Earphones : A wireless destiny.
Remember audio jacks which existed on most phones till 2017 ? The same audio jack might just become extinct this decade, ushering an era of wireless connectivity for all audio based tasks from listening music to taking a call. The journey of Plug and Play on a mobile device is interesting and it started all the way back in the 1980s when the Walkman was invented. Nobody imagined you could play music while going for a small walk in the park. The Walkman was remarkable in a way people couldn’t imagine. The next technology revolution in this domain came with the breakthrough of storing songs on a small memory device instead of the traditional cassettes and vinyl records. Apple being a leader in consumer electronics came up with a milestone product of theirs in 2001…the iPod. A portable handheld device capable of storing 1000 songs was a big achievement.This is how audio jacks started becoming mainstream.
The iPod slowly evolved and found its way in mobile devices starting with the iPhone. The mobile device industry exploded because of its vast utility and it brought a new era where you could just listen to music while commuting or working out. The next improvements in earphones came in the form of audio quality and comfort , this gave rise to headphones. The beginning of the end of wired earphones came in the form of blue-tooth call receivers, it was the first time companies realized that you don’t need wires to transfer audio.The blue-tooth call receivers were pretty successful but this feature wasn't exploited initially , it was incorporated only later in 2016 when Apple became the first company to do away with the audio jack and go completely wireless for audio. Bluetooth receivers was just like a breeze that came before a tornado.
Phones have really evolved this decade with the general trend of getting bigger and more functionality. The audio jack takes quite some space in a phone and designing a headphone jack was also another issue because headphone jacks gets bendy while walking or a jog, so do you keep the headphone jack as an L shape or straight and do you make space for it on the top of the screen or below the screen?As phones started getting big, there was just more room needed for the screen and battery so Apple came up with a first of a kind iPhone 2016 that did away with the headphone jack.
Now there are two sides of why Apple came up with this technique first. One part of the narrative is that Apple believed that wireless earphones is the future and the other part of it is that Apple simply wanted to get more revenue by selling a separate product( AirPods) with their brand value. The other big tech giants like Google and Samsung mocked them for doing such a move , however it has been a common observation that whatever trend Apple starts in the tech world creates a domino effect in other companies. AirPods was a big success for Apple, it basically created a new market with this product and being the market leaders they made nearly 8 Billion dollars from it (https://fortune.com/2019/08/06/apple-airpods-business/ ). To put this revenue in perspective… If AirPods was a separate company then even by itself it would be a fortune 500 company ahead of Motorola and AMD! Other companies then realized the forecast/potential of this market and then started their own attempt at wireless earphones. Everyone wanted to jump into this market even the companies which mocked Apple for getting rid of the headphone jack followed the same trend but 2 years later. It is almost as if every flagship phone should not have a headphone jack.
Now you must be wondering if wireless technology existed why didn’t companies implement it earlier? The answer to that being audio quality. Wireless technology relies on blue-tooth and compression of data happens before getting transmitted, this inevitably reduces sound quality. Therefore companies are now focused on perfecting its sound quality. Adding the extra features like voice assistant and live language translation is just adding towards the overall utility of these new gen earphones.We will now be able to use earphones like we have never used before.
The destiny of earphones is definitely wireless given its benefits. With so many features on it already it’ll be interesting to find out what more can be done with it.
