There's a subtle distinction though - the 30-pin connector and the Lightning connector can only be used to connect to or from an iOS device. If Apple removed th

There's a subtle distinction though - the 30-pin connector and the Lightning connector can only be used to connect to or from an iOS device. If Apple removed the headphone jack and encouraged people to buy Lighting headphones instead, those headphones could not be used to connect to anything else other than an iOS device, and you would not be able to use any of the headphones that use the standard connector on the new device. Basically, the 30-pin to Lightning changeover swapped one proprietary port for another, and did not change any of the potential use cases for that connector.