“Apple improved upon the notoriously unreliable Bluetooth standard and then slightly degraded wired listening by requiring a $9 dongle” is quite a weak anti-trust argument. Almost all innovation comes from this type of vertical integration.
Is this a new thing? I haven't used this in a while, but the lightning dongle used to work fine with my headphones+mic (also intended for Apple's headphone jack). I know there's some difference in how the headphone connector is set up between Apple and everyone else though.
I don't really have any strong feelings either way about it. I dropped my phone once, and the dongle took the brunt of it (saving the expensive stuff) but I did have to buy another.
Saying Bluetooth itself is unreliable is an outdated view. There are shitty Bluetooth devices yes, but the protocol works fine when paired with good devices
By the way, it's so bad that I don't use headphones anymore with the iPhone. I use the phone in speaker mode. And the only reason I even have a new iPhone is because AT&T dropped support for my old one.
My AirPods frequently hop between my MacBook and iPhone without asking though, because the other device played a split second audio clip.
Strong YMMV I guess.
That being said, they absolutely excel at noise cancellation, and that's because their core market is airmen, Bose is used almost universally by pilots for their in-flight headsets. It's where they make their actual money.
They don't have much of an engineering org anymore, they're just a marketing brand that white boxes contracted out designs.
There are corner cases that cause annoyance, and those corner cases are indeed around where Apple is adding on top of Bluetooth: The ability to instantly switch the connected device without needing to disconnect from a previous device, and the ability to pair just by having the devices close. Those features are replicated in the Android ecosystem but are not standard.
If those two features are what you mean by "sucks" then fine. But that doesn't imply that Bluetooth doesnt work reliably, just that it doesn't have these two features broadly supported.
A difference here is that fast pairing and device switching on Android, while not a standard part of the protocol, is open for device manufacturers to support, unlike Apple's versions of these features.
Probably doesn't happen for everyone, otherwise it'd be fixed. But that's how it always is with overly complicated stuff, edge cases everywhere.
Earphone quality drops to something awful whenever the mic is in use. That's just cause of the BT standard. This gets more complicated with multiple devices involved.
I'll be listening to music on my work laptop with my headphones, my iPhone will get a call, it'll switch to the iPhone only to play a ringtone in my ears, then when I accept the call the iPhone will switch back to its own earpiece instead of my headphones. Juked!
Then some unpredictable things. Like it gets stuck connected to the wrong device, or it starts playing music when I turn them on, or it won't connect even with a device it should remember. I've had my BT headphones connect during a meeting, make my laptop start playing random music, then disconnect, causing the laptop to switch to full volume speakers and blast music into my meeting.
I don't fault Bose for any of this. These are the most reliable BT headphones I've ever owned. The standard just sucks. The iPhone side has issues like randomly switching to my car BT when I walk by wearing my headphones. The car BT can only pair to 1 device at a time, so my wife or I have to disable BT to free it up. Overall it's not worth vs just plugging in the darn cable.
I wonder if they are using a proprietary configuration API that is deliberately kept secret or if no Android devs have figured out how to reverse engineer it yet (seems very unlikely).
If the likely former, I'd like someone to address this as well as it almost feels like if they're getting into hearing assistance features, then accessibility becomes important.
Not really, I don't particularly have a problem with how Airpods went, except that Apple could have moved to standardize or at least open up fast pairing and instant switching, but they didn't.
In what world?
Innovation comes from many sources and while vertical integration does assist in some cases, your assertion steps so far past plausible that it is simply ridiculous.
Really? That's a bold claim. Having a large number of companies that are able to offer competing products and services tends to lead to innovation.
But I'm doubtful of this, it seems more likely that some Apple users have an outdated view of how reliable standard Bluetooth actually are, even when paired with their iPhones.
The big competitors like Samsung removed the jack too once they started selling their own wireless earbuds. They realized they could use Apple's strategy too.