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AirPods Live Translation Blocked for EU Users With EU Apple Accounts
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It's baffling, why Apple would withhold such a high profile feature that surely appeals more to the average customer than phone mirroring. Google apparently does not have a problem supporting their version of live translation in the EU. Maybe the goal is to shrink the market share in Europe even further to get below the DMA thresholds 🤔?
It's just an anecdote of course, but my mum just yesterday asked me if Live Translation would work with her iPhone. She was contemplating buying AirPods for an upcoming holiday to France and Spain. Since she does not listen to music using headphones, the purchase was mostly motivated by the translation feature.
I was also excited to try Live Translation out of technical curiosity, even if it's not super useful right now due to the limited set languages supported.
It's just an anecdote of course, but my mum just yesterday asked me if Live Translation would work with her iPhone. She was contemplating buying AirPods for an upcoming holiday to France and Spain. Since she does not listen to music using headphones, the purchase was mostly motivated by the translation feature.
I was also excited to try Live Translation out of technical curiosity, even if it's not super useful right now due to the limited set languages supported.
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This is from the company that brought us Siri, I expect live translation will work just as well.
As one of my professors, a staunch free marketer put it "We believe in free markets but not anarchy."
That is a big challenge. Absent a way to get a review and approval of an approach prior to GTM, companies and regulators are playing whack a mole. As a result, companies are frustrated and you see that come out in decisions about how th GYM in the EU.
The (now) EU was founded to ensure peace and prosperity, which the EU did and has done for years fairly well. Challenges arose as countries with weaker economies joined but the EU has dealt with that reasonably well. It's biggest current challenges are, IMHO:
1. As a weak federal system it is hard to get policies enacted if one country disagrees.
2. Politically, it functioned best when the countries were centrist/liberal democracies and shared some basic values, the rise of more authoritarian regimes is testing its ability to stay politically united, especially in light of item 1.
As with any democracy, it does good things and things that are head scratchers as politicians try to keep their seats.
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So Apple announced the product before it was ready to launch; before they had done checks with regulators.
It’s no different to announcing an iPhone before it has gone through regulatory testing to show its antennas won’t give you a brain tumour. That’s part of the legal requirements, too.
And Apple did seemingly do something like that in China - announcing the iPhone Air with a release date that they’ve had to roll back because even in the massively important Chinese market, they apparently didn’t bother to check that carriers had eSIM support ready (according to MR).
Apple are just sloppy these days. They used to always be on top of all of this stuff; they were clinical about getting everything in line. Flagship product of a multi-trillion dollar company and they just don't have the attention to detail anymore. They’ve become fat and lazy, and the business success has gone to their heads.
It’s no different to announcing an iPhone before it has gone through regulatory testing to show its antennas won’t give you a brain tumour. That’s part of the legal requirements, too.
And Apple did seemingly do something like that in China - announcing the iPhone Air with a release date that they’ve had to roll back because even in the massively important Chinese market, they apparently didn’t bother to check that carriers had eSIM support ready (according to MR).
Apple are just sloppy these days. They used to always be on top of all of this stuff; they were clinical about getting everything in line. Flagship product of a multi-trillion dollar company and they just don't have the attention to detail anymore. They’ve become fat and lazy, and the business success has gone to their heads.
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We really don't know why Apple isn't releasing it in the EU, for all we know they are still working with regulators. Delaying a worldwide release because one group of regulators may have not yet reached a decision would be foolish. They're still going to sell phones in the EU, and at some point the EU users may get the translation feature, depending on what the regulators decide.
The article should be updated, per Politico, it is because of DMA interoperability requirements, not privacy.
This quote from the EU spokesperson in the above article is something else.
Ah yes, really fostering that innovative spirit and promoting competition by making Apple hand over a feature it spent millions developing to its biggest competitors, for free. That’s definitely how they teach companies how to innovate in business schools: subsidize your competitors R&D for them.
It’s clear the EU competition regulators have literally no idea how business works. If companies aren’t allowed to differentiate their products with their own inventions why would they bother developing new features? It literally puts them at a competitive disadvantage because they’ve spent the money to develop the feature but others don’t have to. If that was applied to the market at large innovation would stop entirely.
There is literally nothing preventing Bose from developing a similar feature and putting it in their headphones and associated app. So why does the EU not understand that if the choice is “make Apple give the feature to Bose for free” or “don’t introduce the feature” that Apple is going to pick “don’t introduce the feature.”
But sure, the DMA “doesn’t impede the launch of new products” and “preserves innovation.” It’s no wonder the EU has an innovation problem.
Ah yes, really fostering that innovative spirit and promoting competition by making Apple hand over a feature it spent millions developing to its biggest competitors, for free. That’s definitely how they teach companies how to innovate in business schools: subsidize your competitors R&D for them.
It’s clear the EU competition regulators have literally no idea how business works. If companies aren’t allowed to differentiate their products with their own inventions why would they bother developing new features? It literally puts them at a competitive disadvantage because they’ve spent the money to develop the feature but others don’t have to. If that was applied to the market at large innovation would stop entirely.
There is literally nothing preventing Bose from developing a similar feature and putting it in their headphones and associated app. So why does the EU not understand that if the choice is “make Apple give the feature to Bose for free” or “don’t introduce the feature” that Apple is going to pick “don’t introduce the feature.”
But sure, the DMA “doesn’t impede the launch of new products” and “preserves innovation.” It’s no wonder the EU has an innovation problem.
a bit like how Reuters speculated a lower cost Tesla was cancelled, you told me you took it as a fact even though "Tesla hasn't said so", and it turned out to not be true?
😂
It could also be privacy. There were questions before about whether making things interoperable to adhere to DMA would weaken the data privacy and thus put them in violation of GPDR. It is a catch 22.
This statement is most certainly not true. Apple uses a lot of proprietary tech on top of Bluetooth to make interactive (duplex) voice applications work with AirPods. Third party wireless headphones don't have access to these Bluetooth extensions and therefore can't really compete with Apple in this space. If you have ever tried the Hands Free Profile with third-party wireless headphones, you know what I'm talking about.
The Bluetooth group has introduced a new standard for the transmission of audio in 2020 to address most shortcomings of the old audio profiles called Bluetooth LE Audio (v5.2). For very strange reasons, Apple hasn't implemented this feature on iOS yet though. Could it be because they want to protect their AirPods market share?
The right thing for Apple to do would be to either allow competitors access to their proprietary Bluetooth extensions, or finally introduce Bluetooth LE Audio. The latter would probably be better for the consumers, because manufacturers would not have to deal with two different standards that are essentially doing the same thing.
Edit: Android has support for modern Bluetooth Audio since Android 13.
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I suspect interoperability will weaken privacy, simply because no one can ensure every app will adhere to EU rules nor care about what the EU may try to do to such apps. I agree Apple may have felt they, as a gatekeeper, would be in a Catch-22.
Apple needs to differentiate their products from competitors, and proprietary extensions is one way to do that. Differentiation allows companies to get a premium over commodity pricing. Since Apple is a for profit company beholden to shareholders, differentiation is part of their market strategy.
China was going to launch the iPhone Air with Unicom. The government determined it wanted eSim working across ALL it’s carriers (they’re all State owned Enterprises), so it’s put a hold on the rollout in order for it’s other two carriers to get up to speed. Not surprising, really. China was the first region where the largest carriers all supported RCS at the carrier, not as a stop-gap Google solution. Going all-in on eSim just looks to be something else where they’ll beat the EU in major carrier support.
Differentiation is not an issue per se. It becomes problematic, when a company uses its dominance in one area to seriously hamper competition in a related market like headphones.
This is just wrong. Google Translate already has live conversation features that work with any Bluetooth headphones on iOS. Microsoft Translator does too. The audio quality might not be as good as AirPods, but the core functionality (real-time translation piped through wireless earbuds) definitely works.
What Apple has with AirPods is better audio quality, lower latency, and tighter integration, but that’s not a technical barrier preventing competitors from building translation features. It’s a user experience advantage that Apple earned by investing in proprietary improvements.
Bose absolutely could build their own translation app, optimize it for their hardware as much as standard Bluetooth allows, and compete on features, accuracy, supported languages, etc. They’d just have to actually do the engineering work instead of demanding Apple hand over their improvements for free.
Think about it from Apple’s perspective: they spent years and millions developing those Bluetooth improvements before LE Audio existed. Now you’re saying they should either hand that IP to competitors or throw it away to adopt a new standard?
So yes, Apple might be protecting their market share, but that’s literally how capitalism and innovation work. Companies invest in R&D to gain competitive advantages. When regulators say “actually, you have to give those advantages to your competitors for free,” it removes the incentive to innovate in the first place.
OK, so you do agree that competitors offering translation services and wireless headphones are at a disadvantage.
I think this is exactly what's going to happen. It would make sense though to allow Apple to keep the old, proprietary Bluetooth extensions in iOS. Otherwise, older AirPods would stop working, and I don't think anyone wants that to happen.
By the way, what Apple uses is very similar to how Bluetooth LE Audio works. In fact, I read somewhere, that the new standard was heavily inspired by how AirPods communication works. Can't find the source for that though any more. They also use Bluetooth LE, just not in a standard conformant way.
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They might have an advantage on iOS, but not one that prevents competitors from building competing products. Right now, for example, Google can advertise that their phones and EarBuds have the translation capabilities iPhones don’t. I imagine that might convince some customers to head over to Android.
Also, Apple invested millions developing those audio improvements. Why shouldn’t they get a competitive advantage from that investment? That’s literally how innovation works. Companies spend money on R&D to create better products. The alternative is a world where nobody bothers innovating because they know regulators will just force them to share it with competitors who didn’t pay the development costs.
And if the EU had its way, AirPods’ Bluetooth communication wouldn’t exist to inspire the standard in the first place! Because Apple isn’t going to invest millions to develop new technologies if they’re immediately required to hand it over to competitors for free. You’re literally describing how Apple’s proprietary innovation became the foundation for an industry standard, which is exactly how technological progress is supposed to work.
But under the DMA’s logic, Apple should have been forced to share that tech immediately, which would have killed the incentive to develop it at all, and we’d all be stuck with the terrible Bluetooth experience that existed before AirPods did.
Apple is not under any obligation to hand the keys to the kingdom to competitors so they can develop products with identical functionalities.
This is not about the competition between Apple and Google. It's about companies that want to compete with Apple AND Google in the audio accessory or the translation app market. It would be terrible if only Apple and Google could build high-end headphones or translation apps because of anti-competitive technical barriers.
Why do you think this is the only possible outcome? The Bluetooth SIG exists for exactly this purpose, to advance the technology for the benefit of the whole industry. In fact just this year Apple decided to increase their involvement in Bluetooth standardization significantly by becoming a voting member, most likely in anticipation of more regulatory pressure.
I also don't agree with the premise that market regulation is harmful to innovation. It only applies to companies that have already become a huge player in their respective markets, and that is a really nice problem to have.
No one is asking for keys to the kingdom. Just adequate APIs for interoperability.