10 years without the jack: how the iPhone 7 killed it in 2016

Ten years ago, at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, Phil Schiller walked on stage and offered a single word to justify Apple's most controversial decision in years: courage. The iPhone 7 was arriving without the 3.5 mm headphone jack — the analogue connector that had shipped on practically every audio device since the 1960s. Twitter exploded in mockery. The memes flew. And then, over the following years, almost every smartphone maker on the planet did exactly the same thing.

Why did Apple do it?

The official justification rested on three pillars. First, the Lightning connector could already carry digital audio at a quality above the analogue jack. Second, removing the physical hole freed up internal space for a bigger battery and made IP7 water resistance easier to certify — the iPhone 7 was the first in the line to survive a metre of water for 30 minutes. Third, and most important for the company's roadmap, Apple wanted to push the ecosystem towards wireless audio.

At the same keynote, AirPods were announced at $159 — a price plenty of people found absurd for two little white sticks. The AirPods arrived late, in December 2016, and became the most wanted product of that Christmas. By 2019 they were Apple's second best-selling product, behind only the iPhone.

The reaction was scorn. Then imitation.

The most repeated joke: "Apple included a 3.5 mm-to-Lightning adapter in the box... which you will lose in three days." It was true — the adapter existed, it was tiny, and it disappeared with impressive ease.

Samsung ran an entire ad campaign taunting Apple. "No, we didn't remove the headphone jack. You're going to need this," said a Galaxy S8 ad in 2017. In 2018 the Galaxy S9 still had the jack. By 2019 the Galaxy S10 did not. Coincidentally, the Galaxy Buds also launched in 2019.

The pattern repeated across the whole industry. OnePlus dropped the jack on the 6T (2018). Google removed it on the Pixel 2 (2017). Huawei, LG, Motorola — one by one they all arrived at the same conclusion Apple reached in 2016. Today, in 2026, you have to hunt to find a flagship with a headphone jack.

What was the real problem with the 3.5 mm connector?

The jack is technology from 1878 — yes, the 19th century — originally used in telephone switchboards. The miniaturised 3.5 mm version was adopted by transistor radios in the 1950s and never left. It worked perfectly for analogue audio, but it was a physical hole that complicated sealing, consumed internal space and could not carry digital data without conversion. From a hardware engineering standpoint, Apple's criticism was not wrong — it was just badly communicated.

The market the decision created

In 2015, the global wireless headphone market was worth roughly $8 billion. By 2024 it had crossed $80 billion according to Grand View Research. AirPods were the trigger that normalised spending $100, $200, $400 on a pair of earbuds you might drop down the toilet.

The TWS concept — True Wireless Stereo, earbuds with no cable at all between them — existed before AirPods, but it was niche. After September 2016, every electronics manufacturer on the planet shipped a version. Xiaomi, Sony, JBL, Bose, Samsung, Jabra — the segment exploded in variety and price.

The irony is that wired headphones never actually got worse. With the jack gone from phones, the high-end wired audio market flourished separately, serving audiophiles who plug straight into portable DACs and amplifiers. Anyone who laughed at "the death of the jack" in 2016 now runs a more sophisticated wired setup than would ever have existed had the connector survived on smartphones.

The security angle almost nobody mentioned

There is one angle the 2016 coverage left out: Bluetooth is also an attack surface. Wireless connections have a history of vulnerabilities — BlueBorne (2017) allowed remote code execution on Bluetooth-enabled devices without pairing. BLESA (2020) exploited flaws in the reconnection process. Bleah (2023) hit specific BLE implementations on popular chipsets.

This is not to say the jack was more secure in some abstract sense — a wired headphone simply does not transmit anything over the air. But the security cost of the move to wireless is real, and it rarely enters the design debate. Most users leave Bluetooth permanently on, creating an attack surface that simply did not exist with the analogue connector.

Ten years on: was it worth it?

It depends who you ask. For Apple, clearly yes — AirPods became a product line with annual revenue larger than most technology companies in the world. For the audio market, yes too, in sheer volume. For the average user, probably yes: wireless headphones are genuinely more practical day to day for most people.

But that adapter you lost in 2017? That still stings.

If the historical angle of how Apple reinvented (and destroyed) music consumption interests you, it is worth reading about how the 99-cent iTunes Store destroyed the CD in 2003 — removing the jack was just another chapter of the same rewrite. And to understand how we got here, the story of Winamp and the MP3 era that preceded all of it is required reading. The path from an .mp3 file in Winamp to an AirPod in your ear is more linear than it looks — and it took exactly 29 years.

The 2016 decision completed a cycle that began in 1997 with MP3 and ran through the iPod, iTunes and streaming. That little 3.5 mm hole survived all of it. It did not survive Phil Schiller. To grasp the scale of the transformation, it is worth remembering that the first pocket mobile phone — the Motorola MicroTAC of 1989 — did not even have a decent screen. In 37 years we went from a brick that only made calls to a pocket computer with no wires and no jack.