The Overlooked iPhone Screw Up

I’ve had an iPhone now since just after it was released, and aside from my usual apple fanboyness I really do think it’s a great phone, definitely the best phone I’ve ever used. Yes, I was a bit disgruntled when apple announced the $200 iPhone price drop last week, but honestly, anybody who bought an iPhone, you knew what you were getting into, you knew the price would come down at some point, so get over it, you got to be cool for a couple months at least. I wasn’t surprised by the price drop itself but more by the magnitude of the drop. I would have been impressed with just a $100 drop.

Anyways, on to my biggest gripe about the iPhone since I got it. The headphones. That’s it the headphones, not the interface, not the EDGE network, or anything else, just the headphones. Really Apple, you could have done better, you should have done better. The headphones just aren’t quite up to snuff with Apple design. There are too issues with these headphones that drive me crazy: The lack of some type of cord management to keep the headphones from getting tangled when you throw them in your pocket, backpack, etc. and the square shape of the microphone on the headphone cord.

At first it seems obvious that cord management doesn’t work on these headphones (I’m talking about the little sliding piece of plastic where the headphone cords split that helps keep them from getting tangled when you’re not using them) beacuse the mic on the headphone cable is in the way of a would slider. After a ten second brainstorming session we arive on the idea of some time of rubber or elastic material that could (expand and) slide over the on cable microphone and keep the cords from getting tangled. If you haven’t noticed this cord tangling this is ridiculously annoying to me, I have to deal with it every time i walk in and out of a class and want to start listening while walking around campus. This cord untangling user experience just doesn’t fit with the rest of user experiences apple aims to provide with their products.

The second issue is somewhat related. The shape of the on cable microphone has squared ends. This causes issues when the square end of the cable gets caught on something, say the edge of the desk you’re sitting at, and yanks the headphones out of your ears. Not only is this annoying, it can actually be a bit painful. Just rounding the ends of this microphone would have allowed the mic to slide past anything it now gets caught on and avoided this problem entirely, as well as making it easier to provide some means of keeping the headphone cords from tangling when you store them.

Now that I’ve explained what I hate about the iPhone headphones I have to say that they’re great. The sound quality of these earbuds is great, they’re very comfortable, and the bass response and general sound quality is excellent. I’ve actually had people tell me that calls sound clearer when I speak though the mic on the headphone cable, and it’s easier for me to hear the conversation that way too. So the headphones sound great, I just would like apple to clean up these little details in their headphone design for the next iPhone release, however soon/distant that may be. I guess soon.