VP8 and H.264 to both become mandatory for WebRTC

I think vp8 doesn't have too many hardware implementation either. h264's situation is better though.

That assumes their users actually ever encounter such music. I fully expect that significantly less than 1% of Apple customers ever encounter FLAC music, and those that do, do so infrequently and with other options made available as well. Personally, every time I've seen FLAC as an option, it's been one of a set of options (typically including MP3 and AAC, and often even including ALAC).

> Clearly for Apple "benefit" means screwing users and degrading interoperability.

Bullshit. Nobody is being screwed here. Anyone who gets FLAC music is choosing to do so, and it's pretty trivial to reencode. And there is absolutely no interoperability issue here. FLAC is not a codec chosen for portability reasons; very few people have any reason to be using lossless audio to begin with.

> False pretenses to hide real intentions - retaining lock in and reducing interoperability, which were always Apple's notable goals

Bullshit, bullshit, and more bullshit. Apple was at the forefront of pushing to remove DRM on music, and you're trying to accuse them of lock-in? Either you're horribly deluded, or you have your own anti-Apple agenda that you're trying to push here. Either way, you're pulling this argument from thin air and it is entirely incorrect.

Not "their users", any users. FLAC is the only lossless format that's being actively used commercially (and not commercially) by various services and stores. So, their users encounter it as well when they deal with lossless audio.

> Anyone who gets FLAC music is choosing to do so

Yep, since it's the only practical lossless format offered as above. And Apple chose not to support it to screw their users.

> and it's pretty trivial to reencode.

Yep, it's not hard to reencode. Supporting it isn't hard either - all decent players do it (like VLC and etc.). Apple's one isn't decent though, it's crippled by design, with excuse that "it's easy to reencode". User friendliness just shines there.

FLAC is patent free and actively used (commercially including) by many parties big and small, so this legal FUD is totally unconvincing. ALAC isn't supported in hardware any better than FLAC, so that argument completely misses the point.

> Apple's already had their own lossless compression codec (ALAC) for over a decade

And for over than a decade "couldn't find resources" to support FLAC which is actually used unlike ALAC. Poor, poor Apple.

Yes, the concept is not what's at question here. What's at question is how many people actually are inclined to ever care about something like this, and the answer is almost nobody. Very few people care to reencode their audio files.

> Why so? Is it some kind of stereotype that Apple customers don't care about quality of music or can't be audiophiles?

Why do you leap to the worst possible assumption about everything Apple? You seem to have an extremely strong bias here.

Most Apple customers probably buy their music from the iTunes Music Store and don't ever think about reencoding it, because there's no point. Similarly, most people who buy music from other stores get it already encoded in a lossy format appropriate for listening to. Far and away the biggest reason to be reencoding is when ripping music from an audio CD, and iTunes already supports that. Once ripped, there's no reason to go about reencoding it again, as we've already long since passed the point where people can discern a difference.

The only really legitimate reason to be caring about this sort of thing is when you're doing professional audio work (as opposed to mucking about with music for personal listening), and people who are doing professional audio work aren't using iTunes for this work anyway so that's pretty irrelevant.

> Adding FLAC support in their QuickTime framework is trivial.

That's absurdly naive. It would be practically criminal negligence for Apple to download the latest libFLAC and drop it into the OS they ship to millions of customers without spending significant engineering resources reviewing the code. Then there's the ongoing maintenance burden, of dealing with upstream changes, local bugfixes, and just plain integration with the rest of the QuickTime stack. And if iTunes supports it, then iPhones and iPads really ought to support it if it's at all possible, and that's a really large engineering effort to do so in a way that's power-efficient, if that's even possible (given the lack of hardware support for it).

And that's just what comes to mind off the top of my head. I'm sure there's more that would be involved as well.

And for what? What would you gain from having iTunes support FLAC? You should be transcoding into some other format already for actual use in listening, because there's no point in carrying around large lossless files for personal listening, especially if you use any mobile devices (or laptops). You don't need iTunes to support FLAC just to transcode it, you already have options there, and as long as you aren't transcoding to Ogg Vorbis then your resulting file should work in iTunes (and on iPhones and iPads).