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These leaked photos of the next Apple earphones point to the death of the 3.5mm audio standard

Ready or not, tomorrow’s smartphone audio is going to be digital through and through

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The ubiquitous 3.5mm socket has been the mainstay on portable device audio for many decades--from the first Sony Walkman to the latest Hi-res digital audio players today, it’s the socket that every headphone is built to plug into.

But there’s a foreboding wind blowing these days: one that heralds the end of this audio standard--the move that will eliminate an analog component from our inherently digital devices today.

In a recent leak via Chinese tech leak website Weibo, the next generation of Apple EarPods appear to replace the 3.5mm jack with a Lightning connector. This implies that the headphones are likely to contain some kind of integrated Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC), with the digital audio signal coming directly from an Apple device’s Lightning port.

The 3.5mm jack became as popular as it did owing to its low cost, both at the player and headphone end. But its downside is the analog audio signal that it carries is typically decoded by a cheap component in players, leading to loss in audio fidelity. With the transition to Lightning and USB Type-C audio cables, the audio experience is likely to get enhanced, although at the cost of junking your existing earphones based on the 3.5mm standard.

In the recent leaks of what is likely to be the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, there’s the obvious exclusion of the 3.5mm earphone socket, meaning that the phones will be meant to be either paired with Bluetooth headphones, or use some type of earphone based on the digital-only Lightning connector.

Of course these are leaks and none of this is confirmed, but it’s a trends that is unmistakably proliferating, even among other brands such as LeEco. So if you have a favourite pair of wired Sennheisers or Audio-Technica headphones lying around, now’s the time to get some listening in before they go the Dodo way.

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