The AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) codec may not be widely used across the industry, but Apple devices have been employing it for quite some time. All Apple Bluetooth earphones support AAC, but due to the lack of adoption of the codec by other developers, users are somewhat bound to use them only inside Apple’s ecosystem.
Taking the Apple AirPods as an example, when connecting them to a Windows 10 PC, it will use SBC because the current Windows 10 build only supports Bluetooth audio via SBC or Qualcomm’s AptX. Downgrading to SBC allows the AirPods to reproduce audio, but at a loss of quality that some users may not be fond of.
