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Comment by totallymike | Hacker News Reader

While I’m definitely not a fan of losing the headphone jack, and don’t love not being able to use my headphones and charge my phone, I do see one positive side effect, and I wonder if Apple is doing it on purpose.

You can now buy $20 bluetooth earbuds from Anker that are pretty decent. Apple saying “guess what, everybody: you love bluetooth” has forced the market to respond, and that whole price-down-quality-up thing is really starting to happen.

This, of course, is of no use to people who depend on minimal latency. It will be a very long time, if ever, before bluetooth can match hardwired latency.

What we really need next from Apple is for them to replace lightning with USB-C. I’d love to see the ability to choose to externalize the DAC+amplifier without buying either a lightning-only accessory or a camera adapter. Oh, and also be able to charge the phone while we’re at it.

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> Apple saying “guess what, everybody: you love bluetooth”

I'd think Apple's trick isn't really Bluetooth which remains often “not great”. It's the W1 chip:

“As well as making pairing and switching devices a lot easier, the W1 chip also increases the range of the Bluetooth connection and gives headphones a better battery life. For example, the Beats Solo3 has a battery life that lasts 40 hours and a range of up to 150 feet. Those numbers are just insane for Bluetooth.”[1]

1. https://www.howtogeek.com/340290/what-is-apple’s-w1-chip/

Regarding latency: although I love my AirPods and I do not miss the headphone jack, there’s one real application that I doubt will ever be adequate over Bluetooth: monitoring the audio while you’re playing electric guitar through an amp simulator on your phone. The tiniest amount of latency really stands out while you’re playing.

Haven't found a set of BT headphones that have acceptable latency for gaming, so I thing the latency a problem for any audio application that requires low-latency.

That, and playing rhythm games. No more Tap Tap Revenge.

similarly: wireless microphones for blogging.

Could you elaborate? Do you mean the latency for wireless microphones is unacceptable for dictation, or what?

> It will be a very long time, if ever, before bluetooth can match hardwired latency

It happened long ago, with Apt-X, especially Apt-X HD and Apt-X LL.

> The latency of the aptX-HD codec can be scaled to as low as 1 ms for 48 kHz sampled audio

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AptX#aptX-HD

apt-X is neat; it’s a bummer that, as it’s Qualcomm proprietary technology, only a smallish subset of wireless headsets support it.

Not to mention Apple’s beef with Qualcomm means we’ll probably never see apt-X support in an iPhone.

> only a smallish subset of wireless headsets support it.

That was true a couple of years ago. Now apt-x support is pretty common even in $20 niche. You can buy FiiO BTR3 for $50 (at Taobao), and it supports everything from apt-X (HD and LL) and LDAC (contributed to the Android Open Source Project by Sony) to Huawei HWA, works as USB-DAC too, and you can plug your favorite headphones into it.

minor gripe the apt-x website under "Key Facts"

"Your brain can’t tell the difference between a delay of 0 and 100ms"*

Reminds me of the old "brain can't process more than 30fps" Marketing folks running wild over there.

* https://www.aptx.com/aptx-low-latency*

It's flat untrue, too. You can hear audio latency nearly down to single-digit milliseconds. In fact, there's a fun recording trick where you duplicate a track, pan it hard left and the original hard right, and then delay one by 10ms. (They get heard as two separate parts even though they're completely identical.)

The most common thing is video-audio sync, and regular user would barely recognize 40-60 ms delay between video and audio track.

Yeah that's probably fine. Humans have some sync tolerance because speed of sound is so low. Something 15m away will have 44ms delay of the sound compared to the vision.

But there are other areas where tolerance matters more I think. Say you press a key and sound comes either after 5ms or after 50 ms. I think that would be noticeably different.

Interestingly, I use Bluetooth headphones with my TV and I have never noticed issues with audio/video sync. Have modern Bluetooth stacks reduced the problem or is the TV compensating for the latency by delaying the video?

"100ms" probably comes from the long distance telephony investigations into round-trip time. If I remember correctly, 100-ish ms RTT was when people would start to notice the delay, and conversations became very difficult above ~200 ms. As a result, a lot of telephony hardware tries to keep latencies under that limit.

The brain obviously notices far smaller latencies.

Yes! goddamnit Apple. What’s with lighthning ports in iPhones when you make all this huzzy wuzzy talk that MacBooks are all usb-c because usb-c is the future.

Please be consistent. USB-C everywhere in all your devices. You’re a trillion dollar company now, get your shit together!

I wish there could be a transition period of, say, 3 product cycles on the phones where they had BOTH lightning and USB-C ports. It would be a little ugly and take up space (presumably side by side), but would make the transition a lot less painful. No real chance of Apple doing this, though.

You see that’s why it’s hard, _because_ they’re a trillion dollar company. Big change takes time to percolate.

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