A New Audio Jack?

Rumors continue to fly as to whether or not the next generation of iPhone will contain a 3.5mm headphone jack or not. As the owner of both an iPhone and some pretty good headphones, I’m not thrilled about this.

The larger version of the headphone jack — the 1/4” or 2.5mm version — was invented in 1878 for telephone operators. You probably remember seeing them those old movies where operators were manually moving cords around to connect people’s phone calls. This same plug is still used today on things like microphones and guitar cables.

I couldn’t find an exact date and when the mini version of the connector (1/4” or 3.5mm) was invented. All the articles I found simply said that they became popular on transistor radios. It seems to me that, at least in the 1970s, electronic equipment that stayed at home (like console stereos) used the larger, original size while portable electronics adopted the mini version. As time went on, more and more items adopted the mini-standard. The first Macintosh computers (1984) used the mini ports for both microphones and headphones, as did my first home stereo, purchased circa 1985. The audio plug on the rear of my Amdek computer monitor also used the mini plug.

My first handheld radio came with a 3.5mm plug and a single, mono earphone that looked like something you would stick into your ear to keep water out while swimming. Audio quality improved with radios, the Walkman, and the Discman, but the plug never changed. I could take my wife’s Bose noise cancelling headphones that she got for Christmas and plug them into any of those other things and they would work perfectly.

It wasn’t until I started messing around with audio recording that I discovered the wonderful world of audio adapters. In the mid-90s I purchased a small mixing board that used RCA connections for all its inputs and outputs. My guitar had a 1/4” jack, and my computer’s sound card had an 1/8” one. The solution to this problem was as close as the nearest Radio Shack. Years later, I now have a shoebox full of dozens of adapters — RCA-to-mini, ⅛-to-¼, two-to-one adapters, you name it. I didn’t purchase them all at one time but rather as they were needed, but over time I’ve needed them all.

Now, Apple has a history of nudging people along in the “right” direction (or at least what it considers the “right” direction to be). They were the first ones to release a computer without a floppy drive, for example. The difference, of course, was that by 1998, the writing was already on the wall for floppy disks. Yes, many of us still owned and used floppies on a regular basis, but there were alternatives available — namely, the USB memory stick. When the average mp3 is around 5 megabytes in size, a 1.44 megabyte storage container is relatively useless.

Unfortunately for me (and thousands of people like me), just because the industry says a storage medium is dead doesn’t mean it is. Underneath my computer desk is a set of plastic drawers that contain more than 1,000 5 1/4” floppy disks, containing Commodore, Apple and IBM-PC software. I also own an FC5025, a USB interface that allows me to connect an old IBM floppy drive to a modern PC. I also own a Zoom Floppy, which allows me to directly connect an old Commodore floppy drive to my PC via USB.

For accessing 3.5” floppy disks, I have a couple of USB floppy drives.

At my small writing desk here in the living room, I spy seven things with a 3.5mm audio adapter: this laptop, my iPhone, a tablet, my daughter’s ASUS Chromebook, a handset adapter that looks like an 80s phone handset, and two retired iPod Touches (one with a cracked screen). All of those items are within 1’ of my person, right now.

Apple claims two things — that the 3.5mm standard is old and analog (true) and that it’s preventing them from making thinner devices. I own an iPhone 6+. When it was released, some customers complained that they were bending in their pockets because they were so thin. I know that it’s difficult to see into the future when it comes to technology, but I just find it hard to believe that the future of cell phones is being slowed by the thickness of a 3.5mm jack. I suspect this is less about the thickness of their phones and more about greed. Apple’s new proposed audio jack will be proprietary, which means several things. It means new headphones will cost more because companies will have to pay money to Apple to license their audio plug. It also means, if Apple gets their way, that every pair of headphones I own — and I own many — will be obsolete.

In reality what I think it’ll mean is that we (iPhone users) will all end up buying an adapter — probably $20 — that converts “old-style” headphones (read: the ones that have been working fine for the past 50 years) to Apple’s new jack. We’ll all need one and we’ll all grumble about buying them and we’ll all own them, or we’ll all buy different phones. And I’ll have to buy four, one for each iPhone in the house.

For someone who has seen this before and has been buying adapters for decades now, this is nothing new.