Ah, someone else who also shares this view. I realized this myself a few weeks ago, and it was kinda sad. The reason I realized this could become something to

Ah, someone else who also shares this view. I realized this myself a few weeks ago, and it was kinda sad. The reason I realized this could become something to reckon with is the intricacy of the AirPods' innards: https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/lScC1ACEJmdTFQRm.huge https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/lScC1ACEJmdTFQRm.h..., https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/XwBdUPqAmhHbWgWn.huge https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/XwBdUPqAmhHbWgWn.h..., https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/1ZnAZMJBfmIxFr1f.huge https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/1ZnAZMJBfmIxFr1f.h... (from https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/AirPods+Teardown/75578 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/AirPods+Teardown/75578) Only Apple could design something like that. Have fun reverse engineering such a monster. If good crypto got applied to something like this... ouch. That's one possibility, at least. The other possibility is this. Shhhhhh, but Encrypted Media Extensions can't really stop you from, uhh, tinkering with PulseAudio on Linux, maybe doing a little rerouting, and et voila, who ordered PCM? Obviously everyone's interested in making such systems be full-stack all the way down to the hardware level in the very long term, but for now, Spotify's entire DRM model is based (very successfully!) on this status quo. It could be argued that this is why they're actually delivering Ogg audio (I'm not sure of the bitrate) but the more logical explanation is that it requires much less diskspace. But I'm sure everyone in the industry is aware of the above, and it's factored in somehow. So the cyberpunk distopian worst case scenario is speakers with SoC DACs woven into the acuator coil in the speaker itself, but I strongly (and with much relief) suspect this is objectively quite unlikely.