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Comment by nik_0_0 | Hacker News Reader

"Apple is reportedly planning on shipping EarPods that connect through the Lighting port with the next iPhone"

Good proofreading Verge. Also blanket statements like "no one is clamoring for a thinner iPhone".

I look forward to iPhone removing the headphone jack, making a thinner, lighter phone, and also propelling forward the market demand for bluetooth headphones. I love my Jaybirds, but there needs to be more players in the market.

I mean, it would also be great if it also shipped with a lightning -> 3.5mm adapter, but there is almost no chance of that happening. You can buy one for 40$.

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I look forward to more people joining me outside the ecosystem of iPhone, so I think we are aligned.

Apple is systematically strangling the ecosystem to force their short-term prosperity. Their price setting, app store review model, NDA on developers (the fearful silence devs are forced into) and their increasingly bad mobile UI are things worth killing.

So I hope Apple continues to isolate their ecosystem, because while the upshot is you can make more money selling the entire ecosystem (or licensing it), the downside is that it gets easier and easier for people to start ignoring you.

I'm with you on the price setting and App Store stuff, but it was my impression that they had gotten much better about the NDA issue over the last couple of years.

I would love to see the 3.5mm jack disappear though. I have mixed feelings about consolidating on Lightning though considering that it'd mean the end of auxiliary in car trips for those of us not BT enabled. Regardless of how you feel about the quest for thinness, the headphone jack is unreasonably wide, and something thinner would make it easier to get other components in there, as well as opening it up for other control methods beyond the simple clicker found on many headphones without the need for any hackery to do it.

I think it'd be inevitable that they would then license it rather than making it an open hardware spec, which would be a crying shame though.

"and also propelling forward the market demand for bluetooth headphones"

If bluetooth audio quality actually improved, and they got rid of the lag that makes videos unwatchable - sure. Until then, I would rather at least have an option to use my old analog headphones.

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