This sure does have the stink of plausibility on it.
It sure does seem that Apple is creating a significant marketing challenge for themselves.
Including the adapter would pretty much extinguish the complaints.
Wrong! The cost of the dongle is almost irrelevant. It's the fact that you will never have it with you when you need it, and it's overall inelegance that offends me. It seems acceptable on paper, but in the real world it sucks. I had a win CE phone that required one and the end result was I could not use it to listen to music.
Once you connect the dongle, it becomes an extension of the existing headphone cable. There's no reason to separate it and leave it behind. I do that now with a 3.5 extension. Its not some complicated problem...
Yet, you can't charge your phone if you are using it to listen to music, which is the entire reason any complaints exist.
Like if I was Apple and going to pull this off, I'd put a second lightning connector on it (eg on the other side of the phone) because Nintendo long ago already proved that people will not accept having to trade off charging for headphones. What are you expected to do when you forget or lose the lightning headphones? Listen to your music on the included speaker? Hell no. Apple may assume people will accept bluetooth headphones, but I don't want yet another thing to charge. Is Apple going to waste space in the phone on a wireless charging standard? No. Not before Apple adopts a wireless charging standard for the phone itself.
Hence my point. If the 3.5mm jack goes away, that means either Apple is going to adopt wireless charging for the phone, or is going to force people to use third-party headphones which are heavier, need charging too, and far easier to lose.
Or, you know, possibly, they don't give a shit about charging while listening to music via wired headphones and neither does anyone else. Stop pretending like this ridiculous need has any sort of mainstream concern.
I have to point out that, in any sort of the Docked Stereo situation or Car Audio situation, charging while sending audio over Lightning is a given, and ANY wireless headphone situation as well. So you really have to be specific with your nitpicking, and point out that you literally mean tethering your head to the wall...with a phone that physically plugged in to the charger and connected to your head with wired earbuds. Without a doubt the dumbest thing one could come up with as a reason to not ditch the old 3.5mm jack.
I *hope* the shown adapter is a fake image.. If you're going to design a Lighting->Minijack adapter, why have a "cord" in the middle at all? Can a DAC chip really be *that* big? (Of course, it might be that Apple *could* make it smaller, but if they did, the adapter would end up being $75, not $20)
When I first saw the rumors of the demise of the 3.5 mm analog headphone jack I was appalled but now I'm thinking it might just happen. As painful as it would be to current customers many such standards, real and defacto, have to evolve to fit newer products and adjacent technologies. The ¼" headphone jack was replaced by the 3.5 mm headphone jack as the defacto standard for headphones and I'm sure lots of people who had headphones with ¼" jacks at the time were not too happy about it, or suddenly needing adapters. Heck, you can still buy headphones with ¼" plugs. RS-232 serial ports evolved from 25-pin to 9-pin to being replaced by USB. It happens and product vendors who made large investments in the older technologies that were replaced simply had to adapt as the legacy ports vanished from new PCs.
The tipping point for me on the 3.5 mm jack removal is the expected announcement of new Beats products and the 256 GB iPhone. Apple may be making a play for audiophiles by offering a much higher fidelity audio experience and an iPhone that has the storage capacity to handle a significant collection of lossless audio files. Of course this would imply an upgrade to the Apple Music portfolio to optionally support delivery of such formats that take advantage of the higher fidelity from end to end - at a higher price point of course.
Certainly this could all be crazy speculation and Apple may simply be tweaking specs to serve some other goals such as water resistance improvements, the ongoing quest for supermodel class skeletal thinness, and a higher price point for the top level iPhone 7. Apple has always been about setting new standards so we'll see in a few hours where they are taking us this time around.
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I have to point out that, in any sort of the Docked Stereo situation or Car Audio situation, charging while sending audio over Lightning is a given, and ANY wireless headphone situation as well. So you really have to be specific with your nitpicking, and point out that you literally mean tethering your head to the wall...with a phone that physically plugged in to the charger and connected to your head with wired earbuds. Without a doubt the dumbest thing one could come up with as a reason to not ditch the old 3.5mm jack.
The tipping point for me on the 3.5 mm jack removal is the expected announcement of new Beats products and the 256 GB iPhone. Apple may be making a play for audiophiles by offering a much higher fidelity audio experience and an iPhone that has the storage capacity to handle a significant collection of lossless audio files. Of course this would imply an upgrade to the Apple Music portfolio to optionally support delivery of such formats that take advantage of the higher fidelity from end to end - at a higher price point of course.
Certainly this could all be crazy speculation and Apple may simply be tweaking specs to serve some other goals such as water resistance improvements, the ongoing quest for supermodel class skeletal thinness, and a higher price point for the top level iPhone 7. Apple has always been about setting new standards so we'll see in a few hours where they are taking us this time around.