LeEco launches the Le Pro3, a $399 Android 6.0 smartphone with 5.5-inch display, 16 megapixel camera, Snapdragon 821 processor, and no 3.5mm headphone jack
Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
LeEco's Le Pro3 lands weeks after the industry's most contested hardware decision of 2016 — dropping the headphone jack — and applies it not to a premium halo device but to a $399 phone with top-tier internals: Snapdragon 821, 5.5-inch display, 16MP camera. A month later, Engadget's review confirmed the trade-off: strong build, battery, and performance undermined by weak low-light cameras and a clumsy custom UI.
The move reads as an opening bid in what became a running pattern among Chinese vendors — Xiaomi answered within six months with the Mi 6 at $360, also without a headphone jack, and kept escalating the spec-per-dollar race toward multi-hundred-megapixel cameras by decade's end.
First-order effects
- Buyers paying $399 for flagship silicon now have to live with adapter-or-wireless audio, making the jack removal a mainstream price-tier decision rather than a premium-only one.
Second-order effects
- Xiaomi's Mi 6 followed with the same no-jack call at an even lower $360 starting price, signaling that Chinese rivals would match LeEco's aggressive pricing rather than cede the segment.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the sub-$400 tier becomes where flagship components standardize fastest, forcing differentiation onto cameras and software — exactly the axis along which the later Xiaomi CC9 Pro and Huawei P30 Pro coverage evolved.
The trend: Chinese smartphone makers are collapsing the gap between flagship specs and midrange prices while adopting Apple-style design cuts like the removed headphone jack.