Is Removing The Headphone Jack Really “Anti-Consumer”?

If you’ve paid attention to the tech news of late, you might have had your attention drawn to Google’s decision to remove the headphone jack from their flagship Pixel 2 smartphone. The reaction was as expected — generally unfavorable, with words like “anti-consumer” and “greedy” being thrown around a fair amount.

The reaction was equally as hostile when Apple pulled the same maneuver last year with the release of the iPhone 7. At the time, Apple stated a variety of reasons for the decision — ranging from concerns about their ability to fully waterproof a device with a headphone jack to stating that the saved space could be used to both improve battery life and introduce a haptic feedback system. Google also seemed to take a page out of Apple’s book in their rationale that “removing the headphone jack allows for a bezel less future”. Let’s dive into a couple of the more popular justifications for removing a headphone jack and gauging their validity.

It’s easier to waterproof phones without it

This is questionable, since we’ve seen that the Samsung Galaxy S8 has a headphone jack and is rated IPv8 waterproof, whereas the iPhone 7 has no headphone jack and is only rated IPv7. Heck, even Sony has managed to figure out how to make a waterproof phone with a jack. When Apple said this, what they failed to include (and what I believe is the real statement) is that it’s easier to make a thinner waterproof phone without a headphone jack. Since Apple has decided that thinness is a metric they are striving for (which you can disagree with), they decided to make the perfectly reasonable call that the difference between IPv7 and IPv8 was negligible from a consumer standpoint, and that they had other compelling reasons to get rid of the jack, including…

You get more room for battery

This is also pretty questionable, mostly because the placement of headphone jacks tend to be away from the battery in the corner of the device. However, in the near future, when we have more flexible batteries or figure out how to modularize batteries in a way to insert them freely within a chassis, this argument might make sense from a long-term perspective. If you fast forward to the iPhone 8 and X, the idea of needing extra space to implement wireless charging could have also fueled the decision to ditch the jack.

So why are Google and Apple scrapping something that people seem to really want?

It can all be distilled down the following: people no longer make purchasing decisions within a vacuum with consumer electronics; instead, they buy into an ecosystem and tend to stick with the line of products that fit into that infrastructure.

By removing the headphone jack and introducing a set of wireless bluetooth headphones, both Apple and Google are taking an existing product line (headphones) and creating a version that further locks you into their ecosystem. Sure, the AirPods could be used as normal Bluetooth-paired headphones with your Android device, but you wouldn’t get the cool auto pause functionality when you take one out of your ear and you wouldn’t enjoy the same streamlined pairing process enabled by the W1 chip. The same goes for Google — without a Pixel smartphone paired with your Pixel Buds, you wouldn’t get the real-time translation functionality that they demo’d on stage. This is an incredibly brilliant move on Apple’s part from a business perspective to start this trend and charge users $130+ for it, but is it consumer-hostile?

Is this bad for consumers?

I would argue that it isn’t. We could sit here and argue about the nuances of sound signatures and how audio quality on a pair of wireless headphones will never surpass their wired analogues, but the true fact of the matter is that most consumers are using their phones to stream Spotify at sub-192kbps bitrates. At that fidelity of audio, there’s a lot of subtleties of audiophile-level sound that users are already missing, and will probably never appreciate.

Wireless headphones give a better physical user experience than wired headphones, and being tethered physically to your phone is an undesirable feeling to most consumers. You could make the argument that wireless headphone pairing technologies and battery life aren’t up to par just yet, but what better way to shock the industry into driving innovation on both those issues than to make it a requirement? In fact, the competition to make great wireless buds with awesome battery life has created a ton of new choices in the first post-jack year we’ve had since the iPhone 7 release. We’ve witnessed the benefits of an Apple decision very similar to this one when the company decided to remove the optical drive from their MacBook Air series, which created a ripple effect on all laptops.

Sometimes, the best decisions for consumers isn’t giving them what they yell about on tech blogs; it’s about planning for the future and sometimes making short term compromises in UX to create a better experience in the long term.