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Hobbyist Gives iPhone 7 the Headphone Jack We've Always Wanted (engadget.com)

intellitech shares a report from Engadget: For those of you who miss the iPhone headphone jack, you're definitely not alone. But Strange Parts creator Scotty Allen missed it so much that he decided to add one to his iPhone 7. He just posted a video of the project's entire saga, with all of its many ups and downs, and in the end he holds what he set out to create -- a current generation iPhone with a fully functional headphone jack. It turns out, real courage is adding the headphone jack back to the iPhone. The project took around 17 weeks to complete and throughout it Allen spent thousands of dollars on parts including multiple iPhones and screens and handfuls of lightning to headphone adaptors. Along the way, Allen bought a printer, a nice microscope and fancy tweezers. He had to design his own circuit boards, have a company manufacture multiple iterations of flexible circuit boards and at one point early on had to consult with a chip dealer that a friend hooked him up with.

The final product works by using a lightning to headphone adaptor that's incorporated into the internal structure of the phone. However, because the headphone jack is powered via the phone's lightning jack with a circuit board switching between the two depending on whether headphones or a charger are plugged into the phone, you can't actually listen to music and charge the phone at the same time.

15 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not impressed by Stormwatch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Gain: tons of Youtube views and bragging rights for proving Apple was lying

  2. Re:backlash from apple by geekmux · · Score: 3, Interesting

    all we have to do now is sit back and wait to hear that apple tracked down his phone id, then his phone, and bricked it for carrying out "unsanctioned" modifications...

    If Apple did choose to "attack" a customer like this (who knows damn well they're voiding their warranty), it will be interesting to sit back and watch the backlash from Apples own engineering and design staff, who likely share much of this same maker/hobbyist/hardware hacker mentality.

    Creative minds, make creative products.

  3. Re: backlash from apple by Jesus+H+Rolle · · Score: 5, Funny

    Creative minds, make creative products

    Your comma offends me.

  4. no way by AndyKron · · Score: 3, Interesting

    My Samsung has a wireless charger and a standard phone jack. Awesome camera too. As always: Fuck Apple.

    1. Re:no way by michelcolman · · Score: 3, Funny

      My Samsung has a wireless charger and a standard phone jack.

      You mean you can plug a landline into it? That's an odd feature for a cell phone...

  5. Re: backlash from apple by Stormwatch · · Score: 5, Funny

    Maybe that was an imperative sentence: "Creative minds, I command you to make creative products."

  6. solid proof by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The guy falsified Apple's claim that the iPhone 7 has no the headphone jack because there wasn't room inside.

    His mod has weaknesses because he used off the shelf circuits; Apple would have used purpose-built circuits without his compromises.

    1. Re:solid proof by joemck · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's the only logical reason to remove something as basic as the headphone jack. The only other reasons would be:
      1. "Courage." Because taking away something that tons of people use, calling it a feature, and charging more for it takes real balls.
      2. It interferes with waterproofing. Samsung managed to make theirs more waterproof and still has the 3.5mm jack.
      3. To sell AirPods.

  7. Now I understand by OpenSourced · · Score: 5, Funny

    Reading the ordeal and expense that is putting a microphone jack in an iPhone, I must say that now I understand the reason why Apple took it away. It's simply not worth it!

    --
    Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
  8. Re:Not impressed by ls671 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    TFA seems to confirm popular belief that Apple users don't care about how much it costs.

    --
    Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
  9. Re:I'm all for modifying things but... by ls671 · · Score: 4, Funny

    ... there'd be a lot of difficult technical challenges implanting a retractable microsd card into my pinky finger.

    Just choose a less challenging and more cost effective location instead.

    Inspire yourself from that guy with his headphone jack; you already have an easy adaptable port located in your lower back.

    --
    Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
  10. Re:Not impressed by Jahoda · · Score: 4, Insightful

    > It's the playtime project of someone who has enough money to purchase & destroy multiple iPhones. It'd be easier and of better value to add a lightning port & a better quality DAC in the earphones.

    Somehow, you managed to be modded "insightful" on slashdot, for shitting what is literally a geeks's-geek's-geek technology hobbyist project. I'm not really sure you are clear as to what slashdot is.

  11. Re:Not impressed by caseih · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Are you serious? Oh how the mighty have fallen. This kind of maker thing used to epitomize slashdot.

    Sure it's of no practical value, but the experience and sheer geek joy he got from the project are priceless. This is slashdot where we used to glory in cool hacks like this. Have you hacked a board together from breadboard prototype all the way through to finished, miniature circuit board? Pretty neat stuff. This modern age of makers and youtube blows me out of the water. There's something about making something that is satisfying and always educational.

    I thoroughly enjoyed the video and it was neat to see how manufacturing of those circuit boards works.

  12. Re:Not impressed by garote · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What is "flagrant", is your grasp of language.

    Your audiophiles with their setups are listening in a pristine environment and have trained their ears on hundreds of repeated listens to the same tracks to detect subtle variations in that

    A. Do not represent "quality", but only difference from their own setup, which they assume is of the highest quality.
    B. Simply do not matter in a typical listening environment.

    The DAC in the iPhone dongle is good enough to drive a pair of Sennheiser HD 650s at high volume, converting from 48khz 24-bit lossless. Stick your audiophile friends in some random room and give them a double-blind test with those same headphones on their own amp and they WILL FAIL IT HALF THE TIME. I absolutely, 100-percent, GUARANTEE IT.

    Here's a nice collection of similar studies done over the years:
    https://www.head-fi.org/thread...
    Your "musician friends" are just messing with you.

  13. Re: Not impressed by dgatwood · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The barometric sensor also gives you altitude. For things like HealthKit, it's how the phone counts flights of stairs. It also gives the phone a way of knowing what floor you're on for location manager. GPS gives you this in the open, but the other positioning techniques used indoors don't.

    Seriously? That's kind of insane. There are many possible ways to map your position in a building that will actually work reliably, such as proximity to wireless networks, Bluetooth devices, etc. Air pressure is not one of them. Not even remotely. Heck, even outdoors, air pressure isn't a very good way to measure altitude, because the pressure can shift drastically over the course of a day and over the course of fairly short distances, so you have to have a recent reference barometer reading from fairly close to where you are or else you can be off by hundreds or even thousands of feet. For example, during Hurricane Rita, the barometric pressure at sea level was equivalent to roughly what would normally be recorded at the top of Backbone Mountain (Maryland's highest peak).

    Indoors, barometric pressure is complete crap. Air pressure inside a building is so highly variable that I would expect it to be nearly useless even under the best of circumstances. The air pressure inside a building is set by the inflow and outflow rates of the air handlers, and is thus not entirely dependent on altitude. In many commercial office buildings, opening a door can easily reduce pressure by half an inch of mercury or more, which is like being suddenly catapulted upwards by about five commercial-height stories. And the hardware engineers at Apple ought to know this. After all, unless they've fixed it recently, the air handlers in the Infinite Loop buildings produce positive pressure so intense that it frequently holds the exterior doors open for minutes at a time. I'd bet they see shifts of 10+ stories there.

    So again, I ask, why the h*** does a phone need a barometer? SMH.

    --

    Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.