The original report says that Apple is expected to announce HiFi support on Apple Music in the coming weeks, as it also mentions that it will cost the same $9.99 per month as the regular subscription — suggesting that Apple will not charge more for its HiFi plan.
What makes it more interesting, however, is that these references were only included in iOS 14.6 beta 1. We also verified the internal files of iOS 14.5 and iOS 14.6 beta 2 (released this week), but the codes are not there. This suggests that the mentions of Dolby Atmos and Dolby Audio are indeed related to something new that Apple is trying to hide from us.
For those unfamiliar, HiFi songs have less audio compression, which means they sound better with more detail. TIDAL, for example, has long been well known for offering a HiFi plan, while Spotify recently announced that it’s also working on a version with access to HiFi songs. Apple Music, however, currently only offers songs using the AAC codec with 256kbps bitrate.
iOS 14.6 should also enable paid subscriptions in the Podcasts app, which were announced at Apple’s special event in April. The company says that this new Podcasts feature will be available to users in May, so we assume that iOS 14.6 will be released to the public sometime later this month — corroborating the Apple Music HiFi report.
