I don't know what it means, frankly, and I'm going nuts waiting for someone to tear down the EarPods and Headphone Adapter. My $9 headphone adapter is sitting here, in danger of being ripped apart tonight ... but I figure I'll stick it out one more day and let iFixit, or somebody else do it for me.
Lightning is more than capable of routing an analogue signal out. But Apple's never put it in the specs, nor allowed anyone to do it. If Apple has done this themselves, they've actually opened the door to a whole lot of crap analogue peripherals, like we used to have under the 30-pin dock. Because now, third parties don't have to spend as much to put DAC's and amps into their chipsets, so it makes the MFi license fee more affordable, routing the analogue signal into anything they want.
Whenever I addressed this during the last year, I always prefaced that it was unlikely Apple would go this route, since they eschewed it with their Lightning docks, and 30-pin adapters, and disallowed it under their previous licenses. So this is a major reversal in their policies -- almost on the level of putting the headphone jack back in next year's iPhone. If they did this, then it's not surprising that people said it would never happen.
But the worst part is, this would make it the equivalent of the original iPhone headphone jack adapter that just extended the headphone jack a few inches, with a smaller plug to fit into the iPhone case, allowing people to use non-Apple headphones, which mostly had incompatible plugs. In other words, an adapter that just changes the shape of the plug, and nothing else. Now, that's not to say that people won't be able to buy much higher quality headphones, with custom DACs. But again if Apple did this, they kind of screwed an entire industry by allowing new manufacturers the ability to jump in with a cheap analogue passthrough, and it's most likely to cause serious confusion in the marketplace, as people who buy Lightning equipped headphones won't perceive the difference that one is a digital interface with a superior DAC and custom matched amp, and the other is a simple passthrough of the iPhone's analogue port. They will just know one is more expensive than the other, and assume they're getting the same thing.
I really can't wait for that teardown.
