Today, AirPods are one of the company’s best-selling accessories. Sound quality is not its best feature, but ease of use and connection with Apple products is.
That said, what else could Apple do to improve it? Looks like a new wireless audio protocol can help.
At least, that’s the opinion of Gary Geaves, Apple’s vice president of acoustics, who led the team that created the AirPods.
Talking to what hifi In an interview, Geaves was asked if Bluetooth could be one of the reasons for stopping AirPods and their sound quality, to which the Apple executive seemed to imply yes.
Obviously, wireless technology is critical to delivering the content you’re talking about, but also things like how much latency you have when you move your head, and if it’s too big, between when you move your head and the sound changes or remains static. It’s going to make you feel really bad, so we have to focus a lot on getting the most out of Bluetooth technology, and there are a number of tricks we can use to maximize or work around some of Bluetooth’s limits.
But it’s fair to say that we’d like more bandwidth and… I stop there. We would like to have more bandwidth.
We’re not sure if Geaves’ comments suggest Apple may be working on its own wireless technology or leveraging some other technology to improve AirPods, so we’ll have to wait.