There is an interesting discussion on this topic in the Roon forum, specifically this particular comment by Miles_Account caught my attention.
"As I said earlier (you also referenced this) Apple doesn’t actually care about lossless/audio quality.
Here is what they do care about; advantages over their largest competitor.
Spotify doesn’t have Spatial audio. Apple is very aware of how little difference high resolution makes (see countless threads on even this, a HiFi forum, of people actually having to debate and show graphs just to prove there is a difference). In the consumer space, if you have to point to graphs and argue with a customer about the supposed merits of your technology, it doesn’t have value.
What does have value is a technology that immediately presents itself to the customer as different. There is zero debate that there is a change, it can be up to the individual whether they prefer it or not but there is zero discussion and zero graphs on whether it is different.
This is spatial audio. Regardless of how anyone on this forum feels about its merits I have seen the “wow factor” that it illicits from people who play music from their phone speakers. Dolby Atmos is a game-changer because it's an advancement in audio technology that any consumer can notice and in the cases I have seen, greatly desire.
Spotify does not have this, they have a massive install base, larger than anyone else and more damningly, a free tier. This matters when you are going triple the amount of data you potentially have to stream to those people. The free users matter because Spotify does not make any money off those users, it's considered a gateway to a premium sub but it is not profitable. They won’t stream high res to them but the cost of them plus the cost of the additional bandwidth required for lossless and the storage costs add up.
Apple just dealt a double whammy. Spotify now can’t charge for the increase in costs of these lossless subs and they have adopted a technology Spotify is behind on, that is popular with consumers.
How do I know Apple doesn’t care about audio quality? Well as pointed out earlier in this thread they aren’t allowing people to pay them for lossless files, they aren’t upgrading them and their own products don’t support High Res.
They only care about Spatial audio, that technology
requires lossless:
https://developer.dolby.com/technology/dolby-audio/dolby-truehd/ 2
Spatial audio is why Apple is supporting lossless. This has nothing to do with resolution or bit depth."
I’m an Apple addict, Apple Music subscriber, along with Qobuz. I welcome their announcement but on this matter imho : It’s long gone since they care for the crazy ones : they won’t allow high res purchases & limits iTunes Match to AAC, restricts to their sole products all the work they do on...
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