In a money-printing racket, Apple is charging 30 bucks for the new 'Lightning to 30-pin' adapter and 40 bucks for a 0.2m cable version of the adapter. Anyone who has an old iPhone accessory is probably going to need one of these. And oh, it doesn't ship until October.
For what it's worth, the MagSafe 2 adapter was a fairly reasonable 10 bucks. Given that price it wasn't out of line to assume that the iPhone converter would be around the same price too. But nope! It's 3x-4x the price. That's a robbery. That means if you want to use your old iPod speakers or iPhone cables or car kits or any of your iPod accessories, you'll have to spring $30 for each one. That's going to be a good chunk of change for some people.
And why does the adapter ship in the vague-ish frame of October? Is that October 1st or right before Halloween? It's a piece of plastic! If Apple is forcing us to wait that long after the iPhone 5 comes out, we might as well wait until Monoprice can slash off 4/5th of the price for an adapter that does the same goddamn thing. Don't support the racket, wait until it gets cheap somewhere else. [Apple]