Broken Headphone Plug and iPhone. 😱

The headphone jack is a pretty key port for anyone not on an iPhone 7 or later, so a broken headphone plug shoved in the jack renders a phone pretty much useless. It’s also too small a space for needle nose pliers.

So what do you do if something breaks off in it? Well, searching around on iFixit lead me to the existence of a headphone plug extraction tool (for $50!!!) Unfortunately, my daughter actually uses her phone for school, so the wait (plus $50) was unacceptable if we could find another solution.

Other solutions?

• Crazy glue the broken headphones to its counterpart (and risk sealing it up for good?!)
• Small drill bit.
• Bamboo toothpick.
• Soda straw cut to squeeze around the broken plug.

Ok, the soda straw sounded reasonable and, if nothing else, low risk. So I tried with some IKEA straws and got close to extracting a piece out, but no further. The problem was that there was too much in the plug. (The headphone plug is concentric cylinders that had been shoved all the way in.)

Solution!

So I kept reading… CUTICLE SCISSORS! My wife had a small pair that worked well to extract one of the pieces. Grab what you can with the scissors, push the straw around the remainder and tug to extract. The plug tip slid far enough out in this process to grab with my fingernails.

Below is the final carnage with extraction tools.