Apple’s ‘courageous’ headphone change is actually anything but

If today’s press event is any indication, there’s one word that Apple wants associated with its controversial ditching of the headphone jack in the new iPhone 7: courageous.

Apple senior VP Phil Schiller made it explicit during the event: “I’m going to give you three [reasons we removed the headphone jack], but it really comes down to one word: courage. The courage to move on, do something new that betters all of us. And our team has tremendous courage.”

This isn’t courage, though. Apple’s move to eliminate the headphone jack could have been courageous, but the company didn’t go far enough. As it stands, the lightning headphone jack isn’t courageous, it’s just a crass money-grab.

What is, and what could have been

To be clear, Apple has some genuinely good reasons for removing the old headphone jack. In principle, the lightning jack is just better. It takes up less space, and because it can send power as well as audio, it allows for some cool plug-in devices that won’t need external power (like the batteryless noise-cancelling JBL headphones Apple showed off at its event).

But there are, of course, two main problems with removing the headphone jack as Apple has:

1. Using any older headphones now requires you to carry around an adapter. There’s no way around it, this is inconvenient, and the entire point of having a mobile phone is to carry less stuff around, not more.
2. You can no longer use headphones while charging. As numerous people have pointed out, this breaks lots of people’s habits and workflows.

Even my old iPhone 3G would let me charge it up while watching Netflix

Apple’s answer to the first problem is pretty simple: deal with it or buy new headphones. This makes sense since Apple owns a headphone company. But it also makes sense because “buy new headphones” is also Apple’s answer to the second problem. You can listen with headphones while charging your phone if you grab a pricey new pair of Beats or Apple’s newly-announced Airpod earbuds.

The Airpods were presented at today’s event as Apple’s vision of the future. This, Apple said, is how things will look in the wireless world we’re building by killing off the headphone jack.

Oh, and by the way, these’ll cost you an extra US$160.

(Sure, you could use a cheap pair of bluetooth headphones, but those won’t magically auto-connect the way the Apple ones do. Plus, I doubt Apple’s vision of the future entails you having to buy some other company’s product to fully enjoy theirs).

This is Apple’s vision for music on the iPhone 7, right? So why aren’t they part of the core iPhone 7 experience?

Cowards!