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A comment on Apple's best product is now privacy. Parent comment

Re:Apple's best product is now privacy by scarface74 on Friday September 14, 2018 @06:20PM (#17991518)
No. Teardowns have shown nothing of that sort. It's a marketing decision to push people to buy $170 airpods. In fact, there's a very popular tech blogger's video where he successfully adds in a headphone jack[1] to his iPhone 8.

How are people being "pushed" to buy Airpods when they can use any Bluetooth headphone, the headphones that come bundled with the phone, or use their own headphones with a $9.99 adapter that they have included up until yesterday?

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Re:Apple's best product is now privacy by AndriyKunitsyn on Saturday September 15, 2018 @06:16AM (#17993731)
Simple. There are multiple codecs in Bluetooth headphones, the most used one is proprietary aptX from Qualcomm. Apple has no problems licensing it for Macbooks and iMacs, but for iPhones they chose to reject Qualcomm, do their thing, and use AAC codec, which is supported only by small fraction of wireless headphones. https://darko.audio/2017/12/how-to-enable-aptx-hd-bluetooth-...

So, if your headphones don't support AAC, they will (most likely) fallback to SBC encoding with a subpar sound quality. Don't want a subpar sound quality? Buy Airpods. Or Beats. Or some other overpriced thing that understands AAC. There was some 100 year-old industry standard regarding sound transmission, but apparently it's "obsolete" now, because Apple said so. And bundled headphones don't sound too good.

The removal of headphone jack was purely a political decision to spite Qualcomm and screwing over Apple's customers.

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Re:Apple's best product is now privacy by scarface74 on Saturday September 15, 2018 @06:42AM (#17993774)
So now it’s a bad thing that Apple chose to support an industry standard (AAC) instead of a proprietary Qualcomm only protocol?

But if you aren’t satisfied with the Apple wired headphones, up until the 12th Apple bundle an adapter, you could choose any wired headphones you wanted. After the 12” it would be $9.99. It’s still not forcing you to buy AirPods.

As far as Bluetooth, there are other non Apple/Beats Bluetooth AAC headphones. Nothing forcing anyone to buy them from Apple.

[ Parent | on HN ]