if you are the audiophile kind, then you may already have an portable dac/amp that you use with your phone, or have attached to your pc through spdif/usb that t

if you are the audiophile kind, then you may already have an portable dac/amp that you use with your phone, or have attached to your pc through spdif/usb that then goes into your headphones, bypassing the onboard dac/amp. what will happen is that some headphone manufacturers will start selling headphones with internal dac/amps. there are plenty of pc-oriented headphones that have that, and the gaming oriented ones even have onboard audio processing for surround emulation, like dolby atmos or dolby headphones kind of technology. but what will also happen is that most performance headphone manufacturers will continue making whatever they were making before because a lot of audio equipment out there still rely on the (1/4") phone connectors, and don't need to have dac/amps built into the headphones because the equipment should have their own already. if consumers don't care, they'll just continue using the earphones that comes with the iphone, which will likely work out of the box, or they may buy something else off the rack (like beats which will almost surely make headphones that are compatible with the new iphone) that comes with better speakers. if consumers do care, then they'll get to put whatever dac/amp they love in between their iphone and their headphones. but there are some consumers that care enough about good headphones but not enough about good dac/amps (because honestly most smartphone dacs are already pretty good on their own), who will have an existing pair of headphones they like very much but will need to fork out a little bit more for a dac/amp they don't have. hopefully with apple forcing this arrangement, dac/amps become less of a hobby purchase and we'll see some mass market $10 portable dac/amps hit the stores.