On September 7, 2016, Apple’s Phil Schiller stood on stage in San Francisco and explained why the iPhone 7 would ship without a headphone jack. "It comes down to one word: courage," he said, before introducing the $159 AirPods as the alternative. The line was mocked almost immediately, but the substance of the announcement — that Apple had decided the 3.5mm jack’s time was up — was treated by most of the industry as a starting gun. A decade later, the jack is a lot rarer than it was in 2016. It is not, however, gone, and where it survives says more about who still needs it than nostalgia does.
The flagship phones that followed Apple’s lead did so quickly: within a couple of years, jack-free had become the default expectation for a premium Android phone as much as an iPhone. That part of the prediction held up. What didn’t was the assumption that the rest of the market would follow at the same pace, or for the same reasons.
Budget and mid-range phones mostly never left. The current Motorola Moto G Play still lists a 3.5mm jack in its official spec sheet — not as a throwback feature, but because at that price point, a wired jack is cheaper and more reliable than bundling wireless earbuds or asking a budget buyer to own a separate USB-C dongle they’ll inevitably lose. The jack didn’t survive there out of resistance to change; it survived because removing it never actually saved anyone money at that end of the market.
Gaming phones kept it for a different reason entirely: latency. ASUS’s ROG Phone 9 ships with a 3.5mm output rated for Hi-Res Audio up to 384kHz/32-bit, paired with Dirac Virtuo spatial processing built specifically around wired headphones — a deliberate choice for a category where Bluetooth’s audio delay is a real disadvantage, not just an inconvenience. For competitive mobile gaming, a millisecond of wireless lag is the entire argument for keeping a wire.
The more interesting holdout is Sony. The Xperia 1 VII, announced May 13, 2025, didn’t just retain the jack while everyone else’s flagship dropped it — Sony built it up as a feature, carrying over components from its Walkman audio players, including higher-quality solder in the jack itself, alongside DSEE Ultimate AI upscaling, LDAC, and Hi-Res Audio support. For Sony, the jack isn’t a legacy holdover; it’s part of the pitch to the specific audience — audio enthusiasts who still own wired headphones worth using — that no other flagship maker is chasing. An FCC filing for the presumed successor, the Xperia 1 VIII, surfaced in April 2026 with language suggesting an earphone jack is included there too, on a similar timeline to the 1 VII’s own filing the year before.
Nearly a decade on from "courage," the jack didn’t die the way the 2016 keynote made it sound like it would. It retreated into two very different corners of the market — the budget segment, where removing it was never actually about the future, and one flagship maker’s deliberate bet that a small, specific audience still wants a real wire. That’s a slower, messier story than the one Apple told on stage, but it’s the one the phones being sold in 2026 actually support.