Apple gets royalties from the production of Lightning connectors, which they certainly don't from standard 1/8th-inch TRS jacks. So therefore, they have a very obvious and vested interest in killing off standardized connectors and pushing everything to proprietary connectors, for which they receive royalties, whenever possible.
I dunno - if they were really in this for making you buy new headphones, they'd not bundle the adapter, like they did in the past when they switched from 30-pin to lightening.
Connections
AirPods: Bluetooth
Not to mention the point made elsewhere in this thread that they bundle the adapter for people who still prefer wired.
I even own a pair of wireless Bluetooth headphones (nice onces, Sony's) but it's a pain in the ass to keep them charged and deal with pairing/unpairing them to various devices, or connecting to the wrong device when I want to use them with something else, or get them to work with various laptops' shitty Bluetooth drivers, when I can just use a pair of decent wired headphones and stick them into the ubiquitous 1/8" jack and move on with my life.
I personally favor Bluetooth headphones even with all the annoyance because as bad as it is, cords are even worse.
For those who feel differently, I suspect they'll either use the bundled earpods or just leave the lightning adapter attached to their best pair of headphones and move on with their lives. Maybe I'm wrong and everyone except me is rotating five pairs of headphones between six different devices on a regular basis, but it seems like just another case of piling on to resist change.
You obviously have no idea how Apple works. Apple would never in a million years make a user-hostile decision like this simply to collect royalties. They hold user experience to be sacred, and the fact that they're making this move now means they think that, at least in the long term, this will provide for a better overall user experience, despite the pain of the transition.
Everybody complained when Apple ditched the 30pin connector for Lightning too, basically all of the same arguments here (e.g. "Apple just wants everybody to buy new accessories"), but it turned out to be the right move. Making this argument again over the headphone port just means you don't know Apple and you don't know history.
I have no comment on how Apple actually works or doesn't work but I admire the marketing acumen of a company when a random internet user can argue so passionately about eternal goodness of the company. Especially a company that's about as secretive in it's actual operations as nation-state level intelligence agencies.
This is a repetitive cycle. See it happening right in this thread with the "Apple invented a proprietary wireless protocol to DRM all the music, close the analog hole and make you license their tech" stuff. When... it's just Bluetooth. Same thing happened when they put the microphone and volume controls in the iPhone earbuds; people said it was a way to insert a secret "DRM chip" and force only Apple-approved headphones to be able to listen to music.
So if nothing else, the weight of history is against your "just did this to charge people money" argument. Plus, y'know, the adapter's literally included in the box.
Who's talking about goodness? I'm talking about the values that Apple has, and how your claim is a gross violation of those values. I didn't say Apple was "good", however you want to define that. User experience is but one facet of the whole, though it's an important one. And if you're trying to dismiss my arguments on the ground that I'm a "random internet user", then you have to dismiss literally every single comment made in this thread, or any HN thread, including yours.
Why doesn't they Macbook ship with the dongle to connect it to HDMI screens and regular USB then? Why does that dongle cost almost $100?
Tim Cook's Apple is VERY MUCH in the business of lopping things off to just sell you an addon later.
Also, FWIW, I just checked Monoprice and the HDMI dongle costs $35. And Apple's own dongle (which is $79) includes more than just HDMI (it has a USB port as well, and a USB-C charging port).
