Comment by loeg
15 hours ago
> With Apple's proclivity for proprietary standards, I'm amazed they (or others) haven't rolled their own wireless audio standard by now.
Can you imagine Europe's reaction? They'd fine Apple to the moon -- no innovation allowed unless it interoperates with other products that don't exist yet.
> Can you imagine Europe's reaction?
And they'd be right to do so. The correct approach to creating a new standard is plan interoperability from the start. If a vendor plans lock in by introducing a new standard, they should get shut down immediately and told to do better.
That sounds like a way to not get any progress. The way I'm used to this sort of thing happening is some company brings in a new proprietary standard, makes bank, then all the competition bands together to form an open standard to try and stop them. There is a bit of a tick-tock feeling as consortiums use more open and accessible standards to slowly lever power away from incumbents.
It is interesting to just glance at the history of USB [0] through that lens was originally developed, and it is interesting to see that as I would have predicted the group of companies that developed USB (MS, IBM, Compaq, etc) seem to be disjoint from the companies listed as precursor technologies (looks like that was especially an Apple-led consortium of hardware manufacturers organised around firewire [1]).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#History
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394#Patent_consideration...
As your link shows, even if the IEEE 1394 promoted by Apple was technically superior to USB (mainly because IEEE 1394 had been derived from SCSI), it was killed by patents.
Many superior technologies have been killed by patents and the greediness of the patent owners has been futile and they gained very little from their patents, because people have always preferred something cheaper, even if less good, so the inferior USB has easily won against IEEE 1394.
The patent owners that hope to gain too much from their patents always forget that instead of paying a too big royalty it is always possible to circumvent the patent by using an alternative solution, even if that is inferior.
> The way I'm used to this sort of thing happening is some company brings in a new proprietary standard, makes bank, then all the competition bands together to form an open standard to try and stop them. There is a bit of a tick-tock feeling as consortiums use more open and accessible standards to slowly lever power away from incumbents.
And that leaves you with two standards (at least), non interoperable between them. In the case of hardware this can be really annoying, constraining and inefficient both for consumers and at large.
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It really is a damn shame that my Lightning connectors are all dead and useless despite being the empirically better connector because of Vestager's whinging and stupidity across the entire EU mobile ecosystem.
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Oh yes, Europe bad, regulation bad. Maybe add some nuance to your thinking.
> no innovation allowed unless it interoperates with other products that don't exist yet
Products that don't exist yet... so, future innovation? No innovation allowed unless it incentivises and streamlines further innovation? Count me in!
> interoperates with other products that don't exist yet.
Are you claiming no other wireless earphones exist other than apples'??
That would implement Apple's proprietary protocol. He thinks Europe would think Apple is creating a monopoly for themselves for iPhone headphones since no other company could implement the protocol without Apple's approval.
iPhones work with any BT headphones.
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