Oh no, not this type of comment again. Infosec people always make fun of HN for this exact type of comment. The total lack of understanding of the economics of bug hunting doesn't stop people from commenting here.
Noone is paying $100k in some imaginary black market for web exploits. I mean have you even considered who buys exploits and what type of attacks they conduct? There isn't an active market looking to noisily grab passwords from a low-grade consumer password manager that no enterprise or governments uses. Your XSS/SQLi are only worth a marginal amount of money to the corporation you're pen testing.
And supply/demand is always what drives prices, not the potential damage (or benefit) you can imagine a particular exploit doing. This is as true for vulnerabilities as it is for some business software or mobile app your create. Just because in a perfect situation it could generate x value for a customer doesn't mean there is either demand or an untapped market for it.
A browser-based iPhone zero-day on the other hand can fetch some money. But even then your grey market for this is tiny and most likely not going to be some criminal overlord paying out $100k in bitcoin to kids on a darknet forum.
However, I still stand behind that this corporation should have paid $100,000. There are so many opportunities to exploit this vulnerability. LastPass is seen as something "advanced" users use, so it's highly probable that you could PM link to this page to some computer celebrity, and you would have access to his inbox in no-time, because most people don't use annoying second-factor authorization. This could result in a huge amount of new leaks, etc, etc. $1000 basically screams - "fuck you, we don't care about our security, and we are not going to encourage future white hat future bug reporting".
Just so we are on this page, you will _still_ be able to connect 3.5mm headphones to your iPhone. You will just have to use an adapter.
There are benefits for removing this port:
1. It frees up internal space.
2. It makes outer design more robust, simpler and cheaper for production.
3. It makes the phone lighter.
4. It allows you to make iPhone thinner.
5. You have one less limitation to account for when designing new iPhone.
6. You waste less materials on cables and oversized jacks made out of metal. I really like how article says that there will be lots of cables wasted from this. Well, so what? Should we stop all innovation and keep all standards forever the same so there is no waste? Ideally we should move on to smallest possible ports and most efficient standards. We can get there with tiny steps, and that will include throwing away legacy things.
7. It's easier to make phone waterproof when you have less openings.
In addition to that, lightning jack is superior to microUSB and other jacks, because you can insert it either way. It also has magnetic functionality that the other jacks lack.
Finally, for me as a customer, this change does not bring any problems either. I may have to spend $20 more for adapter. But if the phone costs $500, this change is insignificant.
Companies in the audio industry might have bigger problems from this, but it's their problems, not mine.
I am seriously surprised that BBC would be posting useless crap like this. Could it be because there is a lot of money to be made from shorting Apple stock and then releasing anti-Apple propaganda?