One thing I hope they mention: Apple put in proprietary extensions to give Apple-made Bluetooth headphones an advantage over all others, then removed the headphone jacks.
It's hard to tie all that together. Generic Bluetooth devices work just like you are used to everywhere else -- that is, kinda shitty and unreliable. Must we suffer a universally crappy experience by preventing Apple from improving BT for their own headsets?
Maybe they should be required to license the tech, if they are not already. But I don't want to degrade my experience just because that's the only way to have a level playing field. Maybe the BT standards group could get off their ass and make the underlying protocol better.
This isn't accurate, normal Bluetooth works much better than you might imagine. The kind of things that are added on top with Apple's solution are things like fast pairing and instant device switching. They also have their own custom codecs, but most other Bluetooth communication devices also support custom codecs which, on Android for example, are enabled by installing a companion app.
Re: Bluetooth being better than you portray: Don't get me wrong, you can certainly run into problems, but in normal usage it works just fine. And Apple isn't fundamentally improving on the potential issues with their proprietary solutions.
Normal BT drops to very low sound quality when the mic is in use, because it goes into "headset" mode. Apple got around that with an extension. Combined with the jank pairing and device switching, the difference is pretty big.
AirPods also drop audio quality severely when their mic is active, just as with Bluetooth. Apple hasn’t solved that in any way with some nefarious extension.
Reminds me of how wireless keyboards and mice often don't use BT despite it being totally designed for that use case. They use some random 2.4GHz USB dongle. And well there are BT kbms, but they're unreliable.
I actually love Bluetooth mice and keyboards, especially when they support multi device so I can switch between my phone/laptop/watch with the press of a button. Currently using [0] for a few years, love the build quality and form factor. Then a random Microsoft BT mouse. No problems with reliability.
My Apple BT keyboards+mice run out of battery very quickly and sometimes randomly disconnect/reconnect. A newer non-Apple BT keyboard seems ok on its own, but then there are issues on the other end. My fairly new Windows PC can't wake up from Bluetooth keyboards/mice, so I have to keep a USB one attached. And the BIOS menu requires a USB keyboard too. Dongle eliminates all that complexity.
There are also some BT limitations at play. Key rollover is capped, and mouse polling rate is lower. But that'd only matter to me if I were playing PC games. Ability to switch devices is a plus for BT.
I emphatically disagree. Not in my experience at all. Nearly every single time I use Bluetooth it is a dance of connecting, forgetting, re-pairing, reconnecting, looking for old connected devices to shut them off, etc. Half the time I give up and don't use it. This happens to any combination of Bluetooth devices I have, at all locations, in any situation.
So why is there such a difference between my experience, and the experiences of the other posters here, so different to yours? Could it be that there's something about your situation leading your experience to suck that I'm not having?
I'd put my money on buying cheap devices and painting your experience with them in broad strokes on the technology as a whole. After all, if you have no faith in the tech, why spend money on a good experience? After all, why would $5 earbuds from Walmart have a different experience to a quality pair of headphones for a few hundred dollars to pair with your nearly thousand dollar smartphone?
I don't mean to gatekeep good Bluetooth, because try as I might I can't get my mom to stop getting her own and let me buy the expensive stuff for her, but she still manages to reliably get her Bluetooth paired, connected and working at the start of the phone call whenever I call her despite using budget headphones.
She does have a Pixel though. But it's just the budget one.
I don't really know how all this tech works, but when I bought my new Xiaomi buds, the moment I opened them my Android phone recognised I have new buds and asked me to pair them with one click. It was like magic. My understanding is that this would not be possible on an iphone, whereas this exact behavior works with Apple buds on an Apple phone.
It's not part of AOSP, but something modern Google phones support. It's not a fully open thing - device makers must register with Google - but better than the iPhone situation where only Apple devices can have a nice pairing experience.
I'm fine with Apple implementing BT to spec (i.e. crap) and having their own extensions to improve it. I'm not fine with them eliminating the only alternative, the jack. Since the first iPhone, there's been both BT and jack, and people clearly preferred the jack until Apple decided it was time to grow their accessories sector.
“Apple improved upon the notoriously unreliable Bluetooth standard and then slightly degraded wired listening by requiring a $9 dongle” is quite a weak anti-trust argument. Almost all innovation comes from this type of vertical integration.
Do you actually use the dongle? It doesn't work with inline mics, making it useless even if you were to carry it around everywhere. It also doesn't work with previous iPhones, so you can't share say a car aux between an old and a new iPhone.
Is this a new thing? I haven't used this in a while, but the lightning dongle used to work fine with my headphones+mic (also intended for Apple's headphone jack). I know there's some difference in how the headphone connector is set up between Apple and everyone else though.
I'm pretty sure the commenter is misinformed. The dongle worked with the inline mic on my B&O headphones. But it wasn't worth engaging with that point because I think they're wrong even if the dongle doesn't work perfectly for them.
I use the dongle, fwiw. It stays attached to my "good" wired earphones.
I don't really have any strong feelings either way about it. I dropped my phone once, and the dongle took the brunt of it (saving the expensive stuff) but I did have to buy another.
I used the dongle. I left it permanently attached to my headphone cable, and it was a non-issue to “carry it everywhere.” Needing a wired inline mic is a niche of niche, making the argument about antitrust monopoly even weaker.
Wireless headphones are a better experience is basically every way, and yes microphones on phones aren’t a niche which is why every phone has one. Totally unrelated to wired inline external microphones, though.
If you're taking a call on a phone with headphones, you need an mic on the headphones for anyone to hear you. There were several years you had the option of using BT headphones while the iPhone had both BT and the jack, but you were using the jack.
These days the reliability problems of Bluetooth are effectively gone. Sure, it's not a perfect technology, but Bluetooth devices work completely reliably for me across tons of vendors.
Saying Bluetooth itself is unreliable is an outdated view. There are shitty Bluetooth devices yes, but the protocol works fine when paired with good devices
That is my understanding talking with devs who have worked at the lower layers of bluetooth. Well, two problems. The spec is not an easy one to read with a lot of caveats. But the bigger issue is, a lot of companies half ass their bluetooth implementation. Whether we are talking Windows, Android, iOS, macOS, Linux, etc, if you experience bluetooth problems, often it is the device and not the bluetooth code in the OS.
I have high-end Bose headphones from 2020, a new iPhone, and a new Mac. Bluetooth sucks. You're far better off with AirPods than anything else if you're going to use BT.
By the way, it's so bad that I don't use headphones anymore with the iPhone. I use the phone in speaker mode. And the only reason I even have a new iPhone is because AT&T dropped support for my old one.
I have multiple pairs of high end Sony headphones, Pixel buds, numerous Bluetooth speakers, and Bluetooth works reliably when I pair those phones to my AV receiver, my PS5, my Pixel phone, my tablet, or my TV. I rarely have any problems: the audio is clear, the latency is not noticeable, and devices connect quickly and without fuss.
There are corner cases that cause annoyance, and those corner cases are indeed around where Apple is adding on top of Bluetooth: The ability to instantly switch the connected device without needing to disconnect from a previous device, and the ability to pair just by having the devices close. Those features are replicated in the Android ecosystem but are not standard.
If those two features are what you mean by "sucks" then fine. But that doesn't imply that Bluetooth doesnt work reliably, just that it doesn't have these two features broadly supported.
A difference here is that fast pairing and device switching on Android, while not a standard part of the protocol, is open for device manufacturers to support, unlike Apple's versions of these features.
I tried my Bose NC700 with my Pixel 6. It gave me the quick-pairing notification, asking me also to install an app, which ofc I said no to. Then when it was already paired, I got the pairing notification 6 more times during my call.
Probably doesn't happen for everyone, otherwise it'd be fixed. But that's how it always is with overly complicated stuff, edge cases everywhere.
I have a low end Bose bluetooth speaker that connects up instantly to any of my powered on devices (2x Macbook, iPhone), and can switch between them seamlessly with a button press. I've also never had any issues with Sony WHM1000XM* headphones regarding bluetooth across these devices.
My AirPods frequently hop between my MacBook and iPhone without asking though, because the other device played a split second audio clip.
My Bose NC700 can only remember 3 devices it seems. My corp-supplied laptop+phone put it over the limit, meaning I have to repair whenever I want to switch to another device, and it forgets one as a result (idk how it works, FIFO?). Pairing often takes a few tries, and it's even glitchier on the corp Android phone.
Earphone quality drops to something awful whenever the mic is in use. That's just cause of the BT standard. This gets more complicated with multiple devices involved.
I'll be listening to music on my work laptop with my headphones, my iPhone will get a call, it'll switch to the iPhone only to play a ringtone in my ears, then when I accept the call the iPhone will switch back to its own earpiece instead of my headphones. Juked!
Then some unpredictable things. Like it gets stuck connected to the wrong device, or it starts playing music when I turn them on, or it won't connect even with a device it should remember. I've had my BT headphones connect during a meeting, make my laptop start playing random music, then disconnect, causing the laptop to switch to full volume speakers and blast music into my meeting.
I don't fault Bose for any of this. These are the most reliable BT headphones I've ever owned. The standard just sucks. The iPhone side has issues like randomly switching to my car BT when I walk by wearing my headphones. The car BT can only pair to 1 device at a time, so my wife or I have to disable BT to free it up. Overall it's not worth vs just plugging in the darn cable.
I was gifted AirPods, but I'm on the Android ecosystem. I see a huge difference between what I can configure on an Apple device vs my Android devices. For example, on an Apple device I can enable features to help me hear better in a noisy environment which would be nice to have.
I wonder if they are using a proprietary configuration API that is deliberately kept secret or if no Android devs have figured out how to reverse engineer it yet (seems very unlikely).
If the likely former, I'd like someone to address this as well as it almost feels like if they're getting into hearing assistance features, then accessibility becomes important.
Yeah, and don't get me started on the audiophile perspective on Bose. Bose is an ear candy brand, what you hear out of them is not even close to what the audio engineer intended the experience to be. I won't fault anyone who's fine with them, but I would never buy a pair of Bose.
That being said, they absolutely excel at noise cancellation, and that's because their core market is airmen, Bose is used almost universally by pilots for their in-flight headsets. It's where they make their actual money.
AirPods came out 8 years ago. It’s good to hear it’s better now, though that doesn’t comport with my experience. Are you saying you’d prefer a world where innovation was held from the market for almost a decade while standards caught up and made them available to everyone and every product simultaneously?
> Are you saying you’d prefer a world where innovation was held from the market for almost a decade while standards caught up and made them available to everyone and every product simultaneously?
Not really, I don't particularly have a problem with how Airpods went, except that Apple could have moved to standardize or at least open up fast pairing and instant switching, but they didn't.
I’d prefer if Apple spent its scarce engineering resources on bringing new innovations to market and not facilitating other people to copy what they build. From Apple’s perspective the request is even more twisted: they should move to standardize all their technology and also give it away for free (lest folks complain about paying a “Core Technology Fee”!)?
So? Do you think great engineers or engineering orgs are a dime a dozen? The US government is a many trillion dollar organization. Have you used a government website?
I'm fine with this. Apple can extend sucky BT, Apple can make their faster Apple Silicon chips, Apple can make iMessage since SMS is trash, Nvidia can do CUDA cause OpenCL sucked, whatever. Just don't also intentionally kneecap the competitors by removing their interfaces.
That is very different from saying "Almost all innovation comes from this type of vertical integration."
Innovation comes from many sources and while vertical integration does assist in some cases, your assertion steps so far past plausible that it is simply ridiculous.
What innovation? At the time of removal from iPhone, the LG V35 had a headphone jack but was thinner and lighter than an iPhoe with the same IP rating, and a better camera.
Yes, basically non-Apple headphones are pointless for iPhone owners now. Doesn't matter how much Bose or anyone improves their tech, the port they relied upon got removed. Apple has locked together iPhones and headphones.
I don't get the sense that third party headphones don't work just fine with iPhone, other than a seeming indication that iPhone users seem to think normal Bluetooth doesn't work well, which might indicate Apple has either not invested in their standard Bluetooth stack or at worst, actively degraded it.
But I'm doubtful of this, it seems more likely that some Apple users have an outdated view of how reliable standard Bluetooth actually are, even when paired with their iPhones.
Yes, there have been since 2007. Almost nobody used them until the jack got removed, because they don't work well. BT standard improved over the years, but not enough.
Vertical integration and competition are orthogonal. Vertical integration is when Apple improves upon Bluetooth with a proprietary enhancement to the standard. Competition is Pixel Buds advertising a similar feature set.
Huh? It sounds more like they deliberately broke everyone's devices except their own so you either have to pay them more to continue using your existing headset with an adapter, or if you have a bluetooth headset you're just shit out of luck unless you buy an Apple headset. How is that not anticompetitive?
No actually any iPhone with a headphone jack continued to have a functioning headphone jack. And competitors marketed their phones with headphone jacks for a year and ended up also abandoning that feature.
It's not feasible to use an old iPhone forever, I tried. If the required app updates don't get you, the carrier will.
The big competitors like Samsung removed the jack too once they started selling their own wireless earbuds. They realized they could use Apple's strategy too.
