Apple sells you a lie. The bare iPhone looks sleek, but it's as weak and ravenous as a newborn kangaroo joey. In order to survive outside its heavily protected crèche at One Infinite Loop an iPhone must be enveloped in a bulky case and kept near a power source at all times to prevent shutdown from rapid battery depletion.
And now that iPhones no longer have a 3.5mm headphone jack, users who want to keep their device charged while using wired headphones must resort to using this confounding dongle, described by Chaim Gartenberg of The Verge as a "chimerical monster." Behold the Cheero Earphones with Charging Dock ($28).
Tracing your eyes along this hybrid horror is almost like an optical illusion: one cable splits in two and then splits into two again, forking and twisting as it curves around. And yes, we’ve seen plenty of Lightning dongles before that have tried to fix Apple’s design through standalone Lightning splitters, but somehow this still seems worse.
The worst part about the Cheero Earphones with Charging Dock is that about halfway through writing this post, I started to think, “You know, that’s actually not a half bad idea. I mean, it looks ridiculous, but it’s also so practical! And it’s a pretty reasonable price, too.” Such is the state of living the cursed half-existence that is dongle life.
