[syntheticnature]

They took the tradeoff. Mind you, a number of these things Did Not Matter to them -- they weren't pairing them with the computers, just their phones. I said manufacturing -- they had a bunch of old 'beater' desktops that were over five years old for running device programmers and the like.

It would likely have taken me a full workday to get them up to speed on any security/privacy issues.

As for DRM, not only do I think they wouldn't care so long as their music played, but I'm with everyone who sees no difference between a remote DAC and a local one. (Heck, these folks in manufacturing could easily have disassembled the headphones and put in an analog output at the appropriate point, they had the relevant rework skills -- and that would not trip any phone-internal tamper sensors.)