Something I've been wondering.
At the moment Apple only put the Lightning port (tacky name) in the iPhone, iPad and, iPodTouch I presume?
So, ok, you go and buy brand new, perhaps high end headphone to use from now on.
Then you buy a MacBook, or iMac and wish to plug them in.
So as Apple has established that people should now be buying Lightning headphones, will they fro now on start to fit lightning ports on the rest of their range of machines so you can use them?
Or are you supposed to have 1 set for your iPad/iPhone and another set for your Macbook ?
Apple totally botched the transition from the 3.5mm adapter because of this (in part).
But, you're looking at it the wrong way. It's become clear to me, that despite the confusing signal of including a set of wired Lightning EarPods in the box, that Apple intends for you to buy a Bluetooth set of headphones if you want to use them with anything besides the iPhone 7. The Lightning EarPods are just a starter set for use with the iPhone 7 only.
I feel sorry for companies like Audeze which have jumped on the Lightning bandwagon, because Apple isn't apparently going to do much to support them. Audeze has a detachable cable, so to use them on the MacBook, you'll need to swap out to the 3.5mm analogue cable (or a USB-C cable in the future), but that's nowhere near as convenient as slapping on a simple adapter. So far I haven't seen anything on the horizon which will allow Lightning to adapt to USB-C or anything else. Maybe Apple will introduce a Lightning to USB-C adapter, or maybe they will introduce a Lightning port on the Mac. But that won't help anybody using anything outside of the Apple ecosystem.
So unless Apple allows a MFi license to adapt Lightning headphones to anything else, then they're basically discouraging Lightning headphones, and pushing BT for cross platform compatibility. It's early yet, and we're still a month away from Apple shipping its own AirPods (yet another mistake they weren't ready two weeks ago), so anything is possible. When the new MBPs are announced, I expect to see at a minimum Apple offering a USB-C to Lightning headphone adapter (which would suggest compatibility with Lightning accessories too which Apple may or may not want). From there adapters can be found to convert USB-C to almost anything. 3.5mm adapters will need help from Apple to be successful, because as it stands, they have to be powered in order to convert analogue to digital, just to get the signal into the headphones, only to be converted back to analogue again. Can you imagine having to charge an adapter regularly to use your wired headphones that themselves don't require power?
It's too bad Apple is so secretive ahead of the time as I'm sure manufacturers are only now trying to figure out how best to approach the adapters many people are going to require to use Apples new tech with their old equipment.