Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, Apple, the Headphone Jack Isn't Going Anywhere (yahoo.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Rob Pegoraro via Yahoo Finance: Two things unite almost every phone on display here at Mobile World Congress 2017: Android and a headphone jack. Apple doesn't exhibit its wares at this trade show, so the domination of Google's operating system is predictable. But the headphone jack's persistence did not look so inevitable when Apple cut it from the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus last September. Lenovo's Motorola subsidiary had already shipped a phone without a headphone hack, the Moto Z, and Apple's influence over the rest of the smartphone industry remains formidable -- indeed, within months, the Chinese firm LeEco had debuted a lineup of Android phones devoid of headphone jacks. As my colleague David Pogue predicted in a post approving Apple's move: "Other brands worldwide will be following suit." The hardware on display here at the world's largest mobile tech conference, though, suggests otherwise. Two days of walking around the show floor showed companies expressing a consistent unwillingness to abandon the humble headphone jack, even on models as thin as, or thinner than, the iPhone 7. The MWC floor revealed only one company willing to do away with the headphone jack: HTC. The Taiwan-based firm, which has struggled financially for years despite shipping such well-reviewed models as the HTC 10, used its exhibit to showcase the U Ultra and the U Play, which rely on their USB-C ports for audio output. Unlike, Apple, though, the company didn't make the move to save space, but rather to incorporate its "USonic" feature, which lets the phones' headphones calibrate themselves to your ears and provide noise cancellation.
I do, and I remember all the freakouts over the lack of SCSI and ADB ports, and on the Windows side of the aisle everyone insisting manufacturers NOT kill the PS/2 ports. Ultimately, the technology advances, and old ports aren't needed any more. You may very well find phones with headphone jacks for many years to come. But more and more, the industry will shift to wireless headphones, and those jacks will get less and less use. Kind of like those PS/2 ports that still ship on a few models of motherboards....
. If Apple is wrong about their bet that people don't really care about the headphone jack then it will cost them business.
They already know that they're right. They have the sales figures to prove it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."