{"id":43487,"date":"2024-06-03T14:57:54","date_gmt":"2024-06-03T18:57:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=43487"},"modified":"2024-06-04T07:29:28","modified_gmt":"2024-06-04T11:29:28","slug":"lightning-headphones-that-require-bluetooth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/06\/03\/lightning-headphones-that-require-bluetooth\/","title":{"rendered":"“Lightning” Headphones That Require Bluetooth"},"content":{"rendered":"

Josh Whiton<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A crazy experience — I lost my earbuds in a remote town in Chile, so tried buying a new pair at the airport before flying out. But the new wired, iPhone, lightning-cable headphones didn’t work. Strange.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

By now the gift shop people and their manager and all the people in line behind me are super annoyed, until one of the girls says in Spanish, “You need to have bluetooth on.” Oh yes, everyone else nods in agreement. Wired headphones for iPhones definitely need bluetooth.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

With a little back and forth I realize that they don’t even conceptually know what bluetooth is, while I have actually programmed for the bluetooth stack before. I was submitting low-level bugs to Ericsson back in the early 2000’s! Yet somehow, I with my computer science degree, am wrong, and they, having no idea what bluetooth even is, are right.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

True Apple lightning devices are more expensive to make. So instead of conforming to the Apple standard, these companies have made headphones that receive audio via bluetooth — avoiding the Apple specification — while powering the bluetooth chip via a wired cable, thereby avoiding any need for a battery.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Via John Gruber<\/a> (Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

I think the problem these cheap manufacturers are solving isn’t that Lightning is expensive to license, but that it’s difficult to implement for audio. Actual Lightning headphones and headphone adapters have a tiny little digital-to-analog converter (DAC) inside the Lightning plug<\/a>. It’s like a little computer. Doing it with Bluetooth and using the Lightning plug only for power is surely easier. It’s just lazy. But it’s kind of wild that the laziest, cheapest way to make unofficial “Lightning” headphones is with Bluetooth.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n