[complete transcription so that you do not need to visit X]
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.
So I went back and swapped them for another pair, from a different brand. But those headphones didn’t work either. We tried a third brand, which also didn’t work.
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.
What? That makes no sense. The entire point of wired headphones is to not need bluetooth.
So I turn Bluetooth on with the headphones plugged into the lightning port and sure enough my phone offers to “pair” my wired headphones. “See,” they all say in Spanish, like I must be the dumbest person in the world.
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.
My mind is boggled, I’m outnumbered, and my plane is boarding. I don’t want wireless headphones. And especially not wired/wireless headphones or whatever the hell these things are. So I convince them, with my last ounce of sanity, to let me try one last thing, a full-proof solution:
I buy a normal wired, old-school pair of mini-stereo headphones and a lightning adapter. We plug it all in. It doesn’t work.
“Bluetooth on”, they tell me.
NO! By all that is sacred my wired lightning adapter cannot require Bluetooth. “It does,” they assure me.
So I turn my Bluetooth on and sure enough my phone offers to pair my new wired, lightning adapter with my phone.
Unbelievable.
I return it all, run to catch my plane, and spend half the flight wondering what planet I’m on. Until finally back home, I do some research and figure out what’s going on:
A scourge of cheap “lightning” headphones and lightning accessories is flooding certain markets, unleashed by unscrupulous Chinese manufacturers who have discovered an unholy recipe:
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.
They have even made lightning adapters using the same recipe: plug-in power a fake lightning dongle that uses bluetooth to transmit the audio signal literally 1.5 inches from the phone to the other end of the adapter.
In these remote markets, these manufacturers have no qualms with slapping a Lightning / iPhone logo on the box while never mentioning bluetooth, knowing that Apple will never do anything.
From a moral or even engineering perspective, this strikes me as a kind of evil. These companies have made the cheapest iPhone earbuds known to humankind, while still charging $12 or $15 per set, pocketing the profits, while preying on the technical ignorance of people in remote towns.
Perhaps worst of all, there are now thousands or even millions of people in the world who simply believe that wired iPhone headphones use bluetooth (whatever that is), leaving them with an utterly incoherent understanding of the technologies involved.
I wish @Apple would devote an employee or two to cracking down on such a technological, psychological abomination as this. And I wish humanity would use its engineering prowess for good, and not opportunistic deception.
I don’t understand why you don’t blame Apple first of all for their methods of locking up open standards and/or modifying them just enough that non-apple products won’t work.
I don’t support Chinese companies for doing shitty products, but fuck Apple for everything they do to lock you in their “ecosystem.”
Yeah, I feel like oop reached the wrong conclusion after this. Apple treats its consumers as if they were mindless children and they (for some reason) love it. Just look at the whole “green texts” issue, for example.
Some manufacturers found a smart workaround but the apple brainrot is stronger, I guess.
I wouldn’t call this a “smart workaround”. I mean, I can hardly blame the opportunistic fucks for doing it this way, and certainly the original sin in Apple’s licensing/certification bullshit, but it’s just an amazingly stupid way of doing this all around, brought about by both Apple’s and the earbud manufacturers’ greed.
I think they thought they were in r/apple
Stupidity at its finest. The whole point of cheap 3rd party apple accessories is to use workarounds to get past apple DRMs and use them without paying the apple tax.
Blame apple foremost for creating such a market in the 1st place. You don’t need such workarounds in other phones because they just work.
Wow that sucks. I’m glad I’m not in the apple ecosystem.
Yeah, this would never work on Android! Oh, wait…
It wouldn’t because USBC doesn’t have those expensive standard requirements.
And you can still get (non-flagship) phones with the fucking 2.5mm jack
3.5 surely?
I haven’t seen a 2.5mm jack on a phone in a long time. I still have a 2.5 to 3.5mm adapter that I used to listen to music on my flip phone in 2006 though.
Yeah. With non-pixel phones you can still get SD cart slots, headphone jacks, etc. I think motorola still has cheaper phones that has those things.
I wish I could still get a higher end phone with an SD card slot. I’m holding onto my s20 ultra (I like the pen) until I’m forced out for security update reasons.
The only flagship phone I know that has all the features (3.5mm, SD card,…) is the Xperia 1 series, and those are kinda expensive, sadly.
Yeah. I have t mobile, so the xperia 1 V, and the newly released but not officially sold in the US xperia 1 VI would work, but rare phones tend to lack support, amd I can’t bring myself to shell out $1400 for a phone like that.
I lost my earbuds in a remote town in Chile, so tried buying a new pair at the airport before flying out.
…
True Apple lightning devices are more expensive to make.
…
I wish @Apple would devote an employee or two to cracking down on such a technological, psychological abomination as this.
He wants to take away a budget option from developing countries where people can’t afford the expensive version of the proprietary technology, and he wants Apple to be the one to do it?
Fuck this guy.
Idk…seems like the average apple user to me.
Trillion dollar company Apple is right and can do no wrong.
It’s all those other people who need to do better.
I suspect the ranting author failed to appreciate that Bluetooth is probably cheaper to implement for the audio because regular headphones require three wires while power supply only requires two. Ingenious really.EDIT: Proper wired headphones would also require a soundcard in the dongle.There is a soundcard in the bluetooth headphones and wires are dirt cheap, it’s not about that. Proper lightning headphones require getting your product certified by apple ($$$) and a special apple chip added in ($$$) because iPhones refuse to connect to devices that aren’t.
But they will connect to all bluetooth devices.
Does he want to take a budget option away? At one point he says “And they still charge $12” to me that says that’s close to what proper wired earbuds should cost. People are getting screwed buying something that should have higher sound quality and getting the cheapest Bluetooth quality instead.
He was in the airport, remember. Not in a local market.
Not only an airport, but elsewhere would likely not have been able to negotiate to same prices as a local. Sticker price is almost always the foreigner price, at least when it’s matching or higher than the price one would pay back home.
I’m almost certain I’ve seen $5 “lightning” headphones here in the midwestern US.
Sure, but I have no idea what prices to expect in Chile, airport or otherwise. Just trying to extract some info by the author’s choice of wording.
Nah, it should be like the audio jack, you plug in the headphomes with no proprietary bullshit…Apple is locking poor people out of this easy method by being dicks about lightning connec tors. Im glad EU forces them to USB-c but Apple will probably lock devices out on this also
The iPhone 15 has been out for over half a year now and people still spread this FUD. The iPhone 15 does nothing special with its USB C port.
Also I mention apple locks poor people out of headphones and you reply IPhone 15 is out. You realize many people can not afford a brand new iphone just because it came out?
Every iPhone has been expensive on release. As time goes on more and more people get newer and newer phones. And what was new and expensive becomes cheap and available.
Not so much in places like Brazil, Africa, India etc. you can get a cheap Android phone for $25 but iPhone is still a premium luxury. The new phone every two years is a privalege thing.
Yet… have you tried a non apple USB headset to see if it works? Just becauae you have USB doesn’t neccessaeily mean kernel allows all devices. But even if it works to placate EU now have you noticed that all giant companies start out with something that is OK, then later alter the deal, once you are trapped.
Any USB-C headphones work.
I have tried the Google earbuds, they work, even in the terrible condition that they’re in after 5+ years of rough use
The guy was having a funny geeky bitch. He was laughing at himself.
He doesn’t expect Apple to change anything.EDIT: I think you are right, that last paragraph of his is weirdly serious. Would have been pure comedy without it.
Apple puts a DRM chip in their peripherals, the fault for this happening is mostly on them.
That is actually kind of brilliant. Having to go through MFi and getting the Apple DRM chip into the manufacturing pipeline can be a real pain (and expensive).
With this scheme, they could also run all the wired on/off and volume control actions through Bluetooth AVRCP. Even have a Mic on the wire, so if a call comes in, switch to HFP to talk/manage the call.
Damn, that’s clever. Hats off to whoever came up with it.
Incidentally, there’s very little Apple can do to make this stop, unless they decide to break Bluetooth and third-party accessories.
They are buying cheap earbuds and rant about cheap manufacturing. Doesn’t make sense. I think it’s a genius solution to avoid ridiculous licensing costs. Also why does it matter if the audio goes through the cable or wireless? In this price range it all sounds like shit.
Those earbuds are not so great for flight mode.
Even if it’s a nice solution the licensing issue, they are still deceiving their users. I don’t think I have seen anything like them but they should be clear that they are bluetooth.
Yea, this is not cheap companies doing cheap things. This is companies getting annoyed by stupid licencing and restrictions, getting around the problem.
I was submitting low-level bugs to Ericsson back in the early 2000’s!
Seems kinda dickish to be submitting bugs instead of bug-fixes. No wonder BT sucked back in the day. /s
What’s wrong with submitting bugs? That seem standard, that’s one part of getting it attention and hopefully getting it fix. The reason Bluetooth probably suck back then because low adoption and likely it was still getting started.
I think they were joking. As in actually submitting bugs (adding bugs to the code).
Oh alright silly me 😁
I don’t really see the big problem here? Like sure, it’s silly that it’s cheaper to make wireless headphones than wired ones (I assume - the manufacturers are clearly not too bothered by trademarks and stuff if they put the Lightning logo on it so they wouldn’t avoid wired solution just due to licensing fees), but what business does Apple have in cracking down on this? Other than the obvious issues with trademarks, but those would be present even if it were true wired earphones. It’s just a knockoff manufacturer.
Cheapest possible wired earphones won’t sound much better than the cheapest possible wireless ones, so sound quality probably isn’t a factor. And on the plus side, you don’t have multiple batteries to worry about, or you could do something funny, like plugging the earphones into a powerbank in your pocket and have a freak “hybrid” earphones with multi-day battery (they’re not wireless, but also not tethered to your phone). On the other side, you do waste some power on the wireless link, which is not good for the environment in the long run (the batteries involved will see marginally more wear)
Honestly the biggest issue in my mind is forcing people to turn on Bluetooth, but I don’t think this will change anyone’s habits - people who don’t know what Bluetooth is will definitely just leave it on anyway (it’s the default state), and people technical enough to want to turn it off will recognize that there’s something fishy about these earphones.
Cheap Bluetooth might have connection hitches and, to my knowledge, Bluetooth doesn’t work with airplane mode although I think most airplanes these days aren’t actually affected or we’d have planes dropping out if the sky daily.
Also, does Bluetooth get saturated the way WiFi does? That, I don’t know, but an airplane full of 100 people all on Bluetooth might create some noise issues that would hurt the performance.
Apple sort of shot themselves in the foot here with removing the headphone jack if they had any interest in this issue.
to my knowledge, Bluetooth doesn’t work with airplane mode
The radio regulations were amended about 10 years ago to allow both Bluetooth and Wifi frequencies to be used on airplanes in flight. And so cell phone manufacturers have shifted what airplane mode actually means, even to the point of some phones not even turning off Wi-Fi when airplane mode is turned on. And regardless of defaults, both wireless protocols can be activated and deactivated independently of airplane mode on most phones now.
an airplane full of 100 people all on Bluetooth might create some noise issues that would hurt the performance
I don’t think so. Bluetooth is such a low bandwidth use that it can handle many simultaneous users. It’s supposed to be a low power transmission method, in which it bursts a signal only a tiny percentage of the time, so the odds of a collision for any given signal are low, plus the protocol is designed to be robust where it handles a decent amount of interference before encountering degraded performance.
even to the point of some phones not even turning off Wi-Fi when airplane mode is turned on
I didn’t know that part (the rest yes). So much for using airplane mode to conserve battery. I suppose it’s the tower handshake that is most energy hungry in my experience.
both wireless protocols can be activated and deactivated independently
100% although my comment was in the context of people who don’t really understand Bluetooth at all.
+1 for the rest, thanks.
So much for using airplane mode to conserve battery.
Your understanding is slightly off.
Airplane mode Does In Fact Turn off your CELLULAR Radio This radio is what powers your (2/3/4/5)G and LTE (This is 4G btw) connection to the cell towers.
Most international radio communications laws can prohibit the use of Cellular Radio in flight; however they often don’t prohibit the use of shorter range radio technologies such as WIFI or Bluetooth.
It’s all about ‘loudness’. Think about it. Your phone must ‘scream louder’ at a farther away cell tower than it would need to communicate with a nearby WiFi router or a Bluetooth headset.
Also, phones don’t use a lot of power to purely listen for Wifi beacons. They’re not transmitting until they actually try to join, so leaving wifi on doesn’t cost significant power unless you just happen to be near a remembered network.
Your comment missed the mark entirely. Please don’t reply-guy me; I know what I’m talking about.
Your comment missed the mark entirely.
Not sure why you’re saying that. I wasn’t disagreeing with any of your points, but adding to them another angle that answered the parent comment’s concerns about whether leaving wifi on for airplane mode drains battery. You addressed the cellular radio side, and I was adding a separate point about the WiFi radio that complements what you were saying.
Cheap Bluetooth might have connection hitches
Fair enough, but I’ve only ever seen this happen with cheap wireless cards / chipsets that do both Bluetooth and WiFi and don’t properly avoid interference between these two (for example, I can get perfectly functioning Bluetooth audio out of my laptop with shitty Realtek wireless card if I completely disable WiFi (not just disconnect)). I think this is less of an issue for dedicated Bluetooth devices.
Bluetooth doesn’t work with airplane mode although I think most airplanes these days aren’t actually affected or we’d have planes dropping out if the sky daily.
Yeah, that’s true. As for the second part, AFAIK there was never an issue with 2.4 GHz radios (which is the frequency band Bluetooth uses) interfering with planes, it was more of a liability / laws thing - the plane manufacturer never explicitly said that these radios are safe (so the airline just banned them to be safe) and/or laws didn’t allow non-certified radios to operate on planes.
Also, does Bluetooth get saturated the way WiFi does?
Eventually yes, but it’s much more resilient than WiFi - 2.4 GHz WiFi only has three non-overlapping channels to work with (and there’s a whole thing with the in-between channels being even worse for everyone involved than everyone just using the same correct three channels that I won’t get into), while Bluetooth slices the same spectrum into 79 fully usable channels. It also uses much lower transmission power, so signal travels a shorter distance. And unlike WiFi, it can dynamically migrate from channel to channel (in fact, it does this even without any interference). 100 people actually seeing each other’s devices might be a problem, but I don’t think that’s a realistic scenario - Bluetooth will use the lowest transmit power at which it can get a reliable link, so if everyone’s devices are only transmitting over a meter or so, there shouldn’t be any noticeable interference on the other side of the plane.
And most other manufacturers too for following the stupid decision to remove the headphone jack.
I don’t really see the big problem here?
The primary problem in this story is the lying. If there are Bluetooth earbuds in the box then it should say Bluetooth on the box.
As horrified as I was to read this, it is a little exciting to think that I live in a world where Bluetooth radios are so inexpensive that building it that way is cheaper
I don’t want to rain on your parade, but maybe that’s more of an indictment about ridiculous licensing costs for lightning
LOL. Not in this case. Cheap headphones do not pay Apple a dime. And Apple can’t go after every little headphone manufacturer they have real things to deal with like entire knock off Apple Stores that push millions of dollars a month.
In this case, the answer is less insidious. It’s the batteries. These headphones have BT but no batteries, hence why they are wired (need the power).
Why do they need Bluetooth at all though? Why not pull the audio through the Lightning plug like official Apple accessories do?
If I had to take a guess, it’s because the audio signal coming out of the Lightning port is encrypted because Apple hates everyone who isn’t them
Two reasons. One, it’s actually expensive to wire up lightning to audio. Because the connection is digital, not analogue like the headphone jack. Two Apple can detect data thru software and even disable it, leaving the headphones useless. Why would they? Because you didn’t apply for their mifi program and pay them. These headphones don’t have data, they just plug directly into power.
Its basically how they bypass the “Apple tax.”
Bluetooth’s digital too, my guy. You need a digital-analog converter either way. It’s just that when you use the Lightning port for audio you don’t also need a Bluetooth radio. Besides, USB DAC chips are like a dollar.
Also you just proved my point that they only did this to avoid licensing fees.
Congrats, you just figured out why they include BT + Lightning from a technical side 👏
As for proving your point, if you need that my guy… you are so right that you define right. There is no one more right than you are here.
He’s right
To add to it, you probably also have to deal with parts sourcing. You can probably scavenge Bluetooth radios from several generations worth of equipment or get cheap from China. In contrast, a Lightning cable that can turn data to sound is likely really hard to come by.
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They are cheaper than batteries. The cost of shipping and adding batteries to the production line. They are volatile and require strict regulation so most cheap manufacturers just don’t want the hassle. That’s why it needs power. It has BT, but no battery.
- Plug lightning cable of faux-wired headphones into a charger brick.
- Turn on Bluetooth and connect the faux wired headphones via BT while it not being connected to the phone via cable.
TAKE THAT, SMARTASS REMOTE CHILEANS VILLAGERS!!!
I would love to see the looks on their poor faces when they witness this.
I can tell you what they will look like. They’ll be as convinced as in OPs article that they are still right and say “see, I told you!”
Or next thing ya know, it turns out the brick has bluetooth too and is required to connect to the phone in order to charge it during normal use, so OP’d have to pair it with the phone as well in order to power the headphones, further reinforcing the locals.
It’s Bluetooth all the way down.
Everybody bashing this guy.
First of all, he is an Apple user… What do you expect?
Bet he was happy to pay cheaper price and disappointed to be… Tricked into buying something of the same value he was paying for?
Hard to stay serious on apple brainwashed guys.
At the same time, interesting to learn how even the most idiotic restrictions are always bypassed one way or the other. This fills me with hope for the future.
Dude is just upset he lost his expensive earbuds.
I got second-hand annoyance for the people standing behind this guy in line while he argues with the clerks and tries to flex his “computer science degree”, only to be proved wrong again and again. Is there a techbro equivalent to a Karen?
I mean he’s not wrong, wired bluetooth earphones are a weird thing! But I’m getting huge Redditor vibes off this dude and I mean that in the worst possible way
