dgatwood

mac_128 said:

jonl said:

What an awful future. Those things have batteries and have to be charged, which sucks for anyone who wants to keep using their current headphones. In addition, how many people who would upgrade from the supplied earpods would consider buying expensive Lightning headphones that work only with iOS devices? Want to use them with other equipment that uses the standard port, including your Mac, or a real stereo? You need a different kind of adapter that requires power. What an awful future.

No they don't. They don't need to use any more power via the Lightning bus than the built in DAC and amp currently uses.

and wrong again about buying expensive headphones that only work with iOS devices. If you've been in the market for any headphones, you'd know they all mostly have removable cords now. Demand will not only reduce the price of digital headphones, but combo digital/analogue ports will allow one set of headphones to be used with any device a customer wants with the appropriate cable. 

First, it does take more power, because the iOS device still has an amplifier and a DAC to drive the internal telephone speaker and the internal speakerphone speaker.  Therefore, you don't save any power by removing the headphone jack at all.  You just add the power consumption of the external device.

Second, although what you say about removable cords is true only for large Bluetooth headphones.  It isn't true for any of the cheap analog headphones, and more importantly, it isn't true for earbuds, which make up the majority of headphone sales.  The cost of adding digital electronics to earbuds would increase their cost pretty dramatically from an average of $10 per set to probably about $30, without providing any actual benefit for customers.  That sure sounds like "expensive headphones that only work with iOS devices" to me.