So Apple had their big fall event this morning and I've spent the last few hours doing the thing everyone does after these keynotes, which is reading a bunch of liveblogs at once and arguing in a Slack channel about a phone none of us have actually held yet. New camera, new colors, the Watch thing got GPS and can apparently survive a swim now. Fine. Good. But there's exactly one detail from today that's actually going to change how I use my phone every single day, and it's not the camera. It's the fact that the iPhone 7 doesn't have a headphone jack anymore.
I know, everyone's writing about this today. But I want to talk about the actual mechanics of it, because I don't think it's sunk in yet how annoying this is going to be for a lot of people, myself included.
Here's the setup: audio now goes out through the Lightning port, the same port you use to charge the thing. Apple's fix is that the box comes with a pair of Lightning EarPods (fine, most people were going to use the bundled earbuds anyway) plus a little white dongle, a Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter, so your old headphones still work. It's free, it's in the box, nobody's out any money over it. That's not really my complaint.
My complaint is that the dongle is now a Thing I Have To Not Lose, forever, for as long as I own this phone. I already lose the little rubber tips off my headphones on a regular basis. I have, right now, in a kitchen drawer, at least four USB cables where I no longer remember what they were originally for. Adding a tiny piece of white plastic to the list of Things That Must Be In My Bag At All Times feels like a decision made by someone who has never once misplaced a small object in their life.
And you can't charge the phone and listen to wired headphones at the same time without a separate splitter, which is such an obviously common scenario (charging overnight while a podcast plays me to sleep, which I do most nights) that it's hard to believe it didn't come up in a meeting somewhere. Maybe it did and they shipped it anyway. Phil Schiller's actual word for all this on stage today was "courage," which, come on. Pulling a jack that's been standard on basically every piece of audio gear since the 1960s isn't courage, it's a bet that people will eat the inconvenience because they want the rest of the phone badly enough. That's a fine bet for a company to make. Companies make bets like that constantly. Just don't dress it up as bravery.
The wireless answer they showed off, AirPods, look genuinely interesting to me, I'll give them that. $159, no wire between the two earbuds at all, a custom chip handling the pairing so it's supposedly near-instant, and a little charging case that tops them back up on the go. If they work the way the demo suggested, that's a real product, not just an accessory tax on top of a phone. But they're not shipping with the phone. They're landing separately "later this fall," which means for the first few weeks at least, iPhone 7 buyers are living the dongle life whether they signed up for it or not.
(Small tangent: I still have a drawer full of perfectly good wired headphones, including a pair of Sennheisers I paid real money for a couple years back, and now I get to decide whether to carry a dongle forever or just replace them. Neither option feels great.)
I'll probably end up with one of these phones eventually, my old 6 is getting slow and the battery barely makes it to dinner these days. But I'm not lining up this weekend. I want to see what actually happens once a few hundred thousand of these dongles are loose in the world, getting left in hotel rooms and coat pockets and the bottoms of backpacks. My bet: a small aftermarket industry of cheap replacement dongles within about six weeks, and a lot of people quietly buying Bluetooth headphones instead of dealing with any of it at all.