Taking the headphone jack off phones is user-hostile and stupid
I&#x27;d be completely comfortable for replacing it with USB-C. You already have the port, it&#x27;s an industry standard, it&#x27;s de facto open to use for anyone. It&#x27;s smaller, both in terms of thickness (which I don&#x27;t care much about by now, but I&#x27;ll grant it&#x27;s a thing), as well as volume.<p>What concerns me is that the most popular phone and probably listening device in the world, will move towards a proprietary sound system, fragmenting the headphone and speaker market into two worlds. That just sucks, and it feels like a major nuisance for an entire industry. It&#x27;s like some worldwide government just created a law half the world or industry must use one standard and the other half the other, it&#x27;s just shit.<p>Further, tinfoil-hat time, but I think some sense to this fear. A lot of people have voiced concerns that one can employ all kinds of DRM&#x2F;licensing tricks, now that there&#x27;s full control on the i&#x2F;o. You can for example only allow a certain level of bass on headphones that have a license with Apple. I think these effects will be very limited, but I also think they&#x27;ll all be tiny steps in the wrong direction we really don&#x27;t need.<p>In short, I&#x27;d be fine with a new standard, but not the lightning port, and have a substantial concern about a minor (imo) probability that a digital io leads to walled audio gardens.