Enlarge / The Game Boy Advance SP and its external ports. Notice anything missing?
A leading technology company announces the next in its successful and long-standing line of handheld hardware. The new update sports plenty of long-awaited features, including an improved screen and a better battery. But it also includes one major omission: the standard 3.5mm headphone jack, which had been included on all of its portable products until this point, has been replaced by a proprietary standard. Many in the press are livid, and consumers largely react with confusion, but many shrug it off and decide to buy the product anyway.
This introduction could obviously describe the current brouhaha surrounding the release of the headphone jack-free iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. But you may not remember that it also describes Nintendo’s release of the Game Boy Advance SP way back in 2003.
Nintendo’s mid-generation revamp of the original Game Boy Advance didn’t improve on the internal processing power of the core system. It didn’t support any games that weren’t also supported by 2001’s standard Game Boy Advance. Still, the GBA SP drew interest as the first Game Boy to sport an internal battery pack (boasting 10 to 18 hours of continuous play) and the first to include a frontlit screen, for playing in dark rooms. It also sported a trendy flip-top design that protected the screen when not in use and made the unit easy to fit in a pocket.
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Source: Ars Technica – No headphone jack? Nintendo did it first…