[imoverclocked]

This is the way a lot of companies work and have historically worked. Why spend a ton of resources supporting every operating system and hardware combination out there for all of your devices when you have a perfectly good way of doing it in house?

[PaulsWallet]

> Why spend a ton of resources supporting every operating system and hardware combination...

Making it so Android users can update their bluetooth headphones is not supporting every hardware combination. Adding a OSD to your monitor so people don't need OS X specific software to change their monitor settings is not supporting every operating system or hardware combination.

[hunterb123]

They aren't just bluetooth headphones, they are airpods, you bought airpods because you are in the iecosystem.

Who buys airpods and expects them to work well with anything other than an apple device? You buy them because it'll work well in their ecosystem, really well.

I have some cheap earbuds that work decent everywhere, as well as a generic bluetooth speaker, but I generally use my apple earbuds because they work the best with what I have.

When you support only your ecosystem you can improve the connectivity that bluetooth alone doesn't allow.

[Morgawr]

> Who buys airpods and expects them to work well with anything other than an apple device? You buy them because it'll work well in their ecosystem, really well.

This feels like a hindsight kind of statement. We are conditioned to think that since it's Apple it won't work well with other ecosystems, so "you don't buy apple if you don't have everything apple" which... I mean, it makes sense but it's the reverse logic. I bought my pixelbuds and I can use them on a wide range of bluetooth devices that aren't Google-specific, and they work as you'd expect them to. It's fine if Apple wants to have Apple-specific features if you use them with Apple devices, just like Google pixelbuds have specific integration with google home app and similar google-specific devices, but at least the core bluetooth functionality (+ settings) should be provided to be able to work on any device.

Disclaimer: I've never used airpods so I have no idea how they work, just commenting on the logic of the original statement alone.

[imoverclocked]

> I have no idea how they work

There is definitely some proprietary “glue” in there. One nice thing about them is that you pair them to one device and then all of your other iCloud devices can see them. I would not expect that kind of feature to work elsewhere for obvious reasons. I could be wrong?

They also support spatial audio which is now supported with Android.

There are definitely features of the AirPods which are new or were new when they were released. It’s up to Apple to support those features on their own hardware/OS. It’s up to others to add support to their own operating systems if they deem it worthwhile. Similar goes for other hardware. Yes, the hardware works differently than so many generic components out in the world but that’s kind of the point.

[chesc]

I have airpods and an android phone. They work well now (I really am not interested in spatial audio). They did however work pretty badly until I connected them to an iphone to allow the firmware to update. I dislike the ecosystem argument. They are just Bluetooth earphones... Quite expensive ones at that.

[antihero]

The current iteration of the Samsung Buds Pro didn't have an iOS app, which was annoying.

Ended up just getting a UTWS5 and Moondrop Katos and being a lot happier.

[Teever]

What I'm hearing from you is that we need to regulate companies to mandate interoperability.

Could you imagine a world where telephones couldn't make calls to each other or cars needed special gasoline that was only available from gas station chains that licensed it from your car maker?

What a terrible world that would be.

Why do we accept similar things with computers?

[noisy_boy]

I mean considering the continuous erosion of consumers' rights on their devices and manufacturing trying the assume the position of licensor instead of seller, I don't have a lot of trouble imagining such a world. If Apple said that they will void the warranty on iCars if users put anything other than iGas and make the iGas connectors proprietary, I'm sure a lot of people would nod and queue up to pay, like they do now because the build quality of iCars is the best and they want their cars to just work.

[6510]

I like the feature, it prevents my kids from putting the wrong fuel in.

[noisy_boy]

I rest my case :)

[imoverclocked]

Yes, let’s choose something that will work with everything, say:

RS232 for any wired data connectivity 110 VAC for any kind of power 802.11b for any kind of wireless data connectivity …

Now that we have these mandated, let’s zoom to the present day and figure out just how bad of an idea each of those decisions were.

I don’t know what “mandating interoperability” would mean for all cases in the original argument. eg: Does someone need to write software that can run on every single operating system that supports Bluetooth to perform a firmware update for AirPods before releasing them? That sounds pretty abysmal for anyone that doesn’t have the resources to understand/target/maintain a process for BeOS/Haiku/Linux/Android/iOS/Windows/whatever my car’s console is running/etc.

OTOH, you could write a standard for firmware updates to devices over different channels and see who would adopt it. Make sure it is future proof and covers all currently known use-cases. If it’s adopted by enough people, you aren’t using your local government to write something in stone which will likely be outdated in a decade or so anyway.

[6510]

110 V ? No one uses that!

[imoverclocked]

I know this comment is somewhat in jest but you can buy sockets which are usb/usbc straight out of the wall. While safe and UL-listed, you might technically break local code by installing them because you would replace standard outlets with something (potentially) more useful to you. The code you might break is having a certain number of outlets per linear foot of wall.

Most modern electronics convert from 110VAC to something else and spend a lot of hardware dealing with the fact that they are given single-phase AC and actually need somewhat clean DC. The big exceptions to this would be things like heaters/ovens/stoves or incandescent bulbs which just use 110VAC (or 220VAC split-phase) directly. None of those exceptions require AC and some might even work unmodified with DC. The big issue with single-phase or split-phase AC that's annoying for DC devices is the fact that you can get no power 100-120 times per second when the voltage crosses 0. Thus we end up with giant adaptors/fancy power supplies that plug into the wall sockets and produce DC.

On a power-distribution level, we use AC because we figured out how to transform voltages easily early on. However, we couldn't always agree on frequency (or voltage, or connectors) and thus we have situations like Japan's power grid to this day. Fast forward and we now have efficient ways to convert DC voltage but still pay the cost of AC everywhere because it's both ingrained and regulated.

edit: 0-voltage crossing is 2x the frequency in AC

[happyopossum]

> What I'm hearing from you is that we need to regulate companies to mandate interoperability. Could you imagine a world where telephones couldn't make calls to each other or cars needed special gasoline that was only available from gas station chains that licensed it from your car maker?

That's nonsensical - none of your examples came about from regulation, they were market-driven.

[projektfu]

Although, Tesla continues to equip a proprietary charging port and an adapter is required to use CCS1. Futuristic companies seem to hate standards.

[izacus]

Luckly EU put a boot to the neck of that dumbass idea and EU Teslas have CCS2 port.

I wonder if mandatory opening of interoperability protocols for popular products would improve health of electronics markets.

[imoverclocked]

> Futuristic companies seem to hate standards.

A standard is just something that gets adopted by a bunch of people. There are competing standards for all kinds of things… the market generally decides what standards win. Any company doing something new is by definition attempting to set a new standard.

[projektfu]

There was a time when standards would be developed voluntarily by the major players for the parts that are tangential to their innovation. Apple's success with the iPhone isn't because they use a connector that is prone to shorting and susceptible to lint. Tesla's success in electric cars isn't because they didn't help develop a standard connector. However maybe they plan to pivot to overpriced electricity at their proprietary stations if they lose their competitive advantages, who knows?

When innovation was occurring in integrated circuits the companies standardized on the 0.1" DIP. Then as needs for smaller packages came they worked together on TSSOP and others. Obviously the innovation isn't a matter of packaging.

[imoverclocked]

The original iPhone/iPod 30-pin dock connector was just that: a dock connector. At the time, I recall a lot of different dock connectors and they were all proprietary and special built for the electronics they supported; That was the state of the art in the late 2000s. The next iteration was the lightning connector which is standardizing on USB. It was also better than any usb connector at the time because it could be inserted in either orientation that made physical sense. After a decade of use, we have a lot of expectations around connectors that we didn't in 2012... like pocket lint and well-worn/damaged ports.

If you look at the USB implementors forum, you'll notice many of the big players are there (including Apple.)

I would argue that the 0.1" DIP was a technology innovation of its own. It was adopted because it solved a problem with scalability of TO-5 and similar packaging which was somewhat round in nature, maybe borrowing from the design constraints of vacuum tubes? (complete guess on that part!) There are variants of DIP which have different dimensions than the 0.1" DIP we see almost everywhere today. While there may have been cooperation in choosing 0.1" DIP, I think it's more likely that available parts were largely made in this form factor and thus it was adopted.

[projektfu]

I'm just saying that RCA didn't produce 0.1" DIP while Fairchild produced 2mm DIP, and then make people decide which overall format they're going to work with before buying breadboards and the like.