Apple Suggests That Bluetooth Is Holding Back The AirPods

When the AirPods were first announced, many made fun of the earbuds, its design, and its price. However, fast forward to today, they are some of the best-selling accessories and have since spawned new versions and Pro iterations. We imagine that sound isn’t necessarily the selling point here, but rather the ease of use and connection with Apple products.

That being said, what else could Apple do to improve on it? It turns out that maybe finding a new wireless protocol could be it. This is what Gary Geaves seems to hint at that. Geaves, for those unfamiliar, is Apple’s VP of Acoustics and helped lead the team that was responsible for creating the AirPods.

Speaking to What HiFi in an interview, Geaves was asked if maybe Bluetooth could be one of the reasons holding back the AirPods and its sound quality, to which the Apple exec seemed to hint that it was. According to Geaves:

“Obviously the wireless technology is critical for the content delivery that you talk about, but also things like the amount of latency you get when you move your head, and if that’s too long, between you moving your head and the sound changing or remaining static, it will make you feel quite ill, so we have to concentrate very hard on squeezing the most that we can out of the Bluetooth technology, and there’s a number of tricks we can play to maximise or get around some of the limits of Bluetooth. But it’s fair to say that we would like more bandwidth and… I’ll stop right there. We would like more bandwidth”

We’re not sure if Geaves’ comments suggests that Apple could be working on their own proprietary wireless technology or leveraging some other tech to improve on the AirPods, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Audio, Gadgets
Tags: AirPods, Headphones, Social Hit