When announcing its game-changing and trend-setting new music streaming goodies earlier today, Apple unsurprisingly plugged its AirPods and Beats products, highlighting that all existing (and fast-approaching) headphones with an H1 or W1 chip under both brands will “automatically play” Dolby Atmos tracks on Apple Music going forward.
No high-quality Apple Music love for any AirPods owners
Before grabbing your pitchfork and booking a trip to Cupertino, it’s important to remember (and we can’t stress this enough) that all Apple Music subscribers are set to receive the aforementioned Lossless Audio upgrade at some point next month for free.
That means you will continue to pay just $9.99 a month (or $4.99 on a student account, or $14.99 for a family subscription) whether or not you will ever listen to a single song or album at its “highest quality.” You had to have known there would be some sort of a catch or restriction to this completely un-Apple deal, and well, here you go.
But why?!?
The reason, in case you’re wondering (and we know you are), is the Bluetooth AAC codec used by the AirPods family when connected to your iPhone, which apparently cannot handle the high-quality ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) files used to “preserve every single bit of the original audio file” whenever possible.
