Real world tests shows the A9 being superior to the 820. I'm not sure if Qualcomm has fixed throttling issues, but the A9 almost doesn't throttle at all. The A9 is nearly a year old and will be replaced by the A10, which will widen the gap even more.
		
		
	 
The technical specs are actually of less interest to me than the real-world benchmarks on similar apps while performing similar functions. In the end, that's all that matters. Apple has understood this for years, whereas the PC industry and Android seems to have gotten hung up on the specs.
	
		
	
	
		
		
			Or you could stop at the next convenience store that will have a 1/8" that will work perfectly fine.
		
		
	 
Do you even realize the irony of your statement? You want me to take time out of my trip to find another store that may or may not have a cable I need for a car I only have temporarily, which will cost me money I did not need to spend, in order to do something that my iPhone already does perfectly well with most every other car I own or drive.
I'd rather have you instead in the future stop at a convenience store that has a Lightning to 3.5mm adapter when you find yourself without one. ;-)
For the record, there was only one such store that sold such things within several miles of the location I was in. So even if I wanted to drive around looking for one it would have taken me considerably out of my way. In the end, it simply wasn't that big a deal, as people are making it out to be here in the reverse.
	
		
	
	
		
		
			I was around.  I was also around to see that CD burners started to hit acceptable consumer prices within a year or so after that.  The difference is also that Apple inconvenienced a comparatively small user base at the time by getting rid of a technology used between machines used for around 3-5 years.  Getting rid of the headphone jack makes it a pain to interface with audio devices produced over the last ~30 or more years that could legitimately still be in use.
I'll remove all reservations if the official Lightning->headphone adapter is <$5 so you can have several around the house and one in the glovebox, but I'm betting it's going to be $19.99.
		
		
	 
What's acceptable to you? I didn't have to pay a dime extra for the floppy drive built into every PC sold at the time. A USB floppy drive cost $100 -- CD drives cost almost $300. And no you are revising history. Apple inconvenienced everyone who was doing business at the time. And it took several years before the need for the floppy on the corporate level went away, and there was an affordable substitute that was universally included in every PC. Apple didn't even add a writable drive to iMac until 4 years later. I don't even want to think about how many years it took PCs to update to a standard USB port to exchange data with Macs. Bus powered drives were incredibly expensive, so that was a poor substitute, and CD media continued to cost several dollars per disks which could be written only once, and due to buggy technology, often trashed during incorrect burning, or god forbid you forgot to add a file.
And while Apple may leave behind some technology dating back past 10 years that may "legitimately" be used, 
most people are not using it. And many of the common use cases are being updated on a daily basis. I'd argue most people use their headphones with one device, and possibly two if counting work. The iPhone is primarily used as an audio source without headphones at home and in the car, maybe at work. I'm expecting new Macs to contain a Lightning port. That means one adapter for a non-mac home or work computer, left at work. Most new home stereos have BT built in, but a $20 dongle will solve that on old gear, including a 30+ year old amp. All new cars come with USB & BT, and if that's not available in an older car, there's adapters and dongles for that too. It's not Apple's responsibility to maintain backwards compatibility with all the old hardware out there, merely because it's in widespread use. At least they're not cutting the cord completely -- yet. But that is the future at least with mobile devices.
This is all just like when Apple took away the floppy drive and pushed USB & CDs. You say $300 was a reasonable amount to pay for a huge, buggy external CD drive a customer needed to buy in order to replace the floppy the customer already owned and worked, and I say in that case $200 is not much to pay for a wireless BT headphone that Apple will likely have made substantial improvements on. The benefits are absolutely the same, depending on one's needs. More storage is better only if you need it. But getting rid of wires is always a good thing.
In fact, everyone's been focusing on Lightning to 3.5mm adapters, and I'm gonna go out on a limb and say one of the most popular new adapters will be a BT to 3.5mm dongle that doesn't require plugging into the phone at all. So people can use their old headphones with all the benefits of wireless, with the same quality as the headphone jack, if not better. Battery power won't be an issue, because the iPhone can be plugged in separately, and so can the adapter, don't even have to sit next to the phone anymore. Need to plug into an old 3.5mm port? No problem, maybe there's a pass through jack, so the adapter never has to come off to be remembered or get lost. The sky's the limit.