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AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem

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Re: AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mercy killed? Flash was great. There were so many inventive games and animations in that era. Apple didn’t mercy kill anything - they just removed a threat to their walled garden ecosystem using their anticompetitive position, but dressed it up as a security issue.

> Flash was great. It had a great number of CVEs, you mean? _modern_ HTML and JS have eclipsed flash in all meaningful ways.

By stitching together an inconsistent hodgepodge of sometimes overlapping languages, technologies and APIs. On the user-side, I'm glad I don't need a proprietary player for such things any longer, but I sure hate doing anything remotely touching Web, in particular for the kind of highly interactive experiences Flash was good at.

In truth, the Web has eclipsed Flash, the player, but not the product.

Re: AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem

#92
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm convinced it's impossible to implement the BT spec without MANY of these kinds of bugs popping up. Apple mercy-killed Adobe Flash, we should be asking they do the same to Bluetooth. I'm sick of living in a reality where no one thinks to make something better. It has to be possible.

Mercy killed? Flash was great. There were so many inventive games and animations in that era. Apple didn’t mercy kill anything - they just removed a threat to their walled garden ecosystem using their anticompetitive position, but dressed it up as a security issue.

I’m amazed by the retconning of Flash into a great system.

I agree that some of the content produced in that era was great and it was nice to have tools available, but using Flash and doing the whole browser plugin thing was not great at all.

It’s actually great now that we have actual standards compliant ways of doing animations and other things in the browser without restricting it to one company’s little domain that must be used as a plugin for browsers.

Re: AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem

#93
I’m trying to connect my airports pro 2 to my old, old 2011 iPod. It’s not going very well.

While I haven’t managed to find anything close to an answer using google, chatgpt is quite confident it’s because of Bluetooth versions.

Surely Bluetooth 5 is backwards compatible, but then again if the AirPods thinks it’s connected to an iOS device it seems reasonable that it will start using all the proprietary iOS features and then communication breaks down.

So to me, liberation of airpods is an on-device issue.

Re: AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem

#94
post #20

Cool project, not cool that it needs to exist. Apple isn’t only content to leech off OSS software, they have to force the existence of more of it to workaround what they closed off.

To be clear, you can use AirPods with an Android device for audio.

It’s the extra convenience features integrated into iOS and macOS to change certain settings that have been reverse engineered here. And you can’t actually even use them without rooting your phone and applying a patch to Android’s Bluetooth stack.

Re: AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem

#95
post #64
post #20

Cool project, not cool that it needs to exist. Apple isn’t only content to leech off OSS software, they have to force the existence of more of it to workaround what they closed off.

Seeing how much effort this takes makes me feel vindicated for never buying in to the wireless-earbud trend at all. I love love love having one of the few modern Androids with a real TRRS jack (REDMAGIC 9S Pro) and wired earbuds (Etymōtic ER4XR), that I never need to charge, that can't get lost, and that can't spy on me: https://i.imgur.com/4yymgYO.jpeg What a silly feature list the AirPods have, too. Transparency? I…

> What a silly feature list the AirPods have, too. Transparency? I use earbuds to avoid having to hear the outside world.

What a silly thing to dismiss a product over. The transparency levels are actually a great feature. You can go from noise cancelling to being able to have a perfect conversation with someone or listen for the kids with a quick squeeze of the earbud. I use it all the time.

Likewise your comment that it’s superior to buy a separate clip and attach the wire to yourself so people can yank them out is just asinine. Or is this parody? It’s hard to tell.

This whole comment feels like someone trying to convince themselves that the thing they didn’t buy is actually terrible and bad, so they can pat themself on the back for not buying it.

Re: AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem

#97
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple have been ‘extending’ the Bluetooth stack for quite awhile. They introduced some BLE features before the spec was finished (I think some 3rd party hearing aids were also compatible). I haven’t used non apple earphones for awhile but the seamless connectivity performance of AirPods would suggest this was done for performance, not to deliberately lock in devices. This 2020 paper is great at breaking down some of…

> They introduced some BLE features before the spec was finished In their defence, they went with Lightning shortly before the USB-C spec was finalized. Then, to avoid their customers being screwed over by constantly changing the connector, they kind of had to stick with it for a decade. People will complain if they push features that are ahead of the spec, and they'll complain if they let the spec be finalized befor…

If Apple wasn't forced by the EU, they would try to preserve their walled garden as much as possible. iMessage is the prime example of this.

Re: AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem

#98
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is there evidence it’s for vendor lock in purposes? airpods have a pretty stellar connection for bluetooth, wouldn’t be surprised if there were performance reasons for them going off spec

Specifications are there for a reason... Why use Bluetooth at all if they don't actually use it properly?

This is Microsoft's playbook from many years ago: embrace, extend, extinguish.

Re: AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem

#100
It seems to let you access head tracking data, so now I'm really curious if it would be accurate enough to use with games (eg, microsoft flight sim/arma 3/euro truck simulator 2 head tracking). There is probably a lot of other interesting use cases for it too, but I'm stuck with windows for now so :(
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