Apple presented its new smartphone Wednesday, and nestled in with the iPhone 7's much-ballyhooed features was the disclosure that the company is getting rid of the phone's headphone jack—news that wasn't exactly met with universal acclaim, or much acclaim at all. Chris Taylor is one detractor of the headphone ditch, writing for Mashable that, in nearly 20 years of attending Apple product launches, he's "never heard anything as ridiculous emanate from that stage as I did Wednesday." Apple marketing head Phil Schiller used the word "courage" to describe Apple's innovation, but that's not how Taylor sees it. "Courage is marching across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma in 1965 [or] facing down a tank in Tiananmen Square," he writes. "Courage, by definition, involves doing something that makes you afraid."
Apparently Taylor doesn't think Apple was quivering in its workboots when it came up with this plan. He's got plenty of other words instead of "courage" in mind, including "hubris," "arrogance," "greed," and his personal favorite, "stupidity," which he attributes to Apple for taking "one step forward, two steps back" both technologically ("wired almost always sounds better than wireless") and logistically (no more plugging in other peripherals like credit card readers, for example). Meanwhile, although much of the other feedback online is similarly cranky about the headphone jack's demise, Quartz notes that Apple is actually late, not early, in making this move: A handful of Chinese smartphone brands have been fiddling around with the idea for years, and some have already sent these phones, sans jacks, to market. (Read more on the "pure rage" Taylor says may result from this development.)
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