7 years after declaring it took 'courage' to remove the iPhone's headphone jack, Apple has finally decided buttons and ports are cool again

Apple has long been famous for its bravery—or, in the words of Appple executive Phil Schiller, courage, which he famously used to describe Apple's decision to «move on and do something new that betters all of us» by removing the headphone jack from the iPhone 7.

It was hardly Apple's first couragous act. It took courage to release the MacBook Air, a computer so thin it could house only two USB ports. It took courage to remove the iPhone's multifunctional home button. It took courage to start selling Earpods that only worked with the iPhone's proprietary lightning cable once the headphone jack was gone, and it took even more courage to sell some pricey new Bluetooth headphones at the same time. It took courage to release a MacBook with a keyboard so bad it clearly played second fiddle to making the design just a touch thinner (and cost the company $50 million in a class action lawsuit). It took courage to finally update the iPhone to USB-C—and then saddle it with USB 2.0 transfer speeds from, literally, the year 2000.

But y'know, it also takes courage to admit when you're wrong. And while Apple didn't say it was wrong while unveiling its new iPhones this year—admitting you ever made a mistake with a past product is not a very Big Tech thing to do—that's actually the message I took away from Monday's iPhone 16 presentation. After spending years patting itself on the back for the trend of removing basic hardware functionality in the name of pushing people to new products and more svelte designs, Apple's tactily changed strategies.

We're now in Apple's «buttons and ports are good, actually» era.

This new, throwback-to-the-old-ways Apple wasn't just born today, but I think the iPhone 16 reveal event did crystallize what has been a notable Apple trend forming for the last few years. The big new thing is this: the iPhone 16 has not one but two new physical buttons on it that last year's phone didn't have. One of them is the «action button,» brought over from the iPhone 15