when apple revealed the iphone 7 back in 2016 the company was widely ridiculed
for describing its decision to omit the formerly universal headphone jack as
courageous a term that is usually reserved for people like war veterans
and cancer survivors but marketing bombast aside apple started a trend as
they so typically do and these days many other smartphone manufacturers are
ditching the headphone jack is there actually a good reason for this now the
cynics quickly crafted their own theories apple was trying to be different just
because or maybe they were trying to push their conveniently just released
not to mention expensive wireless airpods which is obviously going to be
easier if the alternative is a clunky looking dongle or maybe they just wanted
more of that sweet sweet lightning connector royalty money for the
third-party headphones that would inevitably show up down the line
featuring that connector but none of these explained the industry trend that
was about to take place i mean did the others follow suit just because they
wanted to be cool like apple well hold on a minute now maybe there were some
shenanigans going on here but the official explanation that apple gave
once you get past the nonsense about courage actually made quite a bit of
sense smartphones are really miniature
computers and the companies that manufacture them are tasked with taking
the basic functions of a machine that has traditionally occupied a large chunk
of your desk or at best your backpack and fit them into something that can
comfortably rest in your pocket and they also provided the admittedly
very reasonable rationale that fewer points of ingress made it easier for
their latest device to officially be water resistant
i mean here's the thing we kind of take it for granted because smartphones even
waterproof ones are everywhere but all of that stuff is not trivial to
do and it requires very efficient use of just about every bit of available space
inside the device so it shouldn't have surprised anyone that manufacturers
including apple had been increasingly viewing the headphone jack as a space
hog that just doesn't justify how much real estate it takes up
and this is especially true when you consider that some people already didn't
use it and they've got so many extra
features that they're trying to cram into these phones to make them stand out
from the competition from 3d face recognition sensors to triple camera
setups to more spacious batteries and this is all in the name of
differentiating their phone from their competitors in a world where truly tiny
differences between models can make or break sales
and according to the folks calling the shots for these manufacturers trends
like displays that take up as much of the front of the phone as possible and
thin sleek chassis are driven directly by consumer demand this has led to not
just headphone jacks but also bezels and even physical buttons ending up going
the way of the television channel dial
now we aren't going to defend every reason
some companies claimed that they were ditching the headphone jack because it
delivers poor audio quality compared to wireless solutions or headphones that
connect digitally via usbc or a lightning port but while an analog
connection can be affected by electrical interference from other components
inside a phone many users were perfectly happy with the sound quality they were
getting and the convenience factor of
something that's compatible with all your old stuff is pretty high but
regardless of the intentions of the company that made your smartphone the
disappearance of the headphone jack looks like it's a trend that's going to
be very hard or maybe even impossible to
reverse even though many users have lamented that bluetooth usbc and
lightning headphones often don't provide good enough sound quality
or a good enough user experience to justify their price tags throw in then
the fact that you often have to buy a separate adapter just to listen to your
headphones and charge your phone at the same time and taking out the headphone jack
remains a controversial decision more than two years after we were all first
introduced to the idea well
i for one accept it i think it's going to be okay as long as this doesn't
become a trend in the tablet space that wait what
really i mean come on
do you have an extra five minutes per day what a tremendous problem and i've got
the solution using brilliant daily problems to help train your brain every
problem provides you with the context and framework that you need to tackle it
so you learn the concepts by applying them and if you like the daily problem
then there's more like it in the quiz on the left so you can explore the concept
in greater detail and develop your framework if you're confused and you
need more guidance then you can join the brilliant community in discussing the
problems so these thought-provoking little challenges are designed to lead
you from curiosity to mastery just one day at a time so what are you waiting
for go to brilliant.org techquickie we're going to have that linked below
and finish your day a little smarter than you began it are a lot smarter
because you also watched Techquickie today also the first 200 of you will get
20 off the annual subscription to view all the problems in the archives so go
go go go so thanks for watching guys like dislike
check out our other videos don't forget to uh leave a comment if you have
suggestions for future fastest possibles we do check those out and subscribe
follow subscribe follow well uh just once if you do it twice it
actually unsubscribes which is bad unless you were already subscribed in
which case it would re-subscribe you
and that would be good oh no
i just snapped a brain cell a sec
no i'm fine