Rumors surrounding Apple’s upcoming iPhone 8 have been swirling for months now, and it seems like most of the major bases have been covered. The tenth-anniversary iPhone will seemingly sport a bold new design with glass panels on the front and back, and a stainless steel mid-frame sandwiched between them. There will not be a physical home button on the front of the phone. Instead, the display will barely have any bezel around it, and the Touch ID fingerprint scanner will be embedded beneath the display itself.
There are some other rumors that cover additional new features, such as a vertically oriented dual-lens rear camera that enables new augmented reality features. There will also apparently be a front-facing 3D camera for facial recognition and 3D scanning. Well, there’s another new feature coming to the iPhone 8 that will address people’s biggest complaint surrounding last year’s iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. That’s right, the headphone jack will make its triumphant return to the iPhone this year. Well, sort of.
Some people went completely crazy when they learned that Apple was ditching the 3.5mm audio jack on the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. Sure it’s a dedicated legacy port, as Apple explained when it unveiled the phones, but hundreds of millions of people around the world still use it each and every day.
To accommodate those people, Apple included a 3.5mm to Lightning adapter with every iPhone 7 and 7 Plus that would allow users to connect legacy headphones. That’s all well and good, but there’s one glaring omission with Apple’s solution: People still had no way to charge their phones and listen to music through wired headphones at the same time.
There are plenty of third-party adapters that allow people to connect a Lightning charger and 3.5mm headphones at the same time, but people have had mixed experiences using them. The bottom line, however, is that you shouldn’t need a third-party accessory to listen to music and charge your iPhone at the same time… especially when some iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus models don’t work properly with wireless headphones.
In 2017, Apple will finally offer a real solution to this problem. That’s right, the iPhone 8 is bringing back the headphone jack.
No, it won’t be a 3.5mm headphone jack and you’ll still need an adapter if you want to connect 3.5mm headphones to your iPhone. As we saw in the iPhone 8 mockup photos we exclusively published on Wednesday, the Lightning port is still the only port on the bottom of the phone. But the new iPhone’s Lightning port will always be free and clear, waiting for users to connect their headphones even while the phone is charging. How is that going to work? Simple: Apple’s next-generation iPhone will finally support wireless charging.
Like the Galaxy S8 and countless other Android phones that have been released over the past few years, Apple’s next-generation iPhones are expected to support wireless charging. While nothing is confirmed, the news comes from multiple independent reports from sources with solid track records. Since wireless chargers work simply by placing the device on a charging pad (or by clipping it in a wireless charging cradle while driving in your car), the Lightning port will be free and clear for users to connect Lightning headphones, or to connect the included Lightning to 3.5 mm headphone jack adapter to connect standard headphones or an aux cable.
Wireless headphones are the future. We all know this, and sales of wireless headphones are skyrocketing. If you’re stuck in the past, however, you’ll no longer have any problem listening to music while charging your phone beginning with this year’s new iPhone models.
