Apple’s 7th generation iPod touch comes with a headphone jack built-in, despite the company dropping it from phones in 2016.
Apple recently took the tech world by surprise with the announcement of a brand new iPod touch – but even more surprising was the revelation that the updated music player features a 3.5mm headphone jack.
Why was this so surprising? Well, Apple stopped including headphone jacks on its smartphones a long time ago in favor of its own multi-purpose Lightning port, with the last jack-friendly models, the iPhone 6S and iPhone SE, being discontinued in 2018.
Despite uproar from consumers at the time, Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller said the firm had been motivated by „courage“ to get rid of the headphone jack.
Schiller explained at the 2016 unveiling of the iPhone 7: „Some people have asked us why we would remove the analogue headphone jack. It’s been with us a really long time and it comes down to one word: courage. Our team has tremendous courage.“
We speculated at the time that the removal of the headphone jack likely freed up space for extra technologies such as the A10 Fusion processor – the same processor used in the new iPod touch (7th generation).
More recently the lack of a headphone jack, on newer iPhone models like the iPhone XS and iPhone XR, has potentially contributed to the rise of wireless headphones, including Apple’s own AirPods (2019).
We asked Apple for comment but the brand declined. So, having spoken to experts and analysts across the industry, we’ve come up with a few reasons for Apple sticking to the jack in the new iPod touch.
Audiophiles have a reputation for eschewing any headphones without a wire, and Apple’s inclusion of the headphone jack on the iPod touch could be part of a wider plan to appeal to music lovers.
After all, the new iPod touch supports Hi-Res Audio codecs like FLAC and Apple Lossless, which are capable of reproducing the full range of sound from recordings that have been mastered from better-than-CD quality music sources, a sound that closely replicates the quality that the musicians and engineers were working with in the studio at the time of recording.
Joe Cox, Global Editor-in-Chief of What Hi-Fi? Thinks that the inclusion of the 3.5mm headphone jack in the new iPod touch could be very appealing to audiophiles, partly because wired headphones tend to sound better than their wireless counterparts.
He explains: “Bluetooth would traditionally compress your music files to transmit them wirelessly, reducing the audio quality before it has even reached your headphones.”
While advances in Bluetooth technology, such as aptX HD means that this no longer needs to be the case, Cox explains that, “with all the parts of the audio chain needing to be compatible, and with more processing happening generally, wired headphones do tend to still deliver better sound”.
“That said, you may need to be listening to CD-quality or better audio, such as via Tidal Masters or Deezer HiFi, and with good headphones, to hear the difference,” he adds.
So, by keeping the headphone jack, Apple could tempt those who would normally opt for a Hi-Res portable music player like the Onkyo DP-X1A Digital Audio Player to try out an iPod touch.
But what about headphones that plug into the Lightning port? Apple sells such versions of its classic EarPods, so why wouldn’t they appeal to audiophiles?
According to Cox, these headphones could even provide higher quality audio than traditional models with a 3.5mm jack – but they just aren’t common enough to have truly taken off in the audiophile world.
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