This feature happens on the phone, not the AirPods. There is no reason at all why this shouldn't be available in the EU, except the consumer friendly need to provide the API for the feature to other device manufacturers.
(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.)
Perhaps the regulations treat is as if you’re “recording” the person you’re speaking with, without their consent?
Apple is most likely withholding features in EU as a bargaining chip in antitrust negotiations, and to discredit EU's consumer protections. Pretending things in Europe are randomly unknowably illegal for no reason supports Apple's narrative and popular opinion in the US.
The audio is captured by the outward facing microphones used for active noise cancellations. That’s why it only works for AirPods Pro 2, 3 and AirPods 4 with ANC. That wouldn’t just work with any headphones.
Even the AirPods Pro 2 will need a firmware update. They won’t work with just any old headphones and seeing that even the AirPods Pro 2 need a firmware update tells me that it is something they are doing with their H2 chip in their headphones in concert with the iPhone.
That it only works with AirPods is just Apple discriminating in favour of their own product which is exactly what the EU was going after.
But their $60 ANC headphones with cheap audio processing hardware in the headphones aren’t going to be sufficient.
They may even be able to use the exposed models on the phone.
The equivalent feature on Android tells me it would. I mean it already does technically.
Are we supposed to treat Apple being late to the party as usual as some kind of exceptional thing only them could do?
https://support.google.com/googlepixelbuds/answer/7573100?hl...
Which are the same price as Apple’s AirPods with ANC.
So Google also didn’t try to support the feature with generic earbuds.
But I mean, you are free to buy overpriced Apple headphones which sounds worse than Sony, only properly works paired with an Apple phone or laptop and whose killer feature was available on their competitors buds years ago if that rocks your boat.
And those Sony ones aren’t cheap.
The first review I found comparing them..
https://wasteofserver.com/sony-wf-1000xm4-vs-apple/
Why would I want to by a none Apple laptop with horrible battery life, loud, and that produces enough heat to ensure that I don’t have offspring if I actually put it on my lap?
This is no different than Google not supporting just any old headphones.
Then the argument came that Apple’s AirPods are “overpriced” even though the cheapest AirPods that support it - AirPods 4 with ANC are in the same price range as Google’s and cheaper than the worse sounding and more expensive Sony Earbuds.
The whole argument seems kind of silly. Just buy the platform you want that has the features you want. If the European thinks Apple is overpriced then it's no harm that they aren't bringing features to Europe. He wasn't going to buy them and now is going to not buy them even harder.
The rest, which is to say that everything Apple sells beside laptops is subpar, their strategy regarding European regulations deprive them of any credibility when they pretend to care about consumers and their prices conversion in Europe is daylight robbery, is just my opinion and accessory to the discussion. I just couldn’t help myself.
The noise cancellation are neck and neck but the AirPods had much less of that “pressure” sensation when using it. AirPods transparency is just plain better. Comfort for long use sessions is better on the Sony’s. Mic is better on the AirPods.
Maybe, maybe not. Assuming Apple's motivation isn't pure self-dealing, it's very consistent with Apple's behavior to forbid or impede doing things that are absolutely possible but sometimes result in a sub-par experience.
I dislike Apple's malicious compliance with the EU too, but it seems unrelated here, at least without any proof.
Alternatively it might have something to do with the translation being performed in iOS, and the capability not being exposed to competitor audio devices, and therefore Apple needs assurance the EU won't consider it anticompetitive?
Or both.
I recently explored building a real-time STT system for sales calls to support cold-calling efforts. However, the consensus from my research was that, even if audio is streamed live without storage, consent laws could still present significant hurdles.
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.
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.
Waiting the way you describe only makes sense if they think the implementation probably follows the law, but they're not sure it will be accepted. We could make that argument for privacy rules, we can't in good faith make that argument for interoperability rules.
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.
Or is it powered entirely by local models?
For anything remotely powerful enough, iOS will have to send voice to some server for processing and that’s a privacy shit show.
If there were real issues with GDPR or the AI Act Apple would have nothing to lose and everything to gain by mentioning at least the generalities of _why_. But they did no such thing so we can only assume it is not any of those things which are the real issues.
You've not given the person being recorded any way to exercise their legal rights around collecting, inspecting and deleting their data.
GDPR is aimed at companies building user databases, not allowing them to completely ignore security, accuracy, user complaints, and sell anything to anybody while lying about it. It doesn't limit individual people's personal use of data.
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_...
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/domestic-cctv-usi...
"If your CCTV system captures images of people outside the boundary of your private domestic property – for example, from neighbours’ homes or gardens, shared spaces, or from public areas – then the GDPR and the DPA will apply to you. You will need to ensure your use of CCTV complies with these laws. If you do not comply with your data protection obligations you may be subject to appropriate regulatory action by the ICO, as well as potential legal action by affected individuals."
You, as an individual, have data protection obligations, if your ring doorbell captures audio/video about someone outside your property boundaries. The apple translation service seems analogous.
This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity and thus with no connection to a professional or commercial activity.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj/eng#rct_18
GDPR is aimed at protecting _individual's_ personal information, irrespective of what or who is collecting or processing it.
You could always put environmental audio through Whisper, attain audio trance crypt at 51010 per cent Word error rate, put that transcript through machine translation, and finally TTS. Or you can put audio directly through multimodal LLM for marginal improvements, I guess, but ASR error rate as well as automatic cleanup performance don't seem to have improved significantly after OpenAI Whisper was released.
Was this post the output of such a pipeline, by chance?
but how would these airpods really be able to know you're in the EU? this should be easily hackable
As part of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) evaluation [0], Apple was found to operate a market for headphones connected to its devices, while competing in the same market with own products and giving itself a competitive advantage by creating OS-features exclusive to them.
The EU found this is not a level playing field for competition and ordered that they have to make such OS features available for other accessory manufacturers as well.
I guess they are currently either trying to make a case for the EU on how it is technically impossible to provide the feature to others, prove that this is somehow not an OS-feature (and should be excluded) or delay any action to maximize the benefit of this competitive advantage in other markets.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are also beats headphones in the pipeline for which they want to use this feature as competitive USP...
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
"[..] The measures will grant device manufacturers and app developers improved access to iPhone features that interact with such devices (e.g. displaying notifications on smartwatches), faster data transfers (e.g. peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connections, and near-field communication) and easier device set-up (e.g. pairing).
As a result, connected devices of all brands will work better on iPhones. Device manufacturers will have new opportunities to bring innovative products to the market, improving the user experience for consumers based in Europe. The measures ensure that this innovation takes place in full respect of users' privacy and security as well as the integrity of Apple's operating systems."It’s enormously difficult to ship any interesting feature that integrates hardware and software. The EU wants Apple to happily accept a burden that makes it harder to produce the products that made it popular in the first place.
I’m disappointed the EU won’t be getting these features (at least not quickly) but I’m hoping the citizenry realizes who’s to blame here
Apple loses the forced bundling but they'll do fine without it and it's a good thing for everyone else.
And yes yes plenty of things go wrong in the EU, I know. Still prefer this over Americas lack of laws and ease of bribing a president.
So... Apple?
My headphones certainly don't have trouble connecting to a device of any manufacturer without loss of functionality, but some of the "citizenry" seems to fall for marketing materials saying only apple can do things securely and in an integrated manner
I get the Apple is trying to spread propaganda that anti-competitive laws are bad for consumers, but in this case, consumers will just buy from another brand and it's a simple net loss for Apple.
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)
Daishiman•8h ago
solardev•8h ago
JustExAWS•7h ago
solardev•7h ago
If you're rich, I'm sure the US is great. If you're not, it's not a great place to live.
nozzlegear•5h ago
Source: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/americans-are-generally-richer...
danudey•5h ago
Having a big house and more money doesn't mean you have a better life; this seems to be the main point of the article you linked, but your comment seems to imply that you missed that point (though I could be misreading). Case in point, this quote from the blog:
> I could go on, but the pattern is pretty clear. The U.S. in general is less healthy and less safe than Europe.
nozzlegear•4h ago
No, I didn't miss the point; there's excellent data in that article for people who think the US is a great place to live, and people who think Europe is a great place to live. That's the beauty of the article, and the crux of my point: both of those groups can be correct – there's no single "this is the greatest place to live for all human beings, periodt" out there. The article concludes:
> But as one final thought, I’d like to offer the hypothesis that life is just about equally as good in all developed countries. There’s personal preference, of course — if you want a big house and a lawn, you might prefer America or Canada, whereas if you want national health insurance and lower crime rates, you might prefer Japan or France. But in terms of where the average person would want to live given the choice, I think all these rich countries are in the same ballpark.
StopDisinfo910•4h ago
Average infant mortality rate in the USA: 5.6 per thousand Average infant mortality rate in the EU: 3.25 per thousand
Life expectancy in the USA: 78.4 years Life expectance in the EU: 81.7 years
nozzlegear•4h ago
Anyway, my point is those numbers are comparable when there are countries like Mexico, Brazil and India out there with an infant mortality rate of 11, 12.5 and 25 deaths per thousand, respectively.
(For the record I don't think the US is a better place to live than the EU, I just don't think it's worse either.)
ioasuncvinvaer•1h ago
StopDisinfo910•1h ago
Well, don’t look at the GINI coefficient then.
I mean, sure the USA is closer to the EU than developing countries but if that’s your argument, that’s not putting the bar very high.
nozzlegear•1h ago
Come on, are you going to make my argument so easy? Twice of two drops of nothing is four drops of nothing. You're nitpicking numbers that frankly don't make a difference because they're too close to matter. But don't argue with me, argue with the author of the article where you can see all of the data and comparisons for yourself.
StopDisinfo910•1h ago
The US infant mortality rate is shameful. Not as shameful as its poverty and homelessness rates but still shameful anyway.
nozzlegear•50m ago
I'm just not interested in nitpicking superfluous numbers with you. You've got the data in front of you showing that outcomes are, by and large, the same across the US and Europe, but you've decided to plant some jingoistic flag on a molehill of miniscule differences when there are countries in your own union with equally "shameful" results.
Please don't waste my time further by harping on these minute differences, I won't respond.
StopDisinfo910•30m ago
It doesn’t. A significant share of the EU budget actually goes toward helping the poorest members in catching up.
> You've got the data in front of you showing that outcomes are, by and large, the same across the US and Europe
Sorry but the data shows the reverse of that. I’m not wasting your time. You are in denial.
The US has high consumption but garbage metrics of approximately everything else. The GINI coefficient is extremely high. The infant mortality rate is poor. Life expectancy is bad for an OCDE country. Homelessness is so high you could believe it’s a developing country. Imprisonment rate, awful, literacy rate, very poor for a developed nation, social mobility, very low, the list goes on and on.
The USA is paradoxical in that it’s the only rich democracy which actually doesn’t take care of its population.
I’m glade you have the privilege of being rich there and I know you have been indoctrinated from birth into believe the US is exceptional, still, the numbers don’t actually look that good when you look at them.
miltonlost•47m ago
nozzlegear•45m ago
mytailorisrich•1h ago
This and social benefits are becoming unaffordable as the economy falls behind.
lm28469•6h ago
JumpCrisscross•4h ago
This is nonsense. The stock market had been propped up by FAANG. But with AI we have a few trillion dollars of value being created by new entrants (e.g. OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic) and legacy companies newly stepping on FAANG (e.g. Oracle, Perplexity).
It may all be a fever dream. But like the dark fiber of the 90s, it should—worst case—leave behind a lot of energy and datacentre infrastructure. (If Washington would get out of the way.)
JustExAWS•2h ago
Right now using the valuation technique that tge value of a company is the net present value of all future returns * some multiple, we don’t know if any of them will ever be valuable.
JumpCrisscross•43m ago
This metric has nothing to do with whether a company is public or private.
JustExAWS•8m ago
lm28469•40m ago
Yeah OK, cool I guess
LinXitoW•32m ago