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AirPods Delay Attributed to Apple Ensuring Both Earpieces Receive Audio at Same Time [Updated]
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Some of Apple's products are starting to seem more like a Kickstarter campaign than anything else...
A juvenile and snarky put-down rather than taking a bit of time putting some thought into and responding to the poster's comment with intelligent discourse. Speaks to what the poster was talking about.
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So Apple is finding out that there is such a thing as 'too small'? I'm shocked...
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Except we don't get our money back, or get new replacements when the junk fails?
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Except we don't get our money back, or get new replacements when the junk fails?
It's probably worse. Designed in powerpoint... er I mean keynote... same diff!
Nice try. But headphones
Nice try. But what benefit do wireless headphones provide? I can still be mobile with wired headphones. And I never need to worry about charging, latency, sound quality, expense and the worry of them falling out and getting lost.
Wires themselves aren't necessarily a problem. It's cheap, unreplacable cords in headphones that suck because it's the cord that invariably breaks at either the jack end or the earpiece/headphone end.
Manufacturers know this and have been taking consumers for a ride for years. They build in planned obsesence by purposefully making the connections weak so they have a limited lifespan, usually but often not even the minimum 1-year warranty period with standard use. They know most people don't even bother to follow up on warranties for headphones that cost less than $50 or $100.
This is where consumers have a vested interest in doing research, buying better and actually pursuing warranty rights even when the hassle doesn't seem worth it. It's too easy to just go buy another pair from the same or a different brand. But it'll invariably suffer the same problems unless we start to demand better. And the only thing they'll listen to is the power of your consumer dollar when you make purchasing decisions. Actively seek out those that do better and you can always negotiate before a sale. Say up front you care about reliability and longevity.
Even some of the brands that offer replaceable cords engage in anti-consumer tactics by doing things like using custom proprietary cords/connectors and I've seen cases where the cost of a replacement cord is virtually the same as the headphones themselves! (And this was for greater than $100 headphones)!
I'm kind of glad Apple is taking on this bull **** in the headphone industry. It really is worth it as a consumer to pursue reliability and build-quality when making buying decisions and to utilise your statutory rights and warranties as much as possible.
Manufacturers know this and have been taking consumers for a ride for years. They build in planned obsesence by purposefully making the connections weak so they have a limited lifespan, usually but often not even the minimum 1-year warranty period with standard use. They know most people don't even bother to follow up on warranties for headphones that cost less than $50 or $100.
This is where consumers have a vested interest in doing research, buying better and actually pursuing warranty rights even when the hassle doesn't seem worth it. It's too easy to just go buy another pair from the same or a different brand. But it'll invariably suffer the same problems unless we start to demand better. And the only thing they'll listen to is the power of your consumer dollar when you make purchasing decisions. Actively seek out those that do better and you can always negotiate before a sale. Say up front you care about reliability and longevity.
Even some of the brands that offer replaceable cords engage in anti-consumer tactics by doing things like using custom proprietary cords/connectors and I've seen cases where the cost of a replacement cord is virtually the same as the headphones themselves! (And this was for greater than $100 headphones)!
I'm kind of glad Apple is taking on this bull **** in the headphone industry. It really is worth it as a consumer to pursue reliability and build-quality when making buying decisions and to utilise your statutory rights and warranties as much as possible.
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No argument there, and those special use cases will require an adapter or dock, neither of which is a big deal. If you're connected to a home stereo or you're using the device for music composition, it's stationary anyway. Furthermore, if your device is connected via USB, it's probably being charged as well.
Apple designers are free to chose the component/feature mix they want for their product. You are free to not buy it if you don't like it. The issue I had with a comment from someone else was the suggestion that Apple only removed the jack to sell more AirPods and Cook should now be fired for this massive ****-up. I think that's absurd. I agree with you 100%. Removing the jack was a design decision. I believe Apple made that decision for the reason they have stated, to accommodate other hardware. Could they have made a fatter, heavier phone and kept the jack? Sure. But they didn't want to.
And they are delayed a bit. So what? In the end, it's no big deal. Now if they never ship or never work correctly, then yes, it's a much bigger issue. But a small delay? Who cares? They will ship soon enough, people will love them, and all of the histrionics on display by certain people will seem downright absurd in hindsight.
Seriously, is the answer to every problem firing someone?
With any reasonably large or ambitious project, or projects there is always a fair share of problems, missteps and difficulties. Acting as if everyone that happens to be at the helm or even individual employees should be immediately fired when something goes wrong is ridiculously short-sighted thinking.
There's been plenty of construction criticism about Apple here. As well as plenty of well-though out defenses. What I can't figure out is, what side are you on?
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Apple should go ahead and release the AirPods while knowing there is a problem. When consumers start complaining about the AirPods not working properly Apple can then blame the consumer for pushing them to far in the ears or dropping them too many times or playing the wrong kind of music and charge $150+ to fix the problem that was no fault of Apple.
Bingo. You've perfectly encapsulated the current business model of Apple.
Correct.
This isn't football or the Russian olympics.
This is the future of how we will connect with our devices.
Takes thought.
Takes time.
Apple is positioning and posturing and doing with what's available.
It's a great present now & better future coming.
Whenever it shows up.
➰
Then they'd better started this trial & error game with iPhone 6. Oral-B the New Standard of Ear Decoration, surprisingly leading to teething issues. Amateurs with 20 billion R&D exp/yearly - but hey, they harvest your sympathy (...)
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Here you are - bypassed the firewall and saved as a PDF
- http://www.filedropper.com/applesmysteriousairpodsdelaymarksraremisstep-wsj
I think it’s more about five straight years of missteps hidden behind the red herring of milked profits.
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“Paid freelance trolls” is, no doubt, just one of the many conspiracy theories which forms pedrotaquelim’s worldview.
Like Steve Jobs never had his share of missteps either.
I would argue it's all a matter of perspective. Where you see missteps by Tim Cook (implying some degree of gross incompetence), I feel it's simply growing pains by Apple. They want to grow the Apple ecosystem in a certain manner, can't show every product the same amount of love, and so some sacrifices invariably have to be made. You simply didn't like the compromises Apple has had to make so far, but that doesn't make Apple wrong for having made them.
I am not saying Tim Cook is perfect, but I do like his track record. I doubt there are many other people who can match his accomplishments, much less top them.
Apple definitely screwed up here, but about the speed of light thing, that's not relevant. There's probably a queue/buffer that needs to be filled. I believe processing time is the main cause of packet delay across the Internet.
(I'm not so much responding to you as continuing the same line of reasoning)
It has to be much better than a few ms. A few ms is good enough to sync audio to video-- it's the difference between seeing someone's mouth move and hearing their voice when you're standing next to them versus when you're standing a few feet away. Sound travels about a foot per millisecond.
Our detectable threshold for interaural time difference, the time difference between ears, is about 10µs (depending on the frequency) because we use the time difference between ears to triangulate where a sound is and our ears are only about a foot apart. If the phase shifts around, it sounds like the low frequencies are moving in space (for lower frequencies, about 1.5kHz and below, we localize sound by phase-- for higher frequencies we do it by amplitude).
As a reference, GPS is pretty much the best clock any of us have access to and it is capable of providing timing information to about 15ns of the system's atomic clocks. For the equipment most of us have, it's probably closer to 50-100ns. So Apple needs to get their time transfer to within a couple orders of magnitude of GPS.
NTP seems to give best case timing accuracy to about 1ms, which is way too coarse. It seems like BLE synchronization is capable of getting closer to 10µs, which is just at the upper limit of what's needed. I'm seeing some speculation that single digit µs sync is possible with the right software stack.
The biggest problem with time sync in a comms system is that the systems are usually optimized for communications-- the only thing it cares about is the bits, it doesn't really care when they arrived. The radios themselves need to be very well synchronized, but no effort is made to pass that sync information up through the hardware/software stack. Once the bits are stuck into a FIFO without time stamps and you cross clock domains, you can pretty much give up on knowing anything about timing.
That can all be dealt with though if you prioritize timing information in the hardware chain. That's presumably what the W1 provides.
So it seems feasible that with the right stack and good hardware support, Bluetooth should be able to sync across radios to better than 10µs without needing to add additional radios.
Apple has world class radio engineers-- you don't really think they were naive enough to just rely on open loop crystal stability, do you?That wasn't the only data. Look at the thread title
My post was going by the original article claim that the delay is about channel synchronization.
Hard to think of a manufacturing defect that could cause that, which wouldn't stem from a poor design. Like relying on matched timing crystals or something.
Now, if the thread title is no longer correct, then of course all related posts are meaningless. (Or someone went into damage control mode.)
I don't really give Gruber's comments any more weight than the WSJ-- they're both based on "I totally know a guy that works there and he told me...". I still think it's a pretty cynical view, though, to assume they never took into account the fundamental engineering challenge.
That said, there's a fine line between what's a manufacturing issue and what's a design issue that didn't show itself until faced with the variances of millions of devices in mass production. Clearly something in their solution didn't scale (I don't think they blew the holiday sales season just to support BT5). This is taking long enough to rectify that it could easily be that they need to spin their chip. One of the critical functions of that chip seems to be maintaining time sync. So one way to harmonize the various rumors would be if there's a marginal circuit in the chip, such as a PLL instability, that manifests itself as a phase delay problem between nodes-- a manufacturing problem that results in a synchronization problem.
I'd be stunned though if this turned out to be a fundamental oversight rather than a bug in an otherwise sound design.
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Just got the email from B&H about my pre-order for beats x:
This email is being sent in regards to your order for 1 of the Beats by Dr. Dre BeatsX In-Ear Headphones (Black).
We regret to inform you that the manufacturer has informed us that they still do not know when they will begin shipping this item but they do know that it will take at least 2-3 months. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this delay has caused you.
This email is being sent in regards to your order for 1 of the Beats by Dr. Dre BeatsX In-Ear Headphones (Black).
We regret to inform you that the manufacturer has informed us that they still do not know when they will begin shipping this item but they do know that it will take at least 2-3 months. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this delay has caused you.
