Frustrated iPhone 7 User Shows You How to Bring Back Your Headphone Jack
Nathan with the Strange Parts channel on YouTube is known for tricking out his own iPhones by building them himself.
Based in Shenzhen, China for the past four months, the former Silicon Valley software engineer has been on the hunt for novel ways to revamp Apple software. His latest video features Nathan attempting to bring the headphone jack back to the iPhone 7.
When Apple announced that the iPhone 7 (and possibly subsequent models) wouldn’t have a 3.5mm headphone jack, smartphone users lost their collective minds.
People were not happy with Apple, calling removing the headphone jack one of the dumbest moves in the company’s design history.
And, as an iPhone 7 user, it can be incredibly frustrating to no longer charge my phone and listen to music through headphone simultaneously. One connection might simplify the design, but it sure didn’t simplify the lives of iPhone users.
So Nathan decided to rewire a used iPhone 7 despite the fact that you cannot charge and use the handset for listening to music with headphones simultaneously. So he drilled a hole into the iPhone 7's aluminum chassis to get a feel for where he would place both ports. He discovered that the only way he was going to achieve his goal would be to create a custom circuit board.
His first attempt at a board was way too big to put into an iPhone 7, but with help from other tech-savvy friends he'd made in China, he was able to reduce the size of the board while enabling both the lightning port and jack to run seamlessly.
He then drilled a hole using an Xbox controller to make the perfect hole for a headphone jack. Finally, despite two broken displays and multiple failures, he achieved the impossible.
Nathan even made a limited edition board for others who wish to replicate his success.