Many many many points to address on your reply....
It's not just widely used. It's the best way to transport audio.
By what standard? If they go Lightning, having a wireless digital signal in the cable and doing the DAC in the earpods seems perfectly reasonable to me, should have less harmonic distortions and better bandwith. If they go Bluetooth, same could apply, depending on how it's implemented. The main argument against Bluetooth seems to be the thought of having to charge them every day, but as long as no info about battery life or charge times are given that argument may or may not apply. If they bring Bluetooth earpods that can be charged on the iPhone's lignting port, the hassle is minimal.
Outside the Apple community, nobody cares about the Apple Watch. I'd rather a fad not dictate the future of how I listen to audio.
Granted. But going wireless with audio makes sense for plenty of reasons, of which the Watch is just one example. I for one never enjoyed having to pull my earphone cables through my shirt to get to the phone in my pocket, I know a guy who runs with his phone around his ankle using bluetooth for audio, ... if we want to build towards a future of wearable computing, cables are not the way to go. If Bluetooth isn't good enough to replace a 30-year old standard, it makes sense to improve Bluetooth until it is.
For me it feels a bit like WiFi vs. Ethernet all over again, and I think once the wireless standard is good enough people will easily flock to it and only fall back on the wired alternative occasionally or in fixed settings.
Nobody really cares about a thinner iPhone.
Agreed. But if Bluetooth works as I hope it will, I don't consider the audio jack important enough as the sole reason to make the phone thicker (battery life on the other hand...)
It's all about the money people!!!
I wish people weren't so blind to this but sadly most are.
If you believe Apple will change this design for the sole purpose of making money from the adapter sales, I think you're significantly overestimating how much total money they make on the adapters. Those things carry a great gross margin per piece but that money still pales in comparison to what they get on the iPhone sales. Plus they want to get as many people into their ecosystem now that there are still people left who aren't yet fully locked into either Apple or Google. The whole idea about razorblade pricing is to have a good razor and price it low, then price the blades high. Having a crippled high-priced razor and also high-priced blades doesn't work. If Apple honestly believed that this move crippled the device from a long-term point of view, they wouldn't do it. It's just that they have this ruthless attitude about "skate where the puck is going", and the adapters are a temporary stop-gap.
One thing is for sure. I'm positive Apple will be under scrutiny from the EU commission which this propriety change. It's one of the few EU things I think is great for the consumer.
Good that we end the post with something we both very much agree on! The EU is great for the consumer, and it's a shame so many people don't realize how much good it's done because of propaganda by local politicians. As to whether they will step in here -> I think it depends. If Apple forces everyone to buy lightning headphones, the EU might complain. If they push towards Bluetooth, which is an open standard and plenty of headphones already on the market, I think the EU will stay away.
Seperately, I wish the EU would start intervening in the whole "locked ecosystem" thing that both Apple and Google have really been playing up for the past 2 years. There's a great article on Ars Technica about this (
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014...g-forward-in-identical-yet-incompatible-ways/ ). I think that after a certain period of innovation, there should come a legal mandate to make devices more interoperable (e.g. why can't I stream my wife's Samsung Galaxy to my AppleTV?). Same argument in cloud services, if I have my entire photo library in iCloud it becomes very difficult for me to switch to another provider - the EU could mandate easier transitions like they did with e.g. banks and electricity providers.
