> In the Apple side, Airpods have had decent ~100ms latency for a few years (enough for casual gaming)
This needs a big citation. It has always been claimed that AirPods have no discernible latency and every time it is tested it is actually pretty subpar (>150ms).
> Bluetooth "aptX Low Latency" has also been around for years, though adoption has been a bit slow. It is quite standard on Android phones
Almost no Android phones support it. Anything Samsung for example is excluded, even if they use Snapdragon Sound chips.
It is not really a technology problem, since I was doing 50ms latency with plain old HFP profile on BT 1.x back in 2002 with a Nokia and the cheapest headset. Latency has being going up even though nothing really changed in the underlying technology (Classic Bluetooth Audio HFP/A2DP is practically unchanged since Bluetooth 2.x times, while LE Audio introduced in BT 5.x is used by almost no one and their codec selection can be considered sabotage).
The problems are (from an enthusiast & armchair analyst PoV):
- Consumers don't care (YouTube works well, after all) and can't even measure it correctly. Manufacturers don't report latency on specs.
- Everyone has an incentive to make it subpar so that they can promote their proprietary solutions with vendor lock-in. Qualcomm/CSR is _specially_ guilty of this, and they dominate the BT headset industry. But literally everyone is doing it these days (Samsung, Sony, Apple, etc.). And even then, most of the time these techs provide negligible improvements on latency or quality (since, #1, customers can't measure).
- The Bluetooth SIG no longer has any remaining teeth (it never had many to begin with). They just rubber-stamp and things barely interoperate with each other these days (e.g. last Sony headsets "support" LE Audio as per logo but on release could not talk with any of the existing LE Audio stacks).
> This needs a big citation.
Here's one from 2022 (so AirPods Pro 2 and iOS 15 or 16), but: https://stephencoyle.net/airpods-pro-2
"As you can see, the second-generation AirPods Pro perform about 40ms better than their predecessors, with an average latency of 126ms vs the original’s 167ms.
"Perhaps a more interesting point to note is that the second-generation AirPods Pro perform only 43ms worse than the built-in speakers (at 83ms). That suggests that up to two-thirds of the time between touching the screen and hearing a noise occurs before Bluetooth data leaves the device. I think there’s still too much latency for audio feedback to feel snappy and responsive over AirPods Pro 2, but maybe at this point there are easier gains to be made by working to reduce the device-side latency."
On the last point, most of that latency is from the touchscreen response, the audio system is capable of single-digits latency.
Things may have gotten much worse recently as I distinctly remember the iPhone around the 4s-6s era having <30ms latency which was a huge advantage over Android.
The Apple Pencil can also go under 10ms latency when drawing, there must be a way of taking advantage of that for music apps?
Is there really _any_ other measurement? This is the number quoted by a lot of PRs, but e.g. professional reviewers put much larger numbers
e.g. rtings puts AirPods Pro 2 at 160ms https://www.computerbase.de/artikel/audio-video-foto/apple-a... (AirPods Pro 3 review is in progress)
and ComputerBase puts AirPods Pro 3 at 160-180ms. https://www.computerbase.de/artikel/audio-video-foto/apple-a...