While Apple appears to view the Lightning port as the future headphone connector of choice, with some manufacturers already on board, there are plenty of us who’ll be reluctant to replace our existing, expensive headphones. Which poses something of a problem as iPhones and iPads continue to get slimmer, and existing ones barely accommodate the 3.5mm socket.

Apple, however, has a potential solution to this in a patent granted today (via Patently Apple). It’s essentially a standard 3.5mm jack cut in half, to make it much smaller in cross-section. This could easily be used with existing 3.5mm jacks using an adapter. The clever part is that it’s actually chopped off a little above the halfway mark, so the revised connector would still fit snugly in standard 3.5mm jacks on other devices.

As always with Apple patents, there’s no telling whether it will ever make it into production, but this one strikes me as a neat solution to a problem that could arrive as early as the iPhone 7, KGI suggesting that it will be around 6mm thick.

iPhone 6 photo: ukmobilereview.com

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