It’s so annoying, but this is why Apple removed the headphone jack on iPhones

If you’re a wired headphone user, you’ll understand the sheer annoyance of Apple removing the headphone jack from iPhones and replacing all their wired earphones with Lightning connectors. Now, you can’t charge your phone and listen to music at the same time without getting one of those stupid splitters, and it’s the most aggravating thing. So, why did they do it?!

The tech giant removed the headphone jack all the way back in September 2017 with the launch of the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus because the headphone jack took up a lot of space and only had one use: providing audio. Building this into the Lightning connector instead saved space and made room for other things, like a second speaker, which was added to the iPhone 7.

Apple’s marketing chief Phil Schiller said at the iPhone 7 launch event: “Maintaining an ancient, single-purpose, analogue, big connector doesn’t make sense because that space is at a premium.” So if iPhones still had headphone jacks, they wouldn’t have two speakers. Now it seems worth it.

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The Lightning port actually provides much better sound too. “The headphone jack is really quite limited. For the person who wants really great sound, using the Lightning port is much better than using the headphone jack,” Dr Joshua Reiss, head of audio engineering research at Queen Mary University of London, told Forbes.

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“The big problem with the old headphone jacks is that they’re analogue technology. Modern audio formats are all digital, and have been for a very long time.”

Apple originally included a free Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter in the box with the iPhone 7, but later stopped providing this. With most people using wired headphones now anyway, it’s just not needed.

Getting rid of the headphone jack is still one of the tech giant’s most controversial decisions. It annoyed people at the time, and honestly, people still haven’t got over it. But for two speakers and better sound quality, it really does make sense. They had their reasoning.

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Featured image credit: Canva