Yes. For over 30 years, consumer electronics had a Just Works™ standard for stereo audio. No pairing issues. No charging issues. No dongles for different devices.
For some situations (jogging, gym, housework, etc) I get that no-wires is also convenient, but others (like the car) make no damn sense, and even the situations where it does make sense aren't a reason to remove the feature.
But we did it anyway because it makes Apple more money.
Ideally we’d get rid of analog and have the same digital standard that works wires or wireless. In practice, I use Bluetooth and CarPlay.
USB Audio Class has been almost universally supported in computing devices for literally decades at this point, as has USB HID Class which supports media controls.
I have no idea whether Apple allows it to work on iOS devices, but a car head unit could easily expose a USB audio class device and it'd "just work" with Android, Windows, MacOS, etc. devices. Add a USB HID "keyboard" that can send media/telephone inputs and you're good to go without any new tech required to be invented. Works with anything that doesn't go out of the way to prevent it from working. All you'd be missing compared to Bluetooth A2DP/AVRCP would be communicating media info back to the head unit, which is more of an optional nicety rather than a necessity.
Plug a USB cable in to whatever computing device you want to source audio from and it would work great.
Unfortunately the majority of the non-technical community, and a surprisingly large amount of the technical community, acts like they're allergic to wires. I honestly do not understand the demand for wireless charging, wireless AA/CP, etc. when a single cable works better for both. It's not that hard to plug a phone in when you sit down in your car.
Wired CarPlay is pretty nice, though.
Yeah, I wasn't suggesting it as something that cars support right now, but it's something that 100% could be supported easily and would "just work" with basically every modern computing device.
> Maybe because "digital keyboard" is too generic compared to "play/pause/next/previous/volume"? Then there's also the phone call controls.
The HID class covers keyboards, mice, trackballs, gamepads, touch devices, spinners, media controls, telephony, etc. All the media and phone controls you could ever want have been defined for decades, so there's definitely no technical reason it wouldn't be usable.
> Wired CarPlay is pretty nice, though.
Likewise to Android Auto, I certainly wouldn't trade it for the controls and audio only system I'm describing, but those who don't want a screen or whatever else could be better supported.
For media playback I agree entirely, TBH I still browse podcasts and music on my phone even while using Android Auto because the app is unrestricted on the phone where over AA it severely limits browsing unless I'm stopped.
For me the screen integration is all about navigation. OEM navigation is almost universally terrible, the few that aren't terrible now will be in 5-10 years when the OEM has moved on to their new system and stops supporting the old, and none of them will ever support something like Waze that offers speed trap alerts.
The wires do work if I need them through CarPlay, or AndroidAuto. And I do use Waze on the car’s built in display sometimes. But mostly - I just enter the car and start driving. No need to put the key in the ignition, or the headphone jack in the phone.
I don't disagree, but I've been using AirPods for 5 yars now and am yet to have any of the issues you're referring to. I just get my tangle free, small headphones out of the my pocket and they just work every time.
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