On Wednesday Apple unveiled its highly anticipated iPhone 7 – an event which saw tech nerds everywhere lose their goddamn minds.
The new phone’s features are pretty spiffy – there’s new camera technology, the screen will be brighter, and it’s water resistant (yay!). But as speculated prior to release, the iPhone 7 won’t have a headphone port.
Yes, Apple has move forward in abolishing the headphone jack entirely – probably because it’s one less hole for water to seep into. Now, you can still listen to music, you just have to do so with wireless ear buds, called AirPods.
At Wednesday’s event, Apple’s Phil Schiller argued that removing the headphone jack was an act of “courage” on Apple’s part. And while the innovation might seem heroic to all the tech-weeds in Silicon Valley, customers aren’t too happy.
Apple users took to Twitter to complain about how they will lose their AirPods in no time – headphones with wires are tricky enough to hold onto!
And the company mightn’t have accounted for users with small children around.
The tiny AirPods – which are basically the size of you regular Apple earphones sans chord – are tiny enough to fit in you toddlers mouth, which means they are small enough to be swallowed.
In fact, according to The Age, the new AirPods fall within the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Product Safety Choke Check. This indicates the AirPod’s dimensions are identified as a size that could have the potential to block a child’s throat up to the age of 36 months.
And this has parents concerned.
The Weekly has reached out to Apple for comment about the AirPod’s hazardous potential, and while we were told there was no official word, the suggestion might be to use AirPods like you might any other small device – and that’s safely and only in the hands of people responsible enough to use it properly.
So while there’s a #bringbackthejack tag trending on Twitter right now, there’s no denying that the AirPods are impressive.
When fully charged you can listen to 5 hours of music and the iPhone 7 comes with a charging case that holds 24 hours of battery. Also, only 15 minutes of charging gives 3 hours of battery life.
There are sensors so the pods know when they are in your ears and built in microphones only work when you are talking. You can even go all secret agent and tap on the pods in your ear to trigger Siri.
And not all hope is lost if you want to kick it old school and keep the headphones with the chord. Also included in your iPhone 7 box will be an adaptor that plugs into the Lightning port and links your existing earphones with the phone.
But lose them and you’re out a reported $229 for 8 grams worth of technology.
And as Vox notes in its report on the tech update:
“History may be on Apple’s side here. Customers invariably react badly to big changes in beloved products. But after a few months of grumbling, they usually accept the change and quickly forget about it.”
So yeah, for consumers there are some seriously annoying adjustments to be made when it comes to Apple’s updates, but odds are, after selling more than 1 billion phones globally, Apple knows what it’s doing.
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
