Anyone who ever wanted to listen to music while waiting for a video call to start with airpods on knows that bluetooth is holding any wireless headphones back.
I never use my airpods max with my iPhone. Likewise I never use my regular airpods with my macbook. But whenever I put them on, no matter what options I check like "pair with last device", it pairs with the wrong device. I have removed the airpods max from my iPhone but Apple will just add it back.
Things like this are why I don't want to use apple's account services at all.
But once every two weeks or so, the phones (or at least one of them) decide they aren't having any of it and just refuse to pair, and I have to spend the whole morning trying to figure out what went wrong. Bluetooth and I are blood enemies on those days!
I think Powerbeats had connectivity problems with the case where sometime the pins didn’t quite touch.
The earpiece craze started long before. I remember my mono-audio Samsung earpiece that went into one ear and worked perfectly from a decade before Airpods. The samsung charged with a simple USB cable, too.
Most people I know use only one airpod at a time. That applies to my two teens in highschool and a multitude of professionals I work with. The same people a decade earlier would just be using the Samsung mono ear pieces or the multitude of other ones that existed.
They are a bit of an improvement over some devices out there, but they are probably a downgrade from Bose bluetooth devices I have owned temporarily (I returned them to exchange for a wired buds pair).
I think you are giving Apple too much credit. I would say Airpods have good marketing and it is smart to give them away for free with their other products to create or perpetuate an illusion of popularity.
Technological limitations caused that to be shelved until much later.
(1) Battery is nearly useless.
(2) The vendor decided to artificially slow the device with forced updates, or worse, the vendor decided to publish a list of CVEs and then declare your device ineligible for the necessary security updates going forward.
https://mostechtips.com/how-to-fix-bluetooth-headset-poor-qu...
Personally I never use headsets for calls, but I also never make calls. I only use headphones for music (and would never touch airpods with a 10 foot pole)
My earphone system when out and about are Shure KSE1200 tuned to Harman IE, electrostats that are easily the best in the world when PEQ’ed. I also use AirPods Pro in a pinch. They’re pretty good - even from an audiophile perspective for those who care about proper engineering - I’d give them an A for their tuning and a B for technicalities… which surely could be improved off Bluetooth. They are decently well reviewed AFA tuning on places like Rtings, Crinacle, and are well regarded for the type of device they are on Head-fi.
If you spent any time on ASR you’d know the vast majority of headphones have highly flawed FR, even the very high end. I’d prefer to listen to the lowly AirPods Pro, at least without hefty amounts of PEQ, over most headphones. Fwiw I found head-fi nearly 20 years ago, have been to several CanJams, have run my own meets, and probably owned over $50k in headphone rigs over the years... I know what what the 'best' sounds like.
Edit: shame about the downvote, but saying "wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole" is a kneejerk thing to say that has no basis in their actual performance or engineering.
I personally use a qudelix with Dan Clark aeon rt. For in ear I use tin audio p(1 or 2, can't remember off the top of my head) and from my experiences the original airpods can't even come close to the tin HiFi planar in ears (yes they do have their flaws, but tinny is not one of them)
No you're confused - the point is it's better quality.
There's no limited bandwidth, and it's physically a larger microphone than the very limited micro one in your headset. It picks up the same background noise that its geometry can't eliminate, and can do the same processing to try to remove it.
Those are tiny microphones in your headset, and there's only two of them, sending back a mono signal! A MacBook Pro has an array of three much larger, higher-quality microphones, with high SNR and directional beamforming and the ability to do proper noise cancellation. They're also on a hardware bus to your system. The microphones in a headset just don't compete.
Try it yourself!
It has rudimentary autofocus and a microphone that handily beats everything that is built in to my other devices.
$25, decent lighting and sitting in a room with lots of fabric in it was all it took to be a video conference king.
I also don't work in tech, so the video quality bar wasn't set very high by my colleagues.