Apple Seeks to Patent Thinner Headphone Jack

[cdmagurus.com]

Apple has applied for a new patent that would halve the size of audio jacks for headphones and the ports needed to accommodate them. The jacks would be sliced in half lengthwise, decreasing the thickness from today's standard 3.5mm to 1.75mm. The housing for the jack would be placed on the outer edge of a device, rather than buried internally. The patent application notes that this would cause a few problems and Apple proposes how to solve them. First, though existing jacks would fit into the new design, there's nothing holding them in place, so they'd fall out. Apple proposes to solve this by creating a magnetic interface to hold the jack in place. Second, the half-exposed jacks would be visually unappealing. Apple suggests that future jacks include plastic caps to make them look better when magnetically attached to the edge of a device. In addition to removing 1.75mm from the thickness of the jack itself, the change would also reduce the size of the port by another 1.25mm. Apple would be able to shave a total of about 3mm off the design of audio jack ports, which could help it design thinner iPhones.



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