[apostacy]

Apple are the ones who are arrogant and disingenuous. It would be easy enough to waterproof the headphone jack, and there is otherwise no serious technical impediment to having one.

Apple is just trying to kill off the open standard headphone jack.

[ballenf]

They were pretty open about exactly that -- wanting to kill off the headphone jack. Since they have gone to all industry standard ports on new MacBooks, I don't know that the argument holds that Apple is against industry standards. When the lightning port was introduced was there an industry-standard small reversible port in use? Just my sense that Apple hasn't been as bad as, e.g., Sony with inventing custom memory sticks for the sole purpose of profit. Firewire was better at the time than USB, etc.

I would be curious whether the headphone port backlash was stronger than Apple predicted. They had to know there would be one. I really don't see how any financial model would have driven the decision -- even a small percentage of lost iPhone sales would easily dwarf profit on a few extra headphone or dongle sales.

Is there any chance the new iPhone will use a USB-C port?

[Tsiklon]

I'd say there's a relative but slim chance of the new phone having a USB-C port, they changed from the 30Pin to Lightning after 5 iterations of the iPhone (and that was 5 model years ago...).

But I think it's more likely they will keep Lightning around for a few more years as they are using it on more than just iOS devices now (see their keyboard and mice, and some of their wireless headphones).

Though it would be nice for them to release an updated version of the standard that can use the higher data transfer speeds afforded by USB3. Especially seeing as they're using NVMe for local flash storage, it could potentially speed up the restore process for iOS devices from your computer.