iPhone 7 headphone hoax sees trolls try and trick people into drilling huge holes in their new phones

The speaker grille in the bottom phone isn’t real – but it’s not hiding a headphone jack

People are being told to drill into and destroy their phones in search of its missing headphone jack.

It’s now well known that the iPhone 7 is missing the headphone jack from the bottom, and that Apple is instead encouraging people to use the Lightning port on the bottom or to use wireless headphones. But some people appear to believe that is just a conspiracy.

Instead of the speaker grille on the bottom of the phone just being decorative, Apple has really hidden a headphone jack behind it, the claim goes. But it’s entirely wrong.

The trick appears to rely on two things: the new iPhone 7 does look remarkably like the iPhone 6, apart from the missing headphone jack; and the desire that people have to get that old port back.

Those two things have been seized on by YouTube videos – now viewed by millions of people – instructing people that if they drill into the bottom of the phone they’ll find that Apple didn’t actually remove the headphone jack but just closed up the whole that would normally let people plug into it.

YouTube is full of people claiming that they had either tried the trick or were going to. But it wasn’t clear how many people genuinely had done so - and how many of them were just claiming it had worked to try and trick others.

"A friend of mine told me it worked for him, but my iPhone won't turn on after I drilled the hole for the jack,” wrote one user. Others said that they had made the biggest mistake of their life, and that their phone had stopped working as soon as they drilled the holes – reporting everything from problems with the screen to nothing working at all.

Others asked specific questions, like the size of the drill bit or how exactly to make sure that they drilled into the right bit and didn’t ruin the phone. But unfortunately drilling into any part of the iPhone is likely to break the phone and certainly won’t reveal a headphone jack.

Teardowns have shown what is hiding behind the fake speaker grille that now sits in place of the headphone jack. And it isn’t a secret headphone jack.

The inside of the iPhone – not a headphone jack to be seen (iFixit)

In its place is mostly an expanded Taptic engine – the precise vibration technology that makes the phone feel like it has a real home button when it doesn’t, among other features. Some of the extra space also appears to be taken up with an expanded battery, which along with more efficient parts makes the phone last longer on one charge.

That means that the phone could, theoretically, live on with a hole drilled into the bottom of it – though it would no longer vibrate properly, at best. But it certainly isn’t going to improve anything, and isn’t worth trying out.