The tech giant looks toward progress in the face of outrage.
Earlier today Apple unveiled the new iPhone 7, revealing that it will no longer have a 3.5mm jack. Instead, consumers will be able to use headphones via a Lightning connector which will support both wireless and wired headphones with an adaptor. And Apple doesn’t care at all if you’re mad about it.
In a new interview with BuzzFeed, Apple VP Greg Joswiak explained the reason for the change: “[The audio jack] had its last big innovation about 50 years ago. You know what that was? They made it smaller. It hasn’t been touched since then. It’s a dinosaur. It’s time to move on.”
The news drew ire from many Apple users and the social media peanut gallery alike, but the computer giant isn’t worried. In the same interview, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller says this is just standard Apple innovation: “We got rid of parallel ports, the serial bus, floppy drives, physical keyboards on phones — do you miss the physical keyboards on your phone?”
He continued: “At some point — some point soon, I think — we’re all going to look back at the furor over the headphone jack and wonder what the big deal was.”
Schiller would also like to dispel the idea that Apple implemented the new port just to prevent iPhone owners from using third party products. “The idea that there’s some ulterior motive behind this move, or that it will usher in some new form of content management, it simply isn’t true,” he told BuzzFeed. “We are removing the audio jack because we have developed a better way to deliver audio. It has nothing to do with content management or DRM — that’s pure, paranoid conspiracy theory.”