Last week, I discovered a surprising fact about Wiim’s new flagship network music player, the $329 touchscreen-equipped Ultra: Unlike all of Wiim’s products to-date, it lacks Apple AirPlay certification. However, there was reason to believe that the streamer could be made AirPlay compatible via a future firmware update once the company finalized the certification process. Today, however, those hopes have been dashed. The current version of the Wiim Ultra hardware will never support Apple’s wireless audio streaming feature.
“The current WiiM Ultra does not support AirPlay,” a company representative told me via email, “and it cannot be made available via an OTA software update.”
That news will not be appreciated by those who have already ordered the Ultra under the assumption it would have AirPlay — an assumption that was broadly shared by me and my industry colleagues when we reported on the device’s official launch. Even some retailers taking orders for the Wiim Ultra have AirPlay listed as a feature.
The inability to add AirPlay via a firmware update apparently surprised Wiim itself. “At its launch at the High-End Munich Show, this wasn’t the belief at WiiM but internal issues changed the situation unfortunately.”
Ironically, the fine print on Amazon’s product listing page for the Wiim Ultra has proven to be the most accurate of all: “NOTE: This device is incompatible with AirPlay and cannot function as an AirPlay receiver.”
Wiim hasn’t provided any details around why the Ultra can’t be made compatible with AirPlay. Instead, the company is simply encouraging its customers to use alternatives: “We understand this may be disappointing for our users who primarily use AirPlay. However, users can still stream audio to WiiM Ultra and connect via Bluetooth. They can also enjoy continued support for Chromecast Audio, Alexa Casting, Spotify Connect, TIDAL Connect, Qobuz, Amazon Music, Deezer, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, and more.”
These are all legitimate options in the streaming world, but none address what might be a critical issue for Apple fans: Since Wiim’s software doesn’t support Apple Music natively, and since the Apple Music app on iOS isn’t compatible with Google Cast (formerly Chromecast Audio), there is no way for iPhone users to stream Apple Music to the Wiim Ultra losslessly at CD quality. Bluetooth streaming to the Ultra only supports SBC and AAC codecs from an iPhone, both of which use lossy compression at lower-than-CD quality.
I’ve asked Wiim how the company plans to handle refund requests from unhappy customers and will update this post when I find out.