Jan 12, 2017 10:05 PM
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There’s really no getting around it: the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus look more or less exactly like the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus from 2014. They are now water resistant, which is nice, although they’re not fully waterproof — keep them submerged in a meter of water for more than 30 minutes and things might not go your way. Samsung’s Galaxy S7 and Note 7 are technically even more water resistant, but I think it’s basically a push — you can get these phones casually wet now without catastrophe, and that’s a big win. If you want to go snorkeling with your iPhone, you should probably get a case anyhow.
So there’s no headphone jack on the iPhone 7. Apple says it needed to take out the headphone jack so it could make space for better cameras, the Taptic Engine(even though the 6S also had a Taptic Engine), and perhaps most importantly, a bigger battery. It was also easier to make a phone with one less hole in it water resistant, but Apple tells me that it wasn’t a huge factor.
Apple ships a pair of its EarPods headphones with a Lightning connector in the box, as well as a Lightning-to-3.5mm dongle so you can use your traditional headphones. You’re not totally out of luck if you have a big investment in corded headphones, but you’re going to want to stock up on those adapters if you regularly plug your phone into a car or have a variety of headphones you like to use — the dongle is small enough that it’s not obtrusive, but also small enough so that it’s destined to get lost if you move it around a lot. At$9, the headphone dongle is the cheapest Apple hardware you can buy; the company thinks people will just buy a few and keep them permanently attached to older headphones. And I’m sure third parties will come up with a million other options, although it’ll be hard to beat$9.
