The End of Headphone Jacks, the Rise of DRM

When you plug an audio cable into a smartphone, it just works. It doesn’t matter whether the headphones were made by the same manufacturer as the phone. It doesn’t even matter what you’re trying to do with the audio signal—it works whether the cable is going into a speaker, a mixing board, or a recording device. With the headphone jack gone, every other option is controlled by the iPhone’s software. With Bluetooth, the phone can distinguish between different types of devices and treat them differently. Apple can choose which manufacturers get to create Lightning-compatible audio devices. —Elliot Harmon (Electronic Frontier Foundation)