Apple lossless goes up to 24bits at 192KHz, which is over 4mbps. I believe bluetooth 5.x only supports 2mbps, although I'm not sure.
According to wikipedia, Apple did file a patent in 2019 for high bandwidth low latency audio streaming over bluetooth (up to 8mbps)[0]. Looks like they've been working on this for a while.
That is just so unbelievably overkill. Especially the sample rate.
This is why "audiophile" is a joke term in the audio engineering community.
It is not biologically possible for us (unless one is an alien) to hear above 22kHz. 44.1kHz is enough to record in perfect fidelity [0]. For strictly listening purposes, 192kHz/24bit is wasteful, just extreme overkill because "bigger numbers = more good".
People can't even reliably detect a difference between 320kbps MP3s and source-quality FLAC/ALAC/WAV/PCM. On very good headphone and speaker setups. Good quality MP3/AAC is all one needs for airpods and the bluetooth protocol can easily handle those bitrates.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...
edit: changed record->playback. Here I'm just discussing playback; for audio production purposes 192kHz/24bit is desireable for several reasons. Once one ships that album/song though, it should be downmixed back to 44.1kHz/16bit.
The interesting part is in how actually valuable improvements are rare, while useless "improvements" are common.
I've got all music in 44.1kHz or 48kHz FLAC (only on the server, so I can transcode it to ogg opus for mobile playback reducing the space usage without lossy to lossy artifacts). Similar effects apply to many other such cases.
Audiophiles buy 10'000$ golden HDMI cables... which don't even support HDMI 2.0a. They buy gold-plated toslink cables (!)
Is there something that does automatic transcoding? Though I can hardly give up the discovery aspect of Spotify these days...