You're dancing around what my gripe is, we have card and chip readers. They use 3.5mm jacks.
If the headphone jack disappear we will need to buy an adapter or buy new lightning equipment readers once available. Or just upgrade to devices that don't need sold separately accessories.
Anything with a lightning connector carries a premium due to Apples licensing fees unless you are willing to risk using a Chinese knock off with hacked locked out chip. We (I) are not, not for a charging cable and especially not for a cable that carries my customers credit information.
Like I said we'll just need to wait and see what happens. If accessories are available immediately I can probably sweet talk our bank into supplying them to us because they have the most to lose.
Oh, I know your gripe. It would absolutely be my gripe to if it directly affected me. The fact that I can't buy a MacBook Pro with an Ethernet port is MY grip. And the fact that I have to use an adapter with it is frustrating beyond words, especially because it's supposed to be a Pro machine. But over the years I have gotten used to it. I've tried windows, and despite the fact that every few years after a massive investment in the latest and greatest tech Apple has constrained me into buying, and all the adapters I've had to buy to keep using my expensive investments in hardware, I'm happy to do it to stick with Apple.
That said, you're still likely only talking about a $5-10 adapter that your credit card reader company is likely to supply, and likely with a bulk discount -- heck they may even give them away. Granted that's on top of your initial investment, but it's by no means as bad as buying a $30-40 adapter, or replacing the entire card reader equipment. And since the Square card reader is only $10, I'd guess it would probably be easier and cheaper to just replace the card reader, after you've gotten sufficient use out of the original. It's not like the 6S is going to be obsolete when the 7 comes out. Then there's contactless payments. At some point, you may want to upgrade your equipment to accept Pay anyway. The Lightning license fee may also a negligible cost, which will simply be built into the price of the product. That's actually the least of my concerns with this move. Apple could charge pennies for the licenses and still make billions of dollars.
As for upgrading to devices that don't need adapters, well I'd almost bet that if Apple removes the 3.5mm jack, within a year, most of the Android flagship phones will too. Apple isn't doing this arbitrarily, they're likely doing it to make room for other improvements and features. In which case, the Android makers are in the same boat. On the other hand, once a phone hits a certain size, those constraints are lifted, so you may find yourself issuing your employees gigantic Android phablets to enable the switch. They will be cheaper of course, and one wonders why any company wouldn't go that route to begin with unless there are other considerations. My company will not support an Android phone on our network because of the security issues, but perhaps that doesn't affect your company.
In any event, I don't deny, it will be inconvenient for some. But no more inconvenient than any change Apple has made during their almost 40 year history.
