You might have heard that the iPhone 7 has removed the traditional headphone jack that allowed customers to use mobile products like payments tool Square. The headphone jack allowed customers to use wired headphones. Apple has changed the jack and I believe this is a bad move for customers. Their wired headphones no longer work with the phone (in the native product).
JV Chamary, Forbes contributor, argued in his post that removing the headphone jack is a good move for Apple. He argues that in pursuit of progress, Apple made the decision to kill the jack—to pave the way for innovative products such as wireless headphones. He wrote, “Ultimately, the reason Apple replaced the headphone jack is because the benefit outweighed the risk of alienating a few existing customers.” My point of view, it’s not a “few” customers, it’s millions of customers. And those customers matter. Right now Apple feels it can do whatever it wants because it’s the market leader, however how long will they be as powerful and successful as they currently are? Will customers eventually get fed up of what Fred Reicheld calls “bad profits”? Forcing customers to buy additional products for what seems to be profit-driven reasons? Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller said at the iPhone 7 launch, “Maintaining an ancient, single-purpose, analogue, big connector doesn’t make sense because that space is at a premium.” He says Apple has a new vision of how audio should work on mobile devices. However, it appears to solely be a way to force customers to use Apple products alone, and buy more of them. We’ve seen in the past Apple force customers to buy new iPhone chargers by making the old ones obsolete. Is this really a customer-centric move? Or a move for the company to purely make more money while also sticking it to companies like Square? We’ve seen Apple do this in the past, and I don’t believe it’s a customer-centric move.
*Note: An earlier version of this story stated that Apple customers will have to purchase an adapter for their Square product. This statement has been removed, as the adapter for the Square reader is the Lightning Connector, which is included with the iPhone 7.
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