A brief history of Apple killing standards you loved — and others you didn't (AAPL)

Apple has officially killed the headphone jack.

Are you over it yet? It’s OK — I don’t like it either.

Nevertheless, it’s worth remembering that Apple has helped lead the tech world down a path like this many times before. And in most cases, we’ve all come out alright.

So to help you take a deep breath, let’s take a quick stroll down memory lane. In the process, you might see just how familiar our current headphone-jack apocalypse actually is.

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The Apple device that made the most drastic changes is also the one that brought the company back to life after years of struggle: the iMac G3. That all-in-one famously ditched the floppy disk when it launched in 1998, but it also did away with the SCSI and ADB ports Mac owners used for connecting hard drives and keyboards and mice, respectively.

I’ll note that Apple, along with Sony, had previously helped shift the industry from 5-inch floppy disks to 3.5-inch floppy disks in the early 80s — though that’s not quite the same as removing them altogether. 

In their place were a couple of ports using USB, a then smallish standard that soon became the most widely accepted connector in consumer tech.

Apple got equally trigger-happy in 2008, when it launched a trio of new MacBooks, including the first-generation MacBook Air. That machine was incredibly slim for its time, but to get there, it had to lose the Ethernet port and the CD/DVD optical drive.