The problem? You’d need a very expensive pair of studio-quality headphones (think: over $500) to register that 48 kHz pristine digital audio. But oh, there’s more. It stands to reason that Apple would no longer have any use for the standard headphone jack, and future iOS devices would thus be stripped of this and outfitted with a Lightning port. That could mean that any pair of non-Beats/Apple headphones would be rendered incompatible with Apple products without a clunky Lightning to 3.5mm jack adapter, which is just cumbersome enough to force you to toss your old headphones in favor of some Beats by Dre. To recap: this new development could mean that Apple would force everyone to purchase either a pair of Lightning-ready Beats/Apple headphones, or an adapter. And you’d be further bound to Apple’s ecosystem.
When contacted by The Daily Beast, a representative for Apple said, “We refuse to comment on any rumors or speculation about the company.”
This potential new, semi-shady development isn’t really anything new under Cook. Aside from the disappointing iPhone 5 and its new Lightning cable, which many users have claimed is vulnerable to breakage, one of Cook’s first big splashes as CEO came in June 2012, when Apple introduced iOS 6 featuring Apple Maps which was a total mess, to put it lightly. Although it did inspire this great New Yorker parody cover, courtesy of MAD magazine. In Oct. 2012, Cook fired Scott Forstall, Jobs’s longtime pal—he’d worked with him since 1992, when he joined NeXT—who’d served as SVP of iOS Software since 2007. Why? Because, like his mentor, Forstall was a bit of a jerk.
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