No more wires? Apple removes the audio jack

Apple has announced the new iPhone, and with it a complete lack of revolutionary improvements, except for one thing: They've taken out the headphone jack socket in favour of using just a single solitary multipurpose lightning connector. But is it revolutionary or just controversial clickbait to send traffic to their site to buy more products?

It used to be the case that Apple would do a press release for a products and it would in each incremental revision become a more advanced and interesting device, blazing down a path never before trodden and revolutionising the way we interact with technology. However in the years since the early iPhone days or the days of quirky iMac designs and arguably since the passing of Steve Jobs, we've seen Apple turn to the safe path of small incremental improvements often paired with one, slightly "out-there",  design choice, like the new MacBook and its single USB-C connector.

Sadly it feels like the iPhone is no longer the pinnacle of innovation that it once was. A lot of the so called improvements seen on this new iPhone 7 are already on other phones, infact even dropping the headphone jack had been done by Motorola before.

What then does it mean for us, the consumers, when it seems like many manufacturers are seemingly in support of the removal of such an integral part of enjoying media on what is most peoples main multimedia device?

Here's some ideas of why they might have done it and some of the (poorly thought through) reasons some people are giving from a design perspective.

1. Removes the requirement for housing a digital to analog converter (DAC) inside the phone.
No it doesn't; this is still in place because the iphone still has speakers, in fact it has two of them. In previous generations the DAC would simply have been routed to either the speaker amp or headphone amp. Equally, is there a DAC inside the 3.5mm headphone adapter? If so the space saving really is nothing at all, if not then the DAC is just rerouting the signal to lightning connector.

2. No longer requiring a dedicated headphone amp. This would be true, however stereo audio requires two channels of amplification working in parallel. So rather than the three they have in iPhone 6 they've moved to two for the iPhone 7. A small efficiency saving that would account for only minimal circuit board saving (one tiny surface mount chip) and very low power draw savings. Also the question of what is actually inside that 3.5mm to lightning adapter raises its head. If there is no amp inside that connector then the amp must be inside the phone anyway.

3. No more physical jack means extra space inside for other functions (like the extra speaker)... Well smaller phones like Sony Xperia Z3 Compact already have both stereo speakers and a headphone jack, making this an incredibly lame excuse for a design decision.

4. Removing the jack can help to make the iPhone even thinner. This may well be the case but is making the phone thinner actually worth anything at all to consumers, or are we once again being forced down the path of miniaturization for the the sake of it? You could argue that we the consumer has spoken, by continuing to buy phones with batteries that last one day. The flip side is that for a number of years now that is all that manufacturers have provided and there simply is not a good choice for a smartphone buyer that wants battery life that lasts a full weekend away.
This does of course boil down to the cynic in me saying that it's all about profits and about making a product lasts for say two years worth of charging cycles before the battery life becomes so woefully poor that it needs replacing, and because it's inside a relatively unserviceable case you have to replace the whole phone rather than just the cheap battery...

6. Apple owns Beats. Beats = profit. It would be pretty cynical to say that Apple just wants to sell more bluetooth headsets, but hey this is Apple, the company with the largest cash stockpile in the world. They claim to be driven by the quality of products, but I'm not sure Beats run by the same model as they are widely claimed to be pretty plastic cases for $1 drivers. (An opinion that I fully share. Beats are hands down some of the worst headphones I've ever heard or used in my long life of headphone ownership).

7. Pure design. The headphone jack presents a problem of design. Its functionality well documented but it creates imbalance in the design adds a hole to an otherwise unblemished and symmetrical surface. Removing it is no longer an issue thanks to the widely available bluetooth headsets and the improvements seen in bluetooth audio quality since its early days. The difference now in overall quality between bluetooth and any other connection mechanism is subtle at most.

8. Water-resistance and ingress. Another design issue presented by any holes in the case are the potential ingress of water and dust, potentially causing catastrophic damage to the phone internals and ultimately total failure. The thing is though that the iPhone 6 and previous were already fairly tight ships and were certainly all capable of being used in the rain or catching a splash off the washing up without completely dying. Infact many phones claiming to be much more water resistant than iPhones were actually pretty shit at being water resistant at all, so any claims of water resistance should really be taken with a grain of salt.


What does it mean for us though?

Not a lot really. It's an unnecessary move and one that Apple has already conceded by including the adapter in the box with the phone. A lot of location audio specific apps rely on the audio jack output for functions like feeding timecode. I only hope it makes app developers change their mind about not developing for Android because "Apple is more pro oriented".