> Do you think Sony, Sennheiser will sell lots of their devices without?

Probably not, and I suspect that was kind of the point. We could simply have increased SBC's bitrate and enjoyed high quality music with our existing SBC gear, the end. But instead, a company saw the money-making potential of this situation, bought the rights to an audio codec designed in the 80s, and pushed for it to be used with Bluetooth by marketing it as "HD audio" (which it wasn't really, at least for the original non-HD aptX). Headset makers got to sell more headsets ("Oh you want to use this fancy new codec? A shame it doesn't work with your current headset, you'll need to buy a new one. Too bad!" - sad Pikachu face) creating more electronic waste in the process, Qualcomm got to collect licensing fees from millions of encoders and decoders around the world, and consumers obviously got to pay for all this (who else?) Other companies saw this and joined the game with their own codecs, and the Bluetooth audio landscape is now this huge mess we all know, with a plethora of codecs competing against each other, and an endless list of platform-specific incompatibilities and limitations. All this when the solution was right there from the start: SBC...

I'm not saying SBC doesn't have room for improvement, especially regarding latency, but it was designed to be capable of much more than what we ended up using it for. It was supposed to support adaptive bitrate for example, but AFAIK this was never implemented correctly.

So yes my opinion of aptX is pretty negative, because IMO this is a typical case of consumers getting abused to make corporations even more money, when there were some much more elegant (but less lucrative) solutions available. Bluetooth audio could have been so much better... Oh well, rant over.