This confuses me too. The camera wart is ridiculous, and I bet if they made the device just that slight bit thicker they'd have room to retain the 3.5mm jack.

The other possibility is that the headphone jack makes water resistance that much more difficult. Maybe they think it's worth it?

They do provide the lightening-to-jack adapter in the box for free.

You're conflating the switch to a proprietary jack with the introduction of wireless AirPods. Those are separate things. You can still use 100% of existing wired headphones with the iPhone 7, just with an adapter, which is a tradeoff that gets you some great other features like the new camera system.[1] The bundled wired headphones and any wireless headphones don't require an adapter. If you don't like wireless headphones, you don't have to use them.

> I would seriously move off iOS if I was making music with it.

Why? That comment seems unsupported by your reaction to this headphone jack change.

[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/johnpaczkowski/inside-iphone-7-why-...

Is iOS used as a platform in professional music making? Is that really a thing?

If you shell out for the AirPods, you can.

Though I definitely agree - I'm pretty sad to see the headphone jack go.

Can you explain this?

I'm also worried about the potential for consumer-hostile DRM on audio playback, especially since it looks like they're introducing their own proprietary wireless protocol.

  > I would seriously move off iOS

Memories of all the feature phones I had with adaptors tells me they will break all the damn time. Kids have a happy habit of losing small things - adaptors and bluetooth earbuds.

So that's 3 sales lost here - not buying 7's for the kids. They can put up with the iPhones they have, buy themselves (slim chance), or switch to Android. That's my popularity shot for a few days.

That didn't even occur to me! Holy crap, what a design flaw. I'm glad I'm not an iUser today

This is a complete deal breaker for me. I was confident that apple was going to unveil two models, one which had the headphone jack and one which didn't.

Lenovo at least had the good sense to offer at least one model that still had the headphone jack, as they were introducing a similar model which did not.

I'm so disappointed in apple.

Many people have the micro usb cable for charging, and iPhone users use the lightning charger.

Only issue for me is you can't listen to music via headphone and charge at the same time.

Audio latency used to be a HUGE advantage for IOS vs Android. It was their biggest USP in my opinion. Android has been improving but it's still not there yet. If the next ipad has this it will be the end for musicians using IOS.

This is huge.

This seems backwards. Only reason to buy Apple phones is the superior hardware. As far as the OS goes, Android (and the google services backing it... especially Google Now) have completely surpassed it and continue to increase the gap every day. Increasingly, Google is treating the mobile devices as just a conduit to access their cloud services (including their far superior machine intelligence backing it). While Apple continues to treat the iPhone as a beautiful device with mediocre cloud services backing the hardware.

Don't believe me? Imagine if you Google stopped creating apps for the iPhone. How big a catastrophe would that be for Apple management? Now imagine Apple ceased to exist. Would the Android ecosystem be affected in any way?