Apples loves to make something new/cool and then make it obsolete a year later. Honestly, frustrating as an Apple customer. Just when I jump to your new product you make it useless by changing something. Tech should be designed to last years, not months.
How is not supporting "24-bit/192kHz" making a headphone obsolete? I would be surprised if you can even hear a difference on any AirPods compared to "24-bit/48kHz".
Any serious blind listening tests for 256kbps AAC on specialized sites such as Hydrogenaudio puts that codec at the border of perceptibility compared to lossless.
Everything above is more deeply rooted in belief than it is in reality - or as the old adage goes: „Music fans use their equipment to listen good music. Audiophiles use good music to listen to their equipment.“
There are people in the community who claim to hear differences between digital cables using error correction as part of their protocol (HDMI).
Which Apple devices are most notable as part of the story of next-year deprecation? And won't compressed streaming still be the norm for almost everyone in the world for a very long time?
What do you mean? In 20 years they changed the laptop power adapter twice and the iPod/phone adapter once. iPad is the worst (2 in ~8 years) since it arrived late in the ipod connector life and adopted usb-c early. In iPad's case it aligned with similarly positioned products and was generally a good upgrade.
Compare to other laptops which never had a standard adapter, phones which were also not standard until they moved 3 times in ~8-10 years from barrel jacks to mini-usb to micro-usb and now usb-c.
I don't have a source but owned MBPs and Airs from the first up until USB-C, and I had more than 3 different power adapters including USB-C for them. But you may be right and I remember differently.
I still have not forgotten the A1234 dual dock that became useless when they released iPhone 4. Or the A1221 headset that barely worked at all and needed a separate charger after iPhone 4. Apple has a history of making accessories that are useless after 1 generation (after 1 year).
In this case, though, it's more like protecting the user from streaming higher bitrate than anyone can hear a difference in on that hardware anyway - which will help their battery life. We're talking about things like ear pods here, not a hi-fi stereo system.
They aren’t changing anything, your AirPods will still be using the same AAC codec it did when you first bought them.
Taking a step back from watching their every move or keynote is one way to keep being happy with your device, and you’ll probably find it does last years.
