Apple Removed Headphone Jack From New iPhones Because It Owns Largest Bluetooth Headphone Company (theverge.com)

Apple's new iPhones -- the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus -- don't have the headphone jack. The company's SVP Phil Schiller said the move signifies "courage" from the company to put a 100-year-old audio standard to bed. But there could be one more reason for this transition to a Bluetooth/Wireless headphones future: it owns the largest Bluetooth headphones company -- Beats. The Verge reports: More likely is that the lack of a headphone jack on the iPhone -- and increasingly, on Android phones as well -- will lead to an uptick in sales of Bluetooth headphones. And it just so happens that Apple owns the number one Bluetooth headphone company, Beats. Beats brings in more revenue from Bluetooth headphones than LG, Bose, or Jaybird, according to NPD figures released in July. In terms of unit sales, it controls over a quarter of the Bluetooth headphone market. Bluetooth headphones are also disproportionately profitable among headphones. NPD has them accounting for 54 percent of all dollars spent in the market, despite representing only 17 percent of units sold in the U.S.. These headphones sell at high prices with high margins, and Apple's company is making the best of it so far. Sales of Bluetooth headphones are already growing, with units up 64 percent year over year according to NPD's US figures. And Apple's removal of the headphone jack is likely to give them another boost.

Comments

Re:Not Causal

[Anonymous Coward]

Its so fun to charge them, after all.

Re:Apple is trying to make money?

[Shoten]

Yeah and they sure don't let ethics get in the way either.

Yeah...else they'd not do something quite so unethical as to make a phone without a headphone jack.

I mean, given a choice between that and ethnic cleansing, it's a tossup as to which is worse, isn't it? What a bunch of bastards.

Unless you're trying to jack the conversation with some implied reference to some other unrelated thing...right?

But Apple has made life better for you

[SuperKendall]

If you really care about audio quality, you should be pretty excited about headphones that can draw power from the lightning connecter... that allows for better processing, better noise cancellation, and so on all for headphones that never need a battery.

That's something that couldn't happen if Apple stuck with audio jacks.

As for the wireless part, it seems like Apple is trying to make that as nice as possible, with as high a quality as possible. That too is better if you care about audio at all.

So why so down on such an obvious improvement that helps wired AND wireless users?