So all Apple needs to do is stop gatekeeping headphone technology.

So Apple is welcome to divest AirPods into a separate company and problem solved. Who knows, "AirPods Inc" may discover there are a great many phone brands out there that could use a nice integration and extra features. Win for consumers.

Vote with your wallet?

In my quest to check if deamed was the correct spelling, I stumbled upon an interesting read https://reginajeffers.blog/2024/03/04/damned-or-deemed-or-de...

You already can replace the default assistant app with any app that declares itself as an assistant on Android, and have always been able to.

Google is a designated gatekeeper carrying all the same DMA obligations for:

Google Search, YouTube, Chrome, Shopping, Maps, Ads, the Play Store, and Android.

https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en

You can replace Gemini with Perplexity or whatever you want on your Android phone, that includes the main system-wide assistant.

So Samsung could nail the regulation part with their earbuds, but Apple with Airpods can't.

Did you just describe Apple as a victim?

Apple doesn't hate European citizens, per se, just EU/EEA customer protection laws.

> It never ceases to amaze me in worst way possible how quite a few people here keep treating them as something more, over and over

A lot of people are investing in Apple, most likely you are indirectly as well, if not you then your pension. Not surprised some people would defend everything they do. Then you have the die-hard fans and I'm sure there's some PR peeps going around especially how it easy it is nowadays with AI.

It's funny, because Apple was/is HN's darling when it comes to privacy, yet handed over the keys to Chinese government when push came to shove.

It's not that people love Apple necessarily. It's also that not all people love bureaucracy and trust in it implicitly.

> EU has defined Apple (but not Google(!)) as a "digital gatekeeper"

Could you explain what you mean? The following article lists Alphabet as a gatekeeper.

https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en

> So if they bring this system in, something which is listening to people real time and using online AI models to translate things, EU might force them to let _any_ 3rd party AI replace it.

If you allow the third party to do that, yes.

> And when someone installs TotallyHonest Co. AI to replace it and there's a massive data leak where they just stored every conversation as-is in an open S3 bucket, who gets the PR flak on HN?

I see this argument often, as often as I hear about leaks. Do you have an instance where Apple was blamed for a leak from a third party? I never heard anybody blaming Apple for Tea app leaks for a recent example, and it is still available on App Store.

Also, an alternative translation app does not have to be provided by a totally random third party vendor. Companies that to me are just as trustworthy as Apple surely will provide alternatives too - Google, OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft or Anthropic.

So I really don't see what's your point here. Don't install the alternatives if you don't trust them.

I’m still waiting for the shoe to drop on the #1 matter, because as things like always-on listening devices and interior video surveillance spreads, people are not realizing that unless they are informing their visitors every time they enter their home (or you hang signs everywhere), that they will be recorded, in many states with two party consent laws, you are thereby committing a separate felony by recording them, with every recording. Technically even if you have your phone out and someone else’s voice triggered the “digital assistant” in a way where the recording was captures and sent somewhere (on device cases are an separate matter), you’ve committed a felony, regardless of whether you did so unintentionally. It’s how many crimes are committed, unintentionally.

Because unbeknownst to many, e.g., just because someone is in your home does not mean they do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy even in spaces that are common, i.e., not the bathroom, e.g., a house cleaner or maybe a contractor or even a guest talking while you are not in the room.

This generally only applies to the voice recording, not the video itself.

I have been a bit surprised that some enterprising attorneys with a hunger for getting rich have not jumped on this matter already. Because you, the owner may have consented to being recorded by an always-on listening device, but your family members or your guests will likely not have done so. Or, even if some slick corporate attorney got you to agree to take on responsibility for notifying everyone as is necessary in each jurisdiction, that makes you even, legally speaking, knowingly engaging in felonious activity.

>Or even more likely, as others have suggested, it’s Apple being petty and withholding features from EU users to put pressure on the EU.

The EU has threatened massive fines for creating features not available to competitors. And the EU refuses to vet a feature officially in advance.

Under such conditions, how would you distinguish being petty from complying with the law?

The EU probably imagined the outcome would be: change your business practices entirely for the EU, and make all new features open to all, immediately, perpetually, everywhere.

But that's not the norm for the vast majority of companies, for a variety of sensible reasons. Given that it's actually hard to do that, witholding new features until you're told "yes this is ok" is a rational response to the law.

> I can also forward a caller to voicemail where their message is transcribed in real time, which is fundamentally the same mechanics.

Voicemail greetings typically inform the caller the message will be recorded, and there'a often a beep which is an indicator of recording as well. If you don't consent to recording, you can hang up without leaving a message.

I wonder if that translation is actually powered by OpenAI and Apple doesn’t want to pay them for inferencing on behalf of app developers.

Or is it powered entirely by local models?

Isn't noise cancelling technically recording people in your environment in this sense then?

Pressure on them to do what, if there’s nothing about this proscribed by the EU?

That seems ridiculous, this is a translation feature. Do you think it is aimed at translating American to Canadian? Those pesky niche European languages are hardly spoken in the Americas so maybe that is the case.

What languages is it mean to translate then? Different accents of English?

German is on the list of supported languages. That can't be the reason why it's not available in Germany. Although as an Austria I must admit their German is a bit weird.

Is this much different than a hearing aid, even in technical detail? A hearing aid will have a small internal buffer containing processed audio. I’m not sure the law will care that the processing is more substantial as long as it’s on-device and ephemeral.

I think it really depends on the legal definition of recording or what it's used for.

Common sense says that a recording that only exists for a few seconds, and is utilized only by the person a speaker is intending to speak to, and is never permanently stored, should be fine. And we can assume Apple has made sure this is legal in its home state of California.

But EU law might not have sufficient legal clarity on this if it was written in a particularly open-ended way.

> even in public spaces

Even in a two party state public spaces are fair game. The Constitution supersedes state law.

At the point where you enable this feature (you wouldn't walk around with it enabled at all times because why?) the phone shows a screen asking you to get consent and the other person touches yes/no and that's it? Or would a signed form with a government seal be required?

> How would this function in two-party consent states like California?

It won't. Regulations permit sound recording, as long as it's not stored. Speech-to-text and hearing aids for disabled people are an example of permitted uses.

(I’m an EU-based user of Apple products) I see your point. However, Apple already provides a translation API[0], a speech recognition API[1], and a Text2Speech API[2], so not a lot more is needed than the API you describe. Also note that, while I have not looked into that thoroughly, it seems the kind of API you are discussing shares many similarities with the features of the Apple Vision Pro SDK (real time computation introducing new constraints…)

I think this situation also shows a strong divide between two visions of Apple end-game (and I think both exist within the company): exposing those APIs makes the Apple ecosystem better as a whole, with its satellite accessories/app developers; while keeping them private gives them an edge as a hardware selling company. Personally, I prefer when Apple embraces its gatekeeper status.

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/translation/transl... [1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/speech [2]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/speec...

> such functionality only has to be provided if explicitly requested by a developer who is working on a competing product

So if I'm Samsung, wouldn't I explicitly request every possible bit of functionality I could force Apple to provide, even if the "competing product" might very slow to market?

How come? If the other person has any other device that translates for them then you can talk to them easily with Airpods.

From what I have seen that is not the case. The AirPods nor connected iPhones are interacting with the other person’s at all.

It is not about the features themselves, it's about Apple owning the OS a series of accessories need to connect to and using it as a tool to secure advantages to Apple Headphones/Watches/Payment services/Entertainment.

No. It's a similar situation with certain AI features from Google.

It is purely out of spite. They like to rant every time how the EU is blocking progress. They are using it to turn sentiment of iDevice-using EU citizens against the EU. It's interesting how Apple rolls over when an autocratic state (e.g. China) asks, but are trying to mobilize their users against regulators, do malicious compliance, etc. when it's democratic states regulating them.

As a Mac user since 2007 and iPhone user since 2009, this behavior of Apple disgusts me. (Yes, I know - vote with your wallet. I switched from Apple Watch Ultra to Garmin Fenix and do have a Pixel with GrapheneOS.)

How are they not complying with the regulation? This is what compliance looks like.

It’s not that simple - when implementing this one runs into the issue that detecting self speech is a solved problem - BUT detecting the speech of a person talking AT you in a restaurant is not nearly that easy - this is known as diarization. This needs custom models - and I am willing to bet the model for the iPhone is tuned specifically to the AirPods . How would they even provide that? And I’d bet that the customer microphones in the AirPods provide a much better time synced stream to the phone than just a random pair of phones - I’d be willing to bet this is not just Bluetooth, but also out of band clock drift, etc. Which allows for much better phase data - which makes training diarization models simpler- and makes the accurate. So - I’d bet there is a per headset model here - and one that probably requires more than just audio.

Apple is using the conservative approach, which is to misrepresent their starting position by moving the goal posts to an extreme. Then they bargain towards the "middle". It creates the illusion of bargaining.

So Apple is throwing a huge tantrum and withholding features from the EU to act like this is a much bigger deal than it is. This gives Apple a lot more bargaining room after the EU bitch slapped them.

Apple likely already has an API they could enable and be done with this. They won't do that. Apple needs exclusivity with new feature releases because they don't do things all that well anymore(Siri, maps, etc, nobody uses those because there are better alts available on ios).

But yeah Apple is just starting way to the extreme so they have more room to bargain. Hopefully the EU sees through this, again, and doesn't budge.

Is there any evidence for this at all? The EU has plenty of regulation surrounding audio recording, as other comments have said. Instead of jumping to the assumption of malicious intent, I think those make more sense up front. I don't think this is a real bargaining chip for Apple to use against the EU for the side loading stuff.

I dislike Apple's malicious compliance with the EU too, but it seems unrelated here, at least without any proof.

The EU said that everything that Apple creates for its own devices has to have APIs for third parties. The translation feature only works for AirPods.

> Europe are randomly unknowably illegal for no reason

I mean they absolutely are especially as EU regulators categorically refuse to review anything in advance just in-case their get a budget shortfalls and need to go looking for fines.

Do all these people also speak some English?

(I live in NYC where the mix of languages is thick, but I rarely have to reach even for my Spanish, because English is still commonly understood everywhere, at least to some degree.)

No you should absolutely blame apple for that. They fear to lose their monopoly and want to set an example for other countries.

Whole neighborhoods in Miami where the primary language is Spanish and many of the inhabitants barely speak English

for the sake of debate: if androland is available across the way, must disneyland provide skybridges so its guests can immediately leave its own attractions and frequent its competitors’ instead?

How dare you assert that Disneyland is working for free in such a scenario?

$99/yr is clearly a fair and reasonable compensation to license all Disney IP for any purpose because Disney has an eleventy bajillion percent margin on ticket sales.

Translation happens on-device.

More likely 130kph, in most countries this is the upper limit on the highways and you effectively have no public areas in the country with higher limit. So the OP is kinda right with their take.

> and is making me want to not hang out here anymore.

Agreed. No matter which side of the issue one is on, the fact you and everyone else who explains the incentive structure is getting downvoted to hell and receiving eloquent responses like "Bull fucking shit dude" is really pathetic.

Is HN really just another emotionalist monoculture echo chamber now? We're downvoting everything we disagree with whether it's true or not? Count me out.

Compliance overhead is real, but it doesn't rule out strategy.

Two things can be true: big fines risk slow launches, and companies also use that friction to shape narratives and sequence rollouts.

> regulation with punitively high fines attached to it creates massive regulatory risk for public companies that have a duty to shareholders to take them extremely seriously

There were multiple cases where this didn't stop Apple from keeping anti-steering rules long enough to get a €1.8B fine (music streaming), eating €50M in Dutch penalties over dating-app payments, delaying Apple Intelligence/Phone Mirroring in the EU citing the DMA, and then getting fined again under the DMA for App Store steering.

There are strict rules in China as well. Apple just plays a different game there. In China it's rapid, quiet compliance with content/data controls. In the EU, the DMA forces structural changes that touch Apple's model, you see legal fights, staged rollouts, and public messaging (e.g., delaying Apple Intelligence/Phone Mirroring).

Bull fucking shit dude.

> Please don’t turn this into another “malicious compliance evil-corporate conspiracy” meme like GDPR is on this site. It doesn’t cultivate intellectual curiosity, just flame wars, and is making me want to not hang out here anymore.

This is the company that is trying to subvert the DMA with Core technology fees that they're not entitled to, and notarization which allows them to retain the gatekeeping power that they're not entitled to. That's the same company that attempted to maliciously comply with a US court order which forced them to allow developers to provide external payment options by instituting a new imaginary 27% fee on external payments, making alternative non-viable.

This is the same company whose internal memos filed in court document their malicious compliance strategies.

> In Slack communications dated November 16, 2021, the Apple employees crafting the warning screen for Project Michigan discussed how best to frame its language. Mr. Onak suggested the warning screen should include the language: “By continuing on the web, you will leave the app and be taken to an external website” because “‘external website’ sounds scary, so execs will love it.” From Mr. Onak’s perspective, of the “execs” on the project, Mr. Schiller was at the top. One employee further wrote, “to make your version even worse you could add the developer name rather than the app name.” To that, another responded “ooh - keep going.”

> [...] The designers’ discussions contextualize their use of the word “scary” to indicate its ordinary meaning and, most applicable here, indicate the goal of deterring users as much as possible from completing a linked-out transaction. Apple repeatedly acted to maintain its revenues and stifle competition. This was no exception. His attempts to reframe the obvious meaning of these communications do not persuade. All of this was hidden from the Court and not revealed in the May 2024 evidentiary hearing.

Apple are grand masters of malicious compliance. Attempting to portray this fact as a "meme conspiracy" is intellectually dishonest bordering on gaslighting, and weaponizing your paper thin veil of "intellectual curiosity" to attack this criticism makes me not want to participate. But I will continue, precisely because of people like you who try to use an aura of intellectually superior and rational "intellectual curiosity" to push false narratives.

I did not know that, and I agree.

GDPR doesn’t mention “personally identifiable information” once; it’s concerned with personal data, which is “any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’)”.

The rest is correct: the restrictions are aimed at organisations, not individuals.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj/eng#art_4.tit_...

GDPR does covers individual's use of eg Ring doorbells insofar as recording video and audio outside of your own property. This would seem to be analogous.

GDPR is aimed at protecting _individual's_ personal information, irrespective of what or who is collecting or processing it.

> Apple would have nothing to lose and everything to gain by mentioning at least the generalities of _why_

Really? You can't imagine any reasons Apple wouldn't want to have a public PR battle about its disagreements with its primary regulator in the market? Have you ever worked with the government?

And trouble. That’s another EU export.

Although the US has the lead on that.

This is the central point that is always missed on this forum.

These are features that apple are dedicating a huge amount of resources to. Tim Cook frequently talks up the importance of artificial intelligence as the future. Apple Intelligence is a tentpole feature of new iPhones, it has heavily influenced their advertising, and takes prime position in their marketing materials.

Withholding these features, even for just 6 months, is harmful to Apple. Especially when Apple appear weaker in the category, and competitors are frequently releasing AI products.

However here you'll read a byzantine concoction on how this is acshually a 4D anticompetitive chess move.

What does it mean to be locked in, exactly? I just bought a pair of Shokz headphones and they work perfectly well with my iPhone. I didn't feel like I was forced to buy AirPods.

The relevant question for Apple is here:

Will those users buy OTHER headphones than Apple then, or still buy Airpods...?

From my observation the "properly locked-in" Apple user buys Airpods and mostly replaces them with newer Airpods when needed, because of Apple's artificial advantage in ecosystem interoperability (the exact reason of the dispute with the EU)

> Have you ever tried bluetooth audio devices on an iPhone/ iPad?

Every day. But I never ran into what you suggest. My iPad is not more annoying than my Dell laptop when it comes to Bluetooth (and both are light years away from my Linux box).

What I don't want is for the protocols that allow for apple's seamlesness to be opened to cheap trash. If Apple is forced to make it open to manufacturers of cheap trash and support it for manfacturers of cheap trash then it won't be economical for them to make cool stuff anymore and we won't have cool stuff anymore. I also dont want it to be easier to make devices that could maliciously take advantage of the friction removal capabilities that Apple builds into their devices. Customers already have a choice, e-waste slop garbage or apple products. The idea that they should be able to have both is quite ridiculous.

Right? Why spend money and effort to R&D actually interesting devices if you can just make cheapo compatible slop instead?

So the throttling was because they found that the old hardware and batteries weren't keeping up and so, instead of letting the devices become completely useless they throttled them.

Butterfly keyboard isn't great but it works better without being crammed full of cheeto dust.

Play store has no barrier to entry and it's a slop filled garbage shithole. There's garbage slop on Apple's Appstore too but nowhere near as much.

The flipside to the 3rd party parts that nobody talks about is that if there was a sudden flood of apple devices repaired poorly with sheapo shit parts then buying used apple devices would be a terrible experience. I bought a lot of my Apple stuff 2nd hand and it all works great. Nobody said that anything had to be cheap, you want cheap go buy something else. Price is what you pay but value is what you get.

The planned obsolescence is not even a thing, they have by far the best record for supporting their old devices. I have an '09 Macbook Pro that is able to run El Capitan and the last security update for that was 2018. Iphone 6s is STILL receiving security updates. If you want to easily upgrade your components then don't buy apple devices, if you don't want to maintain winblows but still want serious applications to be able to run natively then buy apple. Older devices slow down because literally nobody cares about writing software that's lightweight and only uses actually necessary system resources.

Again with the Appstore and the 'user choice' you have choices, dont buy Apple products if you want the freedom to bloat your stuff with crap software. There's a massive market of winblows and android devices with all the pointless unsupported-open-source-with-the-last-update-to-the-project-made-in-1234BCE software your heart desires out there for your slop and e-waste buying pleasure. What security do you gain from installing random shit beyond the security that Apple builds in by default?

ALL tech currently sucks massive donkey cock but at least if you buy an iphone then you know that it'll reliably perform the duties of a small pocket based social media based computer/car audio brain until such a time as you choose to replace it. If you buy a macbook then you know that it'll do the job of portable computing for you as long as your needs don't esceed what 99% of people actually use a computer for besides playing videogames (just get a console for those, seriously how the fuck is a weird RGB chair in an RGB room better than a couch with your cat/dog/friends/family) for over a decade of your life. At least when you buy Apple products you know that you're paying out your ass for something that will 100% deliver on all the promises it makes.

If this competition is only competing on price then it's not really competition, it's a race to the bottom. If you genuinely think that because two pairs of earbuds make noise and connect via bluetooth that makes them the same thing then you are welcome to buy slop and have it work rubbishly with your other slop.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

I had to do some hunting to figure out how a thread about AirPods descended into arguments about life expectancy and pensions. This is where it began. Please take care to avoid starting flamewars like this in future. We all have to consider the consequences of what we post, and it's against the guidelines to post inflammatory rhetoric for precisely this reason.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

There is a world of difference between shipping a feature, and shipping an api that anyone can use to ship a feature. It is such a normal progression to make an api and dogfood it internally, iterate until you have something you feel comfortable supporting indefinitely, and then expose that api publicly. It is not reasonable, IMO, to require that every feature you ship has an API that is ready for public consumption.

Granted, Apple generally doesn't do that last part unless forced. I think some kind of timeline on the DMA requirements would be more reasonable. e.g. you have two years to make a feature publicly accessible before fines start accruing.

And Apple is now saying "That's fine, we'll instead adhere to the law by having our product do less. Don't buy it if you don't like the reduced featureset."

Someone at Apple did math on this and it's not worth their time to make this feature interoperable just for the EU market. That's because of this law. They wouldn't have even considered it without the law.

> No, the EU mandates that Apple cannot implement OS features for the sole benefit of its own hardware-offering in a different market, because this is not fair competition.

Thats would involve exposing public api ie “a burden”

>No, the EU mandates that Apple cannot implement OS features for the sole benefit of its own hardware-offering in a different market, because this is not fair competition.

Why don't the other players make their own smartphones and smartphone OS and then "implement OS features for the sole benefit of its own hardware-offering"?

Is it fair to force another player to let you hijack their ecosystem?

in some ways, are they not able to run their own apps on the iOS ecosystem to support extra features?

My sony headphones claim they do all kinds of magic stuff through the app, but I guess that's not a realtime feature, more like a regularly scheduled calibration

You can connect airpods to a non-apple device and use them for audio.

This is more of an iPhone / iOS feature which uses the airpods as the microphone and audio output.

+1

And the users here on HN saying "it's expensive/difficult to give the same access to competitors" are beyond naive if they think this isn't about protecting the margins on the airpods by giving their own products access to the system competitors don't have.

> for other devices they need to spend some extra integration work to make sure there's a standard they follow

Have you ever built a software product with an API? Would you say it was trivial upfront and ongoing to build and support this API?

Why would Apple have to endure this burden. If a 3rd party maker cannot make their device work the same way with the proper access, it is their own issue and not something Apple should help them figure out. The proper access is the key part, but once that access is open it is up to the devs to figure it out. If their product still has a subpar user experience, that'll be something the market figures out for them

A big part of why they're considered the best is features like moving seamlessly between iPhone and mac within seconds of starting audio playback.

It's not as simple as documentation. If you document the interface, you need to keep it somewhat stable and backwards compatible.

But if it is internal, then you control both ends of the API, and can change them in tandem.

I know, I can't tell if it's intentionally sarcastic or unintentionally Olympics-level irony... but it made me laugh!

Gasoline is the very definition of a commodity. For now, at least, LLM is very from that.

As far as I know, Apple is unique in delivering inference on such a tiny device. For this they deserve a reward. The question is how. Like the EU, I don't believe Apple-only premium-priced locked-down earbuds is the right way.