iPhone 7
Dropped the headphone jack, replaced the home button with a pressure pad, and added IP67 water resistance and the four-core A10 Fusion.
Released September 16, 2016 · Discontinued September 10, 2019 · From $649 (32 GB, unlocked)
The iPhone 7 is the one that removed the headphone jack. Apple called it courage, the internet did not, and every other phone maker copied it inside two years anyway. In the box was a Lightning to 3.5mm adapter and a pair of Lightning EarPods, and AirPods arrived separately that December. The home button stopped clicking. It became a pressure-sensitive pad driven by the Taptic Engine, which meant nothing to press and no moving part to fail, and it also meant the phone could finally be sealed. IP67 water resistance arrived here, four years after Samsung had it. The camera got optical image stabilization on the 4.7-inch model for the first time, a wider f/1.8 aperture and a quad-LED flash. The A10 Fusion was the first Apple chip with four cores, two fast and two efficient, which is the arrangement every Apple chip has used since. Jet black was the color everyone wanted and it scratched if you looked at it.
Reviews & Reception
The headphone jack took the coverage. Reviewers treated the phone as a familiar case hiding an unusually aggressive set of breaks with convention, and several said outright that this was the model people would remember arguing about.
The iPhone 7 and 7 Plus are deeply unusual devices. They are full of aggressive breaks from convention while wrapped in cases that look almost exactly like their two direct predecessors.
This is an iPhone that lays a marker in tech history, and it will serve as the foundation for many important changes to how phones work and integrate into our lives.
And, yes, Apple has removed the headphone jack.