Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Iphone Cellphones Music Apple Hardware Technology

Hobbyist Gives iPhone 7 the Headphone Jack We've Always Wanted (engadget.com) 194

intellitech shares a report from Engadget: For those of you who miss the iPhone headphone jack, you're definitely not alone. But Strange Parts creator Scotty Allen missed it so much that he decided to add one to his iPhone 7. He just posted a video of the project's entire saga, with all of its many ups and downs, and in the end he holds what he set out to create -- a current generation iPhone with a fully functional headphone jack. It turns out, real courage is adding the headphone jack back to the iPhone. The project took around 17 weeks to complete and throughout it Allen spent thousands of dollars on parts including multiple iPhones and screens and handfuls of lightning to headphone adaptors. Along the way, Allen bought a printer, a nice microscope and fancy tweezers. He had to design his own circuit boards, have a company manufacture multiple iterations of flexible circuit boards and at one point early on had to consult with a chip dealer that a friend hooked him up with.

The final product works by using a lightning to headphone adaptor that's incorporated into the internal structure of the phone. However, because the headphone jack is powered via the phone's lightning jack with a circuit board switching between the two depending on whether headphones or a charger are plugged into the phone, you can't actually listen to music and charge the phone at the same time.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Hobbyist Gives iPhone 7 the Headphone Jack We've Always Wanted

Comments Filter:
  • by lkcl ( 517947 )

    all we have to do now is sit back and wait to hear that apple tracked down his phone id, then his phone, and bricked it for carrying out "unsanctioned" modifications...

  • Spending lots of bucks to get what you have for free in every other contemporary phone.

    • Spending lots of bucks to get what you have for free in every other contemporary phone.

      Um, not EVERY...

      Apple wasn't even the first to delete the ancient 3.5 mm jack.

  • by dohzer ( 867770 ) on Saturday September 09, 2017 @05:28AM (#55163695)

    Holy $hit just show some photos of it FFS!
    That vid goes for like 20min.

    • sheesh... you could have gotten your answer in the time it took you to post.
      Unless complaining just to be heard in order to inflate your own ego was your objective all along.

      It's ok, you could be president one day!

  • If I'm reading the summary correctly, this whole project merely created an internal version of the existing adapter. I'm sure a lot of difficult technical challenges were overcome, but so what, there'd be a lot of difficult technical challenges implanting a retractable microsd card into my pinky finger.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I imagine that the internal converter plus jack would take up more space than just supporting the jack in the first place, so unless some parts of the iPhone had to be sacrificed it shows that Apple's excuse about needing to drop the jack to save space has no merit.

      Aside from that, a hobbyist modded his phone so that he didn't need to carry around a converter.

      • Aside from that, a hobbyist modded his phone so that he didn't need to carry around a converter.

        Technically he's carrying the converter around inside his phone.
        As an exposition of hardware hacking, the video is superb.

    • by ls671 ( 1122017 ) on Saturday September 09, 2017 @07:39AM (#55164009) Homepage

      ... there'd be a lot of difficult technical challenges implanting a retractable microsd card into my pinky finger.

      Just choose a less challenging and more cost effective location instead.

      Inspire yourself from that guy with his headphone jack; you already have an easy adaptable port located in your lower back.

  • no way (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Saturday September 09, 2017 @05:46AM (#55163749)
    My Samsung has a wireless charger and a standard phone jack. Awesome camera too. As always: Fuck Apple.
    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      My Samsung has a wireless charger and a standard phone jack.

      You mean you can plug a landline into it? That's an odd feature for a cell phone...

      • by ls671 ( 1122017 )

        Mine has one too, but it can only be used to connect to a dial-up Internet connection.

    • Your Samsung phone is awesome. Unfortunately it has one major flaw: Android. if you don't believe me, go look at Slashdot's own recent topics since last week as proof that it sucks.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Here's another brilliant guy with no common sense. Spending countless hours, and loads of money to basically come up with a lousy solution. Which isn't any better then just using the lightning adaptor in the first place. Personally if I wanted a headphone jack that bad, their are some really good Android phones or just buy a older iPhone that still has one? Why did the person buy a new iPhone knowing it did not have a jack? .....Idiot

  • by OpenSourced ( 323149 ) on Saturday September 09, 2017 @07:03AM (#55163909) Journal

    Reading the ordeal and expense that is putting a microphone jack in an iPhone, I must say that now I understand the reason why Apple took it away. It's simply not worth it!

    • Reading the ordeal and expense that is putting a microphone jack in an iPhone, I must say that now I understand the reason why Apple took it away. It's simply not worth it!

      What a stupid comment. This ordeal and expense is entirely the result of doing something with a device that it wasn't designed to do. If you're at the design stage of the device this would have been incredibly trivial. Hell they would likely just have copied and pasted this part of the schematic from the previous iPhone and called it a day.

      But it does really call out all of Apple's bullshit excuses such as no space for a headphone jack, trying to make it thinner, etc.

  • If Apple had just included a dongle that could both charge and use normal headphones at the same time, it would suck to have to carry the dongle, but most of this would be beside the point.
  • would rather see a micro sd slot added, now THAT add all sorts of functionality to an iphone , and would likely gets apples attention

  • ... he had added a second lightning port.

    While you'd still need either lightning headphones or a dongle to connect to regular headphones, you could then at least still listen while charging (plus you might even gain the ability to charge twice as fast if both lightning ports were plugged in at the same time, but I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't some important logistical reasons why that wouldn't happen... I'm bringing it up only because I can imagne it as a possibility)

    Without the ability to lis

  • ...and then he gets mugged...

  • Didn't they say there was no room for a headphone jack?

    Did they only do it to give their up-coming Air Pods a sales boost?

  • This young man is doing God's work on Earth.

  • USB ports on a macbook.
  • Apple don't seem too shy to create proprietary connectors.
    Why not a magnetic headphone jack for their phones that's similar to the magsafe on their laptops?
    This way they would need less interior space for a plug to intrude into the guts of the phone while making it easier and safer to connect your ear buds.

It is not best to swap horses while crossing the river. -- Abraham Lincoln

Working...