In a video interview with Brian Tong, Apple's VP of Sensing and Connectivity Ron Huang explained why only the updated second-generation AirPods...
TL;DR: USB-C AirPods Pro support lossless audio with the upcoming Vision Pro headset due to the 5GHz band support in their H2 chip. The previous version only had 2.4GHz.
Bluetooth 2.0 already supports 3mbps or (2.1mbps real world)
The bit rate of EDR is 3 Mbit/s, although the maximum data transfer rate (allowing for inter-packet time and acknowledgements) is 2.1 Mbit/s.
BT5 expands on the Low Energy specifications to allow 2mbps burst.
Bluetooth 5 provides, for BLE, options that can double the speed (2 Mbit/s burst) at the expense of range, or provide up to four times the range at the expense of data rate.
Also 802.11n already runs at 54mbps for a 20mhz wide channel.
I think you meant 2.4GHz instead of 2.4kHz, and I think it can transmit a tad more than that given that Wi-Fi 2.4GHz had much more bandwidth than 1Mbit/s.
You can have audio of arbitrary bitrate. Lossless just means it isn't being resampled or transcoded in a way that prevents exactly reconstructing the original signal. There's no reason why you couldn't support lossless audio up to 700Kbps, and the difference between 700kbps and 1mbps is well outside the range of perceptibility. You can also losslessly compress most audio that humans listen to by a significant degree, which is a completely transparent way to support higher bitrates if you can spare the processing time.
I know they won’t but I feel this is one product Apple should offer a simple swap program for users that recently purchased the AirPods Pro 2. It’s not a big deal now, and may never really be, but it does feel like a real F-U to Pro 2 owners.