Thoughts On The iPhone And The Headphone Jack

Why I’m totally fine with Apple abandoning this century-old port.

I wrote this piece back in July but thought it was worth a re-post now that we’re only days away from Apple’s September event and the introduction of the latest iPhone, one heavily rumored to abandon the headphone jack.

Oh, boy. It’s only July and we already have a controversy about the next iPhone, which probably won’t make its debut until September. The current hot rumor about the iPhone “7” is that it won’t have a headphone jack. Despite the fact that Apple has made no announcement yet about the next iPhone at all. Every Apple-focused blog and podcast has been abuzz about the latest rumor. Nilay Patel penned an incendiary piece over at The Verge titled, Taking the headphone jack off phones is user-hostile and stupid. John Gruber responded in a piece at Daring Fireball titled Headphone Jacks Are The New Floppy Drives essentially looking back at the history of the ports Apple has abandoned and musing that those decisions usually work out for the best in the long run. The people I feel most sorry for in all of this are the poor folks staffing the various Apple Stores. I worked in Apple Retail for over seven years, and I know what it’s like to get questions about unannounced products that there can be no good answer to.

I can tell you this: I just recently purchased an iPhone SE, and my guess is that I will never plug anything into the headphone jack. I love listening to audio content on my iPhone, mostly podcasts. I used to always use Apple’s wired earbuds for this purpose, with the wire channeled down my shirt and into my pants pocket to the iPhone. This presented some problems. First of all, the cord would frequently get horribly twisted. Second, and worse, the ear buds would wear out after about three months. I went through probably three sets in a nine month period before finally saying, “enough is enough.”

Last October, after seeing several friends with them, I bought my first pair of Bluetooth earbuds, the LG HBS-750 to be specific. If you don’t have anything like this yourself, you’ve probably seen tons of people with these types of headphones. True, you’ll look a little nerdy wearing them, (there are less nerdy Bluetooth earbuds available) but mine have worked solidly for the last nine months. I love using Bluetooth headphones, and I don’t see myself going back to a wired set. Millions of people have already joined me in this.

That’s not to say there are no downsides to Bluetooth headphones. I have to charge them about every other day. It’s often finicky about connecting and I have to go into the Bluetooth settings on my iPhone and force the connection more times than I’d like. And sometimes if I move my head just right the audio goes choppy for a moment. But all of these real negatives are outweighed by the convenience of not having a wired connection and the reliability of wireless headphones as opposed to what I had used before.

If Apple removes the headphone jack from the iPhone starting later this year, (and again it’s an “if” at this point) I suspect it’ll be in favor of a wireless solution. When it comes to things like ports, Apple likes to skate toward where it thinks the puck is going, not where the puck is. Despite all of the advantages of the traditional wired headphone port, the future is wireless. If it happens, I hope that’s why it happens, and I can’t wait to see what Apple’s wireless earbud solution is.

Originally published at www.johnsherrod.net.