I find it (extremely) difficult to believe that Apple would remove the headphone jack from iPhones. Lightning headphones? Sure. Premium DACs driven from Lightning? Why not.
Remove the headphone jack? Suicide.
Remove the headphone jack? Suicide.
All Apple has to do is tell people, "You need the special Apple headphones," and they'll likely say, "Oh! okay!"
Their users have handled several generations of proprietary chargers just fine. Mac laptop users have also handled numerous generations of video output interfaces just fine. They're simply not a class of user which quibbles about spending on minor electrical expenses in order to get the functionality they want.
In fact, they'll likely be grateful. "Oh, I've been wanting a pair of real studio-quality headphones anyway!"
Though as a counter-argument, I might have said that about removing the 30-pin adaptor for lightning. It involved dropping a huge legacy accessory market, after all...
(Of course, this is all wild speculation and completely unsubstantiated. So there's that.)
The 1.5mm jack, on the other hand, is the standard audio connector for just about every consumer-grade device in the world. Not sure what the upside is for Apple, even with them owning Beats.
So, let's suppose they go this route: I think that an adapter could be ridiculously small. It needs to wrap that audio connector, hold it tighter than a lighting connector holds a lightning cable (should be fairly easy), add about half a centimeter for the lightning plug, and have room for some chip doing lightning-to-audio conversion.
A lot of speculation? Yes, but if it works, I can see them go that way. The main problem is the case of people who use a single headset with iPhones and non-Apple devices (extra weird idea: when do we see lightning in iMacs?)
http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2001-05-20/commentary-so...
Personally, I think HN readers should be a little more open minded. At some point, headphones will need to evolve.
The lightning port can do everything you can do with the headphone port, and more.
There are three problems with the headphone jack that Apple can see:
1. It's limited: it can stream analog stereo sound, and get back analog mono microphone. There's a nasty hack some headphones do so you can have a 2-3 buttons on a headphone (say, prev/next track, pause/play), but that's it. Analog sound over a long cable means you add noise. You get no noise cancelation, no surround sound, no other data streams etc. Maybe they have headphones with extra sensors in mind.
2. It's redundant: it takes space while doing a subset of what Lightning can do: that DAC circuitry takes space and wastes power, and the port itself is an ugly hole for no interesting reason than headphones don't currently support Lightning. If Apple removes the headphone port, it can use the extra power and space for more interesting things (like larger battery, more sensors etc.).
3. It's uncontrollable: Apple prefers vendors go through their programs to ensure quality and compliance, but we have players like Square, who use the headphone port for credit card swiping. They do it just so they don't have to pay Apple for licensing a Lightning solution.
Cross-platform support for their hardware would be the killer feature of using the headphone port.
If the user has an iPhone they can buy the Lightning version, and if they use an Android phone, they can buy the micro USB version.
But chances are the user won't be switching the card reader from one device to another all the time.
Noise cancellation doesn't require anything from the phone. Most noise cancellation works by placing a small mic on the headphones, sampling the ambient noise, and playing an anti-phase waveform of the noise through the speakers to cancel the noise. While you could use the phone mic to do that, it's not necessary (and probably inferior, if the phone is in a pocket).
Or were you referring to the fact that a digital signal degrades in the presence of noise more gracefully? (Lowered bandwidth rather than pops/artifacts.)
(Technically, you don't even need digital signals to stop noise from being picked up in the wires; balanced cables will do this just fine with an analog signal, though admittedly, balanced headphones are not standard consumer gear.)