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The iPhone 7 will not have a headphone jack. It will have a headphone jack. It won't have a headphone jack.

The rumor mill just can't decide if Apple will kill the headphone jack on its next iPhone or not.

For months, speculation has been the iPhone 7 will be the first iPhone to eschew the 50-something-year-old 3.5mm audio jack. Apple will reportedly release new Lightning port-based earbuds and headphones to compensate.

Apple could ship a 3.5mm jack-to-Lightning adapter for with the headphone jack-less iPhone 7 to ease the transition for users. Or it could not include one and sell the damn dongle like it always does when the company nixes ports from its products. (My money is on Apple selling the adapters and making bank.)

The latest iPhone 7 leak published by Nowherelse.fr, a blog with a history of sometimes being right with leaks on unreleased Apple products, claims the iPhone 7 may come with a headphone jack after all.

The purported iPhone 7 Lightning cable assembly, which you can see in the image above, shows what is clearly a headphone jack (the white component to the left of the blue-marked rectangle).

So it's settled then, the iPhone 7 will still have a headphone jack, right? 

Wrong.

From somewhere in China

The iPhone 7 is not expected to debut until this fall (September or October if Apple follows history). We're at least five months out. While it's common for next-generation parts to leak onto the Internet months in advance, these parts don't guarantee anything.

So-called next-generation iPhone parts start to "leak" every spring — many of them turning out to be completely off base.

The fact is, these leaked parts, which are almost always posted on some Weibo account in China, can't be verified in any capacity. They could just as well be from an Android phone that so closely resembles the iPhone, seeing as how phones are all so similar now.

Case in point: In March, an image of a metal phone with cleaner antenna lines claiming to be the iPhone 7's new body popped online (from Weibo and picked up by Nowhereelse.fr, no less) and sent every Apple blog on the web into a frenzy.

The "leaked" image was not of the iPhone 7. Li Nan, Meizu's vice president of sales and marketing, took to Weibo, to take ownership of the phone design for the company's upcoming Meizu Pro 6. The leak could have been from a disgruntled Meizu factory worker or from anyone with access to the phone, though it can't be ruled out that Meizu reps might have "leaked" the image themselves to drum up interest for the Pro 6. (Riding the iPhone's perpetual buzz is common marketing tactic in mobile, and it rarely, if ever, backfires.)

Look back far enough and you'll see the story is the same every year. So-called next-generation iPhone parts start to "leak" every spring — many of them turning out to be completely off base.

Apple is a secretive company. It prototypes many different versions of its products, some of which get sent to factories in China, for small batch productions. Not all of all them make the cut. The ones that don't meet the company's high quality bar get scrapped and tossed back into Cupertino's reject pile, likely never to be seen again.

Hell, it wouldn't surprise me at all if Apple plants a fake rumor or two to throw Internet sleuths off. Just as it's possible Meizu may have staged its own leak for the Pro 6, it's not out of the realm of possibility the company has slowly leaked out the notion the iPhone 7 won't come with an headphone jack. 

There are two reasons why Apple would do such a thing: 1) to temper expectations from users and essentially get them used to the idea of an iPhone with no headphone jack, or 2) to steer fans off and then surprise them with an iPhone 7 that does retain the jack, proving all the "rumors" wrong.

BS until Apple says otherwise

I'm as excited for the next iPhone as anyone (my busted iPhone 6 is barely hanging on), but let's not allow all these potentially dubious rumors to drive the conversation.

And that is, nothing is official until Apple makes it so. Oh, and anything you hear about the iPhone 7S or iPhone 8, which aren't supposed to come out until 2017 and 2018 — HA! As my colleague, Mashable senior tech correspondent Christina Warren put it perfectly: It's way to early to talk about the next iPhone. 

Her TL;DR:

• It will be Apple's fastest iPhone ever

• It will have Apple's most-advanced optics

• There will be at least one extra feature you can't get on any other iPhone.

• It will come in rose gold.

Apple CEO Tim Cook hinted in an interview on CNBC's Mad Money the company has big plans for its products, despite slowing iPhone sales. 

"We're going to give you things that you can't live without that you just don't know about today," Cook told Mad Money's Jim Cramer. "That has always been the objective of Apple." 

For Apple's sake, we hope the iPhone 7 will have something more groundbreaking than 3D Touch and Live Photos. Put that fingerprint sensor underneath the display, maybe?

Stay safe out there Apple fans (and haters). There's a lot of BS coming out the rumor mill. Don't be a fool and step in it.

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