I understand the convenience, but aren't a phone's output capabilities/limitations going to bottleneck much of the increased quality from high-end headphones?
Name another wearable device besides an iPhone that fits in a pocket or on an arm and runs analog synthesizer emulators like Moog Model 15, and allows for mobile music playing with no external power supply, no stands, no desks, no chairs, no benches?
Not everyone is using headphones. I hook up to a Roland Mobile Cube amp that I wear on my belt for mobile music performances (I synthbomb bluegrass circles at festivals, among other things). I use a wearable keyboard that works over USB/MIDI via Lightning.
I absolutey need a 100% analog, latency-free sound system. If it was possible via wireless, I would love that... but Apple did not say the latency of W1. They did not announce a W1 to 3.5mm female adapter with a chargeable battery, nope. I was dreaming of it but then they FAILED.
So now I am orphaned on 6S Plus forever?
Or does Apple just expect me to add at least four more connectors to my setup... one 3-foot Lightning male to female extender, then a hub to split Lightning to two Lightnings; then one to go Lightning to 3.5mm; and finally my existing Lightning to USB?
I need the male-to-female extender so I can put the hub somewhere like a pocket or fanny pack (boy won't that make me look cool) on my body so it's not just hanging off my arm where one of the medusa of cables going into it would, 100% for sure, come unplugged at the exact wrong time during a performance.
Of course Apple doesn't make male-to-female Lightning cables, and so if it's anything like it was with the 30-pin one I bought back in the 4S days, then when iOS 10.1.3 comes out, my phone will start saying "accessory unsupported" randomly during a show one day and reject some or all of my various dongles and extender cables because I made the sin of getting one with a fraudulent Made for iPhone logo on it.
See I have already been through it with this BS. I have had my Line6 MobileKeys' proprietary cable vanish before a show. I have had my iRig MIDI's lame plastic dongle thing come unplugged and have its dumb little ports have their solder crack inside and stop working intermittently.
I bought a G-Boom to test mobile BlueTooth audio but its latency is terrible and unusable.
I bought a Korg MicroKey Air to try BlueTooth MIDI and its latency is barely usable, nowhere near wired MIDI. Its keys are tiny. It is really just a toy.
Don't fool yourselves; removing the headphone port is purely about one thing: $$$. Having to endure idiots who know less than nothing lecture me here about "fake analog" and have Apple act like it's doing us a favor with this, is the most intellectually insulting and infuriating thing that I've ever experienced as an Apple customer.
I cannot believe someone got fired over Maps, and yet they are now pulling this crap. What a fiasco.
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But it would have made so much more sense to include a wireless dongle that goes on the end of traditional headphones, and include the 3.5mm EarPods in the box for maximum compatibility.
Amen. This is what I actually requested in a letter to Apple awhile back.
I said, "Nintendo's Wii U has a wireless controller with a video screen where the latency of the video on that screen actually has less latency than video over HDMI. Why can't you guys do that with audio so we musicians don't need cables anymore?"
But instead they took away the headphone port and did NOT give us another option to reduce cable use. Instead now we need MORE cables and MORE adapters to still get latency free audio.
I bet you anything Apple's engineers totally did make a dongle like that, maybe even a latency free one, and then it got killed because it would not sell for as much as headphones, and everyone would just buy that instead of buying new Beats headphones or AirPods.
I'm telling you, this is just a profit grab and nothing more. It's not about the future. All speakers ever made are analog because sound itself is analog. Impulses traveling through wireless will always be laggier than through a wire due to the receiver device needing to process the signal. It will always have compression because they are too lame to make it uncompressed like it would be over an analog cable.
And yes I do know that the DAC in an iPhone is far inferior, but for mobile musicians how liberating it is by far makes up for any small loss in quality. I have recorded in a studio directly off my iPhone's headphone jack into a Neve board and it sounded wonderful enough to get onto a major album. I would get laughed out of a studio doing that over BlueTooth or whatever.
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