The end of pono?

Edison also believed that DC was the way to go and fried an elephant in public with AC to prove his "point."

Tesla was the true genius engineer and scientist, Edison was a lay tinkerer who knew nothing about physics. Why he gets so much airplay is an injustice of history.

Edison was not a scientist, or all that good of an engineer. He had no formal training, so he stumbled around in the design process a lot. When he would realize that he couldn't do what needed to be done, he went out and tried to find scientists and engineers. Sometimes he would pay them to solve the problem, and sometimes he would just walk off with the ideas he saw.

But he was an admirable inventor for the sole reason that, like a bull dog, once he latched into something he would pursue it to the end. He was a very obsessive and compulsive person. I've seen this many times in my life, and those types of people usually end up being "the winners". Didn't he say "innovation is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration"? Edison perspired a lot. He often dabbled in things that were over his head, academically.

So he didn't really "invent" a lot of things that are attributed to him... he just tinkered around and refined things to make them manufacturable and bring them to market.

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.

At Princeton some people could do all the work required in
a semester in 2 weeks, some had to work 14 hours a day
every day of the semester.
And then there were those who had all their work done by a recent summa cum laude grad who daddy paid 100 K a semester.
Edison did all the above.

"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.
Swdealmaker (Threads | Answers | This Thread)"

I'm not sure I see where you are going with this. With your dac chip example, I don't think its the same as comparing stereo to mono. A lot of companies make dac chips to play the same format. Take Redbook CD, for example. There are any number of dac chips made by different manufacturers that conform to the Redbook standard. With your Apple example, are you saying that the chip in an iPhone is not really playing a supported format like mp-3 or ALAC, and its really just playing some proprietary format that's something else, and we're just not aware of it?