The end of pono?

Neil Young and Pono will have their place in Audio history as Pioneers of High Res Lossless music players.
This is the crawling phase of High Res music players and acceptance.

It’s all about the continuation of creating a better more convenient source to reproduce recorded music.
Wow, glad most of you did not have input to Edison while he was working on sound recordings and reproductions. It took some time but eventually Edison produced the “Perfected Phonograph” with a wax cylinder that played about 3 minutes. Within 15 years, the public started buying in larger numbers phonographs and records from Edison. I was not around at that time but I have been involved with audio systems as Stereo was coming of age to replace monaural, yes I am that old, well I did start with electronics and music at a young age.

The hard core audiophiles did not like Stereo and the flood of recordings that used the ping pong effect to demonstrate the right/left channels and how Stereo recordings worked, provided you even had a two speaker stereo system, otherwise Stereo continued to sound monaural. Also, who is going to buy a Stereo record player / turntable, new preamp / amp, and another speaker? Not to mention the large investment already in mono recordings. Does any of this sound familiar to today’s audio? MP3s will give way to high res music players. As pioneers like Neil Young take the arrows eventually most all portable music players will be High Res music players.

The biggest event will be when Apple goes to High Res Lossless CD quality players in products. Apple purchased Beats to stream better quality music (and make money). For the last few years Apple has asked its labels and artists for high resolution content for its masters for the iTunes program. The likely biggest hold up for Apple is that the wireless Carriers do not want Apple to put the High Res chips in the phones because the capacity with Cellular networks can not handle the increase in data demand, and the consumer can not afford the price. Once the cost of Data and capabilities of the nation’s Cellular system expands, so will Lossless music players, and Apple will be out front with this NEW technology that by then is 10 years old (a guess).

CLARIFICATION TO PREVIOUS POST AND RESPONSE TO COMMENTS
I did not state it well if the implication was that Young invented hi res portable players. However his name recognition has put a spotlight on the subject and is now being propagated into the general press. Yes others have come before the PONO. Other hi res portable players have been out for a few years now, yet I have not seen near the discussion and publicity in the past that Young and the PONO have created.
Once players went digital playback in the early 80’s with the CD and then about 1999 consumers had MP3 digital audio players with internal memory. After that concept was accepted it has been “off to the races” to build the better sounding delivery system. The continued reduction in cost for DAC chips and surrounding production has given way to the ability to build a reasonable cost hi res portable player with internal memory.
Edison vs Tesla
As I understand it, Tesla was more analytical and what I would call a scientific genius. Edison as I understand it is what I would call a marketing / commercial genius. Most of what we have been taught about what Edison is not true and he used others discoveries to bring product to market.
Edison is not much different than our modern day Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Gates and Allen did not write the original Disk Operating System (DOS) for computers. They needed an operating system that they promised to IBM. They knew Tim Paterson and Seattle Computer Products had a system called QDOS0.11 later renamed 86-DOS. Microsoft bought the full rights to market the system to other manufactures for $25,000. The long and short of it is that Gates and Allen became wealthy and Seattle Computer products went out of business about 5 years later after reaching an out of court settlement, where Microsoft paid Seattle Computer Products about one million dollars to undeniably become the owners with all rights to DOS. Tim Paterson and Seattle Computer Products I would call a scientific genius and Gates and Allen marketing / commercial geniuses. Gates and Allen also are scientific geniuses; however they pursue science from a marketing / commercial perspective, much like Edison.
Regarding Apple
Conversion by Codex is not the same a native playing a high res recording. That is like having a stereo record playing on a monaural system. It plays all the music but it is not in Stereo.
The iphone-6 uses the DAC chip make by Cirrus Logic 33821201 a custom chip made only for Apple. It is perhaps possible that this chip could produce native hi res throughput, however it appears Apple dummy downs (limits) the chip with software or the chip is not capable of hi res regardless of the operating software. It’s all proprietary, however one thing is for sure i phone 6 cannot produce native hi res music playback.