Apple can own I/O to own the universe

This article has an odd, simplified, and biased description of history. Apple pushed USB hard and early. The article carefully never made the claim Apple owned Firewire exclusively--it was a partnership with Sony and Panasonic that had certain benefits.<p>I&#x27;m not sure what alternative to the 30-pin connector the author would have been pleased with. Personally, I&#x27;m <i>very</i> glad it wasn&#x27;t micro or mini USB. The Lightning port was shipping years ahead of something like USB-C. Sure, it would be nice if they switched now. I&#x27;m sure even if they used a standard port they&#x27;d still have a certification program because Apple loves control. I&#x27;m confident the licensing money is just a perk. Look at the iPad Pro. They used USB-C instead of extending Lightning.<p>Bluetooth headphones had been disappointing for decades. After being disappointed over and over I had settled on completely proprietary digital wireless headphones (much like wireless mice until BluetoothLE). Then Apple started making some great headphones that added a bit of &quot;magic&quot; around Bluetooth. I hear AirPods work great outside of Apple&#x27;s ecosystem, too. They still have some of the &quot;warts&quot; of Bluetooth like having a battery-draining, low latency, low quality mono mode for phone&#x2F;chat and a higher quality mode for music that sometimes get stuck in the wrong mode, but it&#x27;s nice they&#x27;re using a widely supported standard.

Apple doesn&#x27;t want to own the Universe, it wants to own the profitable universe.<p>Thus it leaves Huawei, ZTE, Xaiomi, Baofeng, and Samsung to make cheap and unprofitable phones.<p>It wants to leave Dell and HP and to make unprofitable PC&#x27;s, etc.<p>If Apple were really to increase market share in phones and PC&#x27;s they would do so at the expense of their own profits. It is much better to let the &quot;competitors&quot; stumble on... For instance the zombie OS Android has great value to Apple because if it didn&#x27;t exist then antitrust regulators would be at Apple&#x27;s throat -- Apple&#x27;s real genius is getting all of these other companies to pay to keep Apple out of antitrust court.

This article seems to be asserting that Airpods have a Wifi radio (in addition to BT and NFC). I can&#x27;t find anything to support that including the article he cites.<p>It does rather devalue his argument about why airpods are so good if he doesn&#x27;t even understand which wireless standards are involved.<p>I have no experience with Airpods, but if they&#x27;re good it&#x27;s because of two things:<p><pre><code> Apple actually invests in the time and effort needed for a good end to end system. From RF and antenna design all the way up to user facing software. They control the whole stack. Basically every line of code, and every gate in every chip involve in that end to end link. That means that proper development can achieve the best possible result. </code></pre> I have some Samsung Galaxy Buds (and a Samsung phone). I have found them to be excellent from a stability and ease of use point of view. Admittedly less good from an audio quality point of view (which isn&#x27;t a problem for me as I use them almost exclusively for podcasts and phone calls at which they do a good job).

A lot of media has been repeating the statement, which I thing is just plain stupid; “AirPods are a new platform”. Because even though they are a great product, a pair of earbuds simply cannot be a platform just because someone looked at the total revenue and compared it to the first iPods.<p>This however is a great write-up showing how the wireless connectivity that powers AirPods might be turned into a platform in the future, if Apple wants to broaden its tech rather than keep it as a competitive advantage.

&gt; So what will the new computing paradigm be? The industry seems to have converged on what Rick Osterloh at Google called “ambient computing,” which is a bigger version of IoT: pretty much everything will be a computer, and pretty much everything will be connected all the time in a way that doesn’t necessarily require human intervention.<p>If « the industry » (whatever it means) thinks that the future of computing is to have computers everywhere, either they have lost hindsight of the reality or they are going to try dangerously hard to push this dystopian future.<p>Every previous computing paradigms were accompanied with some annoyance but also with significant gains for the humanity.<p>Where is the gain to anyone to have computers « everywhere » ? What real problems does this paradigm solves ?

The problem with the article is that it thinks Wireless is simply a better chip ( Apple Silicon ) and that is it. It is not. It is the combination of Software, Chip <i>and</i> Antenna.<p>Apple could sell W1 or W2. But they will have to provide firmware update ( as they do now to AirPod ) to third party which Apple will definitely not provide the source code. And since Apple does not own or understand third party implementation of their design it makes debugging and quality control of MFi literally impossible. ( They tried that with HomeKit )<p>And with that, the whole point of the article was moot.

Maybe I’m in the minority here, but I feel that when Apple pushes an I&#x2F;O standard, it’s been because there isn’t really a better option with wide adoption. When they pushed FireWire, it was at least 10x faster than the SCSI interfaces it replaced while being a significantly smaller connector.<p>Lightning and the iPod dock connected are the only ones that are proprietary. But from all accounts Apple is planning to get rid of the port altogether, which would leave Bluetooth as the audio connector of choice.

To &quot;airpods&quot; example - I think that it is more about Apple making great product than Apple enforcing control. Better eco system control is more of useful side effect.<p>There are other players who can make great products like good quality headphones, with standardized components, because they care about product. Although not common behaviour, it means that it can be done. So I think that most manufacturers just don&#x27;t care enough, probably because most people don&#x27;t care either :-(

in regards to the proprietary I&#x2F;O we have seen already EU pushing for a standardised USB&#x2F;connector which may come very soon[0] hopefully<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ec.europa.eu&#x2F;growth&#x2F;sectors&#x2F;electrical-engineering&#x2F;red-directive&#x2F;common-charger_en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ec.europa.eu&#x2F;growth&#x2F;sectors&#x2F;electrical-engineering&#x2F;r...</a>

This won&#x27;t happen because it would require Apple to share their software as well as hardware. The seamless pairing and automatic handoff enabled by W1 and H1 relies on a very sophisticated software stack.<p>There&#x27;s no way Apple is going to distribute that software to third parties, and even if they did there&#x27;s no way they would be able to guarantee the quality and compliance of all of that on third party platforms. Apple is all about user experience and buggy flakey third party systems in the W1&#x2F;H1 ecosystem is absolutely off the table.<p>The way to do this is for third parties to come together and come up with open standards for automatic pairing and seamless device handoff. The problem with that is I suspect it&#x27;s incredibly hard.

These speculations gloss over some important points. Apple doesn’t control anything but their own ecosystem (even that only to some extent).<p>FireWire never made it bug because they were too draconian in licensing. Ditto on their HomeKit certification: they ended up relaxing their security chip requirements to get even the low level of adoption they have today. They were arguably the primary enabler&#x2F;driver of USB, SCSI, and the Sony rigid “floppy” but they did not initiate any of those.<p>Also their M.O. is to dominate profit share not market share. This doesn’t always require them to commoditization their compliment; often they basically ignore it.

At this point Apple really owns most things. Either by having officially bought them or by controlling platforms that things have become coupled to.

&gt; But why do the Airpods “just work?”<p>Ours don’t, the microphone went early on. It takes some fiddling to get them to connect to the intended phone and sometimes the left ear is has to be put in and taken out 3-4 times to get sound. My wife and I almost always use our wired lightning earphones in preference to the AirPods. We are both still resentful that our nice ordinary headphones no longer plug into our phones. The only reason we stick with apple at this point is the better privacy