Klaus wrote:
Yeah, the headphone thing is going to piss off a lot of people, but it's more a case of Apple being the first ones to rip off the bandaid. I think most manufacturers will drop the 3.5 mm audio jack in the next few years. It's a relic from an old analog era. The main reason it still exists is because the standard is so widespread, but it makes less sense by each day. It's a bit like insisting on composite cables when there's HDMI. The lightning port is already built into every iphone and it's a much better connector since it's digital. It could support things like hi-res audio and noise-cancelling headphones which usually require an additional power source.
Noise-cancelling headphones are humbug gimmicks. They make sense only in very specific circumstances and even then you'd pick passive over active NC all day and for those you don't need a power source.
It's theoretically true that you have a higher ceiling in audio quality using the lightning port but there is no point going that far as humans are not even remotely capable of exhausting the quality that's transmittable via the 3.5 jack. Similar to people who insist on listening to everything in FLAC which reads nice but makes no difference to our ears.
There's no need at all to get rid of the jack, the talk I've read from that direction was usually either Apple fanboys or people championing progress for progress' sake and ironically the people who'll lap Apple's shit up are going to listen to 128kbps YouTube rips on their shitty Beats resulting in the sound quality of $5 trash cans. I think most manufacturers know most of this already thankfully and won't drop the jack anytime soon.
