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Comment by elboru | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for mentioning AirPods! I was so excited to buy them after a ton of reviews saying they just worked. They said the days of fighting with Bluetooth audio were gone. I believed them, then reality showed up.

My Mac sometimes unpairs them and worst it doesn’t find them. Some times while my baby is sleeping I put my AirPods and play a loud video just to realize they were not connected. My wife’s right side AirPod just stopped working after one year of use...

If apple is considered top tier in reliability, then technology in general really just sucks!

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To provide an anecdotal counter-example, AirPods have worked seamlessly for me so far. Much quicker to connect and more reliable than Bluetooth. So their marketing isn't completely off-base :)

I was under the impression that AirPods works over Bluetooth, did Apple really invent their own wireless technology + protocol just for the AirPods?

It does (they can be used with Android devices), afaik only the pairing part is proprietary.

Shh nobody tell him AirPods are just bluetooth headphones :)

https://www.apple.com/airpods-pro/specs/

But they're not; they're one specific implementation of BT with some proprietary secret sauce for the multi-device pairing etc.

My manager had to buy new headphones as when she is WFH she used airpods and iphone to connect to calls and the irpods constantly cycled leaving garbage audio whenever she tried to speak.

I'm using a BT Jabra headset, with noise cancelling I got for about the same cost, 16+ hours of battery, easy pairing and super useful phone app, great ANC, and solid audio quality, at least to a non-audiophile. My biggest complaint is the closed back design leaves my ears a bit irritated after 4+ hours of use. Not an airpods competitor but for the cost I am way happier.

I use my AirPods with multiple devices, and that process is also fraught with problems. Switching to another device takes an absurdly long time. About once per month, switching will make bluetoothaudiod peg a core and ultimately hard crash the entire computer. Yes, the kernel panics if it doesn't hear from this userspace process frequently enough.

Surprisingly, iCloud syncing works fine. If I pair my AirPods with one device, it always pairs with all of them.

I accidentally coughed whiskey through my nose when I read that.

They work well enough, but they don't work magically well.

The main issue is with the right pod not always turning on when I take it out of the case. The solution is to put it back in the case for 5 seconds and to try again.

The second most important issue is the airpods falling out of sync with each other. It seems like the signal from my Samsung S9 in my pocket is choppy. Looking left or right for too long will make the signal drop. Putting my hands in my pockets also will. If I put the phone in my backpack, it's okay.

This is still more pleasant than wired headphones, but it's far from a magical experience.

I really don't get it.

Personally, I hate ear buds and, as such, never bought ear buds. Rather, I spent ~$20 on SoundBot bluetooth headphones starting some five years ago (long before air pods, methinks) and haven't had problems with them at all.

I also have a seven year-old phone (HTC OneMax) running custom (unofficial/ported by a random hacker) Android[0], and it pretty much works.

Sure the battery life has degraded since 2014, but that's to be expected, no? I wish I could replace the battery (as I did with my 15+ year-old Panasonic cordless phones), but there really aren't too many mainstream mobile devices that allow that any more.

As for poor quality software/hardware, if you don't like it, vote with your feet and/or wallet.

If stuff doesn't work, why use it? Even more, if stuff doesn't work and you can't/won't fix it yourself, then don't use it.

Software devs and hardware manufacturers don't care about whiny blog posts or complaints on HN, they care about the bottom line. Impact the bottom line and you may have a chance at improvement.

Stuff that actually addresses the issue is useful. A great example is the lack of Android support after 4.4/KitKat on the HTC OneMax mentioned above and the abandonment of it on Cyanogenmod/LineageOS in 2017, where those (myself included although I'd never hacked on Android ever -- and failed miserably -- thankfully someone else did not) impacted by this took action to provide the latest Android on an old, unsupported, discontinued device.

If you're not taking positive action toward making things better (whether that's fixing the problems or voting with your feet/wallet), then you're not going to have any impact.

While whinging about it on your blog may be a way to relieve the stress you feel about whatever issue(s) you may have, it's not constructive or useful.

That is unless your goal is to get lots of comments on HN where the Apple Fanbois sagely agree, and lament there's nothing to be done about it because Apple is the pinnacle of tech and since no one could possibly do anything better than Apple (or the apps that run on their gear) therefore all technology sucks.

And that's objectively false. There's lots of tech out there that's quite good. I suggest using that and shunning rather than using, then whinging about the stuff that sucks.

[0] https://forum.xda-developers.com/htc-one-max/rom-lineageos-1...

Edit: Fixed typos/formatting issues.

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