Apple is quietly replacing noise cancellation because ongoing patent lawsuit | Hacker News Reader

Apple is quietly replacing noise cancellation because ongoing patent lawsuit

old.reddit.com

106 pointstiagoleifert22 comments

Wouldn't be the first time that Apple is nerfing perfectly well-working hardware.

I never thought about Airpod updates, but according to their site they are applied automatically if you're in the vicinity of an iPhone/iPad/Mac and they're being charged. Does anyone know more details about it / how to prevent updates? Do you need to keep them away from Apple devices while charging? Does it matter whether they're paired via Bluetooth?

>nerfing perfectly well-working hardware

S3TC, texture compression on mobile killed after S3 lawsuit

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/itc-judge-rules-tha...

The irony? Apple invented this very technique, encoding 4 colors using 2 values. Hoffert work at Apple Advanced Technology Group and consequent patents from 1990 (US5046119A) for Apple Video 'road pizza' codec, except S3 their patent added "for texture compression" at the end. The patent is about dividing colorspace between two points and is directly copied from mode 0xC0 of the original Apple Video codec. ~10 years later S3 sues and wins because Apple is somehow incompetent at proving prior art.

https://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php/Apple_RPZA#0xC0:_4_Colo...

    color0 = colorB
    color1 = (11 * colorA + 21 * colorB) / 32
    color2 = (21 * colorA + 11 * colorB) / 32
    color3 = colorA

https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/S3_Texture_Compression DXT2/DXT3:

    0 color0
    1 color1
    2 (2*color0 + color1) / 3
    3 (color0 + 2*color1) / 3

A better link directly to the rumor: https://old.reddit.com/r/airpods/comments/yfc5xw/airpods_max...

This type of "product gets nerfed after you buy it" happens a lot. Not enough people care about the crappy IoT devices this usually happens with, but Apple customers are relatively well organized, so I'd be disappointed to not see a class action lawsuit.

Extremely misleading title: A review site measured slightly worse noise cancellation performance after a firmware update. Nothing is being "replaced" (with what?), as far as I can tell.

And is the source for this being due to patent lawsuits seriously a speculative Reddit comment?

They changed something within the ANC codebase, they confirmed as much. It's also not disputed that it's of a different / lower quality than before (if you can tell or not is up for debate).

The APM already have issues with reliability as is so i'm sure this is only bound to make people more upset.

I don't doubt at all that something could have changed, or even that it changed for the worse, but the extraordinary claim ("Apple broke it intentionally or negligently because of a patent lawsuit") demands a bit more evidence than anonymous speculation on a web forum.

Well they've already acknowledge the changes in the firmware, so our interpretations aside, they have materially altered it. Now the question becomes is there a user agreement that allows software updates / changes that may limit or restrict features in future upgrades, that i'm not aware of.

The nature of the software change was an intentional action, the result of which may not have been the outcome but it was still intentional. That's their argument.

Can Jawbone (or the troll) keep the patent private if it was funded by DARPA / public taxes ?

This is another can of worms that we may need to open. There is not an insignificant amount of products built off research and or original source paid for by the government. The intel community is full of companies that start this way, as is medical.

I'm not sure where or how to get that worked, but it is a worthwhile conversation.

The biggest issue with this isn't even the nerfing, but just like with Adobe, it's the fact that Apple essentially forces all but their most savvy consumers to accept their anti-consumer updates.

If Apple simply stopped selling new devices that violated the patents and selling new nerfed versions, there would be no problem. The entire problem is forced updates.

Force updating all devices Apple can argue in court there are no Apple devices infringing this patent in use thus they shouldnt pay as much.

Technically you are also violating the patent(s) merely by using an infringing product.

AFAIU, normally the patent rights holder couldn't recover damages from an infringer if the infringer didn't have notice. But I suppose it's possible that you now have notice, and therefore could be liable for statutory damages if you continued using the product, presuming Apple hasn't already updated your device.

(Also possible there's some other technicality saving you. I-am-not-a-patent-lawyer. But I know that with copyright such a scenario is possible even without actual notice. Copyright makes infringers out of everybody all the time. Not that people generally care or even should care. And not that it justifies automated systems that "helpfully" intervene. ;)

Very interesting. If true Apple's hope to keep this quiet is completely in vain.

Although, reducing the signal to noise ratio may help muting the message...

Keeping things quiet is the point of noise-cancellation.

But if it is a patent violation, does changing it and saying they're not doing it anymore help?

Hard to say anything meaningful without knowing more about the state-of-the-art in noise cancellation algorithims.

Which I imagine involves a lot of closely guarded secrets.

If they patented, they aren’t closely guarded.

The techniques needed to actually recreate it is very likely closely guarded, since modern patents can be very vague.

Call me naive, but of all people surely Apple can just... _buy_ the patent troll?

I’d imagine if Apple made an offer the reply would be “double it” and then “double it again”

That would cost too much money since they could name their price. Much cheaper to simply deal with the issue by degrading the products they sold. No refunds!

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