The iPhone 7 is an awesome smartphone, provided you aren’t a fan of listening to music and charging the phone at the same time. Thanks to it only having the one Lightning port, charging and listening are two activities that don’t go together.
Apple’s solution is a shrug and a pair of $200 wireless headphones, or some kind of god-awful dongle. So, Pioneer made a pair of headphones that build the dongle right in.
The Pioneer Rayz Plus are a $150 pair of wired earbuds that include active noise-cancelling and auto-pause when you pull them out of your ears. Much more importantly, they also have a tiny Lightning port pass-through, which means that when you plug the headphones into your iPhone via the Lightning port, you can plug a Lightning cable into the headphones, and thus juice up your phone while also listening to music.
This isn’t a groundbreaking concept, but it is the most slickly-designed solution to Apple’s home-made problem that we’ve seen yet. The headphones having a Lightning connector on the end also means that you can have active noise cancelling capabilities without the headphones themselves needing a battery. The circuitry to power the noise cancelling is powered from the phone, which is more convenient than other solutions, which normally require charging headphones separately, and only give you 10-20 hours of noise cancelling.
If you’re less concerned about charging your iPhone, there’s also the $100 Rayz, which are virtually identical but without the Lightning pass-through. Both models are available for purchase through Pioneer’s website right now.
