The lag is what I'm curious about. Given the lag I experience while streaming Bluetooth from my iPhone to my car, I'm expecting to see about the same amount of lag. Which is annoying because it's definitely a worse experience than a cable.
I'm not defending the the removal of the headphone by any means, but you are unlikely to experience any lag with the lightning cable. It's just a pcm bytestream getting out of the phone into a dac in the headphones. The latency won't be any different than what already is.
If you are talking about their new wireless headphones, It will probably have some delay but probably not even close to bluetooth. They could just modulate that same bytestream to some ghz radio frequency without adding anything remotely as over engineered and cumbersome as a bluetooth stack. I'm pretty sure those airpods are not bluetooth compatible.
I didn't catch that the AirPods aren't Bluetooth. I wonder if that was designed based on problems with Bluetooth or more to get tighter integration with Siri. Perhaps they needed it to sync pairings over iCloud.
> If you are talking about their new wireless headphones, It will probably have some delay but probably not even close to bluetooth. They could just modulate that same bytestream to some ghz radio frequency without adding anything remotely as over engineered and cumbersome as a bluetooth stack. I'm pretty sure those airpods are not bluetooth compatible.
What about encryption?
Not to mention that Bluetooth doesn't use PCM because of battery life constraints (more radio traffic == more energy used), I doubt that Apple's protocol is uncompressed.
There is no encryption AFAIK, and there wouldn't need to be any compression. Even today, you can connect a regular USB DAC / headphone amp to the iPhone via the USB camera connector dongle and use that. Any device that follows the USB audio standard is supported (depending on power draw, of course).
If you look at how old Bluetooth is, it wouldn't be surprising if a new system could be much more efficient. Uncompressed audio isn't high bandwidth by today's standards.
Bluetooth 4.0 is completely unrelated to Bluetooth 3 but for the name. It was a separate standard developed by Nokia and brought wholesale to the Bluetooth SIG and they effectively told them that's what 4.0 would be ^_^
Yes, it will have some lossless compression and encryption for sure. But I'm pretty sure it's a much simpler stack than bluetooth. Even the use case is different, they just want to send audio from your pocket to your ears and I trust their engineers to do that the smart way.
My car lags something fierce -- like a whole second or more. But my regular bluetooth headphones doesn't lag at all when connected to my phone or tablet. I even bluetooth-tether my tablet to my phone for Netflix and then listen over bluetooth.
Seems to me it's a solved problem for most devices.
Bluetooth audio lag does depend on the buffer size of the audio device. My car also has a two second lag when playing through Bluetooth, but my Bluetooth headphones have nearly no perceptible lag at all.
I have the Bose QC35s - there is zero lag when using them... however my car's bluetooth (seems a common thing) lags at least 1.5 seconds which is frustrating.
