14 DAY TRIAL // We’ve seen quite a lot of people out there criticizing Apple and CEO Tim Cook after the latest product launches, but Internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis launched some pretty serious accusations, criticizing some of the most recent decisions, such as the removal of the headphone jack.
In case you’re wondering who Jason Calacanis actually is, it’s worth mentioning that he’s the one who invented Weblogs when he was just a blogger, before joining AOL and working on Netscape. He was also involved in some other companies, including Sequoia Capital, Mahalo.com and Angel Investing, which were both founded by him.
The removal of the headphone jack
Going back to what he said, Calacanis used the last edition of This Week in Tech podcast to blame Tim Cook for all the bad decisions that Apple made lately, including the removal of the headphone jack.
“Getting rid of the headphone jack, and forcing people to make a decision if they want to charge their phone or make a phone call, is incompetence,” he said in his statement.
“And to take the MagSafe connector […] to take this innovation that they’re known for and throw it away, and put four USB-Cs and take away another loved feature, the HDMI that plugs right in, knowing that people were in the video business and developers love that, it reeks of some level of incompetence that can only happen when you put someone as boring and visionless as Tim Cook in charge of a company with a legacy and a passionate user-base like Apple.”
Apple’s removal of the headphone jack on the iPhone was one of the most criticized changes the company introduced in the last decade, but Cupertino executives described this as an act of courage that nobody else was willing to do.
Right now, however, Apple is indeed forcing iPhone 7 users to either charge their iPhones or listen to music with wired headphones, as doing both things at the same thing is not possible given the fact that there’s just one Lightning port.
Opinions on whether Calacanis is right or not are still mixed at this point, but there’s no doubt that Cook had his own share of criticism following the new product launches, so it’ll be quite critical for him to make the new iPhone and MacBook sell better than their predecessors.
