Over on Micro Everything, Mats picked up on an recent WSJ article about Apple’s wireless audio potentialities. I too have given this plenty of thought… no big surprise… but I just can’t keep quiet about my random toughts anymore… there are many things I find pretty intriguing about Apple’s approach to this wireless audio distribution, but the aspect I want to talk about foremost is how sneaky and un-Apple they’ve been in rolling it out.Wireless audio by Apple has been leaking into the Apple platform, reaching the more adventuresome consumers via a series of Trojan Horse tactics…
- The Airport Express. It started here with a simple point-to-point wireless audio feature called Airtunes about 4 years ago. The two primary limitation… it only allowed point-to-point links and the source point had to be iTunes running on a computer. Well now that has changed…
- The 2nd generation Airport Express with Wireless-N has also seen the quiet launch or point-to-multi-point airtunes. Now you can play your iTunes to more than one Airport Express endpoint at any time.
- Because Airtunes is a custom audio payload protocol that uses WLAN network as its network transport, any WLAN enabled device with the necessary protocol software running on top of it can be a potential source or receiver of Airtunes content… such as
- Another PC – as receiver as well
- Apple TV – source or receiver
- iPod Touch – as source via WiFi
- iPhone – as source via WiFi
- iPhones and iPods are also perfect platforms to have your sweet touch screen remote controls… (a la http://www.alloysoft.com/) with all kinds of opportunities for third party skins, features, meta content exploits, etc… and not to mention the hardware only gets cooler and cooler every year, so consumers will constantly be getting more and more GUI capabilities.
The “predictable” wireless speakers would perhaps be very slick looking speakers with Airport express electronics built in.All in all I say, what a platform!!!?? Compare this to Microsoft… who have had so many false starts here, with big splash promises that just never measured up when put to the early adopter stress tests… but they have their Xbox I suppose… as if!As for Apple, I just can’t wait for the APIs to mature and for the community of nifty software developers to catch on and build out a great set of exeriences…But mine isn’t all glowing… being who Apple is, I see two potential impediments to world domination in this space…
- How much will Apple bind the experience to iTunes and protected AAC contents? If it’s more open – platform and library agnostic… you have the makings of something really interesting.
- Another caveat is that I don’t know of any high throughput WLAN in urban environments anymore. I am not sure WLAN networks will give the kind of QoS needed to maintain robust synchronized multi-point wireless audio instances… I’ve all but given up on WiFi in NY. Too crowded… too many APs fighting it out… tough problems, no doubt.
Apple’s under the radar approach is a nice way to hedge against exposing the system infrastructure risks… and in the meantime, they can quietly build out the user-level application functionality in a nice way… it may be that to truly realize their vision, they’ll need new dedicated wireless audio transports to work this out… for reals… time will tell.
Apple’s Trojan Horse… it may be only a sandbox
Over on Micro Everything, Mats picked up on an recent WSJ article about Apple’s wireless audio potentialities. I too have given this plenty of thought… no big surprise… but I just can’t keep quiet about my random toughts anymore… there are many things I find pretty intriguing about Apple’s approach to this wireless audio distribution, but the aspect I want to talk about foremost is how sneaky and un-Apple they’ve been in rolling it out.Wireless audio by Apple has been leaking into the Apple platform, reaching the more adventuresome consumers via a series of Trojan Horse tactics…
The “predictable” wireless speakers would perhaps be very slick looking speakers with Airport express electronics built in.All in all I say, what a platform!!!?? Compare this to Microsoft… who have had so many false starts here, with big splash promises that just never measured up when put to the early adopter stress tests… but they have their Xbox I suppose… as if!As for Apple, I just can’t wait for the APIs to mature and for the community of nifty software developers to catch on and build out a great set of exeriences…But mine isn’t all glowing… being who Apple is, I see two potential impediments to world domination in this space…
Apple’s under the radar approach is a nice way to hedge against exposing the system infrastructure risks… and in the meantime, they can quietly build out the user-level application functionality in a nice way… it may be that to truly realize their vision, they’ll need new dedicated wireless audio transports to work this out… for reals… time will tell.