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I think in most of these cases the real reasons are more mundane - spending the resources on supporting extra formats would give them no competitive advantage (and a significant cost in terms of maintenance and security). It sucks, but that's the capitalist system for you.
Nobody's complaining Apple doesn't support actual MPEG ALS, for example.
Way more than ALAC. Music in FLAC is provided by many music services and digital stores. Music in ALAC? I never saw it being sold anywhere.
> because there's almost never a reason to care about having a lossless audio codec.
That's utter nonsense. Any time you want to reencode your music, you care about the lossless codec for the source, otherwise you'll degrade your quality. For example if tomorrow some state of the art lossy codec comes out which reduces size / computational complexity of decoding (such as Opus for instance), you can reencode your audio library in it for usage in mobile devices and so on. But without lossless sources that won't be an option. Lossless codecs are functionally equivalent to audio CDs. Lossy ones are not.
Because almost nobody has any reason to want lossless music. Anyone buying music in FLAC is deluding themselves if they think they can hear a difference between that and a properly encoded lossy codec like MP3 or AAC.
> Any time you want to reencode your music, you care about the lossless codec for the source, otherwise you'll degrade your quality.
True. But this is an issue for so few people as to be effectively zero. Extremely few people actually do this sort of thing, and I would wager that most of them aren't Apple customers to begin with.
If Apple had infinite engineering resources, then yes, it would be nice to solve every single problem for every person, everywhere. But Apple's engineering resources are not infinite, and it would be a flagrant waste of those resources to spend them on issues like this that impact effectively zero Apple users.
Patents stop them (JPEG2000 is not a free format). FLAC is not patented. Q.E.D. Apple don't supported it just in order to be nasty to everyone.
Oh please, stop with this FUD. JPEG2000 is no different to Ogg or VP8 in that regard, both of which Mozilla is happy to ship. It was designed to be usable without having to licence any patents. Any known patents have been waived. The possibility of unknown patents remains but is vanishingly small by this point (other organisations much larger than Mozilla have been shipping JPEG2000 code for years).
http://www.jpeg.org/jpeg2000/index.html
>Furthermore, it includes guidelines and examples, a bibliography of technical references, and a list of companies from whom patent statements have been received by ISO. JPEG 2000 was developed with the intention that Part 1 could be implemented without the payment of licence fees or royalties, and identified patent holders have waived their rights toward this end. However, the JPEG committee cannot make a formal guarantee, and it remains the responsibility of the implementer to ensure that no patents are infringed.
What the fuck does Mozilla even mean by "free format" these days? It's an ISO standard, it was designed to be usable without paying any fees, there is a waiver of any known patents, it's been used across the industry for years without legal problems. I can't think of a single way that it could be made "more free". The only possible reason I can see is that it wasn't invented by Mozilla/Xiph. And really that is just pathetic and very much a "nasty attitude".
> It has always been a strong goal of the JPEG committee that its standards should be implementable in their baseline form without payment of royalty and license fees...
It's only for baseline.
> is no different to Ogg or VP8 in that regard
They are patent free, no strings attached, unlike JPEG2000.
