For a few years now, the 3.5mm jack is being dropped from most flagships and as a result I keep seeing armchair engineer justifications as to why the jack is going away. Stuff like "they want to sell headphone jack adapters" or "they just want to copy the iPhone", stuff like that. Now, I have a Master's in Computer Engineering and work in-industry as an R&D engineer for a government contractor. I've had experience working on large-scale projects like those they have for consumer electronics, and to see actual analysis on why the headphone jack is being dropped crushed by hundreds of comments that don't make any sort of real sense (mostly on Reddit, to be fair, so not unexpected) has slowly pushed me to engage the conversation around this and I feel it's of worth to clear the air here.
Now, I have never worked in the mobile tech industry specifically, nor have I worked on a team putting out on a phone, but as mentioned I've worked on large-scale tech projects that involve hundreds of engineers as well as smaller scale projects that involve substantially fewer people. In addition, many of the design review standards and practices are used throughout the tech industry, including the mobile phone industry, so I do have some insight on what is going on here. But I must be clear that I can't say as a complete certainty what exactly goes down when an OEM decides to drop the headphone jack, just some informed speculation.
First, some tech background. Mobile phones in many companies involve a development cycle of many years of what you can think of as pre-production, and then a year of two of much more focused production. When Google bought Motorola, they continued to put out phones relatively similar to those they had put out before the acquisition for this reason. But then, a year or two in, Motorola's lineup, branding, and overall design ethos changed dramatically once they had "emptied out the pipeline" and started putting out the phones that Google had started oversight on from day one. That being said, when a phone enters full development with about a year to go, it's at this moment where a lot of the design decisions are put into place. What a phone looks like, what it can do, what ports it has, what specs, etc., usually it's about a year from release when the decisions are made. This does not prevent major and drastic changes from being made later on, but the decisions here start accumulating momentum and often to undo some of them will result in delays, sometimes by months. On top of that, phone development is often rushed, as-is. Mistakes made early on in the hardware are fixed through software patches as opposed to redesigning the motherboard and fabbing samples again, a practice that could take more than a month. So these engineers are often worked very hard to get their job done, and due to the nature of how the generational cycles work in the mobile industry, these time constraints are set in stone--not just for the phone maker itself to launch products on a yearly basis, but also as new generations of SoCs launch yearly, 4G/5G radios improve year over year, and RAM/Flash pricing changes even daily.
Secondly, some business background. When the iPhone 7 launched, some industry watchers assumed that the lack of a 3.5mm would mean that the phone would crash and burn. Instead, it seemingly followed the same trend the iPhone has been on for a while, where it launched bigger than ever but had a shorter tail than the last generation. This is due to broader trends with how consumers are willing to wait longer to upgrade, and when they do upgrade they more often do so at the very beginning at the gen, to make sure their phone feels like the fresh new thing longer. As a result, it became clear that in the market segment those iPhones targeted, consumers were largely apathetic as a whole to the loss of the headphone port. On the business/marketing side of things, not having that port was no longer a detriment to the phone's possible sales. But on the other side of the coin, consumers continue to agitate for more and more featured phones. Because these devices are treated as long term investments, consumers no longer value weird oddities like slide out speakers or Star Wars branding at the cost of core features such as waterproofing, multiple cameras, strong vibration motors, a large bezel-less screen, etc. So while lacking a 3.5mm port may not impact the bottom line too immensely, lacking some of those other features will lead to opinion pieces saying you've made a mistake, which in turn creates negative press for the phone. (Some may point out that lacking a headphone jack port also creates negative press, but that press is softened by the fact that most other companies are also making the same move, which leads to a consumer impression that no phones have this port anymore so why care that this specific model doesn't, either?).
All of this comes down to that design review a year out, where the engineers are running the show, talking about the decisions they've made for their design. In this same room are going to be at least some business folks who are giving feedback on these decisions. Now, as I've said I don't actually work on these types of products so I can't say for certain but I can pretty easily envision how these meetings likely go down: engineers trying to figure out how to work in what they want into the phone while also working in what the business people demand in the phone. These discussions likely will lead to a common result: we don't have the room to fit everything you want unless we make compromises. Because the premium segment of smartphones sell to consumers that don't necessarily care about lacking a headphone jack, that compromise is one the business people may not necessarily push back on, and the engineers are happy to abandon that port because, to be fair, it's a pretty massive port compared to some of the other components on the phone. Now, does this mean those engineers could have worked with that headphone jack, and found a way to make it work? Possibly. It requires the team to be skilled and have the people to spend the extra work on it, though, and not all teams have that sort of talent.
As a result, many flagships have ended up dropping the headphone jack in order to make the incredibly complex work of making a phone more viable. Already, I can hear people try to pre-empt and say "but what about...", and I'll try to address some of those arguments now:
Now, I have never worked in the mobile tech industry specifically, nor have I worked on a team putting out on a phone, but as mentioned I've worked on large-scale tech projects that involve hundreds of engineers as well as smaller scale projects that involve substantially fewer people. In addition, many of the design review standards and practices are used throughout the tech industry, including the mobile phone industry, so I do have some insight on what is going on here. But I must be clear that I can't say as a complete certainty what exactly goes down when an OEM decides to drop the headphone jack, just some informed speculation.
First, some tech background. Mobile phones in many companies involve a development cycle of many years of what you can think of as pre-production, and then a year of two of much more focused production. When Google bought Motorola, they continued to put out phones relatively similar to those they had put out before the acquisition for this reason. But then, a year or two in, Motorola's lineup, branding, and overall design ethos changed dramatically once they had "emptied out the pipeline" and started putting out the phones that Google had started oversight on from day one. That being said, when a phone enters full development with about a year to go, it's at this moment where a lot of the design decisions are put into place. What a phone looks like, what it can do, what ports it has, what specs, etc., usually it's about a year from release when the decisions are made. This does not prevent major and drastic changes from being made later on, but the decisions here start accumulating momentum and often to undo some of them will result in delays, sometimes by months. On top of that, phone development is often rushed, as-is. Mistakes made early on in the hardware are fixed through software patches as opposed to redesigning the motherboard and fabbing samples again, a practice that could take more than a month. So these engineers are often worked very hard to get their job done, and due to the nature of how the generational cycles work in the mobile industry, these time constraints are set in stone--not just for the phone maker itself to launch products on a yearly basis, but also as new generations of SoCs launch yearly, 4G/5G radios improve year over year, and RAM/Flash pricing changes even daily.
Secondly, some business background. When the iPhone 7 launched, some industry watchers assumed that the lack of a 3.5mm would mean that the phone would crash and burn. Instead, it seemingly followed the same trend the iPhone has been on for a while, where it launched bigger than ever but had a shorter tail than the last generation. This is due to broader trends with how consumers are willing to wait longer to upgrade, and when they do upgrade they more often do so at the very beginning at the gen, to make sure their phone feels like the fresh new thing longer. As a result, it became clear that in the market segment those iPhones targeted, consumers were largely apathetic as a whole to the loss of the headphone port. On the business/marketing side of things, not having that port was no longer a detriment to the phone's possible sales. But on the other side of the coin, consumers continue to agitate for more and more featured phones. Because these devices are treated as long term investments, consumers no longer value weird oddities like slide out speakers or Star Wars branding at the cost of core features such as waterproofing, multiple cameras, strong vibration motors, a large bezel-less screen, etc. So while lacking a 3.5mm port may not impact the bottom line too immensely, lacking some of those other features will lead to opinion pieces saying you've made a mistake, which in turn creates negative press for the phone. (Some may point out that lacking a headphone jack port also creates negative press, but that press is softened by the fact that most other companies are also making the same move, which leads to a consumer impression that no phones have this port anymore so why care that this specific model doesn't, either?).
All of this comes down to that design review a year out, where the engineers are running the show, talking about the decisions they've made for their design. In this same room are going to be at least some business folks who are giving feedback on these decisions. Now, as I've said I don't actually work on these types of products so I can't say for certain but I can pretty easily envision how these meetings likely go down: engineers trying to figure out how to work in what they want into the phone while also working in what the business people demand in the phone. These discussions likely will lead to a common result: we don't have the room to fit everything you want unless we make compromises. Because the premium segment of smartphones sell to consumers that don't necessarily care about lacking a headphone jack, that compromise is one the business people may not necessarily push back on, and the engineers are happy to abandon that port because, to be fair, it's a pretty massive port compared to some of the other components on the phone. Now, does this mean those engineers could have worked with that headphone jack, and found a way to make it work? Possibly. It requires the team to be skilled and have the people to spend the extra work on it, though, and not all teams have that sort of talent.
As a result, many flagships have ended up dropping the headphone jack in order to make the incredibly complex work of making a phone more viable. Already, I can hear people try to pre-empt and say "but what about...", and I'll try to address some of those arguments now:
- Yes, Samsung has had the headphone jack in their phone for a few years past everyone else. The story, as best as it can be told by anyone outside of that company, is that the iPhone 7 launched without a headphone jack partway through the development period for the Galaxy S8. The leaks at the time portrayed some internal arguments about whether to drop the jack or not, and at one point they even considered creating a proprietary port to replace the headphone jack. In the end--probably because they were already deep on developing a phone *with* a headphone jack, the Galaxy S8 launched with a headphone jack, and received tons of praise for it. It's likely the marketability of *having* a headphone jack (because if you notice, I've only ever mentioned that not having a 3.5mm port is not necessarily a downside--I never said anything about the *upside* of having it) convinced Samsung to continue pushing to keep the port. But even they are poised to drop it--it leaked earlier this year that they were planning to drop this port on either the Note 10 or the Note 11, and further leaks of the Note 10 have confirmed it does not have this port. It seems plausible that it has no longer become enough of a marketing point to warrant the extra work the engineers claim they have to do to include it.
- Yes, I too have seen that video of a dude modding his iPhone 7+ to include a headphone jack port. It's important to note there, that the widely assumed/believed reason for the lack of this port on those iPhones was because of a lack of space. It should be noted, though, that this is true on the *smaller* iPhone. The iPhone 7+ is a bigger phone, and therefore has more space to spare. the space taken up by the headphone jack port on the smaller phone is now taken up by a larger vibration motor for their solid state home button. While they may have been able to work the port into the larger phone, they likely couldn't make everything fit on the smaller phone and so removed the port on both phones for parity.
- Yes, I've seen the fact that some smaller OEMs like LG and OnePlus keep the headphone jack port well after bigger ones had dropped it, implying that even smaller, less capable teams are able to make it work. It also should be noted, though, that these OEMs only work with larger handsets--phones that used to be called "phablets"--and not the smaller phones that stronger teams at Apple and Samsung work with (a normal S9 is far smaller than the G7, for example). Also, OnePlus isn't actually a small company. They share tech, supplies, manufacturing lines, development talent, etc., with their sister company Oppo, one of the larger tech companies in China.
- Yes, I'm aware that phones in the midrange still often launch with the 3.5mm ports. This is because consumers who buy phones in this range are perceived as being more price conscious, and therefore need the jack as they don't rely heavily on Bluetooth or relatively pricey adapters to make up for the lack of a port. So the business need of products in this range clearly outline the port as a must-have, as opposed to a nice-to-have or even a no-need-to-have. Instead, features such as waterproofing (which requires a gasket inside the phone), and multiple cameras often get compromised on.
