Of course Apple pushed back against DRM. Why wouldn't they? It did nothing but limit their market. Piracy wasn't Apple's problem, and as a result of dropping DRM, music sales boomed, iPods became more popular than ever, and iTunes now makes them money hand over fist. How long do you think that'll last?

Back in the 90s and even into the turn of the century, Microsoft had a pretty laissez-faire attitude about piracy. Back then, they could afford to, and they knew every pirated application and OS strengthened their position in the market. But when they began to reach saturation and the quarterly reports weren't showing the same rate of growth, they got pretty serious about piracy with the hardware activation and criminal cases against pirates. And when that failed, well, that's why we have Office 365 and a free Windows OS with nightmare invasive telemetry that's nigh-impossible for most folks to remove.

Apple has now reported, what, two quarters of consecutive slowed growth? No big deal; it's the biggest company in the world, and profits are still rising. But you can bet the folks at the top are feeling the squeeze. I'm sure they've got plenty of stuff in the works. Maybe it'll do well. Maybe not. But we all know that Apple plays the long game. If they do drop the analog jack, it won't have been because they just wanted a slimmer phone. At least part of the reason - and in my opinion, the primary reason - will be because it gives them more control over their market. More control over the lucrative accessory sales (including adapters and third-party licensing), and another lever of control should those two quarters of slow growth turn into four or eight. They won't want to implement DRM, and I very much doubt they'll ever do it for standard MP3 sales. But streaming? New releases? Exclusives?

Again, they won't want to; it's hostile to the consumer, bad for their brand, and expensive on the tech support end. But after a period of slow growth, a few product stumbles, and a handful of high-profile restructures or executive departures, I think you can count on them to make those long-game bets start paying off.

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