I also agree with your logic. The part I don't like is that wireless or lightning based sound can occur today without removing the 3.5mm jack. The 3.5mm jack isn't standing in the way of anything. When Apple removes a technology, it is usually because that technology is no longer being used much by the majority. In this case, the majority still use the 3.5mm.
Well, think of it like this ... nobody on either PC or Mac was using USB when Apple dropped the ADB, Serial and SCSI ports from the Mac. Had Apple just added USB ports to the Mac, and left the legacy ports it would have taken much longer to push the industry to the new paradigm. As it was, the removal of those ports caused many people a lot of expense, and difficulty as USB devices were expensive and hard to get, without the variety of choice customers had come to expect, and most were buggy. Now granted the future benefits are much more obvious than they were at the time, but even so, an ADB or PS2 mouse just worked. There was no reason to remove it, especially on the iMac. But that move paved the way for better equipment on the PowerBooks that would have had to drop something else to accommodate those legacy ports. With Apple's move, I maintain until proven otherwise with the phone that Apple has to be dropping the 3.5mm jack to free up internal space for new features or improvements -- a direct relation to the adoption of USB on its mobile devices.
In terms of benefit, USB proved to be hands down better. The problem with 3.5mm is not one of whether it's a quality connector, but rather its utility for the overall device. 3.5mm does one thing -- it supplies an analogue signal, one that's been processed through a mid-powered headphone amp at that, making it less suitable for some types of connections. Lightning does many things, and supply audio output is one (albeit not analogue, though it's capable). And in doing so there will potentially be a quality increase depending on the external device connected -- Apple no longer provides an over-amped signal to a line-level device, or an under-amped signal to a set of headphones which require more power, via a compromised analogue output to accommodate whatever's plugged into it. It's now the responsibility of the external device to optimize it's own amp to meet it's own requirements. Another side benefit of this, is that the headphones will sound the same regardless of what source they're plugged into. In the end, the benefits are all going to be in the eyes of the beholder (or in this case ears), and whether they warrant replacing a universal standard for convenience. The same argument could be seen with the conversion from analogue TV to digital. I don't think there's a person on these forums who would argue that digital TV is a significant improvement over analogue TV. Yet, at the time, many people, perhaps the majority, found the loss of convenience, having to spend money on tuners, replace TVs and equipment, etc. wasn't worth what they perceived as modest improvements. They accused the government for being greedy in wanting to resell the analogue frequencies. Etc.
But in the end, it boils down to utility and moving people toward a wireless goal. Leaving the 3.5mm connector behind, not only utilizes valuable space in a limited mobile device, but it also holds back development of the wireless space, as people are always going to opt for the path of least resistance, and expense. As long as cheap 3.5mm equipment exists, that's what they're going to chose as long as the quality is good enough. Before the digital TV conversion, HD TVs were unaffordable for most, but less than a decade later, digital TVs cost much less than their CRT counterparts did, and most people own one, though not all even notice the quality, like my mom who always watches SD channels in stretch mode. We can only speculate what would have happened if the government had not just shut down analogue broadcasts, but rather left them both available side-by-side, and let the customer migrate over to digital at their own pace. But my guess is that we wouldn't be in the same place we are today if that had been allowed to happen, as many here suggest we do with the headphone jack, assuming it is even a choice Apple has.
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Good question. I mention the internal DAC still being needed because many people have posted that removing the 3.5mm jack "shifts" the DAC to the listening device (e.g., wireless headphones, Lightning wire driven headphones, etc.) and that's not true. Removing the 3.5mm jack certainly does free up some space but it does not eliminate the onboard DAC & amp still needed to drive the internal speaker.
Part of my argument for not removing the 3.5mm jack, in addition to being a ubiquitous, reliable, and good quality standard, is that the iPhone will still require the internal DAC and amp. So I think Apple should keep the 3.5mm jack since the iPhone still has the internal components to drive the 3.5mm jack, especially if Apple is going to fill the 3.5mm space with a second speaker. And if Apple does fill the 3.5mm jack with a second speaker, I think most people would rather keep the 3.5mm jack than have a second speaker.
A second speaker is really useless. The speakers will be maybe 1 inch apart. No one will be able to get a stereo image from speakers so close together.
I agree with you both about the second speaker. If they do that, it totally blows my operating theory about the why, and will seriously disappoint me that they chose to eliminate the headphone jack before it was really necessary. Though I contend that regardless, they must know how much the move will hurt them in the short term, if as rumor suggests, they are delivering such an uninspiring iPhone update this Fall, and therefore have some kind of plan in mind, like letting the stock drop enabling them to buy back a massive amount of shares before launching the next revolutionary model.
