A year ago, Apple got rid of the headphone jack on the iPhone, a painful sting to music lovers and a move not even Apple did a good job of selling us on. So an enterprising hacker decided to bring the jack back, just in time for the iPhone 8’s arrival next week.
The hacker at Strange Parts was annoyed that he couldn’t use his beloved headphones with the iPhone 7 unless he resorted to an annoying dongle, so he took matters into his own hands. In the end it’s mostly just the dongle Apple included with the phone, but put inside the phone’s casing. You’d think installing the physical jack would be the hard part, but not so much, it turns out:
Specifically, because I was using the logic from an Apple headphone adapter and a headphone jack from an iPhone 5, I had to find space to put them without breaking anything else. I feel like I got extremely lucky about finding space inside the phone. There was inexplicably a lot of extra room in the lower left hand corner, right where I wanted to put the headphone jack. And because I was connecting the headphone adapter to the lightning jack, I needed to figure out how to make the lightning jack still work for things like charging and syncing to a computer.
This took a lot of work: Spare Parts wound up using three iPhone 7s and a bunch of spare bits in order to put this jacked phone together. But, as you can see above, it works! He has an iPhone you don’t have to pair your headphones to! And, since he could fit it into the iPhone without compromising its precious thinness, perhaps Apple might take notes.
(via Spare Parts)