Opus is one of the lowest-latency frequency-domain codecs out there (not including ADPCM-style codecs), as well as being the best-sounding voice and music codec at a given bitrate, beating MP3 and AAC (excluding ultra-low-bitrate voice, and recent neural codecs). In listening tests, LC3 is only better than Opus when Opus is deliberately misconfigured to compress audio badly.
Looking around for battery usage, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21982964 claims LC3 is no simpler to decode in specialized low-powered hardware than Opus, while https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=118692.msg979046#msg9... claims LC3 is "basically Opus with a few marginal gadgets thrown in". In that case, I think the only reason Opus couldn't be as widely supported as LC3 is that there isn't money to be extracted from the system.
Thanks for the explanation. So it's a different situation from e.g. hardware H264 decoders, where the extra silicon makes a dramatic difference.
Then the main concern remains interoperability. I'd still pay a bit more to make sure my friend's random device has a better chance of working at all. Bluetooth is already a tire fire so I wouldn't like to add another layer of interop issues.
Hardware Opus decoders are completely unnecessary for desktops, and probably so for laptops or even phones I think. It's possible it substantially improves battery life in small-battery headphones and such, or it's physically impossible for headphone Bluetooth chips to support CPU decoding. But I doubt Opus is any harder to implement in hardware (or DSP firmware) than LC3 (which I don't know if it's easy to implement, but I assume they're trying to get hardware to support it).
Looking around for battery usage, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21982964 claims LC3 is no simpler to decode in specialized low-powered hardware than Opus, while https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=118692.msg979046#msg9... claims LC3 is "basically Opus with a few marginal gadgets thrown in". In that case, I think the only reason Opus couldn't be as widely supported as LC3 is that there isn't money to be extracted from the system.