Rumours are starting to surface around the Lightning socket on the new Apple hardware.. Starting with the iPhone 6 it’s been reported that the Lightning socket will be used as a headphone jack.
Its fair to say the recent acquisition of Beats Audio limited something hardware related was bound to be in the pipelines.. If these rumours come to fruition, then I wouldn’t be surprised to see some Beats headphones on the shelves in Apple stores sporting the all new lightning connector.
There’s lots going on in the news with regards to mini usb connectors being made almost mandatory with all phone manufacturers. However, it seems unlikely Apple would adopt this.
The most obvious downside of this would of course be the inability to charge whilst listening to music. Although there would undoubtidbly be a plethora of inline adapters to enable charger and audio at the same time hitting the shelves.
The biggest benefit if this did become reality would be the switch from analogue to digital music. The (soon to be extinct?) 3.5mm jack only supports analogue music streaming, whereas the lightning connector would almost certainly be digital.
At least there’d be one saving grace for us not rushing out to bag the iPhone 6+ on day of release. A simple firmware upgrade would probably bring the headphone functionality to the older models lightning ports.