Greg Kumparak: ‘Two Years Later, I Still Miss the Headphone Port’

Greg Kumparak, writing for TechCrunch:

None of these are that big of a deal. Charge your damned headphones, Greg. Stop losing your dongles. The thing is: they took a thing that just worked and just made me happy and replaced it with something that, quite often, just bugs the hell out of me. If a friend sent me a YouTube link and I wanted to watch it without bugging everyone around me, I could just use whatever crappy, worn out headphones I happened to have sitting in my bag. Now it’s a process with a bunch of potential points of failure.

“But now its water-resistant!” Water-resistant phones existed before all of this, plenty of which had/have headphone ports. As a recent example, see Samsung’s Galaxy S9 with its IP68 rating (matching that of the iPhone XS).

“But it can be slimmer!” No one was asking for that.

Regular readers know that I’m fully on Team AirPods — I honestly don’t miss the headphone jack on my iPhone or iPad Pro at all. But I sympathize with those who miss it. You certainly can’t argue with the simplicity angle.

But on the thinness front — there really are engineering issues related to the space the headphone jack takes up. I’m not going to say Apple “couldn’t” make an edge-to-edge iPad Pro or iPhone XS or XR with a headphone jack, because I don’t know that for a fact. But look at the XR’s off-center Lightning port. If they couldn’t center the Lightning port, I think there’s a good chance they literally could not fit a headphone jack there. When I asked Apple about the lack of a headphone jack on the new iPad Pros, their answer was simple: “Space.”

★ Thursday, 27 December 2018