When you buy wired headphones, you might be forgiven for thinking it’s plug and play: You plug the headphones into your phone and the copper wire carrying the audio flows into your ear canal. It’s that simple.
The problem is that that simple mechanism has become complicated, with recent years seeing a proliferation of cheap wired earphones that, counterintuitively, rely on Bluetooth to work, despite still using copper wires.
The problem is mostly seen in earphones designed for iPhones: In 2016, Apple removed the universal 3.5mm headphone jack from iPhones, meaning there are nearly eight years’ worth of iPhones out there, from the iPhone 7 to the iPhone 14, that can only connect headphones via Bluetooth or Apple’s proprietary Lightning port. (Apple switched to USB-C on its iPhones last year after European Union law pressured device companies to standardize connectivity ports.)
Apple has used this move to promote wireless AirPods, and also sells its own wired headphones that connect to the Lightning port for $19, and there’s also an official dongle available for $9 that converts the Lightning port to a 3.5mm output, which works as intended, plugging into the Lightning port and playing audio.
But Apple also has a strict certification process, called MFi, that requires accessories for Apple products to meet certain requirements to work as intended with the Lightning port, which means companies have to pay for the privilege of being genuine Apple accessories. (If you have an unlicensed accessory, you might see the “Accessory may not be supported” warning every time you plug it in.)
As a result, we’ve seen a steady stream of copycat earbuds that choose roundabout ways to connect to Apple’s proprietary port — specifically, by requiring a Bluetooth connection even though they’re wired earbuds.
What’s happening is that when you plug earphones using this workaround into the Lightning slot, they receive power from the port while also acting as a Bluetooth receiver that transmits a signal via your phone’s Bluetooth, meaning your wired connection is actually wireless.
Sure, audio is sent from the headphone jack to the earbuds in a traditional wired fashion, but the signal gets to the jack without any physical data transfer whatsoever, so, oddly enough, even though the earbuds are plugged into your phone, all this physical connection does is power the on-board Bluetooth chip (and potentially drain your battery life even further).
Well, this all seems very complicated and roundabout, so you might be thinking: “Why bother? Why not just make them Bluetooth earbuds in the first place?” Well, besides preventing the constant annoying message of unsupported accessories from popping up, it’s cheaper to make wired earbuds than to build a tiny battery into wireless earbuds. Bluetooth is an open standard, so anyone can develop it, but accessing Apple’s Lightning port would probably require an expensive certification process, a cost that would be passed on to customers. And people sure love cheap earbuds.
