Apple Seeks to Patent Thinner Headphone Jack
Aug 18, 2011, 4:08 PM by Eric M. Zeman
Apple has applied for a new patent that would halve the size of audio jacks for headphones and the ports needed to accommodate them. The jacks would be sliced in half lengthwise, decreasing the thickness from today's standard 3.5mm to 1.75mm. The housing for the jack would be placed on the outer edge of a device, rather than buried internally. The patent application notes that this would cause a few problems and Apple proposes how to solve them. First, though existing jacks would fit into the new design, there's nothing holding them in place, so they'd fall out. Apple proposes to solve this by creating a magnetic interface to hold the jack in place. Second, the half-exposed jacks would be visually unappealing. Apple suggests that future jacks include plastic caps to make them look better when magnetically attached to the edge of a device. In addition to removing 1.75mm from the thickness of the jack itself, the change would also reduce the size of the port by another 1.25mm. Apple would be able to shave a total of about 3mm off the design of audio jack ports, which could help it design thinner iPhones.
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Comments
Another
I had an Ipod shuffle and all controls were on the wire, so when I broke those headphones I had to spend $35 just for another pair so I could even control Volume and song selection.
Pointless.. Well to me, some people will go for it and fall for this.
Wait a sec...
Keyword - Proprietary
This is one of the reasons I don't respect Apple anymore. They blatently do things to control you after you purchase their products.
It's more like you're renting it...
Once you invest in some accessories that ONLY work with Apple products, you are much more likely to keep buying them.
They know this, and exploit it fully.
* Full disclosure - I own an iPod Touch 4
When the iPhone and iPod touch came out, Apple made changes to the ...
(continues)
Patent hungry
no wonder they suing samsung!
samsung phones are lighter and thinner than iphone! Samsung Galaxy S2 is thinner and lighter than iphone4 !
Nokia tried this and failed
Because Apple can sell swamp water to a Cajun, maybe they will succeed and "reinvent" and rename the Nokia headphone jack.
