John Gruber's defense of courage takes a remarkable amount of "courage" to write with a straight-face. For anyone who gives a damn about audio quality, wired is the way to go. Ever wonder why Bluetooth headsets tend to sound worse? It requires transcoding to A2DP. It's removing the most successful port of all time, dating back to 1878 in its 1/4 inch iteration, and the billions of devices the iPhone can connect to headphones, speakers, cars, home audio systems, to the more esoteric like audio inputs for recording, square readers, turntables and so forth.

In the Steve Jobs era, when the technologies were killed we were offered, superior successor. When Apple killed the floppy, I hadn't used a floppy for ages and USB was infinitely better. When Apple killed its own FireWire port, USB 2.0 was far more widely used, and USB 3.0 was trickling in. When the MacBook Air was introduced without optical media, streaming media was the new normal and USB thumb drives offered larger, faster, rewritable storage that could be attached to a keychain.

The difference is in the Tim Cook era; the practicality is gone. The Mac Pro slashed its PCIe slots for no discernible reason other than the planned obsolescence. The 20 inch iMac dropped its ability to upgrade its RAM. The MacBook sports a single port for no apparent reason. And the iPhone 7 has dropped its headphone jack with no-benefit to the consumer. Gruber making the analogy is of Apple dropping Flash support isn't correct. HTML5 is superior. Instead, a more apt analogy would be to argue the MacBook's singular port is better than having 2, as users love expensive easily lost dongles.

This isn't a "What would Steve do?" article but more Apple's slow realization that once we're locked into its eco-system, we'll tolerate most of its attempts to gouge us in the wallet along the way. If Apple has courage, it's courage lies in its willingness to fuck every consumer in the wallet.