4 ms·

I'm not defending the the removal of the headphone by any means, but you are unlikely to experience any lag with the lightning cable. It's just a pcm bytestream

I'm not defending the the removal of the headphone by any means, but you are unlikely to experience any lag with the lightning cable. It's just a pcm bytestream getting out of the phone into a dac in the headphones. The latency won't be any different than what already is. If you are talking about their new wireless headphones, It will probably have some delay but probably not even close to bluetooth. They could just modulate that same bytestream to some ghz radio frequency without adding anything remotely as over engineered and cumbersome as a bluetooth stack. I'm pretty sure those airpods are not bluetooth compatible.

AlexandrB 10y ago
> If you are talking about their new wireless headphones, It will probably have some delay but probably not even close to bluetooth. They could just modulate that same bytestream to some ghz radio frequency without adding anything remotely as over engineered and cumbersome as a bluetooth stack. I'm pretty sure those airpods are not bluetooth compatible. What about encryption? Not to mention that Bluetooth doesn't use PCM because of battery life constraints (more radio traffic == more energy used), I doubt that Apple's protocol is uncompressed.
- mark-r 10y ago
  If you look at how old Bluetooth is, it wouldn't be surprising if a new system could be much more efficient. Uncompressed audio isn't high bandwidth by today's standards.
  - kale 10y ago
    Bluetooth v4.2 is not yet 2 years old. Bluetooth v5 is coming out in the next couple of years. Bluetooth 4.0 really dropped power requirements for a lot of use cases. It's an adapting standard that's not sitting still by any stretch.
    - arcticbull 10y ago
      Bluetooth 4.0 is completely unrelated to Bluetooth 3 but for the name. It was a separate standard developed by Nokia and brought wholesale to the Bluetooth SIG and they effectively told them that's what 4.0 would be ^_^
- jdmoreira 10y ago
  Yes, it will have some lossless compression and encryption for sure. But I'm pretty sure it's a much simpler stack than bluetooth. Even the use case is different, they just want to send audio from your pocket to your ears and I trust their engineers to do that the smart way.
- snom380 10y ago
  There is no encryption AFAIK, and there wouldn't need to be any compression. Even today, you can connect a regular USB DAC / headphone amp to the iPhone via the USB camera connector dongle and use that. Any device that follows the USB audio standard is supported (depending on power draw, of course).
Havoc 10y ago
>I'm pretty sure those airpods are not bluetooth compatible. Apple's tech specs list them as bluetooth.
tedmiston 10y ago
I didn't catch that the AirPods aren't Bluetooth. I wonder if that was designed based on problems with Bluetooth or more to get tighter integration with Siri. Perhaps they needed it to sync pairings over iCloud. Edit: From the official product page: > Connections > AirPods: Bluetooth http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMEF2AM/A/airpods http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMEF2AM/A/airpods

AlexandrB 10y ago

> If you are talking about their new wireless headphones, It will probably have some delay but probably not even close to bluetooth. They could just modulate that same bytestream to some ghz radio frequency without adding anything remotely as over engineered and cumbersome as a bluetooth stack. I'm pretty sure those airpods are not bluetooth compatible. What about encryption? Not to mention that Bluetooth doesn't use PCM because of battery life constraints (more radio traffic == more energy used), I doubt that Apple's protocol is uncompressed.

mark-r 10y ago
If you look at how old Bluetooth is, it wouldn't be surprising if a new system could be much more efficient. Uncompressed audio isn't high bandwidth by today's standards.
- kale 10y ago
  Bluetooth v4.2 is not yet 2 years old. Bluetooth v5 is coming out in the next couple of years. Bluetooth 4.0 really dropped power requirements for a lot of use cases. It's an adapting standard that's not sitting still by any stretch.
  - arcticbull 10y ago
    Bluetooth 4.0 is completely unrelated to Bluetooth 3 but for the name. It was a separate standard developed by Nokia and brought wholesale to the Bluetooth SIG and they effectively told them that's what 4.0 would be ^_^
jdmoreira 10y ago
Yes, it will have some lossless compression and encryption for sure. But I'm pretty sure it's a much simpler stack than bluetooth. Even the use case is different, they just want to send audio from your pocket to your ears and I trust their engineers to do that the smart way.
snom380 10y ago
There is no encryption AFAIK, and there wouldn't need to be any compression. Even today, you can connect a regular USB DAC / headphone amp to the iPhone via the USB camera connector dongle and use that. Any device that follows the USB audio standard is supported (depending on power draw, of course).

Havoc 10y ago

>I'm pretty sure those airpods are not bluetooth compatible. Apple's tech specs list them as bluetooth.

tedmiston 10y ago

I didn't catch that the AirPods aren't Bluetooth. I wonder if that was designed based on problems with Bluetooth or more to get tighter integration with Siri. Perhaps they needed it to sync pairings over iCloud. Edit: From the official product page: > Connections > AirPods: Bluetooth http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMEF2AM/A/airpods http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMEF2AM/A/airpods