De-innovating to innovate. (Or, when is a no feature a new feature?)

It is a religion for the technogeeks, tech editors and reviewers to fawn at whatever Apple throws at them. Now here is another Apple phone, the iPhone7, which ditches the headphone jack and it is being touted as a new feature!

In the highly competitive smartphone business, where not only innovation has reached a dead end, even sales are stagnating, de-innovating is the next innovation.

Just the other day they created mobile phones, which played music through either wired or wireless headphones. Now, you have a "new and improved" phone, which does what all phones were already doing, play music through A2DP Bluetooth headphones, but takes the wired feature out. Except that it doesn't! You can still connect your old wired earphones into the power port of the iPhone7.

But, aren't we all supposed to thank Apple's relentless innovation, which continually blesses the humankind with manna raining down from the ninth cloud, where Steve Jobs now lives, presumably. My guess is that the iPhone will remove the screen itself from the iPhone8 and then the phone itself from the iPhone9. After all, we have time to live through the supernova of our sun and well into the days when the earth encircles a white dwarf.

Meanwhile, go ahead and buy those $159 EarPods, a small price to swim in the holy waters of Applelake and to keep up with the Jonses. 

And, don't forget to charge three pieces of innovation every evening - the two EarPods and the phone itself. Aren't you feeling blessed already?

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3117622/smartphones/why-apple-dropped-the-headphone-jack-in-the-iphone-7.html