Possible alternate explanation: maybe Apple is promoting Lightning headphones not because they want to eliminate the headphone jack, but because they intend to start pushing some kind of smart functionality to headphones and audio devices.<p>That&#x27;s pure speculation. No clue what that functionality might be. What if they were leveraging the processing power of the iPhone to achieve some kind of adaptive noise canceling on any headphones? I don&#x27;t know.<p>I do know this: this isn&#x27;t like dropping the floppy drive or optical drives on Macs. By the time those were dropped, hardly anybody was using those features on their Macs. But a casual glance around any plane or public transit tells you that a lot people use their headphone jacks all the time.