Hit the headphone, Jack

A world that is ready to live without all those iPhone plugs is a world prepared to live without journalism (despite Bon Jovi's poignant epiphany)

At this point it’s impossible to determine whether Apple is very good at getting rid of “unnecessary” features or if it ingeniously made us believe it is. A brief retrospective would recall the floppy disk drive, the CD drive and all USB-A ports on Macs, and the headphone jack, the Touch ID and the Lightning port on iPhones. “The charging plug?” you might be wondering. Yes, sorry for the spoiler, but the next generation of iPhones will probably kill it for good. As this CNN article describes it so flawlessly, Apple has a history of removing these technologies from its gadgets “before people think they’re ready to give them up.”

Note that the key concept is not “removing,” but “before they’re ready.” All these years, the company has been taking action to substitute a feature before customers ask for it, before they complain about it, before they start to think it’s out-of-date.

This is not a run-of-the-mill trial and error to estimate the gap between present and future. It is effortful, very time-consuming, and relies on a myriad of reasons that resemble the strategy of chess, which seeks to anticipate as many…