When Apple introduced the original iPhone in 2007, the first-generation device technically had a headphone jack. However, the port was set so deeply inside the phone’s body that it didn’t work with most headphones already on the market. If someone wanted to listen to music through an iPhone using a previously owned pair of cans, they’d have to buy a bulky third-party adapter. A year later, the iPhone 3G added a headphone jack that could work with standard headphones, and with more than 1 billion iPhones sold to date, those early hiccups have been largely forgotten.
In November 2015, rumors began to circulate in earnest that Apple planned to do away with the headphone jack entirely in the next version of the iPhone. As each tidbit of speculation trickled out in the months that followed, reaction was predictably intense, despite the literal littleness of the issue. By January, a #SaveJack petition garnered 200,000 digital signatures, while some tech writers were offering opinions like “sounds good to me,” “good riddance,” and, more recently, “who cares.” Last month, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak warned that killing the 3.5mm jack was “going to tick off a lot of people.” Just this week, a sober-minded Guardian article weighing the pros and cons of such a change was annotated on Genius with comments invoking the 20th-century shift from horse-and-buggy to car.
Click to read a lot of smug commentary from the sort of people who got aroused when AP de-capitalized Internet. https://t.co/iTpow5NBqd
— Peter Feld (@peterfeld) September 6, 2016
Today, of course, Apple confirmed those long-floating rumors by announcing that the iPhone 7 will no longer have a standalone headphone jack. Instead, the new iPhone will ship later this month with earbuds that connect directly via Apple’s Lightning connector, which until now has most commonly been used for charging purposes. As in the iPhone’s earliest days, users who still want to plug in their old headphones can use a special adapter, although this time Apple is including the Lightning-to-3.5mm dongle with each new phone. Another option will be to listen via wireless headphones; typically, this means via Bluetooth headphones, which work with current iPhones, but Apple didn’t utter the B-word in its announcement. Not coincidentally, Apple also today announced a new line of wireless headphones called AirPods, and Apple-owned headphone maker Beats unveiled its own products using the same wireless technology as AirPods.
The message is clear: Apple, at least, believes the age of headphone jacks will soon be behind us. Tech triumphalists and diehard Apple enthusiasts aside, there are reasons to believe the company is right on this one. As the petitioners, a cursory glance at Twitter, or the multiple pro-jack blog posts using some variation of Charlton Heston’s deranged “cold, dead hands” line show, though, it’s also clear that Wozniak was right about the change ticking people off. For most of us, in the end, gradually adapting to the new world of wireless or digitally connected headphones will involve learning how to navigate with a fresh set of the trade-offs that tend to come with any new technology.
Though Apple may have misfired by not including a fully functioning headphone jack in its original iPhone, the company has successfully killed off various technologies before. With the launch of the iMac in 1998, Apple kickstarted the demise of floppy-disk drives. More recently, Apple has ushered away the CD and DVD drives that replaced the venerable floppies. Whether the CEO is Steve Jobs or Tim Cook, Apple has a solid record of predicting—or, if you prefer, imposing—various gadgets’ obsolescence.
It’s not just Apple. Another reason to suspect the future truly is wireless is that other smartphone makers have been betting the same direction. The new Moto Z phone, from Motorola’s parent company Lenovo, doesn’t have a headphone jack, either; instead, it comes with an adapter for USB-C ports, another type of connector that has emerged in the past few years (and which Apple could have chosen instead of its proprietary Lightning socket). Chinese company LeEco is making three phones without headphone jacks for Android. Intel, too, has backed USB-C as a replacement for those old 3.5mm ports. No less an Apple rival than Samsung gave away wireless earbuds at a recent event. If the headphone jack truly dies, Apple will have plenty of accomplices.
Still, listeners don’t need to be Luddites to start missing a jack that reputedly traces its lineage to the 1870s—and the dawn of the telephone itself. Apple’s Lightning cords are the source of much online umbrage from users who say they break all the time. It isn’t hard, either, to find complaints about Bluetooth connections being unreliable. Then there’s the basic “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” annoyance of feeling compelled to embrace either of those options: OK, so I used to be able to just plug this cord into my phone and hear music come out of it, but now I have to do something different? Something that might not work immediately with my car or stereo? For what?
The tech companies’ rationale may not matter much if a post-3.5mm-jack world becomes reality, but their motive here doesn’t have to be particularly nefarious—not more than usual, anyway. Phone designers only have so much space to work with, and they’re constantly trying to jam more features into smaller products, so if one connector had to go, it makes sense that would be the headphone jack (and not, you know, the power cord). And for people who buy expensive headphones, digital connections can theoretically producer higher-resolution audio. Yes, Apple in particular is trying to use the situation to sell its own headphones, but if you’re surprised by that, I can think of $2.4 trillion in overseas profit that’s really going to shock you. I’ve seen it suggested that somehow the shift from analog output, through traditional headphone jacks, to digital output, through USB-C or Lightning connectors, is part of a sinister copyright-enforcement plot. I don’t think the music industry has quite the power anymore, and the Future of Music Coalition seems to agree.
The pros and cons of Apple’s specific successors to the headphone jack won’t be apparent until they arrive. But it’s hard to see why they or other smartphone companies’ new headphones would necessarily involve any more compromises than previous music-listening technologies. In the mid-2000s, listening to my iPod over some decent but not outrageously priced Sennheiser headphones, I once found myself at jury duty for a week with a broken headphone jack. A trip to the Genius Bar couldn’t come soon enough. When I bought my first iPhone, the phone part basically didn’t work. Another visit to the Genius Bar.
Even in more recent years, after my dog ate those beloved Sennheisers and I replaced them with a pair recommended in a music magazine’s online shopping guide, I’ve often found myself laughing at the ridiculousness of being a paid music writer, in a world where we can potentially listen to music anywhere, and yet somehow not being able to. When it’s a winter dog walk in sub-zero windchill and the headphones unplug themselves, I’m not as amused. Maybe that’s another (seemingly counterintuitive) argument for the old 3.5mm—if so much can go wrong with those, what new problems will the next technology create?
For now, though, so much of that feels like the same nostalgia, the same romanticism, we often associate with any technology that becomes obsolete. When doing research earlier this year for an article about turntables, I found that Bluetooth was an increasingly prevalent option for home vinyl-listening setups, too. Unlike cell or wi-fi networks, you seemingly don’t have to worry about losing a signal when you travel to the mountains; one gadget talks to the other. I bought a $20 Bluetooth speaker a few months ago, and I’ve already used it more than an embarrassingly much-higher-priced, frustratingly unreliable Apple AirPort device I bought years ago, which uses wi-fi. If you turn the microwave on while watching Netflix over our Google Chromecast plug, good luck. Bluetooth and USB inputs are already standard in cars that are several years old; doing away with the aux cable could just mean one less cord cluttering up the dashboard, whatever memories of plugging in at friends’ parties it may evoke.
On the day that Frank Ocean’s Blonde arrived, I was out somewhere I couldn’t listen to it. That night, when I got home, after everyone in the house had gone to sleep, I lay there and listened to it in the dark in bed, on just the $15 headphones I now use when I’m away from my desk or my stereo. It felt like the perfect way to hear music that seemed like such a casual yet intimate work of self-expression. It reminded me of sitting in my room listening to music on basic Walkman headphones as a teenager. There are probably people who, not too long ago, would’ve argued having that kind of experience with a digital stream was impossible. When Lightning and Bluetooth and USB-3 are gone, someone will miss them, too. But for now, Apple has assured one thing: It’s time, past time really, to say our goodbyes to that 3.5mm jack.