Six Colors:

Is Apple removing the headphone jack from the iPhone? Nobody really knows, though rumors have swirled for quite a while now. A recent exchange between Nilay Patel and John Gruber returned this debate to the foreground last week.

Of course, the truth is that it’s very hard to talk about this rumor in the absence of actual information. Any move like this by Apple would be accompanied with a raft of other information, including Apple’s rationale, any new features enabled by the removal, and of course adapters for existing hardware. In the absence of all that, people are able to fill in the blanks with bogeymen or rainbows depending on their point of view.

As Snell says, “This is a tech unicorn, an unannounced feature on a nonexistent product, and it’s important to keep that in mind.” But it’s also helpful to remember, Apple has done this kind of thing many times in the past and it’s always (generally) worked out – after a period of time when tech pundits bitch, moan and complain about it.