When Tim Cook finished showing the new screen and speakers, his following line dropped like a stone: the iPhone would no longer have a 3.5 mm headphone jack, all for better sound and a cleaner design.
The livestream chat lit up. "Cook, are you kidding me?" "Give me back my headphone jack." "As expected of Apple, they never make life easy for ordinary users." Plenty of people listen to music every day, and piles of wired earphones would, at a stroke, be sidelined.
Heifeng Lu watched without blinking. If memory served, Apple planned to ship a serious pair of Bluetooth earbuds soon, and this move cleared the path. It was all connected.
In Huaxing Technology's conference room, a few executives turned to him. "President Lu," asked Jianyu Liu, "do they really dare remove the jack?"
"What is there to be afraid of?" Heifeng said, leaning back. "Done right, this triggers a real shift in phones."
For everyone at the table, the tradeoffs were obvious. Removing the analog port frees interior volume, and in a phone, that means room for other modules. Bluetooth audio and digital interfaces have matured enough that the idea is technically sound. If the future is integration and fewer ports, someone has to go first. If a domestic maker tried it today, consumers would flay them alive. This sort of line crossing needs a giant like Apple or Samsung to normalize it.
Which also meant the third-generation Hongmeng X did not have to tiptoe anymore. "You know what to do with the X-series now," Heifeng said to Jianyu. It was not the first time they had discussed a dual-speaker layout and removing the jack. Until now, leadership hesitation had parked the idea. With Apple taking the lead, Huaxing could follow with a clear conscience, reclaim space, and spend it on more useful tech.
Cook did not spend long justifying the deletion. He pivoted to the main course, the iPhone 7's configuration, and the part everyone had been waiting for, the A10 processor. He framed it as Apple's most significant leap in years, the end of what critics called toothpaste-squeezing upgrades.
Last year, Huaxing's Kunpeng A2 had jumped ahead of Apple's A9 and Qualcomm's Snapdragon 815. That had rattled both camps. Qualcomm answered this season with Snapdragon 900 on a 10 nm process, benchmarked north of 270,000. Apple answered with the A10. The subtext was blunt: We are still the silicon king.
On stage, Cook laid out the gulf. A9 had been a dual-core design on 14 nm. The A10, he said, moved to 10 nm and eight cores. From 14 to 10 nm, from two cores to eight, the jump sounded dramatic, and the performance claim sounded more surprising still. In his words, overall speed rose ninety percent over the previous 6S generation. If you translated that to domestic benchmark scores, he said, the iPhone 7 would land around 350,000 points.
In other words, the A10's generational span, by Apple's telling, collapsed years of incremental steps into one lunge. The message to rival phone makers watching the stream was not subtle.
Heifeng's face stayed calm, but he did a fast mental recalculation. He had planned to let Kunpeng A3 retake the crown from Apple and Qualcomm. On current tuning, A3's composite score hovered near 300,000, and even an aggressive push would struggle to crest 350,000. Against what Apple had just claimed for the A10, it would be a hard head-to-head.
Cook kept the drumbeat going. The screen moved to a new Retina HD panel with a wider color gamut and higher brightness. The cameras stepped up too, with an 8-megapixel front unit and a 20-megapixel rear module with optical stabilization, 2× optical zoom, and 10× hybrid zoom. Water and dust resistance reached IP67. The battery crept up to 2,300 mAh, though charging remained at 5 V, 1 A. Nothing earthshaking on the power side, yet in aggregate, the sheet looked clean.
The room in Piao City was silent for a few seconds after the segment ended. Then Heifeng spoke. "File the jack decision as settled industry direction," he said. "Treat dual speakers as baseline on the X-series. For the rest, hold your nerve. Where we cannot match, we out-execute."
He did not posture for his own team. Apple's move on the port solved Huaxing's dilemma in one stroke. The rest would be patience and craft. Integration stays the trend. Ports go away, first the headphone jack, then eventually the charging hole when wireless is good enough. Between those waypoints, the work is the same: build a phone that earns its space gram by gram, and spend every cubic millimeter inside the shell on something the user can feel.
By the end of the keynote, the internet had settled into its familiar split. Some mocked Apple for "courage" and nickel-and-diming. Others cheered the cut and welcomed the cleaner body and louder stereo. Heifeng did not bother to join the noise. He went back to the X3 checklist, drew a line through the headphone port, and made a note beside speakers, required.
Apple's show had done him an odd favor. It had given him cover to do what he wanted to do anyway.