Buy a pair of wired headphones and you’d be forgiven for thinking they’re simply plug and play. Stick them on your phone and the audio comes out through copper wires to your ear holes. Simple as that.
The problem is that that simple mechanism has become more complicated, and in recent years there’s been an influx of cheap wired headphones that, counterintuitively, rely on Bluetooth to work, despite having those copper cables.
The problem is largely present in headphones designed for iPhone. In 2016, Apple removed the universal 3.5mm headphone jacks on its iPhones, meaning there are almost eight years of iPhones in the world (from the iPhone 7 to the iPhone 14) that can connect to headphones only through Bluetooth or Apple’s proprietary technology. Lightning ports. (Apple switched to USB-C ports on its iPhones last year after European Union legislation pressured device companies to standardize connection ports.)
Apple used this move to push its wireless AirPods and also sells its own. wired headphones that connect to your Lightning ports for $19. You can also get an official $9 dongle that adapts the Lightning port to a 3.5mm output. These work as intended, connecting with the Lightning port to play audio.
But Apple also has strict certification processes called IM F that require any accessory for Apple products to meet certain requirements in order to work with the Lightning port as intended. That means companies have to pay for the privilege of being a genuine Apple accessory. (If you have an unlicensed accessory, you will probably see a alert appears every time you plug it in and says, “The accessory may not be compatible.”)
This has led to a steady trickle of knockoff headphones that have chosen to use indirect ways of connecting to Apple’s proprietary port. That is, by requiring a Bluetooth connection, even for wired headphones.
What’s happening is this: the plug on the headphones using this solution goes into the Lightning slot, which then works as a Bluetooth receiver that draws power from the port but routes its signal through the phone’s Bluetooth. That means your wired connection is actually wireless.
Yes, audio moves from the headphone jack to the headphones in the traditional way, but the signal reaches the jack without any physical data transfer. So, interestingly, even though the headphones are connected to your phone, all they do with this physical connection is consume power for their built-in Bluetooth chip. (And potentially eating up more battery life.)
Well, all of this probably seems very complicated and indirect, so you might well ask yourself, “Why bother? Why not just make them with Bluetooth headphones to start? Well, in addition to avoiding that annoying unsupported accessory message constantly popping up, it’s cheaper to make wired headphones than it is to put a small battery in each wireless headphone. Bluetooth is an open standard, meaning almost anyone can develop it, while accessing Apple’s Lightning ports requires a presumably expensive certification process that would get you transmitted to the client. And boy, people love cheap headphones.