“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” the old saying goes.
That’s what a good number of people are saying in the wake of the iPhone 7 announcement. Indeed, if you paid attention, you know one of the biggest changes to Apple’s latest smartphone is the omission of a piece of decades-old technology: the trusty headphone jack.
My Yahoo Finance colleague David Pogue is actually a big proponent of the move, contending the headphone jack adds unnecessary bulk (see his piece, “Why the headphone jack must die”). But having spent a week now with an iPhone 7 review unit, I can say that a headphone jack-less existence will annoy millions of people used to that port.
Apple (AAPL) tries to make that painful journey a wee bit easier by tossing in an adapter that plugs into the iPhone 7’s lightning port and lets you use your old earbuds and headphones. The problem for me? I accidentally threw it out with the paper packaging the adapter came with. Based on sheer principle, I refuse to fork over $9 for something I’ve taken for granted on every single iPhone I’ve owned since 2007. But now I have 4 pairs of “old school” EarPods lying around that are semi-obsolete.
Living without the headphone jack in my phone also forced me change some of my habits.
I can’t listen to music through wired headphones and charge my phone at the same time, something I do a lot of — and I bet a good number of other people do — when I get to the office or just before I head home for a 5-mile run. I can’t use the pair of Lightning EarPods provided with the iPhone 7 to listen to music on or join my editors for Google Hangouts on my MacBook Pro, which still has that legacy headphone jack port.
So now I carry two pairs of EarPods around: one for my phone and one for my computer. It’s frustrating when I blindly rummage through my backpack at work only to come up with the wrong pair of earbuds.
I also finally threw down $150 for a pair of wireless PowerBeats 2 headphones on sale for running. Do I regret the purchase? Not really. The PowerBeats 2 are incredibly comfortable to wear, and the audio quality is good enough for my day-to-day needs. It’s also liberating to run cord-free. But I wish the 5-hour battery life were twice that, and I seriously dread the day they go missing, simply because they’ve fallen off my shoulder.