5 reasons Apple should kill the headphone jack in the iPhone 7

that Apple will indeed ditch the headphone jack on the next iPhone.

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Instead of using that 3.5 mm standard headphone jack, people will have to plug their wired headphones into the Lightning port, where you plug in the charger, to listen to music.

They could also connect wireless headphones using a Bluetooth connection.

Although in the short term it may be frustrating to consumers — or absolutely infuriating to some — there are a lot of advantages for Apple to eschew this more than 100-year-old technology in favor of the super fast Lightning port.

iphone 6s
The iPhone 6S and 6S Plus. REUTERS/Beck Diefenbach
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It allows Apple to make the device thinner.

iphone charging
r. nial bradshaw/Flickr

People love their thin gadgets! As my colleague Alex Heath reported recently, removing the headphone jack from the phone would allow Apple to make the phone about 1 millimeter thinner. (The iPhone 6s is currently 7.1 mm thick.)

You wouldn't need a separate battery pack to power noise-canceling headphones.

bose battery pack
Bose/Tech Insider

I recently got an awesome pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones, and I love them. But they come with a pesky, awkward battery pack that powers the noise-canceling function. Since the lightning port is powered, future iterations of these headphones could possibly be powered by your phone rather than by a battery pack.

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It enables higher quality audio.

20 Something Woman Wearing Headphones
Flickr / Sascha Kohlmann

The digital Lightning connector can support higher quality sound than a 3.5 mm analog headphone jack. As Apple Insider recently reported, Apple is working on launching its "Hi-Res" streaming service, which would deliver higher quality music (Spotify and other services offer a similar high-quality audio stream). Sound of this quality can be transmitted over Lightning, but not a 3.5 mm jack.

It would be "smarter."

Spotify headphones
Christian Hartmann / Reuters

As my colleague Alex Heath reported in January, you could program an app like Spotify or Apple Music to open when you plug your headphones into a Lightning port. Since it's a digital signal, more information than just sound and electricity can be transmitted over the wire.

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It could allow Apple to make the iPhone smaller.

iphone with headphone
Steve Kovach/Tech Insider

This theory comes from Matt Galligan, a San Francisco-based designer and entrepreneur.

In a post last month on Medium, Galligan explained that the headphone jack takes up significant internal space, reaching nearly to the display of the phone if you lay it on top of the phone, like we did in the photo above. With a smaller Lightning connector, that space could instead be used for the internals of a display, increasing the size of the screen but not the phone.

Galligan also cites patents that show Apple could move its fingerprint sensing technology from the home button to the display. And since the newest iPhones, which have pressure sensitive screens, make switching from one app to another as easy as pressing hard on the left edge of the screen, a home button becomes a lot less important. 

"The phones will become shorter, and likely easier to handle," Galligan writes.

Check out his full post on Medium.

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Apple has a long history of moving the industry forward when it comes to this stuff.

macbook port
Jonathan Morrison

People were up in arms when Apple didn't include a floppy disk drive on the candy-colored iMac. The same goes for when the company stopped shipping CD/DVD drives on their Macs, and removed the FireWire 400 and 800 ports from their computers 

In all of these instances, Apple has been right — the industry moved in the direction Apple was going. Floppy discs, CDs, and FireWire have all pretty much gone the way of Crystal Pepsi.

The new MacBook, which came out last year, only has one USB-C port and a headphone jack. But we'll have to wait and see if Apple made the right bet on this one.

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