Apple justified the decision to do away with the legendary 3.5mm headphone from the iPhone 7 by stating that it had the courage to embrace the change and make the bold step to the next curve. While that may be true, it is also true that this was a business driven decision rather than one made for making the life of an average consumer easier. A proprietary port means that manufacturers for the accessories will have to pay a licencing fee to Apple every time they want to have an accessory that is compliant and that plays well into Apple’s hands to monetize the accessory market which is on the way up as smartphones become a must have.
Geek speculates that seeing Apple steamroll ahead, Samsung is on the fence when it comes to the subject of headphone jack and that it may decide to follow the lead of the Cupertino giants and ditch the 3.5mm headphone jack for a proprietary connector. The report states that, ‘Right now, Samsung is thought to be at the exploratory stage to see how viable it would be’.
While this may well be true and Samsung could decide to cut Apple’s market by introducing a port that will work on Samsung devices, there is a small matter of USB Type C that sticks out like a sour thumb. Samsung used the Micro USB port till the Galaxy S7 and only moved to the universal port that USB-Type C promises to be, with the Galaxy Note 7. As long as the USB Type C as a port stays on the Galaxy devices, there will be very little incentive for any manufacturer to develop headphones only for the Samsung proprietary jack and pay a royalty for the same. USB Type C is perfectly capable of relaying audio output and brands like LeEco and Moto have already taken the jump where they are using the port to carry the audio from phones to headphones. And as long as it exists a headphone manufacturer would much rather build for a more universal port that the Type C is, which by the way, being a Universal port does not come with issues like licencing fees.
If perhaps Apple was using the Type C port for charging and had replaced the 3.5mm headphone jack with say a lightning connector, nobody would have batted an eyelid and the case will be the same with Samsung unless they decide to completely ditch Type C and go with a proprietary connector for their headphones and charging, a bit like what Sony did on their old Walkman range of devices. With Samsung only moving to Type-C recently, we would perhaps categorise this rumor to be weird and perhaps unlikely to happen than actually follow through and wait for it to come true.
Original image: Androidpit
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