Apple replaced the headphone jack on the iPhone 7 with a fake speaker grill
Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
That means some people have started to buy the phones only to immediately disassemble them, like the team at iFixit did early on Friday morning.
They bought an iPhone 7 Plus in Australia, as soon as it went on sale, and started taking it apart. And their teardown reveals what's in place of the headphone jack that Apple removed.
In short: nothing complicated, just some plastic. No speaker, and no electronics.
"In place of the headphone jack, we find a component that seems to channel sound from outside the phone into the microphone... or from the Taptic Engine out," they write.
Yep - in the place where the headphone jack used to be there's a piece of molded plastic. "No fancy electronics here, just some well-designed acoustics and molded plastic," iFixit writes.
See for yourself:
Here's what was there last year, in the iPhone 6S, courtesy of iFixit (which also writes the best iPhone repair guides.)
That's not to say the space freed up by the headphone jack is wasted. Apple could have used some of that space elsewhere, especially to put the "Taptic Engine," or one of the phone's vibrating motors, closer to the new home button.
"That jack takes up a lot of space in the phone, a lot of space. And there's a lot of more important things we can provide for the consumer than that jack," Apple CEO Tim Cook said earlier this week.
If you're interested in the guts of your new iPhone 7, make sure to look through iFixit's entire teardown.
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