Getting to True (and Non-Captive) Wireless Stereo

Wireless stereo earbuds are super-convenient but are locked into proprietary solutions. Consumer-friendly solutions need to be interoperable. In the world of wireless earbuds we fairly quickly recognized, after Apple introduced AirPods, that earbuds connected by a strap were truly unconvincing in their claim to be truly wireless. Why did those other products even start with a strap? Mostly to keep power consumption down and to synchronize between left and right speakers, both of which become trickier if the speakers are really unconnected.

In its latest assessment of the headphones landscape, market research firm Futuresource points out that the true wireless segment has grown 178% year-on-year, with Apple achieving a whopping 80% market share. On a worldwide basis, the overall headphones market totaled 79.1 million units in Q1, with retail revenues topping $4 billion.

A strange week we had, with most of the technology world focused on another edition of GSMA's Mobile World Congress (MWC), with the usual gush of new iPhone-clone announcements and most of the key semiconductor giants dividing their announcements with embedded world 2018, taking place at the same time in Nuremberg, Germany. Still, neither was much affected by the clash. MWC is more and more consumer electronics, autonomous cars, cloud solutions, and software developers pitching their latest ideas on social-engineered apps.

There were hardly any surprises at the Apple scheduled event in San Francisco. Just a sequential confirmation of all the rumors that had already been circulating for a while. This doesn’t mean that Apple didn’t deliver on the expected performance, design and the highest engineering level in all the new products announced, from the Apple Watch Series 2, to the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, all the way to a full range of audio accessories from Apple and Beats, including the new wireless Airpods and the fact that we now have officially entered the “jackless age”.