Apple's recent plan to remove headphone from its iPhone 7 might be a good thing. Lets find out how.
If the rumours turn out to be true, and the iPhone 7 launches on September 7 without a headphone jack, some Apple fans are bound to be disappointed.
The 3.5mm socket has been used as the default audio connector on the vast majority of electronic devices - from computers to game consoles - since the 1960s.
Now Apple supposedly wants to shake things up by forcing customers to either use headphones that plug into the Lightning port, which is currently used for charging, or wireless headphones, which connect to the iPhone via Bluetooth.
Given that millions of iPhone owners around the world currently use wired headphones, it's a potentially risky move, but one that Apple evidently has confidence in.
Some rumours suggest that Apple is planning to bundle the iPhone 7 with new wired EarPods that use a Lightning connector, while others claim the phone will launch with wireless headphones, or "AirPods" .
There has also been some suggestion that the new iPhone will come with a Lightning-to-audio adaptor, so you will still be able to use your regular wired headphones - though these things are easy to lose.
While the move may seem like a travesty to anyone who has forked out for expensive headphones in the past, there may be method to Apple's madness.
Recent tests by MacRumours found that headphones connected via the Lightning port provided better sound quality than those via the standard headphone jack.
This is down to the limited size of the 3.5mm headphone jack, meaning sound quality suffers as a result of a smaller, less expensive amp and inbuilt digital-to-analogue music converter (DAC).
Lightning connector headphones contain their own amp and DAC, putting the manufacturer in charge of the audio quality.
However, there's little doubt that headphones that plug into the Lightning port would offer significantly better audio quality than wireless ones.
The 8-pin Lightning connector can handle more data than Bluetooth, which is what counts when your headphones decode audio signals digitally, according to TechRadar .
Dr Kevin Currie, senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, told the website that the most advanced version of Bluetooth available can only transfer data at a maximum of 25Mbps - or 3.25 megabytes per second.
The Lightning port, he says, can transmit information at a rate of 480Mbps - or around 60 megabytes per second - for far superior audio quality.
That means, if you care about audio quality, and you have to choose between wired headphones that use the Lightning connector and wireless ones that use Bluetooth, you should go for the wired ones.
You may even find they're better than your old ones with a traditional audio jack.
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