My problem with removing the 3.5mm headphone jack and replacing it with Lightning is that Lightning isn't significantly smaller. Lightning is wider and still has some significant height. If they were to remove 3.5mm, why not replace it with something much more advanced? My guess is Lightning has an expiry of around 2019.
Lightning is probably too thick to make it to 2019. I think there's about 2 generations of iDevices before "thinner" means "introducing Lightning 2". So Apple will make a bunch of money selling licenses and adapters for Lightning 1 and then do it again with Lightning 2.
And per this move, those with good headphones might get to enjoy carrying around 2 (TWO!) adapters 3.5mm to USB3 and 3.5mm to Lightning, as the former (and it's much cheaper licensing) probably has a much better chance of adoption in non-mobile devices than a proprietary jack controlled by a single company.
Why is this happening? Well Lightning will have profit in it (unlike 3.5mm which has no Apple proprietary patents). Of course, Apple competitors are not going to embrace Lightning, so it makes great sense they'll either keep 3.5mm or embrace a public standard like USB3 that doesn't have comparable (high) licensing costs.
And why do we need to switch to Lightning? "We" are trying to spin "higher quality" and "the future" but because an iPhone is a phone, it is still going to have to have a DAC
INside it. So the arguments of high quality DACs outside- while fine- doesn't eliminate the one inside the phone. Before the audio can be heard by our ears, it must be converted from Digital to Analog. Do that inside the phone (where a DAC must persist anyway) and send the analog through a ubiquitous, no-adapter-required, you-already-have-this-jack-on-your-headphones 3.5mm jack. Or shift it outside and pay up again for another DAC so that the digital form of the audio signal can move a few mm or cm further up the pipe (wire) toward your headphones. Will that make any perceivable difference in what our ears can hear? Very likely not. For those that argue otherwise, why couldn't Apple just put a better quality DAC
INside the phone where they have to have one anyway?
Net result: more licensing dollars in exchange for a loss of "just works" ubiquity... going from a global standard to a proprietary one that will collide with "thinner" in about 2 more generations of iDevice development. And then what? Lightning 2 and buy it all again. This is a Sony-like proprietary play.
As to "the future" crowd, wireless is a mess if one cares about quality. Bluetooth is a poor substitute for wired unless one doesn't care about quality. Yes, wires can get in the way but trading off quality is a rough way to solve that problem. Maybe Apple is going to roll out some new wireless audio standard that overcomes the audio flaws of Bluetooth "as is"? From my perspective, THAT is the best possible outcome of Apple jettisoning 3.5mm. But even that seems likely to come with "proprietary" hooks and thus probably won't be compatible with everything else (unlike 3.5mm).
Lastly, if Apple adopts Lightning as THE way, does that put Lightning ports on Mac computers? Else, again, it's adapters just to use one set of headphone/earbuds with different products from Apple too. I don't buy "thinner & lighter" if one pretty much has to carry adapters to support "thinner & lighter". What a mess!
