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Not everything at the <£100 price point is rubbish...

I recently got a £20 Havit Bluetooth receiver and connected it to a pair of £70 Sony MDR-7506 headphones. The receiver drives the headphones louder and with less distortion than my iPhone can, and the battery lasts for a few days of intermittent listening. Whatever loss is introduced by the aptX coding is invisible to my ears.

I'm blown away by how good this setup is given the price and there shouldn't be any dependency on an expensive source device to run it.

I've been under the impression iPhones don't do aptX, did you find a workaround?

That would cut into the Beets business.

They don't support aptX, but Beats and others (the Sony 1000Xs, for instance) usually support AAC over Bluetooth which is similar in quality.

FYI for anyone wanting higher-quality over Bluetooth, make sure that your devices all support a compatible codec: https://www.audioholics.com/audio-technologies/bluetooth-aud... e.g. iDevices support AAC but not aptX, while Android devices are typically the opposite. See also: https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/enable-aptx-aac-bluetooth-a...

The DA on older iPhones is mediocre, the DA in those lightning converters is even worse. Try a separate DA if you really want quality audio output.

> the DA in those lightning converters is even worse

Absolutely not true.

https://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/lightning-adapter-audio-qu...

Not to bag on Rockwell, I appreciate his reviews and viewpoints, but do you trust that he has the requisite expertise to correctly analyse the quality of such an adaptor?

I... don't. His write-up doesn't inspire confidence either - I have no idea how he has performed the measurements.

I know enough to know that audio measurement is a very tricky endeavour, and most other measurements put the lightning adaptor's output at a few dBA worse in SNR and dynamic range than the iPhone 6S' jack output (but otherwise similar). Both are easily worse than a good external DAC. Certainly not "better quality" than the inbuilt option as Rockwell claims.

It's good enough for almost everyone, and is likely to be capable of higher fidelity than most source material, but most agree that it is objectively a worse DA.

Would honestly love to read any sources you have on the SNR.

And the DACs in older iPhones are equally good. Mr. Rockwell has reviews of those as well.

I have to agree with the other commenter here. I have not noticed any difference moving from iPhone 6s to 7 (with dongle) listening through my Shure 530 headphones.

The Apple premium has gone so damn high though.

I got my first Mac when the Mac mini came up. It was a little more expensive than same-generation PCs but besides being OSX it was a PowerPC that never made any fan noise, and was small. I've subsequently had three Macbooks and two iPhones - but I can't afford this somewhat-better-somewhat-more-expensive racket anymore. Prices have risen too much; to boot, the quality gulf between Macs and garden-variety Dells and Acers has pretty much crashed. Macbooks have had multiple problematic years now; iPhones did away with headphone jacks; and OSX peaked at 10.6.8, where it indeed was five years into the future - but Windows 10 is decent now and even has the whole Unix toolkit with WSL.

Disclaimer: not trying to convince you, just sharing an anecdote like you did.

- I agree Apple pricing has gone out of control. I should not have to shell out 1500 EUR for a 256GB phone with a bigger display no matter what (XS Max). I mean okay, it's probably the best phone out there but come on. It's a mobile computing device, not a life's insurance bill.

- I fully agree MacBooks and desktop Macs haven't had good years in a while. IMO the MacBook Pro 2015 15" was Apple's laptop peak. They haven't produced anything worthwhile in the laptop departments ever since.

- Desktop Macs are a horrid mess where greed trumps everything else so much that even I who spent 6 figures on tech during my life cannot justify paying 5000 EUR for an iMac 27" 5K with maxed out specs (i7 CPU, 64GB RAM and 1 or 2TB SSD). Right now your only viable choice for a future-proof machine however is either the iMac 27" or the iMac Pro, and both are expensive as hell.

- macOS version, not sure, I started actively using it only a year or so ago so it feels quite good to me and is tons more predictable than Windows 10. You have to fight with Windows 10 to make it your own and not be barraged with popups. macOS in comparison stays out of the way.

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To summarize, Apple has peaked, including in the smartphone and tablet departments. Upgrades are very smallish and iterative while the price tags remain huge.

The way I see it, Apple has been coasting for a while. They need to get back on track because inevitably somebody will try and displace them.

(As a random example, Xiaomi phones are probably the best physical designs and software experience I ever had. But I still don't trust Google's binary blobs and the general baseband processor stuff so I stay away from Android.)

FYI you can get better deals on Apple stuff by buying refurbished.

>I should not have to shell out 1500 EUR for a 256GB phone

Yes, we're lucky that a lot of people in the world are not in a position to fight for higher quality of life for the resources coming out of the land near them or their labor, nor do we have to pay for environmental damage from manufacture and disposal of our devices, otherwise it would be much more than 1,500 EUR.

>But I still don't trust Google's binary blobs and the general baseband processor stuff so I stay away from Android.

Why do you trust the Apple ones then? At least on android you can get rid of most Google code with Lineage + microg

> At least on android you can get rid of most Google code with Lineage + microg

...as far as we know. What about the baseband processor that has access to everything at any time?

> Why do you trust the Apple ones then?

Becase they took a stand and refused to introduce a security backdoor in the FBI San Bernardino case. And because iPhone hacks cost more on the net compared to Android ones. This to me indicates that iPhones are harder to crack -- so the demand is higher, suppy is lower and thus the prices are higher.

All circumstantial evidence of course, but it's what we have to go on.

Also, compare OS updates: Android has significantly more critical security fixes than iOS, every single time.

Maybe it means they are finding more bugs and fixing them, or maybe it means Android is basically security Swiss cheese. my money is on the latter.

Android has a hell of a lot more people developing it/for it. I wouldn't be so sure of that assumption.

That doesn't mean much when flashing their ROM means voiding your warranty though. Also, their efforts don't really count in the very important areas like the OS security itself; Google reigns supreme there, mostly.

I am a former flashing-ROMs fanboy but the truth is, you are either stuck on ancient kernels or sometimes part with functionality you prefer to still have (like rooting).

I gave up, eventually.

It all depends on one's perspective. There was a time when a typical PC was $5000+ in today's dollars. We just got used to Moore's law bringing cheap disposables.

You're taking it pretty far off track. This article is about listening to music.

The "premium" only applies to new products. The author here tried using a CD player, so the storage (and novelty) requirements are pretty low. A $5 used iPod would work just fine.

"Yeah, but what really gets under my skin is that every other company out there is okay with producing garbage. Meanwhile, Apple produces things that work comparatively well, doing what you expect and then, claims that reasonable functionality is premium."

If the standard is garbage, then functionality is premium.

Can I blame free market dynamics ? It's been a quite obvious trend since the 2000s. Audio components became commodities to reach bottom prices, no more middle class, good functionality is high end (which is now pushed to higher prices with branding like beats or devialet)

Is Beats even good functionality? I heard they used mediocre components and spent most of their money on marketing...

The audio quality on my £110 wireless Beats X neckbuds is abysmal compared to a set of £30 wired Sony earbuds.

My kid has some wireless Beats headphones and she loves them because she likes how they look and they are very comfortable for her.

She might be able to find headphones that sound better, but she has never found any that also are comfortable and have good industrial design. At least not in the price range that Beats typically sell for.

Tear downs support this. Medium quality at best.

That depends on your definition of functionality. Don't assume the purpose of Beats is to produce accurate audio. If the purpose is to make people feel good because they own the same headphones they saw some celebrity wear, they are apparently quite functional.

They added weights to their headphones to add a "quality" feel to them, because they were made of plastic and usually high-end headphones use metal in some places like the mounts and the headbands.

Did you really just call apples products interoperable? maybe among their other crap, but sure as hell not among other devices. Which are all interoperable among themselves btw.

And yet every time I go to a presentation or a lecture people ask to borrow my MacBook for it because their Windows or Linux laptops can never even connect to their projectors or Bluetooth speakers on the first try. Often they cannot at all connect.

Yet the MacBook connects to everything on the first go with zero fuss.

So yeah, I am calling part of Apple's functions and devices interoperable. Why aren't you? These are observable facts in the wild and it happens every day somewhere around you as well.

Hah. This is the opposite of every single experience I've seen at my work, where both PCs and Macs are supported. Usually the Mac person plugs into a projector and it doesn't work, or they don't have their adapter. The HP works every time.

Well if they don't have their adapter that's not really a problem with the Mac's compatibility now, is it? They simply forgot a very important piece that will help them achieve the goal. I don't blame my TV for not getting a signal from my PC if I lose my HDMI cable.

I know my experience is anecdotal. So is yours. Just shared what I've observed 30+ times now.

Fewer and fewer people can even recognize quality anymore. People mistake popularity for quality. They blindly trust brands. They accept things not working or falling apart. Companies have picked up on this, and don't have to invest in quality anymore. Prices get lower, then everyone has to not invest in quality. People would rather buy and throw away a $50 pair of shoes every year than buy a $200 pair and have it last 10 years.

> And oh yeah, let's not get started on OEM spyware masquerading as harmless adware.

You act like Apple devices do not contain IME?