it’s not about the headphone jack

So far, I feel as though everyone having the discussion about the iPhone ditching the headphone jack for “lightning headphones” is missing the point. It’s not about jacks and ports, it’s about the wires.

Wires are a bad user experience. Having wires hanging out of your computer/tablet/phone/etc. is a mess. You trip over them, they’re in the way, they’re ugly. Down with wires. Whether the iPhone ships with lightning headphones or not, the long term future of headphones doesn’t have wires in the equation, and Apple knows this.

This idea led me to an interesting thought regarding renewed reports that Apple is developing a new display with GPU. Maybe it’s not just an attempt to power a 5k display sending minimal data across a cable, maybe it’s an attempt to skip the cable altogether.

Killing off an entrenched port like the headphone jack seems a little like something Apple would do, but I’d bank on them trying to serve the more noble goal of removing cables altogether.

Update: Some further thought on the topic yielded the following tweet.

What if purported “lightning headphones” just use lightning cable to charge, as in the Apple pencil, but are in fact, wireless.

— Chuck Skoda (@skoda) June 24, 2016

And John Gruber, taking it a step further:

Plug them in to the device you want to pair them with, click “Pair”, and you’re done. Easy to charge, too.