by Dan Moren
A proposed adapter for the eventual death of the iPhone headphone port
UI designer Sean Nelson has a suggestion for dealing with Apple’s inevitable transition away from the headphone jack:
Apple shouldn’t make an adaptor, but if they did, I wondered, what would it look like? Our end-goal shouldn’t be pushing music into a metal hole until the end of time, so focusing on a Lightning convertor seemed silly. What made sense to me was instead turning standard headphones into Bluetooth headphones, and thus this little design exercise was born.
These kind of Bluetooth-to-minijack adapters already exist, but I have no doubt Apple could design a nicer one, as Sean does here. And as he says, this is more about dealing with the transitional period–read “for people who have nice headphones they don’t want to give up”. If Apple does in fact go the Bluetooth headphone route, preferably by creating a pair of Bluetooth headphones that customers actually want to buy, that seems like it might ease the transition even further.
All of that said, I’m still not convinced the iPhone 7 will be the line in the sand for the classic minijack. But it’s probably coming sooner than we think.