This is the way a lot of companies work and have historically worked. Why spend a ton of resources supporting every operating system and hardware combination out there for all of your devices when you have a perfectly good way of doing it in house?
Making it so Android users can update their bluetooth headphones is not supporting every hardware combination. Adding a OSD to your monitor so people don't need OS X specific software to change their monitor settings is not supporting every operating system or hardware combination.
Who buys airpods and expects them to work well with anything other than an apple device? You buy them because it'll work well in their ecosystem, really well.
I have some cheap earbuds that work decent everywhere, as well as a generic bluetooth speaker, but I generally use my apple earbuds because they work the best with what I have.
When you support only your ecosystem you can improve the connectivity that bluetooth alone doesn't allow.
This feels like a hindsight kind of statement. We are conditioned to think that since it's Apple it won't work well with other ecosystems, so "you don't buy apple if you don't have everything apple" which... I mean, it makes sense but it's the reverse logic. I bought my pixelbuds and I can use them on a wide range of bluetooth devices that aren't Google-specific, and they work as you'd expect them to. It's fine if Apple wants to have Apple-specific features if you use them with Apple devices, just like Google pixelbuds have specific integration with google home app and similar google-specific devices, but at least the core bluetooth functionality (+ settings) should be provided to be able to work on any device.
Disclaimer: I've never used airpods so I have no idea how they work, just commenting on the logic of the original statement alone.
There is definitely some proprietary “glue” in there. One nice thing about them is that you pair them to one device and then all of your other iCloud devices can see them. I would not expect that kind of feature to work elsewhere for obvious reasons. I could be wrong?
They also support spatial audio which is now supported with Android.
There are definitely features of the AirPods which are new or were new when they were released. It’s up to Apple to support those features on their own hardware/OS. It’s up to others to add support to their own operating systems if they deem it worthwhile. Similar goes for other hardware. Yes, the hardware works differently than so many generic components out in the world but that’s kind of the point.
Ended up just getting a UTWS5 and Moondrop Katos and being a lot happier.
Could you imagine a world where telephones couldn't make calls to each other or cars needed special gasoline that was only available from gas station chains that licensed it from your car maker?
What a terrible world that would be.
Why do we accept similar things with computers?
I wonder if mandatory opening of interoperability protocols for popular products would improve health of electronics markets.
A standard is just something that gets adopted by a bunch of people. There are competing standards for all kinds of things… the market generally decides what standards win. Any company doing something new is by definition attempting to set a new standard.
When innovation was occurring in integrated circuits the companies standardized on the 0.1" DIP. Then as needs for smaller packages came they worked together on TSSOP and others. Obviously the innovation isn't a matter of packaging.
If you look at the USB implementors forum, you'll notice many of the big players are there (including Apple.)
I would argue that the 0.1" DIP was a technology innovation of its own. It was adopted because it solved a problem with scalability of TO-5 and similar packaging which was somewhat round in nature, maybe borrowing from the design constraints of vacuum tubes? (complete guess on that part!) There are variants of DIP which have different dimensions than the 0.1" DIP we see almost everywhere today. While there may have been cooperation in choosing 0.1" DIP, I think it's more likely that available parts were largely made in this form factor and thus it was adopted.
That's nonsensical - none of your examples came about from regulation, they were market-driven.
RS232 for any wired data connectivity 110 VAC for any kind of power 802.11b for any kind of wireless data connectivity …
Now that we have these mandated, let’s zoom to the present day and figure out just how bad of an idea each of those decisions were.
I don’t know what “mandating interoperability” would mean for all cases in the original argument. eg: Does someone need to write software that can run on every single operating system that supports Bluetooth to perform a firmware update for AirPods before releasing them? That sounds pretty abysmal for anyone that doesn’t have the resources to understand/target/maintain a process for BeOS/Haiku/Linux/Android/iOS/Windows/whatever my car’s console is running/etc.
OTOH, you could write a standard for firmware updates to devices over different channels and see who would adopt it. Make sure it is future proof and covers all currently known use-cases. If it’s adopted by enough people, you aren’t using your local government to write something in stone which will likely be outdated in a decade or so anyway.
Most modern electronics convert from 110VAC to something else and spend a lot of hardware dealing with the fact that they are given single-phase AC and actually need somewhat clean DC. The big exceptions to this would be things like heaters/ovens/stoves or incandescent bulbs which just use 110VAC (or 220VAC split-phase) directly. None of those exceptions require AC and some might even work unmodified with DC. The big issue with single-phase or split-phase AC that's annoying for DC devices is the fact that you can get no power 100-120 times per second when the voltage crosses 0. Thus we end up with giant adaptors/fancy power supplies that plug into the wall sockets and produce DC.
On a power-distribution level, we use AC because we figured out how to transform voltages easily early on. However, we couldn't always agree on frequency (or voltage, or connectors) and thus we have situations like Japan's power grid to this day. Fast forward and we now have efficient ways to convert DC voltage but still pay the cost of AC everywhere because it's both ingrained and regulated.
edit: 0-voltage crossing is 2x the frequency in AC