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Comment by joewalnes | Hacker News Reader

This seems like FUD. Being able to stream audio through Lightning is necessary for audio docks and other accessories. It's quite a leap to say they're going to remove the headphone jack.

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I disagree. The MFi program is specifically for headphones, not other accessories.

Take a look at the bottom of your iPhone (if you've got one). The headphone port is significantly taller than the lightning port. At some point, even if it's not this upcoming generation, the devices will be too thin to support a headphone jack.

I imagine the next line of MacBooks shipping with lightning ports onboard. Possibly even to replace USB (along with adapters) - USB is the tallest port on the recent units.

USB is so ubiquitous and without any peer that comes even close to it's market adoption or fulfills the same requirements of cost and H/W manufacturer support. This isn't like when they removed floppy disk drives, the ADB ports or FireWire ports.

Removing USB would be a very, very crazy (and bad) move.

They'd obviously just move to the new USB 3.1 connector.

Agreed. Pure FUD. You can tell the author doesn't know what he's talking about because he misses the obvious comparison: HTC actually did this & it went nowhere, quickly.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/23/confirmed-t-mobile-g1-has...

Many phone vendors before HTC have used proprietary headphone connectors.

But Apple is not most phone vendors.

Didn't all the accessories that relied on the old 30-pin connector stop working when Apple switched to Lightning a few years back?

I think you can use the lightening adapter on older accessories. This is the case for my logitech speakers I bought 3 years or more ago.

Same for the quite advanced Alesis IO dock.

Or they require an adapter to work.

Similar thing happened with iPod peripherals when Apple brought out the 30-pin connector about 10 years back.

Not to mention that Beats' business would be shooting itself in the foot by locking their products to working with iDevices only. I mean, you wouldn't even be able to jack them to your Mac! This is the worst idea ever!

What makes you think that beats would stop making headphones with normal jacks?

Then they can sell two pairs of headphones to every sucker!

Bose sells their headphones with a number of attachments. One headphone with a removable connector.

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