It’s been roughly 10 years since headphone jacks were stripped from nearly all of our smartphones. On one hand, this was a tragedy—but it’s one that occurred for a good reason. More than one, actually. In some ways, our phones are better off for having kissed this beloved port goodbye.
Thinner phones than ever before
Phones can’t be thinner than their ports
In 2025, the iPhone Air and the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge were two ambitious phones marketed solely around how thin they were. Ultimately, both phones were busts, as they sacrificed too many features that people cared about, such as reducing the number of cameras, while costing more. Yet despite the hype, neither of these phones was thinner than an Android phone that hit shelves a decade prior—Motorola’s Moto Z.
The Moto Z, launched in 2016, was only 5.2mm thin. It was also the first Android phone to do without a headphone jack, doing so even before the iPhone. It’s a phone that’s too old to run today, but its legacy lives on most explicitly in the Air and the Edge.
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- SoC
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A19 Pro chip
- Display
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6.5-inches
- Storage
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256GB, 512GB, or 1TB
- Ports
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USB-C
- Operating System
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iOS
- Colors
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Sky Blue, Light Gold, Cloud White, Space Black
The iPhone Air is the newest model to join the iPhone flagship line, and its design is lighter and thinner than ever.
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- Display
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6.7-inches
- RAM
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12GB
- Storage
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256 or 512GB
- Battery
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3,900mAh
- Ports
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USB-C
- Operating System
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One UI 7
Samsung’s latest flagship phone provides the company’s bleeding-edge technology in a slim form factor. If you pre-order the Galaxy S25 Edge directly from Samsung, you’ll get $50 in credit and a free upgrade to the 512GB model.
The headphone jack may not seem like that large of a port, especially if you’re trying to picture it from memory, but it’s a taller hole than the USB-C ports on our phones today. That means if you’re trying to shave every millimeter you can off the thickness of a device, you eventually will run up against the dimensions of the headphone jack. At the onset of readily available Bluetooth earbuds and headphones, it became an increasingly easy call to make. Besides, you can always add a headphone jack back in.
Super-thin slab phones may not have taken off, but this thinness is vital when it comes to foldables. The Galaxy Z Fold 7 is one of many book-style foldables released in 2025 that are only slightly thicker than the opening of a USB-C port. Many of us feel flip-foldables are still too thick to be practical and hope to see similar improvements there.
I hear some of you already—you don’t care about how thin your phone is! But the removal of the headphone jack has quietly contributed to improvements in areas that most of us do care about.
Larger batteries, camera, and audio
Space has been freed up for other things
When considering the impact of the headphone jack, it’s not just a matter of the size of the port itself. This iFixit repair guide for the Galaxy S9+ gives an idea of how much space is used by the headphone jack internally.
Now compare this with an iFixit teardown of a Galaxy S25 Ultra.
You can see how there isn’t any wasted space inside the phone. Removing the components necessary for the headphone jack frees up space for other components. Larger camera modules occupy more of the top half and go up to the top edge of the device. More phones now have multiple speakers rather than the single down-facing speaker common in the past. More space is available for the larger batteries that many of us crave.
Our phones can withstand far more abuse
Fewer ports = fewer weak points
Our phones go with us everywhere, and they’ve become far more robust in order to survive the abuse we put them through. We can now drop phones into swimming pools and expect them to be just fine when someone dives in to fish them out. Some phones can even survive the water pressure and steam they would encounter in the shower. If you’re recording a video of yourself white water rafting, your phone can survive all the moisture without needing a protective case.
With IP68 ratings standard across many of today’s phones, they’re not just protected against water, but dust as well. Many can handle the sand they encounter at the beach. All of this is done by reducing the number of ports that allow any type of ingress into the phone. In a sense, the headphone jack had to die so that far more phones dropped into pools of water can live.
Hindsight is 20/20
If you had asked me if I would want to give up my headphone jack in order to gain all of these features, I don’t know if I would have taken you up on that trade. Now that I have these advantages, I wouldn’t want to go back. After all, I’m about to pick up my Nintendo Switch 2, which does still have a headphone jack—and I kind of forgot it was there. I only use my Bluetooth buds when I game. When it comes to my phone, I don’t miss the headphone jack at all.
Please stop acting like phone thickness matters—nobody actually cares
This is not a problem that needs to be solved.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
