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Apple Is Letting Companies Make 3.5mm To Lightning Cables Now (9to5mac.com)
Apple has updated the specs for its Made-For-iPhone accessories program, letting accessory makers put USB-C ports on licensed devices, as well as create 3.5mm to Lightning cables for the first time. 9to5Mac reports: With the new specs, companies in the MFi program can now include USB-C receptacles on their officially certified iOS and Mac accessories for charging. That allows users to charge MFi accessories with a USB-C cable and or power adapter they might already have, for example, and also draw power from the USB port on a Mac using the same cable. It also has other advantages for manufacturers. Apple's documentation for the new specs lists battery packs and speakers as products that could benefit from using a USB-C receptacle. Products are also allowed to bundle USB-C cables with the MFi accessories, but manufacturers can opt to not include a cable or adapter and reduce their costs and or price in the process. Unlike with Lightning receptacles, Apple does not allow the port to be used for passthrough charging or sync of an iOS device. Also, new for accessory makers is the ability to create a Lightning to 3.5mm stereo analog audio output plug, which would allow users to go direct from the Lightning port to a 3.5mm input on another device.
Visionary? Magical? Great innovation?
Reinventing the wheel might be great, unless of course all you need is a wheel.
3.5mm jack just works. It's cheap it does what it needs to do. No real need to change it yet.
If they really want to do something new with sound they should make their stupid music app play FLAC. Isnt that the whole point of getting sound over W1 headphones? (AKA"special blutetooth")
Seriously, for such an innovator this is rubbish.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Alternate headline: Apple creeping towards a USB-C future. This move sounds suspiciously like the lead-up to a surprise announcement that they're courageously killing Lightning and replacing it with USB-C. Long overdue, IMO. Lightning is still limited to USB 2.0 speeds, and the latest revision of Thunderbolt uses the USB-C connector. Macbooks use USB-C as well, so iDevices are the only Apple things not yet using that connector... and would have much to gain by doing so. One of the last pieces of the puzzle was digital audio over USB... which had an official protocol finalized in the past year or so. Now that 3rd party manufacturers can produce licensed iDevice compatible gadgets with USB-C ports, everything is in place. Sure they'd have to include a USB-C to 3.5mm dongle instead of the Lightning one, but switching over sooner would be pulling the band-aid off quickly. People who bought those Lightning headphones would have to get a USB-C to Lightning adapter, as well.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Wrong. You are trying to find technical reasons for the decision when with Apple it's always about money. Someone did a revenue analysis and decided that with lower demand for the newer hardware, there was more money to be made this way as opposed to feature lock-in (or lock-out ;). With Apple, it's always about the revenue.
You claim he's wrong, and back it up with exactly zero evidence, giving only hater conjecture.
His pass-through reasoning is probably right on - they are looking to prevent someone from creating an "iTunes cache device" that makes perfect digital copies of the all-you-can-eat iTunes subscription, so that you can turn off the subscription and still have all the music you aren't supposed to have. That explains the data pass-through restriction quite nicely.
The charging bit is more of a mystery - if it was really about variable power delivery they could have put specifications around it - your device must accept these signals from the phone about power utilization and be able to step up / down the charge being delivered accordingly, etc. After all, this is a device certification program - if the device can't do it or doesn't do it properly when tested, it's not certified.
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