Next week, on September 7, Apple is having its fall event where it announces, among other things, the new iPhone. That makes it silly season right now in the Apple-rumor business. If you want to impress your friends with your “inside” knowledge, I’d recommend MacRumors iPhone 7 rumor round-up.

As a result of the sheer volume of phones Apple has to build every year, I suspect there will be very few hardware related surprises next week. I’ve got a few pre-announcement thoughts on some of the new features.

Farewell 16GB?

According to the rumor mill, this year will see the long-overdue death of the 16 GB iPhone in favor of 32GB for the entry model. I sure hope that’s true.

The Dual Lens Camera

I am really looking forward to seeing how well the dual lens camera system works. There’s a lot of ways to implement a dual lens camera system and while the hardware manufacturing business is leaky, Apple’s software team is not. At this point, I don’t think anyone outside Apple has any idea what they’re going do with those two lenses and I can’t wait to find out. While I'll most likely be a fan of the dual lens camara, I don't like the bulging metal around the lip of the camera lenses in the leaked photos. Unfortunately, even Apple must obey the laws of physics.

Sans Headphone Port

The other big news will be the removal of the headphone jack. Apple is going to take a ton of heat over this. The fact that the headphone jack is being removed is well known enough at this point that everyone who wants to write go after Apple on this has been sharpening their knives for weeks.

As for me, I think the removal of the headphone port is a bad idea unless they can demonstrate a really good reason for doing so. Just last night I walked into my daughter’s room and saw her listening to her iPhone with the headphones plugged in while the lightning port was being used to charge the phone. I know I sound like a grumpy old man but it seems like everyone in my life under the age of 20 prefers to keep their phone constantly at 15% charge. For those people, the ability to simultaneously charge and listen to music through headphones is something they do every day and removal of the headphone port makes that harder.

Also, my wife uses the auxiliary port in her car to plug into her iPhone, which means we’ll probably have to buy several of the inevitably required Lightning-to-headphone adapters. Like I said, I hope they’ve got a good reason. (Water resistance is my guess.)

All that said, I got on the Bluetooth bandwagon a few years ago and rarely plug headphones into my iPhone so other than helping my family cope, it won’t bother me with respect to my own phone.

Part of me is just curious on an intellectual level as to how Apple will go about justifying the removal of the headphone port and how their public relations department will handle the inevitable backlash. Strap in, gang.

We’ll be recording a Mac Power Users episode immediately following the September 7 event so expect more on this topic.