[20yrs_no_equity]

For me, personally, anywhere that I want to plug in my ATH-M50x is somewhere that I'm not moving, so I don't mind a dongle. USB-c provides enough wattage to power an external DAC and if Apple does get rid of the headphone port on the next MacBook Pro, then that's what I'll buy. (Currently I plug the headphones into the headphone port at work, but at home I have a DAC/Amplifier plugged into my monitor's digital audio out, thus the mac's audio goes over HDMI.)

I care enough about sound quality that these headphones are the only ones I'm interested in using for awhile.

Apple has enough of a track record of getting rid of things, and people thinking it's absurd for them to do so, only within a few years for it to be obviously the right move. So I trust them a fair bit.

One of the biggest examples of this is releasing a phone without physical keyboard. How absurd!

There were several years of people insisting the iPhone was going to fail, or was inferior because it didn't have a physical keyboard like the Blackberry.

[illumin8]

I use the same set of headphones with an Aune T1 DAC (I'm sure there are better ones out there, but I bought it a few years ago) and it works great. The thing I really like about this setup is that the DAC is class compliant, so it will work if I connect it to any iOS or MacOS device, although it requires a powered USB hub when I connect it to my iPad.

It's kind of cool to have a lossless, high quality audio setup you can listen to with a mobile device, although I'll be the first to admit that you could spend a lot more money if you wanted to get a better setup.