Also you get reliable sound quality. The DACs in the iPhones were always decent. Now you have no idea what kind of quality you're going to get from a given list

Also you get reliable sound quality. The DACs in the iPhones were always decent. Now you have no idea what kind of quality you're going to get from a given listening device. Plenty of them are noisy POSes; my girlfriend had a Belkin adapter that had automatic gain (!) and would ramp up to blast hiss through the car stereo during quiet segments... and sometimes even during non-quiet ones. The phones will always have to have DACs in them, to drive their speakers if nothing else. Denying customers a physical connection to them is just a dick move.