The new iPhone is waterproof and has an improved camera, but perhaps the biggest surprise was that there will be no headphone jack. Now Apple is rolling out wireless earbuds called 'airpods'. The wireless earbuds will cost an additional $159.
A local tech expert says that the company is starting a trend that will eventually do away with headphone cords, making everything wireless.
But there are ulterior motives behind the change. William Caput is a security expert and ethical hacker in Chico. He says Apple is trying to make more of a profit off credit card transaction fees.
In regards to making a profit off credit card transaction fees, services like Square and Paypal are the company's biggest competitors. Since Apple Pay is entirely within the operating system, competitors have no method of pushing back. By getting rid of the headphone jack, Apple has the potential to deal a major blow to the competition, taking a bigger slice out out of the transaction fee pie.
"Credit card transactions are 2.5% per transaction," Caput said. "If you kill off that and force people to use a different payment method, then its a pretty good market segment they're gonna be getting a hold of."
He said that in the long term, small businesses using services such as Square may either have to switch to Android or stop using mobile payments altogether. Caput expects competitors like Android to try to draw new customers and businesses that don't want to make the change.
While the switch to wireless headphones is driven by financial motives, it does start a trend toward wireless technology. The transition will be gradual, just as past technological changes have been.
"Eventually, everything's gonna be wireless, we're not gonna have a headphone jack," Caput said. "It's like VHS goes away, DVD comes in, so a lot of people use VHS for years. There's always people using the older technologies, they just eventually get left behind to where they're not really valid."