Here's a link to the story:
 
http://arstechnica.com/ap...-3-5mm-headphone-jack/

tlw

sharke
Maybe if this headphone crap pulls off I'll give an Android phone a whirl.

The android grass may look greener but it comes with perils of its own. Just bought a cheap android phone for my 80 year old father in law and my wife is setting it up. My brother and sister in law use Android and they've just sent her an email of all the Android updates to avoid because they break something.

Some telecom companies apparently limit making Android updates for their phones available to the first 12 months of a phone contract, so that might be worth checking out.

 
Yeah I've heard pretty much the same thing, with certain manufacturers and phone companies crippling features and adding their own pointless crap. 

arstechnica
The "iPhone 7" rumor mill kicked into overdrive this week when Fast Company reported that the design may ditch the standard 3.5mm headphone jack to make the phone thinner. The report echoes a similar, shakier report from Japanese website Mac Okatara back in November, but Fast Company and 9to5Mac both have anonymous sources who lend extra weight to the claim.

Ah,  anonymous sources...  Must be true then..

sharke
Here's a link to the story:
 
http://arstechnica.com/ap...-3-5mm-headphone-jack/

I could give lots of links to similar articles, including from the British press, reporting about internet reports about what an anonymous source might have said to someone else, but there seems to be nothing that ties in to an original source that is remotely firm or attributable.

Until then as far as I'm concerned it's all treatable as yet another internet conspiracy theory that gets reported by media outlets desperate for a new story every 20 minutes. Then the rest of the media reports those reports, and the reports in turn get used as feedback to support the conspiracy theory being true so there are more reports and the whole thing goes round and round in a feedback loop.

We'll just have to wait and see I guess.

Well I think we can apply a little logic here. Phone manufacturers have quite obviously elevated thinness to a high priority in the evolution of their design. They get thinner and lighter with each generation. The standard headphone jack is a bottleneck. If they want to get thinner and lighter then I guess they're going to have to rethink the connection between cans and device.

Personally, device thinness isn't a priority for me. In fact I prefer my gadgets to have a bit of meat about them. If I valued thinness over headphones then the prospect of a new connector probably wouldn't worry me too much.

sharke
Apple has definitely gone downhill since Jobs died. ...

I think it was in that PBS special and interview with him, that he said something like ... "what can I say? I hired a guy that eventually fired me!" ... and I've always thought that without him, it became too much of a ... just make money company ... since the products are not quite as good as the relative machine elsewhere. AND you can not upgrade them!
 
But, in the end ... he was the same as all of them.

Apple was a money grubbing company that exploited consumers (and the people actually building its products) for it's own benefit under Jobs. But they are certainly not unique in that respect. And lots of stuff didn't work properly under Jobs too but they just blamed it on the user - and seemed to mostly be able to get away with it.
 
What died with Jobs is more the myth than anything else. 
 
And myth is hard to build, hard to maintain and hard to replace - particularly when everyone is watching the new guy's every move with a high degree of skepticism that Jobs didn't have to deal with for a long time.

I assume Apple has not made an official announcement of this design change because they have not had sufficient time to engage a gigantic auditorium equipped with eighty foot video screens and populate it with ten thousand fanboy journalists so that a high stepping CEO can come out and snap a microphone cord like a whip while the crowd goes wild and the screen fills with...AWESOME!!!!
 

Maybe they simply will be moving to USB-C (which actually makes sense).

drewfx1
 
What died with Jobs is more the myth than anything else. 
 

As a user of Apple products myself, that is not my experience. And there seems to be a consensus among other Apple users around me, most of who can be pretty critical - and who were even before Jobs died.  

Maybe not the typical fanboys/legion of idiots most often portrayed as the monolithic Apple users base by people with a grudge against the company to conveniently support their argument, but not to be dismissed as an insignificant exception. Unless one's just trying to make a point.
 
Of course, as a non-user, one's perception may be entirely different...