Headphone Jack: RIP
If you’ve not been into the world of tech recently, then it’s obvious that you might use TWS (Truly Wireless) Earbuds alongside your smartphone for audio purposes. But if you’re a hard-core tech enthusiast or an audio lover, you still might not have been able to cope up with the aftermath of the removal of the audio jack from smartphones. It was first commercially done in the year 2016, which left a crater in the tech industry, later filled by wireless counterparts. But why was it done in the first place? Also, was 2016 the first time for this act?
The Background:
It was the year 2012 when the Olympics was hosted in London. Alongside it, in the eastern section of the globe, a company named “Oppo” was trying to do something bold enough to catch some eyeballs, but not enough to change the industry. All they were trying to do was to launch a phone that was sleeker than any other phone at that time & they named it “the R5 aka Finder”. It was the slimmest in the class, but at the cost of thinness, Oppo removed a crucial element of it, i.e., the headphone jack. Due to its semi-global release, the Oppo R5 could not find tractability in the market and thus could not establish itself as a major smartphone release thus relieving the mass from the thought of removing the beloved jack. But as the old & wise say, “it was the silence before the storm”. 2016 was the storm.
The Silence within the Storm:
Apple knew that 2017 was going to be a big year for them. After all, they were going to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the iPhone. It had to be revolutionary, but to keep it sane, Apple had to do some things the year before that.
The headphone jack was unanimously the best port for the smartphone, but the iPhone X was a new breed on its own. It needed an edge-to-edge display with minimal bezels, including the bottom chin. Android phones at that time wanted to achieve that but weren’t able to because of the headphone jack. To achieve that borderless look, Apple used a flexible OLED screen and folded it inside the device, which ensured their desired look. But what it did was that it captured the space within the phone which couldn’t permit the presence of a headphone jack anymore. Also, due to the presence of the gigantic notch, they could not even think about getting it on the top of the phone.
The Storm:
The day just came. It was the 16th of October, 2016. A day that truly revolutionised the way we listen. To make a habit for the upcoming iPhone X, Apple removed the headphone jack from the iPhone 7, the phone before it. They did this with “courage”. But being a trillion-dollar company, Apple just solved a problem that they just introduced a few minutes back in their keynote. Their answer to it was the “AirPods”, a wireless earbud which only works with Apple devices. A perfect move by Apple like usual.
That day, the globe encountered something different, a change that took us to the age of wireless technologies. At first, this move was mocked all over the media, but Apple being adamant about their product, showed the profit they made off of it. And later, just like clockwork, every other brand just copied them in the pursuit of profit, thus removing the beloved headphone jack forever.
RIP
