As the rumors that the next iPhone will drop the 3.5mm headphone jack have intensified, I’ve been keeping tabs on the specific argument that Daring Fireball’s John Gruber made yesterday: that removing the headphone jack from the iPhone is the modern-day equivalent of removing the floppy drive from the iMac in the late '90s. It caused some pain at the time, but it was the way things were moving anyway, and in the grand scheme of things it was a smart thing to do.

The people on the “get rid of the headphone jack” side of the debate normally choose some version of this position as justification: that the jack is “old” and so getting rid of it represents “progress.” And the fact of the matter is that Apple has been pretty good at this kind of progress over the years, picking up new technologies like USB and SSDs and dropping aging ones like the DVD drive well before those technologies had gone (or ceased to be) mainstream.

But the headphone jack is not the floppy drive. It’s not the 30-pin connector. It’s not the DVD drive. It’s not even USB Type-C. It’s not, in other words, directly comparable to all those other times when Apple has been “right” to remove or change something, both because of the ubiquity of the headphone jack and the quality of the supposed replacements.

Floppies sucked in big, obvious ways

When Apple shipped the first iMacs without floppy drives in 1998, the problems with the technology were readily apparent: floppy disks had low capacities (especially relative to their physical size) and were failure-prone, slow, and noisy; just about the only thing they had going for them was how widespread they were. But clearly better technologies were already available—the then-popular ZIP drives had many of the same problems but offered a lot more space, and the CD-ROM had already been established as a convenient, relatively cheap way to move a lot of data around. In the years immediately following, CD-Rs and RWs and then DVDs and the growing popularity of the Internet helped to end the reign of the floppy as a mainstream storage medium.

It's pretty much the same story for the DVD drive, which Apple ejected from the MacBook Air and then from the rest of the lineup between roughly 2008 and 2012. High-capacity, dirt-cheap USB drives and media streaming made comparatively inflexible, slow, large optical disks and drives unnecessary for mainstream consumers. Both Lightning and USB Type-C are significantly smaller, more usable connectors with wiring changes that were necessary for future growth.

Each of these transitions caused some pain, but each of them also made sense even at the time, given that the new replacements for the outgoing technology had already arrived or were on the horizon. The proposed replacements for the headphone jack—at least, the ones being proposed by the rumor mill at this point in time—have the distinction both of being less widespread than the headphone jack and not obviously better than the headphone jack.

And that’s where a lot of the complaining is rooted. The headphone jack has shortcomings—the waterproofing challenges are totally surmountable, but the jack takes up space inside a phone that could be used for battery or other components—but those problems are minor enough that they are by far outweighed by the jack’s convenience.

Consider either Lightning or USB Type-C headphones, ignoring for a minute the fact that we may soon be entering a world in which there are two competing standards for headphone jacks where one perfectly adequate universal standard has existed for decades. These headphones would only work with devices with certain ports, and they would either need their own digital-to-analog converter (DAC) or the standards would need to allow the headphones to use the phones’ internal DAC (audio over USB Type-C can theoretically do this, audio over Lightning can't). If the replacement is Lightning, all headphone makers will need to get their products blessed by Apple via the MFI accessory program. If Apple boots Lightning in favor of USB Type-C, it’s probably better in the long term, but it’s the 30-pin-to-Lightning transition all over again, and that transition technically won’t even be complete until iOS 10 officially drops support for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2.

If the replacement is Bluetooth, that standard at least has the benefit of being more universal and widely used than Lightning or USB Type-C. But Bluetooth headphones are and always have been relatively expensive, they need to be charged, and they’re prone to interference and pairing problems—if Bluetooth was going to kill the headphone jack, it has already had many, many years in which to do it.

And if (as has been rumored) the replacement is some third option, an Apple proprietary wireless option that solves most of Bluetooth’s annoyances but is incompatible with not only other devices but also older Apple devices, that comes with its own problems. You would solve Bluetooth’s connectivity problems but not its battery problems, and you would add Lightning’s broad compatibility and licensing issues.

None of these alternatives are slam-dunk replacements for the headphone jack. There's an obvious, clearly defined internal logic to the floppy disk thing (and the other changes of its ilk) that isn’t present here.

The headphone jack has been literally everywhere for figuratively forever

Killing the headphone jack is bigger than getting rid of floppies or even the reliable old rectangular USB port. The 3.5mm headphone jack is well over 50 years old, and it has been one constant in the evolution of modern consumer electronics. The Walkman. The Macintosh 128K. The Game Boy. Countless computers from IBM, Compaq, HP, Gateway, Dell, Acer, Lenovo, Toshiba, Sony, Asus, and others. The iPod. And yes, even the Samsung Galaxy. The headphone jack has been there for all of it, and today I can throw five different gadgets in my bag with one set of headphones without having to worry about it.

Where’s the replacement? What’s coming that will do what the headphone jack does, but better? What does Apple have planned that will justify the dongles and the incompatibility and the waste that come with replacing a port that has been truly ubiquitous in consumer technologies since before I was born? I’m still running into 30 pin connectors in cars and in hotels, and that was one port that one company used in three product lines for a total of eight years.

You can replace the headphone jack, but you shouldn’t do it lightly. When people complain, it’s not just reflexive whining from change-averse graybeards. The jack’s age and ubiquity are features, not liabilities, and they’re features you’re going to need to think about when you try to replace it. I’m willing to be convinced. But it’s on Apple and the companies that have already begun ejecting headphone jacks from their products to present a strong argument, and so far they’re doing a bad job.