Remember:

* Apple knows best

* this is a totally legitimate product decision because no one likes wires on their headphones since like 2016

* what you really want is bluetooth, especially airpods -- have you bought your airpods yet? Ecosystem FTW!!1! -- even though they introduce latency that's unacceptable in some situations

* Apple knows best, and look, you don't get a career as a bold product thinker by caring about some kind of insignificant minority of niche creators who care about latency in music making

* Besides, why are you such a whiner? Just buy a $35 dongle that takes up your only port like everyone else (at least, until we finally succeed in our quest to remove that port too and achieve seamless invulnerable portless design, a rock, and island, and an island never cries)

* Apple knows best

* Look, why are you such a hater?

Shit, seriously? We use a first-gen big pro on our (electric) piano at home and being able to run midi into the iPad while also using headphone-out on the iPad is key for our use. I guess at least the new ones use USB-C so there are more adapter options so maybe there's a USB + headphone jack adapter out there, but 1) it's entirely stupid that we'd need one, and 2) if it's not a first-party Apple adapter we'd be rolling the dice that it works at all, let alone that it'll still work in six months—which is a big part of the problem with this dumbassed dongle-verse they've created, that most of the dongles on the market are awful so you can't always count on finding a version of the thing you need that actually works with your hardware.

Or I guess they expect me to buy Bluetooth heaphones, but... why? We have like three sets of corded ones two of which are quite good, and about a dozen pairs of ear buds. We don't need new headphones. We need a headphone jack.

> Or I guess they expect me to buy Bluetooth heaphones

...which adds another source of frustration to the setup - bluetooth latency. At some point I've tried setup like this: midi keyboard -> USB dongle -> iPad -> bluetooth speaker; the latency sucked. Not something you observe when you listen to music on Youtube, so not something that 99% users will notice, which means it will never get fixed.

Finding a usb-c adapter which has a good DAC may be a process in itself. I got several $20-$40 adapters from China, and they all have a very tinny, absolutely atrocious sound on their headphone jack.