Rumor: Too Many Parts In Headphones, Apple Experimenting With Unibody Design

If there’s a seam or extraneous feature in an Apple product, you can pretty much be assured that the company is rethinking it, one design decision at a time. Apple got tired of design flaws in the early MacBooks that resulted in chipped keyboard parts, and this ultimately resulted in the company deeming them a manufacturing defect. The result, Apple tore it all down and built stronger, sturdier unibody devices.

It sounds like Apple’s setting its sights on “seamless, more aesthetically pleasing unibody” headphones for their mobile devices through ultrasonic bonding. We’re not joking: one headphone, one solid piece of ultrasonically welded plastic.

AppleInsider has uncovered a patent that illustrates Apple’s attempts at combining plastics, and deburring curved plastic objects with their headphone lineup. The next time you buy a next generation iPhone or iPod, you may find yourself with a set of unibody earbuds.

Photo Credit: Peter Gerdes

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld and TechHive.