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AirPods Delay Attributed To Apple Ensuring Both Earpieces Receive Audio At Same Time (macrumors.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Mac Rumors: AirPods were originally slated to launch in October, but the wireless earphones were later delayed. Apple said it needed "a little more time" before they are ready for customers, and it has yet to provide an official update since. While the exact reason for the delay remains unclear, a person familiar with the development of AirPods told The Wall Street Journal that Apple's troubles appear to be related to its "efforts to chart a new path for wireless headphones," in addition to resolving what happens when users lose one of the earpieces or the battery dies. The Wall Street Journal reports: "A person familiar with the development of the AirPod said the trouble appears to stem from Apple's effort to chart a new path for wireless headphones. In most other wireless headphones, only one earpiece receives a signal from the phone via wireless Bluetooth technology; it then transmits the signal to the other earpiece. Apple has said AirPod earpieces each receive independent signals from an iPhone, Mac or other Apple device. But Apple must ensure that both earpieces receive audio at the same time to avoid distortion, the person familiar with their development said. That person said Apple also must resolve what happens when a user loses one of the earpieces or the battery dies."
Apple should get out of the Courage business and get back into making computer hardware.
I don't know how much more "courage" the industry can take...
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Christmas is officially ruined.
Back in my day we had wires, and no worries about synchronization or worries about single earbuds running our of battery.
You'd have thought Apple would have a working solution *before* trying to kill off the 3.5mm jack.
Next up: Apple complicates toilet paper.
Table-ized A.I.
...according to Gruber.
1. Build audience of people who buy products based on hype alone.
2. Make those products cheaper, crappier and more awkward.
3. ???
4. Profit!
Alternative Right.
Vs the existing implementation of sending the audio to one and having it relay the audio to the other? Apple's method would have less latency and higher throughput but does that matter for this application?
My headphones with the headphone plug get left and right at the same time, everyfricken time.
1. user loses an earpiece
2. battery dies
3. battery loses an earpiece
4. user dies
=
Meeting on Tue to discuss 1 & 2
Meeting on Thu to brainstorm 3,4 (tentative)
=
company meet with outside consultant Wed/reorg?
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Make then use regular off-the-shelf heading aid batteries. User replaceable and available at any pharmacy.
Bha-ha-ha-ha...
Oh, you're serious.
How is Apple going to make money off the the batteries that way? Now they might stamp an apple logo on some off-the-shelf hearing-aid batteries, polish them to a mirror finish, and put them in some slick looking packaging and sell them for 8X the price. Excuse me while I go patent my new business model...
They released their flagship product (iPhone) that requires wireless headphones by default, and don't have the wireless headphones ready for sale synchronized with the release?
The US economy actually depends on innovation similar to how the Middle East economies depend on oil. We are innovation addicts.
It's a myth that innovation itself is needed to stimulate consumption. There are plenty of existing things people already want, if they simply had the money.
But, anything that becomes a commodity to manufacture or manage gets shipped to cheap 3rd-world manufacturers (C3WM) where labor is cheaper. To maintain the USA's higher cost of living, we have to push the envelope to create new devices and markets that are too cutting edge to be commoditized (yet).
For example, when personal computers were new, they were mostly made in the USA. As they became more of a commodity, their production shifted overseas. Jobs himself used to assemble Apple computers in his garage.
Apple similarly knows they have to push the envelope to avoid being bowled over by C3WM who can throw labor at the problem. The expense and complexity of wireless earphones may seem like overkill now, but if they make Apple products slightly more convenient than the others, they have a sales and marketing edge over the C3WM that allows them to charge a premium.
Eventually the C3WM will catch up in wireless earphones and every phone will support them, and Apple will have to move on to the next Next Big Thing (which is probably already in their lab).
Thus, it's not just a "first world problem", but a first world survival technique (if you want to survive as a first-worlder).
Table-ized A.I.
So apple is charting a new path with their headphones... but what happens when a user loses a headphone or the battery dies? Perhaps they should have talked with someone familiar with their development.
Seriously... that summary is crap and made head spin trying to make sense of it.
Is quite repetitive.
Is quite repetitive.
This summary is quite repetitive.
#DeleteChrome
Apple also must resolve what happens when a user loses one of the earpieces or the battery dies
What's supposed to happen? FindMyDeadEarpiece[tm]?
So basically you are saying these headphones (and Apple products) are not manufactured in C3WM countries? What planet are you from?
So, there's 50 million urban youths?
Or maybe you're stereotyping a bit.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
I saw that rumor Samsung, but it's not too late to retain a headphone jack in the S8. Please don't be courageous.
I guess I'm behind the times because I don't have this problem with my ordinary wired earbuds. Woe is me.
Please donate money to me so I can buy this expensive, technologically inferior bit of crap.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
CSR has several "receive-and-forward-in-sync" chipsets available. Of course, Apple doesn't like CSR for iOS type devices (hence no AptX for iOS, but AptX for OSX). But then, if they used the proven, off-the-shelf solution they couldn't brag about their W1 chip (which apparently doesn't work as well as the existing solutions), so... Courage?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I'm waiting for a phone company to show some real courage and buck trends.
Give me a fatter phone. Use that extra space for more battery and useful ports. Maybe even make the battery removable. Add some rubberized trim around the edges for better grip and drop/impact protection.
Seriously, no one cares if it's 12.3 grams heavier, or 5.1 mm thicker. And we've long since reached a point where the internals are good enough. The incremental updates every year are nice for some top-end applications, or flexing them benchmark scores, but don't really affect a user's day to day experiences.
Have the courage to make a phone people actually want, and see what sells.
This signature is false.
Not just one battery to keep charged but TWO! This no headphone jack ideal just sounds more courageous all the time.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Could you repeat that please?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
No, they're still smug too.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
So basically you aren't quite bright enough to realize you are posting in the comment section of a story that completely proves you are wrong.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
If they truly cared, they would have figured out how to make wireless earphones work properly before removing the headphone jack from their phones.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Well, I find it very hard to care what you think.
So that makes us even.
It is easy, if you don't want to lose one of the buds, glue a plastic cord to them and tie the cord together and then tie that cord to your mobile phone, never lose a ear bud again see, all too easy ;DDD.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
About 80% of the US population lives in urban areas. About 27% of the US population is aged 21 or under. That means about 22% of the US population is 21 or younger, and lives in urban areas. Given a population of 325 million, that's about 71 million urban people aged 21 or under. So his estimate of 50 million youths is probably pretty accurate...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
If they did care, they could have used the CSR 8670 which supports device-to-device syncing and streaming, as used in the Earin and Bragi Dash products. Out-of-the-box, off-the-shelf operation as needed by the AirPods. But then, why use something everyone else uses (that works), when you can invent your own (W1) that doesn't? Because - courage!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
You don't seem to quite understand that design for manufacturability is in fact an integral part of a sound engineering practice.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I'll give you a hint, they didn't get all that money by hating their customers.
Why do we need cellphones?
1. The iPhone 7 does NOT require wireless headphones by default. That's retarded.
2. There are thousands of wireless headphones that work with the iPhone 7 (ever heard of Bluetooth?).
they aren't thinking about headphone jacks.
All phone companies know that the real way to make billions is to be build a 4 inch thick brick with 2 weeks of battery life; a phone where every component can be swapped using thumb screws.
But, alas, phone companies hate making money. That's the only possible explanation.
I don't think that's going to be a problem. From what I've read, humans treat sounds as simultaneous if they occur within 0-20ms of each other (depending on loudness, this can go up to as much as 100ms). Literature on audio-video simultaneity is much more complicated so it's harder to give solid numbers, especially since people's brains apparently quickly adapt to ignore the effect of slightly out-of-sync videos, but I'd say your average person would find it hard to notice any audio-video lag shorter than 80ms. In any case, a few dozen microseconds either way certainly won't be noticed by the user.
Instead, I'd say the problem that will plague most airpod users will be audio dropping out altogether from wireless congestion in crowded areas.
is screwing your customers, then ok. Personally I prefer companies that make lots of great products and sell them for barely any profit so I get to have great stuff for less. A company with huge profit margins is a company that is charging more than they have to.
If you are an investor, liking a company to make a high profit margin makes sense, though I still have to question it in the case of Apple since they hoard the cash rather than pay it out as a dividend. However if as a consumer you applaud high profit margin you are silly.
Problem 1 - Lose one earpiece.
Solution 1 - Maybe use a tether of some sort to keep the earpieces together?
Problem 2 - Battery dies
Solution 2 - Maybe have that tether double as a charging lead? You could plug it into some sort of handy port on the phone to keep the batteries charged up.
Problem 3 - Audio sync between earpieces.
Solution 3 - Perhaps shift the audio hardware to the phone, decode the audio there and then transfer simple audio signals down the tether to the earpieces? That might work.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
They are mostly software driven. The hardware is not the key.
Table-ized A.I.
You're so full of shit, it's running out your hater-ears.
No, no, it just looks like bird-poo is dripping out of your ears. Those little dangly bits are actually part of the AirPod's design.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
They're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars researching this, when they should have just stuck a $5 audio cable on them..
When we hear a sound and can tell what direction it comes from, the volume in one ear compared to the other usually helps only a little. Direction is determined more from which each the sound reaches first. There can be up to 0.7 ms of difference in time. So any sync issue that's anywhere near 0.7 ms will make it so the sound sounds like it's constantly coming from one direction, even if the volunteers are the same.
we don need no analog audio!
I have additional information on the "story".
* the trouble appears to stem from Apple's effort to chart a new path for wireless headphones.
* In other wireless headphones, only one earpiece receives a signal from the phone ; it then transmits the signal to the other earpiece.
* Apple has said AirPod earpieces each receive independent signals from an iPhone, Mac or other Apple device.
* Apple must ensure that both earpieces receive audio at the same time to avoid distortion
* Apple also must resolve what happens when a user loses one of the earpieces or the battery dies
Also
* the trouble appears to stem from Apple's effort to chart a new path for wireless headphones.
* In other wireless headphones, only one earpiece receives a signal from the phone ; it then transmits the signal to the other earpiece.
* Apple has said AirPod earpieces each receive independent signals from an iPhone, Mac or other Apple device.
* Apple must ensure that both earpieces receive audio at the same time to avoid distortion
* Apple also must resolve what happens when a user loses one of the earpieces or the battery dies
Also
* the trouble appears to stem from Apple's effort to chart a new path for wireless headphones.
* In other wireless headphones, only one earpiece receives a signal from the phone ; it then transmits the signal to the other earpiece.
* Apple has said AirPod earpieces each receive independent signals from an iPhone, Mac or other Apple device.
* Apple must ensure that both earpieces receive audio at the same time to avoid distortion
* Apple also must resolve what happens when a user loses one of the earpieces or the battery dies
removing the headphone jack was a stupid idea
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
"But Apple must ensure that both earpieces receive audio at the same time to avoid distortion, the person familiar with their development said."
So, I make a phone, shove it down your throats saying you either can buy generic crappier than crappy crap BT headphones or you can buy my fantastic BT headphones. There's only one catch: in can only play music in canon, but don't worry, I'll just need a bit to come up with a convincing selling point to convince you this is the technology of the future and all music was actually meant to be listened this way. Now go, spread the word.
Next time I'll convince you breathing is bad for you.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
And design-for-nonrepairability is part of a sound marketing scheme.
"Buy our new shit, same as the old shit but with fresh new DRM."
Enjoy your chastity devices, Applecucks! You didn't want to mess around with any of that non-Apple stuff anyway. It might give you cooties!
MATH! Lord i wish more people knew and used it..
What is C3WM? I just Googled the term and the only relevant result was this post.
Target is one I can think of off the top of my head. They have extremely low profit margins, in the realm of 3%. So you know that you are getting pretty much the best price they can offer you when you shop there based on what they are paying and the overhead of running their stores.
In terms of making lower margins than Apple though, that would be basically anyone. Apple's margins are INSANE. The only companies that see margins as high as they do are software companies, and then only a few. No other electronics manufacturer is even close.
For $159, they better make sure they work. Can you imagine the backlash?
Point of order... skepticism is NOT hate. It has been two years but Apple is the company whose CEO made fun of people that expect to use a computer longer than three years from date of purchase. Expecting a company with Apple's track record to care about a produce they have marketed for more than 30 seconds after the OEM warrantee expires is total fantasy.
NRRPT/RCT
If they truly cared, they would have figured out how to make wireless earphones work properly before removing the headphone jack from their phones.
Spoken like someone who has never created anything.
If they did care, they could have used the CSR 8670 which supports device-to-device syncing and streaming, as used in the Earin and Bragi Dash products. Out-of-the-box, off-the-shelf operation as needed by the AirPods. But then, why use something everyone else uses (that works), when you can invent your own (W1) that doesn't? Because - courage!
I am quickly going to be out of my depth relative to a BT developer like you; but it looks like the CSR8670 uses AptX, which is not only proprietary (and licensed!) (whereas the W1 is backwards-compatible with BT 4.0, IIRC); but also does nothing to fix the connectivity problems rampant in BT headsets, whereas, if the reviews of the Beats 'phones that use W1 are correct, connectivity using the W1 is a large step above everyone else.
And from what I have read, the Bragi Dash is nothing to Brag about. In fact, the Bragi Dash website talks about troubleshooting intra-pair communications dropouts and other issues.
And I note that the Bragi does NOT use BT for the intra-pair communications; but rather what appears to be a proprietary comm. protocol. Although you say that there is a provision for "device-to-device syncing" in the 8670, unless you are talking about the AptX-low latency support, which only states an absolutely horrible 40 ms. of "latency" (which I don't know if that means that's as good as it gets for "device-to-device synchronization"). A 40 ms ear-to-ear delay would make the difference between a good, tight stereo image and something that sounds like it was played-back in a 20 foot hallway.
And besides, why would Apple put the nearly-obsolete 8670, which is BT 4.0 at best, into a product on the threshold of BT5 being approved?
Point of order... skepticism is NOT hate. It has been two years but Apple is the company whose CEO made fun of people that expect to use a computer longer than three years from date of purchase. Expecting a company with Apple's track record to care about a produce they have marketed for more than 30 seconds after the OEM warrantee expires is total fantasy.
And yet Apple has a pretty damn good record of supporting stuff long after the warranty expires, even in the U.S., which does NOT have strong consumer protections in that regard...
It's as if they had to do some big R&D project to figure out how to sync separate digital audio receivers. We've been doing things like this in the open-source world for years now--I hacked together a synchronized multi-sink audio system as a weekend project in 2011, for example.
That was UDP/IP/ethernet, but the same principles of latency-matching apply pretty much regardless of the underlying transport.
I suspect that this actually has nothing to do with "[having difficulty figuring out how to] ensure that both earpieces receive audio at the same time to avoid distortion"--because, frankly, I don't think the people at Apple are so stupid as to think they need to invent latency-matching themselves and then also have difficulty with it.
They're probably just having difficulty sourcing parts from one of their vendors or something, but claims like `oh it turned out to be very hard to synchronize playback wirelessly because we're breaking so much new ground with multiple independent receivers' reads as much more profound to the general public who don't actually even know where to begin thinking through something like that.
Having the universe conspire against you with things like physics and math, vs. having let some plebeian manufacturing house upset your schedule due to retooling-problems or materials shortage or some local holiday you didn't know about... or whatever. Which would you rather have as part of your narrative?
-rozzin.
CSR 8670 doesn't guarantee that two audio streams fed to two unsynchronised devices are in sync during playback.
There's too many issues with Jitter and varying clock rate of individual sound cards (which is what the ear buds are).
Personally I don't think this can be solved without some shared clock between the two buds. Maybe a high power microwave signal as the clock source beamed straight though your head.
Considering the vertigo-inducing result that even a tiny bit of jitter and/or frequency-drift WILL produce in stereo audio playback, you might be right.
Like it or not, the only way Apple is going to be able to fix this (or at least spackle-over it nicely!) will be for them to declare one earbud as "Master", and have that do comm. of raw output data over to the other 'bud, with enough FIFO to allow them to present the output to the DAC sections in perfect sync.
But the trouble with all that is that you have a "Master" (the two earbuds are no longer "peers"), and the additional FIFO means additional latency...
That might be true, but I am mostly talking about the difficulty of a good implementation and not so much the rational of the feature(s). Latency can be a tricky issue when both software processing and error correction of radio signals is involved, let alone battery issues.
A sloppy implementation may be relatively easy, but Apple high standards in general.
Table-ized A.I.
wire.
cheap 3rd-world manufacturers (C3WM)
He defined the term before using it.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Such as their support of touch disease? Charging people $250 for a fix to a manufacturing defect; such courage!
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Such as their support of touch disease? Charging people $250 for a fix to a manufacturing defect; such courage!
When it appears that it is the result of product abuse by the customer, yes. And BTW, if the customer is repeatedly dropping their phone and/or turning it into a boomerang-shape, that is NOT a "manufacturing" (or "engineering") defect. It is "abnormal wear and tear", and you can find many examples of this happening with other OEM's phones, too, under similar conditions. It is just more difficult to search for, since nobody gave those examples a catchy, easily-searchable "name". But Samsung, HTC, LG, etc. all have suffered with BGA packages breaking-free of their solder in the field.
Um, the bending issue with the iPhone is a manufacturing defect. They made the phone too thin with no support, therefore it bent easily, leading to touch disease. It is not caused by dropping in any way, which you would know if you looked into the electrical cause of the issue. You would almost think that Apple never had any issues with BGA packages.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/...
But yeah, I am sure that every manufacturer has design defects causing BGA chips to pop off the board because the phone doesn't have sufficient support of the circuitboard.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Um, the bending issue with the iPhone is a manufacturing defect. They made the phone too thin with no support, therefore it bent easily, leading to touch disease. It is not caused by dropping in any way, which you would know if you looked into the electrical cause of the issue. You would almost think that Apple never had any issues with BGA packages.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/...
But yeah, I am sure that every manufacturer has design defects causing BGA chips to pop off the board because the phone doesn't have sufficient support of the circuitboard.
Despite your snarky response, the bending issue with the iPhone 6 is not a manufacturing defect. If, as you say, they made the phone "too thin with no support", that would be a design defect. And the fact that the "bendgate" meme came and went so fast tells me that it was almost assuredly a "fake news story".
I have looked into the "electrical" cause of the issue, and it can be, and is, caused by repeated drops to a hard surface, which breaks the solder ball connections on large BGA packages.
And yes, Apple (like many others) have had occasional problems with BGA packages in the past, caused by bad solder-balls, warped chip packages, warped PCBs, and all other manner of "co-planarity" issues. If you looked at the insides of pretty much any smartphone, you would not try to pin (no pun) the problem on "insufficient support of the circuitboard". There simply isn't enough free-air-space in a typical smartphone for a board to flex much at all. Not saying it can't happen; but I'd put that particular cause on the "less-probable" end of the spectrum.
Oh, and yes, nearly every OEM at one time or another has had issues with BGAs. Several years ago, NVidia had a couple of YEAR'S worth of BGA problems with their GPUs and Video Cards, that affected nearly every product they were a part of. But don't believe me, do your own damned research.
Sorry. Apple is just held to a higher standard, and so when their stuff breaks, people tend to bitch. Loudly. Then the Haters pick it up, and the Meme begins...