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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

Bluetooth on Macs is infuriatingly broken, even with Apple's own products. I have the AirPods Pro with a 2019 13" MBP and run into similar issues: if I'm just listening to music, everything is fine. As soon as the microphones come on to do a call, the audio quality goes down the tube and there is a loud crackling noise in the right AirPod that never goes away (and I know this isn't the crackling problem with AirPods Pro in general, because I already had mine replaced to fix that issue, and they work fine on all other devices). I end up having to take the right one out, which defeats the entire purpose of having ANC headphones.

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This isn't the bluetooth, it's a known problem with the AirPods Pro. I used the regular AirPods (with no issues) for a year before getting AirPods Pro, which I then used for a couple months before the increasingly bad audio issues made them completely unusable. I ended up buying a new pair of the regular AirPods and, again, no issues.

I read somewhere that it was an early-batch problem and that it's been fixed in newer iterations of the Pro, but there's no way I'm going to spend money on them again just to find out. The AirPods Pro are the only Apple device I've ever been totally and completely disappointed with. The regular AirPods remain one of the most unambiguously-good Apple devices I've bought.

I had mine replaced under warranty because of this. The specific problem only appears in the active noise cancelling or transparency modes. Can also test it by touching the pod. Ones with the problem will make crackling noises in active modes.

Agreed. On my iMac Pro, both AirPods and AirPods Pro had serious reliability issues. Occasionally during calls I would end up having skipping audio issues, and my bluetooth magic trackpad would also stutter when these issues were ongoing. Sometimes the bluetooth driver would seemingly crash, everything would reconnect, and it would be fine.

The workaround I discovered was that if I plugged in my bluetooth trackpad via USB during a call, these issues would basically never happen.

Not to mention all the other general issues with them failing to stay connected to my Mac, or failing to connect initially. These issues also happened on multiple MacBook Pros, including new top-of-the-line 16" models. Whereas I have basically zero problems with AirPods on my iPhone or AppleTV.

In short: the macOS bluetooth stack has some serious shortcomings that aren't present in iOS.

Not had that one. The annoying one for me is the switching between the Mac and the iPhone. Never connects to the correct device ever. If I answer a call I have to spend 10 seconds debugging it and reconnecting.

Bluetooth is infuriatingly broken. Headphones work sometimes and not others. My car sometimes connects to my phone and other times not. Doing Bluetooth voice chat on discord with some games breaks game audio completely.

The most reliable Bluetooth I've found is a hardware device that pretends to be a USB sound card and connects to my headphones via Bluetooth. Anything with a full operating system seems like a disaster.

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