5. Dropping standards

Apple’s position as a market leader and reputation for innovation has given it a lot of leeway when it comes to adopting

new hardware standards. It knows it can drop a popular port in favour of what it thinks is the hardware of the future and people will still buy its products in droves – albeit at the expense of a bit of grumbling.

What’s interesting is that everyone else usually follows suit, resulting in major hardware industry shifts. We’ve already seen that with touchscreens, but it applies to the more modest ports and cables too.

Moving on

In hindsight, much of the fuss surrounding these decisions seems like a storm in a teacup. For example, when Apple dropped the 3.5-inch floppy drive in the iMac in 1998, Bloomberg quoted one angry Mac fan as saying the lack of the thenstandard drive would “kill this machine”. But the follow-up from the rest of the industry was so complete that floppy drives had been completely abandoned within a few years – and soon, manufacturing of the drives had ceased completely.

From VGA on Macs to the 30-pin port on the iPhone, Apple is ruthless when it comes to dropping standards that it perceives as archaic, and is very willing to adopt new, replacement standards that end up driving the industry forward. Ditching the floppy paved the way for the mainstream adoption of USB and CD drives, after all, with obvious storage and speed benefits.

The abandonment of the headphone jack in the iPhone 7 is part of the same story. Apple forecasts a wireless future, and doesn’t mind making the first move.

Its revenues and popularity are such that it knows it can weather the resulting storm. How long will it be until the 3.5mm jack is viewed the same way as FireWire? Apple can’t tell other companies what to do, but in many cases, when Apple drops something, everyone else follows.