Comment by Y-bar

Comment by Y-bar a day ago

59 replies

Three months ago a commenter here on HN claimed to me that this will be bad for Apple users:

> There is simply no good way to make the API public while maintaining the performance and quality expectations that Apple consumers have. If the third party device doesn’t work people will blame Apple even though it’s not their fault.

And, competition probably can’t build for it anyway:

> It’s impossible to build Apple Silicon level of quality in power to watt performance or realtime audio apps over public APIs.

And:

> […] Apple has to sabotage their own devices performance and security to let other people use it. The EU has no business in this.

Well, I look forward to next year when we’ll have the receipts and see!

fabioborellini a day ago

Apple can't perform well with audio on Apple Silicon, either. In 2025 macos is the only OS with audio cracking appearing with CPU load. Even Linux is better

  • indemnity 19 hours ago

    Yeah, this is a regression since macOS Tahoe. Amazing that it still exists after several patch releases, is audio working not a basic test case for Apple?

    I’ve found it to be worst when using Xcode / simulator and having headphones on for music.

    sudo killall coreaudiod seems to fix it for a while.

    • concinds 5 hours ago

      It's ludicrous. I remember when Apple took pride in the audio never stopping. Once a very long time ago my entire Mac froze, even the Force Touch trackpad was unresponsive, but the music kept playing. Now, press Volume Up and the audio stutters. Or AirPods randomly get choppy and then stop playing until you reconnect them. The heck?

    • charliebwrites 16 hours ago

      > sudo killall coreaudiod seems to fix it for a while

      For me this fixes it for about 30 minutes then I have to do it again… and again… and again…

      I wonder why some folks need to do it more than others

    • _fzslm 2 hours ago

      I've had it since the first macOS that shipped with my M1 Pro MacBook!

  • dawnerd 9 hours ago

    That drives me nuts. It happens more in my AirPod pros and gen 4 AirPods.

  • bdcravens a day ago

    I don't think it's CPU-based, but I've always had an issue with my AirPods Max on my iPhone with audio cracking (my AirPods Pro work fine, and the Max works fine with my Mac)

    • codesnik 12 hours ago

      I only have it when iphone simulator is running and using the same audio output.

  • Y-bar a day ago

    Personally not experienced this. However, continuity camera seems to have gotten more unstable over the past months for me.

vachina a day ago

[flagged]

  • x3ro a day ago

    You mean it will benefit Apple’s customers, who prefer headphones not made by Apple? If only the incentive for Apple to improve their interface was that its paying customers will have a better interface.

    • stavros a day ago

      I really don't understand people who defend Apple on this. The only reason I can imagine is that they're shareholders who don't use any Apple products, or shareholders who use exclusively Apple products and can't understand what sort of poor scrub might want an accessory not made by them.

      • darkwater a day ago

        It's the second one, but without being shareholders.

        • tt24 13 hours ago

          Strange opinion. Anyone that holds the SP500 (which is probably 99% of HN users between 9am and 5pm PT) are Apple shareholders, and what’s good for Apple is entirely aligned with what’s good for them.

          Taking a further step back, this same group of HN users probably understands the straightforward idea that what’s good for Bay Area tech companies is beneficial to them in a much broader sense, since they’re generally employed by them or by a very small group of other companies closely related to them.

          You can accuse them of being greedy, selfish, or whatever, but certainly not that they’re unaware of where their interests lie.

    • vachina a day ago

      non-apple headphones work just fine with Apple products. In fact, Apple's bluetooth stack seem to work best among all the portable devices I come across (no random droppings, connects on first try etc.)

      • geraldwhen a day ago

        I was unaware that my headphone experience as impaired in some way.

        I exclusively use non Apple headphones and I have no issues. I had AirPods for a while and I don’t remember them being better.

        • array_key_first 15 hours ago

          They have nifty apple-only features, like you can hold them close to the iPhone and they'll pop up and pair with a neat UI.

          It's mostly gimicky, but it does give the user the impression that the apple Air pods are higher quality because they have all these things thought out. In actuality, Apple just made it so they're the only ones who can do that.

      • eptcyka a day ago

        My iPhone has plenty of trouble connecting to various devices at times. God forbid it has to manage connecting to my car and my headphones at once. It works OK most of the time, but at least once a week it proves to be a problem.

  • latexr a day ago

    Apple used to brag that “it just works”. That included peripherals it did not control. Nowadays, it can’t even have its own devices work correctly.

    Apple has stopped improving long ago, and it’s not regulation that’s at fault.

    • vachina a day ago

      I was unconvinced till I switched my devices, one by one, to Apple products a few years ago. They really do just work, especially with specification abiding devices.

      Everything else feels flakey.

      • Macha 12 hours ago

        I will say, I have an Apple device minority ecosystem, and it seems to be that the Apple devices are the bad citizens there.

        For example, I have Sony and Bose headphones with bluetooth multi point. The way this is supposed to work for example is that I can connect them to my PC and my smartphone and have my PC playing videos or whatever, and my phone can override that when something "priority" like a phone call comes in.

        Except if the iPad is one of the connected devices, then it will claim priority once a minute or so, _even if it's playing no audio_, thereby interrupting other audio streams pointlessly. This makes all the other devices look like they can't play audio and the iPad can, and I'm sure the iPad plays nice with airpods, but it seems weird to me that every non-Apple combination of devices I hve also plays nice with each other.

      • ruszki 13 hours ago

        Except of course these things:

        - Reliable internet sharing, especially when connection is spotty, and when your connection switches between operators or countries

        - Making alarms randomly silent. I missed a flight once because of this. There is no excuse for this.

        - Randomly not working AirPlay

        - GPS is terrible compared to any of my previous Androids. Even my first Android in 2010 was better than this.

        - Finding an operator can take a loooong time after crossing border

        - Random restrictions in App Store, like no torrent clients

        - Generally terrible keyboard for my native language (Hungarian). Prediction and basic accent fixing doesn’t work at all. The exception is when I don’t need to change a word with diacritics… when the keyboard’s dictionary clearly contains them

        - Apple Maps is still a joke. Many times it doesn’t load the underlying map layer at all. I switch to Google Maps search for what I want, finding it, reading some info, looking some images, then switching back to Apple Maps, and it still doesn’t load. Also, navigation and speed limit information are unreliable to say the least.

        - Heavily underdocumented MacOS virtualization API, and half the features can’t be used in a real environment, but these restrictions are completely undocumented

        - Wanting to have a running DNS server is a challenge on MacOS

        - Unusable GPU when no monitor is connected

        - You basically need to turn off all security features in MacOS to allow some basic automation, like with FaceTime

        - Generally terrible compatibility with anything non Apple. Do you want to show your photos on your friend’s random TV without hassle? Good luck.

        - Many built in features (eg SSH, VNC) are heavily restricted, and good luck if you want to replace them cleanly. Most information on internet is “just use the built in solution”. Also they are many times completely insecure.

        There are hacks for these, but “they just work” is not true at all. On the level of how “they just work”, top level Android and Windows devices are also on that level for more than a decade in case of Android, and at least 20 years for Windows (if not more). Maybe Apple TV is my only device which just works without hitting some quirks. Especially compared to my other TV and TV adjacent devices. But even here its FaceTime solution, let’s say “interesting”.

  • SvenL a day ago

    Based on the latest iOS / MacOS update they don’t want to improve their interfaces anyway.