue for iOS fans, though. You can only choose between the current and previous generations of iPhones, and Apple’s already dropped the jack last year, which means your options are limited to the iPhone 6 and the SE.”
MacDailyNews Take: Much ado about nothing. The headphone jack is dead. Live with it.
We haven’t used our iPhone 7 Plus Lightning ports for anything other than charging since the day we unboxed them because:
And, even if we didn’t have AirPods, we’d be just fine, thanks, because in every iPhone box, Apple included: Apple Lightning to 3.5 mm Headphone Jack Adapter
