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I do like my tech device ecosystems working seamlessly. What's nice about each of the Apple, Google, and Amazon ecosystems is that the devices all work seamles

by Johnie 3y ago

I do like my tech device ecosystems working seamlessly. What's nice about each of the Apple, Google, and Amazon ecosystems is that the devices all work seamlessly within the ecosystem. This is much harder to do across companies. Take for example, Beats headphones integrate seamlessly with the iPhone, MacBook Pro, and AppleTV. Or Nest integrating with Google Home Or Ring integrating with Amazon Echo. There are tradeoffs to be made that benefit the consumer.

michaelt 3y ago
If it's truly difficult to use non-Apple headphones with the iPhone, some would say that proves we need more competition law enforcement, not less.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  Bluetooth is famously finicky. Apple headphones "just work" with Apple devices. You can switch audio from your phone to your Apple TV with a single confirmation click. No need to unpair and then manually initiate a connection on your desired device. I don't know how competition law enforcement is going to make Bluetooth work better? But your solution would be to make Apple technology worse?
  - mvdtnz 3y ago
    Have you used a bluetooth device in the last 8 years?
  - mattlondon 3y ago
    FWIW, I've found outside of the apple ecosystem that Bluetooth just works. Everything supports pairing to multiple devices. I have a M1 MBP that I sometimes use non-apple Bluetooth headphones with and I can't say it is any different than android or windows. You will get problems if you buy no-name things from Amazon, but you always get problems when you buy anything no-name off of Amazon. You will also get problems if you use Linux of course (even with good headphones), but that obviously goes without saying. Yes yes I am sure you can get Bluetooth to work reliably in Linux by just recompiling the kernel and change your alsa config to use jack to remap your output to yada yada yada... No thanks.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - nothead 3y ago
    Bluetooth isn't as finicky as it appears when you use non-Apple products. After the initial pairing process, I can connect any of my devices to any other device with a bluetooth radio, and all I need to do is occasionally tell one device what my intent was if it connects to the wrong thing (say, connecting to my car instead of my headphones. Or connecting to the wrong TV). Some cheaper devices are more difficult (I have a super cheap bluetooth receiver for an old car where you need to turn on the BT on the phone before turning on the dongle) but nothing along the lines of "unpair, repair, unpair, repair". The behavior of Apple devices interacting with non-Apple devices is an intentional design choice by Apple to NOT support seamless interoperability. That's very different from the underlying tech being inferior to Apple's proprietary solutions.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > If it's truly difficult to use non-Apple headphones with the iPhone Huh what? At least the large brands have pretty much zero issues. The exception is battery power indicators (AirPods don't show power level on Android phones, and JBL's PartyBox and Anker's SoundCore don't show power level on iOS/macOS devices), and for older wired headphones the behavior of the buttons may be weird depending on if they have been designed for Apple or for Android.
  - baq 3y ago
    I've got the soundcore q45 and battery display works fine on iphones and macbooks. sound quality is potato level in calls, though.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      Yeah but that's common across all headsets, including AirPods. As soon as the microphone is enabled, it falls back from high-quality AAC to the ages old SBC profile.
      - baq 3y ago
        If there's one thing I can't understand about modern wireless voice comms, it's this. We can push megabits per second of pixels, with low latency, over wireless with miracast, but can't figure out how to push 16-20 kHz of 8-bit audio signal full duplex? It makes zero sense.
        mschuster91 3y ago
        The problem is processing power. Encoding of anything takes a lot of battery power, so the complexity must be kept at a minimum. That said there is a successor called LC3 [1], but hardware support for it has been lacking as it's a relatively fresh standard. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LC3_(codec) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LC3_(codec)
taeric 3y ago
Standards help get ecosystems working seamlessly more so than consolidation does. See, for example, cell phones and televisions. More, look at how non-integrated much of the big companies are. Sony used to amuse the heck out of me for how isolated all of their products were from each other. Microsoft, similarly, had some odd screwups in their own ecosystems. Often by trying to present it as if they had a set of APIs that would work on all of their offerings, but with hard to reason about restrictions based on what you were targeting. Amazon was similarly run as a series of different teams/companies that all happen to be under the same umbrella company name.
whatwhaaaaat 3y ago
Glad you mentioned nest integration. Something that played well with other companies/open source until google bought it. There is nothing preventing cross company integration but these companies themselves. That behavior should not be rewarded by customers or allowed by regulatory agencies.
crote 3y ago
> This is much harder to do across companies. Because those tech companies intentionally make it unnecessarily hard. Rather than creating an (open) standard they dig out an extra moat around their walled garden, and make it essentially impossible to release well-integrated products without paying the Apple/Google/Amazon Tax - if they even allow it at all. Just compare it with a standard like Wifi or Displayport: it's orders of magnitude more complex than pushing some audio to a headphone, yet it works seamlessly across dozens of vendors. When was the last time you had to worry about your computer with a Windows Ethernet port not being compatible with a router providing Apple Ethernet?
- skydhash 3y ago
  I like Apple hardware, more so because the developers has put out great apps on them. But yes, it's mildly infuriating when considering how closed the ecosystem with no reason other than control. I have a 2011 mac mini I used as a server and Linux Mint works beautifully on it. But no proper support for Linux on M1. And HomePods not having line in. At least Apple has a Right Way (tm) for using their devices. There are worse limitations on other's device (Kindle not supporting epubs, smart TVs being smart first instead of being a TV,...)
  - nothead 3y ago
    [dead]
  - 76SlashDolphin 3y ago
    FYI, Kindle has supported ePUBs for a while now. You can even send them to your Kindle over email.
- WWLink 3y ago
  Man can you imagine if google, ms, apple, et all got together to make some open standards? It would be fucking awesome! Not that it hasn't been done before, but it's been a while. x_X
  - ljm 3y ago
megablast 3y ago
> devices all work seamlessly within the ecosystem. Until they don’t. Adding an Apple Watch to my iPhone means it no longer supports airdrop, and I can’t install apps to my iPhone via Xcode.
- macintux 3y ago
  > Adding an Apple Watch to my iPhone means it no longer supports airdrop Reference? I admit I use Airdrop once every 5 years or so, but I've had a Watch for longer than that.
MiguelX413 3y ago
That hardly constitutes an argument in favor of monopolies.
baq 3y ago
Apple is probably right. Nest… is that still a thing? Ring-Alexa integration is good but not great. Amazon Music the app integration with Alexa is… non-existent? I can’t play music on my phone and move it to an echo device. I’m now resorting to posting on HN and hoping that a product dev or PM notices.
jemmyw 3y ago
Why would headphones need to integrate seamlessly with one set of computing devices but not another? This sounds like a market failure rather than a nice thing - anyone should be able to make headphones that seamlessly integrate with all platforms.
datavirtue 3y ago
Henceforth, all technology will communicate via publicly documented APIs.
ljm 3y ago
Google, Meta and Slack have all had their hand in EEE'ing XMPP, which for a long time was the standard for open messaging. Slack and Discord have gone a level above and locked IRC behind their walled gardens, despite their very existence being based on IRC. A healthy market would see casual interop between these services, and they all started with that interop before slowly strangling it out and monetising through adverts, tracking, data mining, and exclusivity. Open protocols allow you to bypass that though, which is why each of these networks are locked down. There's no reason why your Airpods should talk over a proprietary Apple protocol and your web apps only work 100% effectively on chrome browsers, having inferior functionality by design if you don't commit fully to the landlord of your walled garden of choice.

by Johnie 3y ago

michaelt 3y ago

If it's truly difficult to use non-Apple headphones with the iPhone, some would say that proves we need more competition law enforcement, not less.

crazygringo 3y ago
Bluetooth is famously finicky. Apple headphones "just work" with Apple devices. You can switch audio from your phone to your Apple TV with a single confirmation click. No need to unpair and then manually initiate a connection on your desired device. I don't know how competition law enforcement is going to make Bluetooth work better? But your solution would be to make Apple technology worse?
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  Have you used a bluetooth device in the last 8 years?
- mattlondon 3y ago
  FWIW, I've found outside of the apple ecosystem that Bluetooth just works. Everything supports pairing to multiple devices. I have a M1 MBP that I sometimes use non-apple Bluetooth headphones with and I can't say it is any different than android or windows. You will get problems if you buy no-name things from Amazon, but you always get problems when you buy anything no-name off of Amazon. You will also get problems if you use Linux of course (even with good headphones), but that obviously goes without saying. Yes yes I am sure you can get Bluetooth to work reliably in Linux by just recompiling the kernel and change your alsa config to use jack to remap your output to yada yada yada... No thanks.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- nothead 3y ago
  Bluetooth isn't as finicky as it appears when you use non-Apple products. After the initial pairing process, I can connect any of my devices to any other device with a bluetooth radio, and all I need to do is occasionally tell one device what my intent was if it connects to the wrong thing (say, connecting to my car instead of my headphones. Or connecting to the wrong TV). Some cheaper devices are more difficult (I have a super cheap bluetooth receiver for an old car where you need to turn on the BT on the phone before turning on the dongle) but nothing along the lines of "unpair, repair, unpair, repair". The behavior of Apple devices interacting with non-Apple devices is an intentional design choice by Apple to NOT support seamless interoperability. That's very different from the underlying tech being inferior to Apple's proprietary solutions.
mschuster91 3y ago
> If it's truly difficult to use non-Apple headphones with the iPhone Huh what? At least the large brands have pretty much zero issues. The exception is battery power indicators (AirPods don't show power level on Android phones, and JBL's PartyBox and Anker's SoundCore don't show power level on iOS/macOS devices), and for older wired headphones the behavior of the buttons may be weird depending on if they have been designed for Apple or for Android.
- baq 3y ago
  I've got the soundcore q45 and battery display works fine on iphones and macbooks. sound quality is potato level in calls, though.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    Yeah but that's common across all headsets, including AirPods. As soon as the microphone is enabled, it falls back from high-quality AAC to the ages old SBC profile.
    - baq 3y ago
      If there's one thing I can't understand about modern wireless voice comms, it's this. We can push megabits per second of pixels, with low latency, over wireless with miracast, but can't figure out how to push 16-20 kHz of 8-bit audio signal full duplex? It makes zero sense.
      - mschuster91 3y ago
        The problem is processing power. Encoding of anything takes a lot of battery power, so the complexity must be kept at a minimum. That said there is a successor called LC3 [1], but hardware support for it has been lacking as it's a relatively fresh standard. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LC3_(codec) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LC3_(codec)

taeric 3y ago

Standards help get ecosystems working seamlessly more so than consolidation does. See, for example, cell phones and televisions. More, look at how non-integrated much of the big companies are. Sony used to amuse the heck out of me for how isolated all of their products were from each other. Microsoft, similarly, had some odd screwups in their own ecosystems. Often by trying to present it as if they had a set of APIs that would work on all of their offerings, but with hard to reason about restrictions based on what you were targeting. Amazon was similarly run as a series of different teams/companies that all happen to be under the same umbrella company name.

whatwhaaaaat 3y ago

Glad you mentioned nest integration. Something that played well with other companies/open source until google bought it. There is nothing preventing cross company integration but these companies themselves. That behavior should not be rewarded by customers or allowed by regulatory agencies.

crote 3y ago

> This is much harder to do across companies. Because those tech companies intentionally make it unnecessarily hard. Rather than creating an (open) standard they dig out an extra moat around their walled garden, and make it essentially impossible to release well-integrated products without paying the Apple/Google/Amazon Tax - if they even allow it at all. Just compare it with a standard like Wifi or Displayport: it's orders of magnitude more complex than pushing some audio to a headphone, yet it works seamlessly across dozens of vendors. When was the last time you had to worry about your computer with a Windows Ethernet port not being compatible with a router providing Apple Ethernet?

skydhash 3y ago
I like Apple hardware, more so because the developers has put out great apps on them. But yes, it's mildly infuriating when considering how closed the ecosystem with no reason other than control. I have a 2011 mac mini I used as a server and Linux Mint works beautifully on it. But no proper support for Linux on M1. And HomePods not having line in. At least Apple has a Right Way (tm) for using their devices. There are worse limitations on other's device (Kindle not supporting epubs, smart TVs being smart first instead of being a TV,...)
- nothead 3y ago
  [dead]
- 76SlashDolphin 3y ago
  FYI, Kindle has supported ePUBs for a while now. You can even send them to your Kindle over email.
WWLink 3y ago
Man can you imagine if google, ms, apple, et all got together to make some open standards? It would be fucking awesome! Not that it hasn't been done before, but it's been a while. x_X
- ljm 3y ago

megablast 3y ago

> devices all work seamlessly within the ecosystem. Until they don’t. Adding an Apple Watch to my iPhone means it no longer supports airdrop, and I can’t install apps to my iPhone via Xcode.

macintux 3y ago
> Adding an Apple Watch to my iPhone means it no longer supports airdrop Reference? I admit I use Airdrop once every 5 years or so, but I've had a Watch for longer than that.

MiguelX413 3y ago

That hardly constitutes an argument in favor of monopolies.

baq 3y ago

Apple is probably right. Nest… is that still a thing? Ring-Alexa integration is good but not great. Amazon Music the app integration with Alexa is… non-existent? I can’t play music on my phone and move it to an echo device. I’m now resorting to posting on HN and hoping that a product dev or PM notices.

jemmyw 3y ago

Why would headphones need to integrate seamlessly with one set of computing devices but not another? This sounds like a market failure rather than a nice thing - anyone should be able to make headphones that seamlessly integrate with all platforms.

datavirtue 3y ago

Henceforth, all technology will communicate via publicly documented APIs.

ljm 3y ago

Google, Meta and Slack have all had their hand in EEE'ing XMPP, which for a long time was the standard for open messaging. Slack and Discord have gone a level above and locked IRC behind their walled gardens, despite their very existence being based on IRC. A healthy market would see casual interop between these services, and they all started with that interop before slowly strangling it out and monetising through adverts, tracking, data mining, and exclusivity. Open protocols allow you to bypass that though, which is why each of these networks are locked down. There's no reason why your Airpods should talk over a proprietary Apple protocol and your web apps only work 100% effectively on chrome browsers, having inferior functionality by design if you don't commit fully to the landlord of your walled garden of choice.