Apple's latest $34.95 iPhone dongle may be the definition of madness

Apple ditched the headphone jack on the iPhone with the iPhone 7. The company’s latest and greatest iPhones, the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and the iPhone X also don’t have the headphone jack. The only way of listening to music on Apple’s newest iPhones is to use a wireless headphone or use the lightning connector on the phone. But if you are charging your phone and want to listen to music with your wired headphones on the iPhone at the same time, that’s obviously not possible.

Apple already sells a $39 dongle that lets you charge your phone and listen to music via a lightning connector at the same time, and it’s now selling a new dongle that’ll let you use a 3.5mm headphone jack instead. The Verge reports that Belkin has released a new version of its Rockstar adapter for the iPhone which lets you charge your phone via a lightning connector and listen to music via a 3.5mm headphone jack at the same time for $34.95.

The report notes that the new dongle is also thicker than the 3.5mm dongle that Apple already ships with its iPhone, and it also looks quite clumsy to use. Listening to music while charging your phone with that dongle will be quite annoying, especially when you are on the go. But this is just a new addition to Apple’s ever-growing collection of idiotic and expensive dongles that the company’s customers are forced to buy due to the lack of essential ports on its newest hardware. So unless you go completely wireless and buy a Bluetooth headphone,  you’ll have to use a dongle to get around the lack of the 3.5mm jack on the newest iPhones.

Or, as Steve Jobs once said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”