Why Cory Doctorow Thinks Apple's Disappearing Headphone Jack Should Scare You

Fortunately Apple has significant competition in this space, which means those of us already using a competitor's phone don't have to care, and everybody who was using Apple's phones can choose another brand if analog out is important to them. I don't think Apple fully appreciates that they no longer have the power to set the standard for this kind of thing any more.

The market will decide. Apple sells around 70M phones a quarter, time will tell. Corey is free to buy whatever phone he wants.

"Today it’s easy to record streamed music from the analog headphone jack on the phone, and even to convert the stream back to digital and transmit it in real time to someone else."

Is this really that common nowadays?

Personally I think the move is more of a way of selling Apple/Beats headphones than any DRM/Anti-piracy stuff.

"The end-to-end digital audio stack will allow for higher quality audio"

Highly unlikely. For starters, most people already use cheap earbuds which negate any advantage whatsoever.

Plus, environmental noise is practically irrelevant over the short distances of a headphone cable, so you're not gaining anything by going digital for the lat few feet.

In theory, headphone manufacturers could attach matched digital-audio converters (DACs) that take into account the headphones' characteristics, but in reality, I suspect blind A/B tests will reveal nobody can tell the difference.

The reality is the potential upside is meager, and the potential downside is huge.

None of riaa/dmca/drm can prevent pirate from cutting apple headphones with knife and receiving audio directly from speaker wires, so drm argument is pretty weak. What is really worrying me is that "one doesn't simply plug quality 3.5-headphones into lightning socket".

Am I the only one who wondered just who this Cory Doctorow person is?