Interesting. I never had much of an opinionon Forbes till a few years ago I noticed them posting nearly exclusively NYPost style clickbait. I didn’t think it was that bad of a publication.
There's a ton of sanitization of attachments. It just isn't foolproof.
On iOS messages attachments are decoded in a separate, heavily restricted and sandboxed process, and the decoded sanitized results are sent back to the UI process. It just isn't perfect.
This is 2026. iPhones use standard USB C headphones, you can charge your phone at the same time while using your wired headphones using MagSafe and you can even by low end $59 Beats Flex headphones that have all of the Apple magic.
I’m going to need HN geeks to get over analog headphones from the 60s
I've never had a USB-C port fail with many of them being plugged / unplugged multiple times a day for years. At most they fill with dust you have to fish out. Aux ports would often get in a state where you had to very carefully position the jack for it to work.
I am a huge 3.5mm jack defender and I am still upset at how Apple created a post-USB C world. But this is a common misconception.
USB C headphones and 3.5mm headphones (and Bluetooth, USB A, etc) are all equally as "analog" as one another (with the exception of someone with all-analog equipment, of course).
You need a DAC somewhere between the chip you're getting the digital signal from and the speakers that are playing an analog signal. And so the quality of that depends on (among other things) the quality of your DAC.
With USB or Bluetooth headphones, the DAC is somewhere in the headphone. With the 3.5mm jack, the DAC is behind jack. If you have a device with a crummy built-in DAC giving you a noisy signal, you'll be better off using a USB DAC.
I haven't used Apple's USB C earbuds, but Apple does make a $10 USB C to 3.5mm DAC that performs very very well for its price point.
The difference is you always can buy USB C headphones with a known good consistent DAC. A 3.5 inch headphone jack serves no purpose in the age of USB C - even my wife’s mixing board has USB C input that she can plug her iPhone into.
Next thing HN folks are going yo want the iPhone to come with a SCSI port.
And technology moves on either way. There is not a single high end phone that still comes with a 3.5 inch headphone jack in 2026. The number of people who care in 2026 is probably less than the number of people who want to run Linux on their phone.
Yes, but that's different than what we're saying. I think many more people want and use 3.5mm jacks than they do SCSI ports. The 3.5mm jack is excellent. We're in a thread about a new device released with this wonderful port.
Also, many people want to run Linux on their phone. About 7 in 10 smart phones run Linux, and smart phones are devices billions of humans use every day.
We are in a thread on HN where you have people who complain about not having root access on your iPhone, want to run Linux on everything and bemoan the fact that most websites don’t work with JavaScript disabled.
This is as far from the mainstream as you can possibly get.
Come September it will have been a decade since Apple dropped the headphone port - the world has moved on
I would very much like root on my phone and most of the websites I use don't require JavaScript. Apple hasn't dropped the headphone port, they even announced a new product today called the Macbook Neo with one. There is even a thread on HN about it :)
Or I can just not do stupid shit and listen to hifi headphones released in the past 2-3 years, many of which have a 3.5mm jack (and adapters for larger, if plugging into dac/pre-amps).
Which you said aren't being made anymore. Which is factually untrue. The best bit is, they're still being made! And there's plenty of people who are still buying them!
Why? Because a $170 pair of closed-backs sounds infinitely better than the $550 Bose Quiet Comfort Ultra nonsense.
FiiO FT1 32Ω being a prime example, if you are looking for closed back suggestions :^)
No I said high end phones are no more coming with headphone jacks than they are coming with SCSI and VGA ports. I’m sure it would be convenient for you if the iPhone came with a right and left 1/4 inch audio jack.
Why do they need to sound better? Also, in a lot of instances, they do sound better because they can offer powered functionality such as ANC. Can’t get that with a truly analog headphone. I’d never use analog headphones on a plane, for instance.
Low-end wired earbuds come in packages with dozens of units. I buy cheap earbuds because my kids love breaking them. Not everyone optimizes for the same thing. Analog remains the bees knees in certain settings.
Also, I think for a good number of people, their first job out of college is oftentimes one they will look fondly back on because they've just finished ~17 years of school, have financial independence with a salary, and are still bright-eyed about all the possibilities.
Google is the Xerox Parc of AI, but unlike Xerox they decided to enter the ring with Gemini which is now quite good.
(For those who don't know the history, Xerox Parc and SRI before them invented the modern PC GUI and a lot of other modern PC stuff in the late 70s and early 80s, which Apple copied and then everyone else copied from Apple. Xerox paid a lot for R&D but never used it at all since it would cannibalize their copier business, classic innovators dilemma.)
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