Can the 3.5mm to Lightning adapters be legally produced without paying royalties to Apple for using the Lightning connector?
On a related note: I wonder if one reason for eliminating the jack is to close that open interface which some devices like the "Square" were using. I'm not sure how much of an impact this has though; it was just a thought.
I hadn't thought about the Square with the loss of the headphone jack, that's an interesting change. Can the Square device be adapted to use the Lightning connection? Maybe Bluetooth?
Bluetooth sure. It was already using modulated audio like a modem over the analog jack. You can pair using bluetooth and continue to speak audio, with maybe lowered bandwidth to robustly survive the subband codec -- the mandatory base codec.
But I don't know what kinds of OS-level permissions go into allowing apps to pair with bluetooth devices on iOS.
My concern was basically about Apple being able to prohibit manufacturers from making hardware that they don't explicitly approve. (I don't know if they can or can't.)
Electrically it'll work, but mechanically it'll suck. Right now you hold the phone in one hand and swipe the card with the other. With this adapter, you'd need three hands: phone, reader, card. Or find a place to put the phone down while you run the operation.
For something like a card reader, you really want a device that plugs straight into the phone. If Square isn't able to build a Lightning reader just because Apple controls the port, that would be kind of irritating.
Alas, no. There are third-party NFC terminals which work with iPhones, though, so you could at least do it that way. Square has one, which talks to the receiving phone over Bluetooth.
Pretty sure that the adapter would work just as well (I don't know anything about the readers, but assume they are just encoding the CC info as an analog signal and listening to it over the microphone port... I wonder how easily they might be snooped via EMI).
Even if the electrical functionality doesn't change, the mechanical functionality has. With a flexible cable between, it will be far more cumbersome to hold the phone and reader, while swiping a card.
Yeah, you're right. I bet it would work anywhere you grabbed the analog signal from. You could probably even repurpose a set of bluetooth headphones for it.
On a related note: I wonder if one reason for eliminating the jack is to close that open interface which some devices like the "Square" were using. I'm not sure how much of an impact this has though; it was just a thought.