AirPods don't “just work” | Hacker News Reader

AirPods don't “just work”

philip.design

927 pointsknowingathing937 comments

I generally enjoy my AirPods. They are occasionally quirky, but most of the time they really do “just work” for me. The annoyances are annoying when they happen, though.

The strangest part is that the annoyances aren’t getting any better over time. At first I assumed that they were growing pains of an early product launch. Yet now we’re years into the AirPods experience and they continue to be just as quirky as when I first got them.

Apple seems so hot or cold on fixing their own bugs. Certain bugs get rapidly patched in the next iOS or Mac software release. Other bugs languish for what feels like forever. Do Apple execs just not use AirPods? Are they using a different configuration or hardware combination that doesn’t have these bugs? Have they just trained themselves to overlook the bugs because the workarounds have become a reflex? I can’t imagine working at any tech company where one of the flagship products had such a high rate of annoyances without having a lot of engineers diverted to replicating, diagnosing, and fixing it ASAP.

Apple seems to only improve peripherals (like the AirPods) with new hardware releases; not software updates. They make money based on units of AirPods moved.

Not strictly true in this case. Apple added a lot of additional functionality to the airpod pros over time. The tuning is hidden under the accessibility settings, but it’s there.

They have added some things to the airpods over software updates. But I assume they are pretty limited if they are already pushing the hardware to the absolute limit on release. A lot of the stuff they push over updates seem to be things they already planned to have but perhaps didn't have the firmware polished enough yet.

In my experience, the annoyances actually get worse over time.

I got my AirPods back when the original ones were released and the experience probably was as good as physically possible (short of including multiple radios so they can maintain connections to multiple devices in parallel and simply mix the audio client-side).

They then (2 years ago?) released this new feature where AirPods could automatically switch between all your devices which is just too slow and is more of an annoyance in practice, but even disabling the behavior made the existing experience much worse: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30085538

I agree. When I got my first pair roughly two years ago (after years of using various versions bluetooth earbuds you could buy on Amazon for $20) they seemed like magic. Take them out, they automatically and nearly instantly connect, and almost never had any issues.

I just bought v3, and while the sound is noticeably better, the connections are all over the place. At least once a day, the connection simply dies. Multiple times a day it decides to connect to another device that I'm not using. If you answer a call and then put an airpod in your ear, it's got about a 50% chance of connecting, after a multi-second delay. Sometimes it says its connected, but it's not, so the iphone isn't emitting sound from its speakers and nothing is coming out of the airpods, leaving me sounding like an idiot repeating "can you hear me now?" until I manually kill the connection and use the built in speakers. Absolutely infuriating.

Whoa I thought that was just me. It used to be pretty easy to switch the device AirPods are connected to. Now, AirPods connect to the right device in 50% of the cases, 30% of cases they do not, but I can click connect on the new device and it works, remaining 20% the only way to get things working is either manually disconnecting on the device they attach to or putting them in the case and trying to get happy scenario again.

To summarize, things are generally better but way less consistent.

It’s not just the AirPods, the experience is as crappy on the AirPods Pro and Max.

The experience is mostly crappy when you involve macOS. No problems moving around iOS here with my Pro's.

Yeah I totally know what you are talking about with it being too slow and unreliable. But it's also the primary reason I use airpods. They are the only device I know of that let me almost seamlessly switch between my macbook, iphone, ipad, and while running they connect direct to my watch. It's worth so much to me that I don't even consider any competitors.

And I will put up with a lot of quirkyness or waiting for connection to have that.

I recently upgraded from an iPhone XR and a lot of frustrating software problems just went away. Nothing to do with AirPods in my case, but it made me realize the effect of having an older phone with less processing power and less developer attention paid to it. I wonder if your AirPods problems might have to do with having older devices connecting — ie. the other side of the Bluetooth connection.

I have an iPhone 13 and I have all of the annoyances, often, except 6+7. In fact I have had these annoyances with all my iPhone and Airpods combinations. It's probably all due to bluetooth, even though Apple uses their own W1 chip to connect.

It's not always processing power. Some of the older phones had known issues, for example the iPhone 7 often had a faulty audio IC, and the iPhone 6/6+ had low RAM relative to its larger screen size and bigger graphic sizes.

Prior to the 8 and XR, iPhones had Bluetooth versions 4.0 or 4.2, which meant things were slower to connect, and also meant lower microphone data quality. Apple hasn't done any customer education around this. A lot of people with older MacBooks have poor microphone quality when using AirPods - but it's primarily their computer that is the bottleneck.

Extend that to AirPods Pro. My right ear cup crashes periodically - then I can only hear out of the left side until the watchdog timer engages and nukes the left cup too. I frequently have to reset it by holding down the buttons for 10 seconds in order to get it to connect to anything. It frequently disconnects and refuses to reconnect if I take off my mask out from under it. It stops detecting my head occasionally. An iOS bug probably, but I can't change the Mic mode anymore when on calls - it just shows me them menu options but I can't tap any of them. And the ear cups started to smell, lol, but there's no clear way to actually clean them due to their, well, magnets. I bike to work and have to dry them when I arrive because sweat builds up under the cups. They're also just too big to fit into anything practical, so I end up just carrying them around in one hand.

All in all, they're fine, but they most certainly do not just work for me, and they're not a $600 product IMO.

Can I ask why you purchased them in the first place? They seemed very obviously to not be a $600 product from their announcement.

Are there any other over the ear headphones that provide great sound quality, noise cancellation, pair with computers and smartphones, and have a solid mic?

I’ve looked at the Sony XM1000’s and from what I understand there is some issue with Windows where if you enable the mic, it goes into some different Bluetooth mode that degrades the audio quality coming out of the headphones. Many wireless headphones are advertised to only work with smartphones.

I just want something that does it all, connects to all my devices, and works.

Wait is there a device that can do stereo AND mic? I’m not aware of any and I’ve searched long and hard. AFAIK, there is no way it is possible with the current BT spec. Are you saying your Apple headphones can do that?

A quick look through Reddit shows that no, they can't. https://www.reddit.com/r/airpods/comments/kg3w4n/airpods_max...

21h2 and more recent versions of Linux allegedly add these codecs, but I don’t know how that played out in the real world

I think it’s mostly on the device side. Both sender and receiver have to have the codecs available. TBH, I just recently learned you can go into iOS Bluetooth settings and change the device type to “speakers” and use your computer (at least if your computer is running Linux) as a speaker. It’s freakin magic.

Bose quite comfort 35 ii and the 700. We use them 4-6 hours a day due to covid homeoffice and couldn't be happier. IMHO if you want to have something better you have to switch to the studio section and give up the BT.

> I’ve looked at the Sony XM1000’s and from what I understand there is some issue with Windows where if you enable the mic, it goes into some different Bluetooth mode that degrades the audio quality coming out of the headphones.

I have the Jabra Elite 85h's and have the same exact problem on OS X from time to time. (I really like them otherwise, though!) I'm not entirely sure what it is.

probably because the bultiin microphone is enabled due to bluetooth limitations

I don't think there's really any headphones that provide "great"[1] sound quality and noise cancelling + bluetooth. There's necessary tradeoffs that need to be made and physical limitations that mean that sound quality and noise cancelling ability are kind of at odds with each other.

You can definitely get "good"[1] sound quality + noise cancelling, but for me at least most decent non noise cancelling headphones sound noticeably better than my Sony XM4s, even at much lower price points. I'm fine with this though, because I use my XM4s when I need to focus without being distracted by background noise and they do an amazing job at that.

(There's also the issue of bluetooth signal not being as good as wired, and the DAC/Amplification needing to be built into the headphones but I don't think that's having as much of an impact on the overall sound signature - it hasn't been my experience when using bluetooth adapters on some other headphones, and using the XM4s wired).

[1] Obviously peoples subjective idea of "good" vs "great" vary wildly, I'm just sharing my subjective opinion on things.

I got the Sony WH-1000XM4 as a replacement to a cheap wired Sharkoon RUSH ER2. It's like 300 USD vs 30 USD. Sony provides good sound quality + great noise canceling + bluetooth. But as soon as I switch on the mic the quality turns bad. It's abysmal with a old Win 7 Laptop and bad on a Win10 Laptop/iPhone. So for all cases which require a mic, I switched back to the cheaper wired one. Getting an extension cord for the wired one would have been a much cheaper solution. The Sony one only shows its real strengths when walking outside in a noisy environment.

I used my Developer Transition Kit credit, as I'd already purchased an M1 laptop and had no need of anything else - other than headphones.

If you are experiencing all of these reliability issues, have them replaced by Apple. My original AirPods Pro had some serious issues. Firmware would update on only one of the pair, and so preventing them both from connecting to the same device. Or one would just crash frequently...

After having both replaced I have had zero issues since. I assumed it was some hardware quirks with earlier models.

That's good advice. I'll set up an appointment.

I've similarly found AirPods both "just work" from a user experience, especially compared to alternative bluetooth audio devices, and also are quirky from a reliability standpoint. There have been fixes pushed out in past, particularly with the earlier models, where fixes could be done via OTA firmware updates.

The remaining quirks all feel related to Bluetooth tech and, specifically, the low-power available to AirPods (compared to, say, my giant Bose headphones).

I can only speculate but I think AirPods are currently limited by the bluetooth tech itself. What I expect we'll see is apple will ship a version with a proprietary radio system. They probably won't be compatible with non-Apple devices but they'll be 10x better than today's AirPods (more reliable, simultaneous audio from multiple devices, even better battery life, etc.).

There's no guarantee Apple will pull this off. But I'd bet it's far more likely there's a team of engineers dedicated to this strategy as we speak than that Apple just "gave up" on one of their best-selling product lines as soon as the MVP proved there was a huge market.

Man, you sure are overly optimistic. That part about bluetooth doesn't make sense, tons of products work reliably with similar dimension/weight restrictions as airpods. If Apple with its army of engineers can't make their products work reliably, how could have much smaller companies succeeded? Btw one of biggest disappointments for me with airpods (pro) is weak bettery life compared to competition.

I am currently shopping around for new truly wireless headphones for iphone and not a single comparison has apple airpods/pro as winners in 2 most important categories (for me but I believe for many others too): sound quality and battery life. Same for their smartwatches but thats another topic.

Apple, or any company, sees that even product with such flaws still sells very well, so there is little pressure to fix things asap. That some engineers somewhere are working on next gen (or even 2 next gens in parallel) is expected, but these generational updates are very iterative and never revolutionary (that's what new product lines are for, for much higher price).

One anecdote from today - had a year end review call with my boss while being on sick leave due to covid. He desperately tried to pair his new iphone 13 pro max with his new airpods (not sure if pro or regular) and gave up after some time. It just didn't work and we had good old phone-in-hand call.

Could you give examples of some Bluetooth devices that work reliably?

If you know any bluetooth headsets that don't have similar quirks to what the post talks about, let me know, because otherwise I'm thinking this is Bluetooth and it wont get better until we ditch it.

Quirks of Bose AE2 that I'm dealing with:

1) Switching to the low fidelity Bluetooth headset mode when the mic is activated. Why does this still exist? I'd be happier if they just didn't add a mic if they can't support better quality audio. 2) The headset nominally supports connecting to two devices, except there's no mixing. One channel is primary and will override the other. Annoying when you're on a meeting on a laptop and a notification arrives on your phone and the audio cuts out to play the notification tone. 3) To add, sometimes Apple devices just play silence? Meaning, the secondary device will get muted and it will take a minute for you to figure out why it's not playing. There's no user control over this primary/secondary aspect. 4) Oh, yes, I use three devices daily which results in a lot of manual switching. 5) The devices or the headphones don't always automatically connect for some reason. It's not clear either if it's from me manually switching them or what.. 6) Endless issues with Spotify "Failing to play song" when the audio output switches. 7) Not bluetooth, but this headset gives the "Low power, charge me!" chime when the battery is low, even when plugged in and charging.

re #1: This is basically because it's written into the standard that everyone implements. There are non-standardized extensions to get around this that nobody implements because they're non-standard and a perpetual "This will be fixed by the next standard!". There are also codecs that mitigate the issue by solving the underlying bandwidth problem, but nobody implements those because there's licensing and thus it's not universal. All of this is made worse by the fact that there's really only a few vendors out there. Almost everyone buys the same stuff, which makes the same tradeoffs and the result is that everything sucks in basically the same ways.

Which is why people pay extra for Apple products, because they don’t make excuses like “this sucks because of the Bluetooth standard”, they build something that works even if it’s incompatible with non-Apple systems.

Funny you should say that because one of the issues with Catalina was MacOS forcing all headsets, airpods included, to use the terrible default codec I was explaining. Moreover, this then forces all other audio data on the system down to the same terrible quality [1]. The official response was that this was "expected behavior".

This is probably also the explanation for annoyance #3 in the article.

[1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/282705/airpods-ext...

#1 was explicitly mentioned in TFA, so not sure why this is an oppy to say airpods fixes common bluetooth problems, instead it seems Apple is equally burdened by them??

So, I just switched from Android to iOS, and I've noticed that the bluetooth reliability is significantly worse than what I've become used to.

I switch from a Pixel 4a to an iPhone 11, and both my Bose QC 35 headphones and Sony wireless earbuds are having lots of issue that I never head on the pixel.

So, my takeaway is that iOS is behind here, though I don't know enough about the underlying tech to say anything for sure. Just my anecdotal experience...

FWIW, Android is now on it's 3rd (4th?) Bluetooth stack rewrite (latest being Gabeldorsh?). I haven't done Android dev in a long time, but bluetooth reliability was a real pain to get sorted even for Google.

> 6) Endless issues with Spotify "Failing to play song" when the audio output switches.

Are you on Windows? I have the same issue with iTunes on Win11

I'm a on Mac, but it's interesting that you have the same issue on an entirely different system. Clearly we haven't figured out how to reliably have audio devices popping in and out of existence, all while playing music.

I've used 100+ Bluetooth devices and ever single one of them had weird connection quirks. Hell every wireless protocol I've ever seen has been similar excluding some actual industrial stuff.

Would love to know which BT products are actually reliable. Seems like the best are only "reliable" relative to others which are "downright unusable".

My only other bluetooth headset is a set of Bose QC35s. As sibling comments reported, quality is about par overall. I find UX of Bose is worse on all counts when working with multiple devices. And the battery life of my AirPods is less on a single use, but much better overall considering I can recharge in the case.

My airpods, generally, also have to put up with more. I don't use my Bose with my phone or on the go which is, generally, where the AirPods experience 90% of their quirks.

That makes for a poor sample size though so would absolutely love suggestions for more reliable alternatives.

Edit: apparently I don't know how to spell Bose

> I don't use my Boss with my phone or on the go which is, generally, where the AirPods experience 90% of their quirks.

My experience is the opposite. When I'm not on the go, the likelihood that my AirPods pick up the right device is slim -- like trying to connect to an iPad on a complete different floor vs. the phone I'm trying to make a call on.

When I'm on the go, the only device they can find is my phone, and all works great.

Yeah, makes sense for that problem specifically. I don't really have that problem ever. All my problems are skipping audio, dropped connections in one pod, and other intermittent problems.

My Bose always connect to the wrong device in my home and have zero method to correct. So I'm quite satisfied with the AirPods which seem to get the right device 99% of the time (no exaggeration - probably use 4x per day and connect to unintended device maybe once per month). I'm sure it helps that my phone is always on silent mode.

Yes, bluetooth has plenty of unfortunate limitations. For example, there is no standard high-quality bidi audio codec in bluetooth spec (see https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/duplex-high-quality-audi... for detailed explanation).

>The strangest part is that the annoyances aren’t getting any better over time.

Like most of what apple releases lately. People claim apple maps is better now, but its still missing a lot of data around the LA area especially with local business that Google maps has no issue crawling, and generally shoddy navigational asks (like unprotected lefts). Siri has also gotten no better since its release 10 years ago now (wow), if anything it defers to coarsly googling my terms more and throwing me the first couple irrelevant results as a response. If I wanted to do that I would open a browser and touch to talk into the search field.

I hear you, though Google Maps still seems terrible with unprotected lefts in LA. Just yesterday, it directed me to make one one onto a six-lane road.

They seem rarer for me with Google maps. Imo I think rerouting is better with google maps as well. If I get an instruction like that I'll ignore it and turn right and Google will pick up a new routing before I get to the next intersection. If I do it with Apple it might ask me to do a u turn after a right turn and still try and make that left. To be fair I don't use apple maps at all anymore but I see it fail horribly whenever my partner uses their phone for navigation. Its missing a bunch of local businesses and restaurants and sometimes looses the GPS lock on the phone too (like assuming you are on the parallel road to the freeway and trying to route you back on rather than correctly assuming you are still on the 5 and didn't teleport onto surface streets)

If by "unprotected" you mean "no green arrow", in what part of the LA area is it feasible to avoid unprotected lefts? They are all over the place in my neighborhood.

If by "unprotected" you mean a left from a stop sign onto a street that does not stop, then I agree. They can be almost impossible. Waze was especially notorious for them a few years ago.

The latter I mean. "Take a left on pico from this stop sign, hold your breath and good luck, no one will let you in." Somehow google maps ignores these and prefers me to make a right out of a parking lot or a stop signed street and take my lefts at lights (or off the major arterial) seems like its just a simple set of rules you can apply to your navigation algorithm to avoid these entirely, but the fact that they are still there years later tells me the Apple maps designers really don't care too much.

It does seem like it should be simple to avoid those. I can imagine it might be complicated if the model treats turns as instantaneous and only considers edges in the road graph as taking time.

I would love a road navigation tool that gives more options to modify the cost of various route features other than pure distance/traffic. To me, Google is too willing to give a complicated route to save a tiny amount of time. It makes the driving more mentally draining. I would raise the cost of all turns, stop signs, and intersections where I don't have priority.

Apple could farm their data to see how long people wait to make turns it recommends and adjust the edge weight accordingly. I'm guessing that's what Google does.

The maps themselves are fantastic if you live somewhere covered by the latest round of updates. I think the business data will always be trailing Google Maps though. Google has their entire search engine to grab data, they crowdsource data via app notifications, and in cases where businesses are updating their own info it wouldn’t surprise me if they do it on Google Maps and just don’t bother anywhere else.

Siri does continue to be lame though. Driving is the one place I would want to use it for anything beyond timers and reminders, but I don’t dare because I can’t check to see if it’s doing anything dumb. Last time I tried to text someone while driving using Siri, it got picked up by my Apple Watch, which worked great, but also my phone, which picked the same message up and promptly sent it to a totally different contact.

I don’t care, I want google maps and I want the default to be google maps, but there’s no way of setting that, I even tried uninstalling apple maps and now when I click on addresses it prompts me to reinstall it.

Didn’t Microsoft get done for antitrust for similar dark patterns in the late 90s?

I like "workarounds become a reflex". This is a very succinct way of describing one of the causes of why people often claim to have no issues using something that universally has issues.

A great example is the gaming PC vs gaming console war. PC gamers often seem to refuse to admit there's untold little quirks you have to deal with when using a general-purpose operating system and modular hardware to play games. They don't notice the workarounds they are continuously employing, because it's become a reflex.

> there's untold little quirks you have to deal with when using a general-purpose operating system

"Though initial iterations of the software for the original Xbox and Xbox 360 were based on heavily modified versions of Windows, the newer consoles feature operating systems that are highly compatible with Microsoft's desktop operating systems, allowing for shared applications and ease-of-development between personal computers and the Xbox line." Wikipedia

> and modular hardware

This is true. There are, e.g., fake GPUs that will make your experience quite bad. I always buy pre-build PCs from my favorite tech store, and I have personally avoided the problem. But Steam forums show that some people is not so fortunate. Also there is people trying to run modern games in very old PCs, consoles solve that problem by not running new games in previous generation consoles.

> newer consoles feature operating systems that are highly compatible with Microsoft's desktop operating systems, allowing for shared applications and ease-of-development between personal computers and the Xbox line

Microsoft created its Universal Windows Platform (UWP) to enable software to run across multiple Windows devices from desktops to tablets to consoles. It has not really been a resounding success, though it has some inconvenient limitations as well as business restrictions such as being tied to the Windows Store.

Even the Windows Store has moved away from UWP by supporting Win32 apps.

It's not about the OS technology in use, it's about all the practicalities of how it is deployed on consoles vs. on desktops. Things like immutable OS volumes, fixed configuration tested on the hardware, the extent to which they build higher level automation to do what the user expects, etc. "The Xbox One runs Windows" ignores all these details which make it a much more seamless experience than on a PC. The PS4 runs FreeBSD, but try gaming on FreeBSD and let me know how it goes in comparison...

Honestly, it's plainly obvious that gaming on consoles is much more seamless than on PCs. If you don't think so, you're not recognizing all the little quirks you're dealing with on a PC. When was the last time a driver update broke a game on a console? Ever had to install support software to make a game work well with a particular controller? Issues with overlays and system feature integration? Unexpected performance loss due to a weird configuration? Mysterious DRM malfunction issues? Windows Update gone wrong? Those things (mostly) just don't happen on consoles because it's a much more controlled ecosystem.

> When was the last time a driver update broke game on a console? Ever had to install support software to make a game work well with a particular controller? Issues with overlays and system feature integration? Unexpected performance loss due to weird configuration? Mysterious DRM malfunction issues? Windows Update gone wrong?

I agree (I don't get why people downvotes). My argument is that a quality PC does not have that problems. The fact that you can get a very cheap PC creates many of this situations. But I get into "No true Scotsman" territory with that logic. And that is why I agree with your arguments.

But those things I mentioned happen regardless of the hardware build quality. Hardware quality will avoid hardware issues, things like overheating or stability problems. The things I mentioned are software integration problems that are a natural consequence of the PC ecosystem being much more heterogeneous. It doesn't matter how good your hardware is.

There's just no way around the fact that when your ecosystem gives people much more choice and flexibility, it's going to be jankier than one which doesn't. It's just math. As you add dimensions to the problem space you reduce the fraction of the problem space you can test to ensure the user experience is good, and you rely on users to figure out how to reach a good point in that space, since you can't do it for them. If your dimensions are at least separable you might have a better chance (linear scaling instead of exponential), but modern systems are too complex to keep one issue from influencing others. It's a massive engineering problem.

The cost or "quality" of the PC is not a factor.

Just the simple fact that you have to manually install graphics drivers is a basic issue that you don't have to deal with on console. Just visit any of the PCgaming subreddits and you'll find plenty of examples to do with troubleshooting graphics issues, with people suggesting using Graphics Driver Uninstaller to try and completely remove conflicting driver versions etc.etc.

I remember when there were annoying stutters after the initial BF1 launch and one of the workarounds was to use task manager to change the CPU priority for the task. Here's an example thread for ModernWarfare https://www.reddit.com/r/modernwarfare/comments/j26zli/stutt...

Literally none of those issues affect console gaming. It's sit down and start gaming without any hassles within 15 sec of turning the machine on.

I've been a PC gamer for 30 years and it's a pain in the ass compared to console. With the new generation of consoles targeting 60fps, my final annoyance with console gaming has disappeared.

>My argument is that a quality PC does not have that problems.

Part of nvidia's drivers often contain workarounds and hacks specific to games. Sometimes they have gone wrong and bricked a game until the developer or nvidia can fix it. Buying a "quality" PC doesn't alleviate you from having to use nvidia drivers.

There's also a lot of little things. Like, you launch a game and there's no audio. Well, Windows at some point decided to switch audio outputs on you. You may have a lot of them. Line out, headphones, a bluetooth headset, a virtual out for streaming software, a monitor with built-in speakers - and now you've got to click the little speaker icon and try to figure out what should be selected, which may be named after the driver or hardware vendor and not totally obvious.

That's the sort of thing that for the most part just doesn't happen with the consoles, because they're limited and tuned for the intended experience.

> Well, Windows at some point decided to switch audio outputs on you. You may have a lot of them. Line out, headphones, a bluetooth headset, a virtual out for streaming software, a monitor with built-in speakers

I agree that I have found that problems. I just get the same problems with my TV (Samsung) when I have several audio devices. Maybe one can argue that is a TV problem, not a console problem. But non-portable consoles need a TV to work. So, the problem exists but it's moved somewhere else.

After your comment I realize that portable consoles are that ideal all-in-one, at least older ones without HDMI or Bluetooth.

On my PC each legitimate output device has a duplicate with the same name that does nothing. Every once in a while when I launch a game it will switch to the duplicate entry and I will have to switch it back. It's a quirk where the fix has become a reflex.

I've never had to deal with this on any console I've owned.

Disabling all the duplicate entries might help.

Or not. Shrug. Sound configuration is one of worst aspects of Windows.

I remember it being pretty good on Windows XP. I’d run programs like reaper with full control of my soundcard and it’s IO. It wasn’t until win10 that everything sound related became a chore. I can still find snippets of XP UI in win10 hidden under many layers of new age UX. Stuff like the “listen to this device” checkbox

You can rename audio devices to be something just friendly.

Right. You can. A workaround. This is something you don't have to do on an XBox or PS5.

And that's a workaround to make it easier to perform another workaround, the "why can't I hear my game" problem. So we're in workaround Inception now, nested workarounds.

Yeah, there's something to be said for playing an online game in which everyone has the same exact hardware (mostly). This is coming from a person who occasionally plays competitive games on a 2012 Thinkpad and comforts himself when he loses by saying, "it's ok, their computer cost as much as a used car. Don't feel bad about losing".

Happy 10th birthday T-530, 1 decade and still trucking!

>A great example is the gaming PC vs gaming console war.

Which war was that? A bunch of teenagers and man-children arguing online between PC vs console superiority is in no way a 'war' and is anything but a great example for "workarounds become a reflex". Online squabbles between rabid fanboys and brand loyalists should be left alone and not be used in logical debates.

>PC gamers often seem to refuse to admit there's untold little quirks you have to deal with when using a general-purpose operating system and modular hardware to play games.

I highly doubt your broad generalization is accurate. Do you have any sources for your claims? Every PC owner and gamer I know both online and IRL openly admits this hobby is not a smooth sailing endeavor. Again, I would love to see your sources for your claims, otherwise I feel HN is degrading into reddit where people make broad fact-less generalizations with no arguments and others upvote regardless because it gives them self-approval and dopamine hits.

>They don't notice the workarounds they are continuously employing, because it's become a reflex.

My personal example would be MacOS, when I, an outsider who never regularly used MacOS, point out various UX quirks that trip me up and cause issues for me rather than make my life easier as I was promised, I saw that everyone I know who is a long time user of MacOS got so used to the quirks that they formed some workarounds that turned into reflexes and just became part of the experience and not viewed as issue anymore but as tolerated and expected behavior. Basically for them MacOS is simpler because they already know the quirks and workarounds inside and out, not because it's objectively simpler than the alternatives. Same goes for long time users of Linux and Windows if you're coming from the other side.

So in the end it's not about one being objectively better than the other, it's about people always will have more issues with the things they don't know very well and be subjectively biased towards the things they already know and like. It's the nature of humanity.

> PC gamers often seem to refuse to admit there's untold little quirks you have to deal with when using a general-purpose operating system and modular hardware to play games. They don't notice the workarounds they are continuously employing, because it's become a reflex.

Not just a reflex, a cargo-cult reflex.

Look at the litany of optimization/debugging nonsense that is parroted across the internet. Registry fiddling, disabling Windows services, setting core affinities, divination by chicken bones, all sorts of nonsense - the impact of which is, of course, not ever empirically measured.

That one's actually a good argument for open source software, in my experience. While the cargo-cult culture exists everywhere less experienced users are involved, in FOSS land there's a decent chance some developer or power user (any developer, not just a project member) will stumble upon the problem and either figure out the real issue themselves or coordinate with the project devs to do so. I've done this many, many times over the years. Complete nonsense cargo-cult stuff doesn't tend to survive forever in this ecosystem, because someone eventually realizes it's nonsense.

In Windows land? Decades can go by without anyone knowing what's going on, unless someone motivated enough to reverse engineer the binaries involved shows up and finds the issue. That isn't very common. Though when it happens it can be hilarious [1].

[1] https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...

Apple's stuff _always_ have issues and annoying ones. My Homepod stopped seeing any HomeKit devices. Reboot didn't help. I didn't feel like digging into it so I just went to bed. Couple days later out of all a sudden they start seeing stuff again.

Recently my Hue bulbs have decided to sometimes all show as unavailable in HomeKit, which is annoying. They normally revive themselves in a few minutes but I can’t figure it out.

Unfortunately no other home automation platform (Google, Amazon) lets you keep everything on your local network, and using Home Assistant would make using Siri for it harder, so I’m stuck with an annoyingly buggy platform.

> Unfortunately no other home automation platform (Google, Amazon) lets you keep everything on your local network

Exactly the reason I keep dealing with HomeKit annoyances.

You can use home assistant and HomeKit together pretty seamlessly. We have all our lighting automation as a zwave network though hass, and the lights are also included in HomeKit. We can use Siri or hass app or the native home app/widgets in iOS without any issues. And everything runs locally too.

At least their issues are relatively benign compared to the hot mess that is Windows. Had to re-install a friend's Asus all-in-one PC last weekend and god this was not fun. Took over a day worth of downloading Windows updates, battling Realtek's audio driver and Intel's chipset drivers until everything was finally working as expected (and most of the drivers are from 2016 - only God knows how much exploit surface these have!). Anything Bluetooth on Windows is still a hit-and-miss. And then you have to research on how to disable all the phone home crap, the ads and other bloat.

Linux is even worse, where even basic stuff such as suspend to disk or 3D acceleration regularly takes days or weeks worth of sifting through StackExchange posts, mailing lists, obscure blogs and 2010-era Debian Wiki posts.

And don't get me started on the clusterfuck that is Android. Got a new iPhone? No problem, transferring all the data is painless. Migrating in the Android world? Good luck getting even half of your stuff working.

Compared to all that, Apple is a fucking breeze to work with, because the competition is just mind bogglingly bad.

It's only bad for 3D because nVidia has their secret sauce (and corner cutting) in the driver and locked down firmware blobs that have very restrictive distribution.

If you have an Intel or AMD GPU everything either just works, or works with the latest drivers (might require an added repo if the card came out after the last stable release).

Yeah, Apple is a breeze but only if you stay within the crib prison they put you in.

New Pixel data transfer? Plugged in iPhone with the supplied USB-C -> A adapter, and all my contacts, photos, calendar data, etc. migrated to the new phone. Took less time than my mom migrating from an iPhone 6s to an iPhone 13.

Android isn't a fair comparison, since Apple is a single-manufacturer monoculture.

Samsung-to-samsung: I can give anecdata only but moving to a new samsung phone was completely effortless. The only things that broke, broke because there was a newer android OS version on the target (not much of that). This would of course break (and maybe worse) on iPhone -> newer iPhone.

> Apple's stuff _always_ have issues and annoying ones

True. I’m fully into apple ecosystem with iMac, Apple tv, macbook and phones. So, naturally I use airdrop a lot, to the point that sometimes I depend on it to work. But, every few days it just stops working. Even after turning off Bluetooth, wifi on phone and mac it just doesn’t shows the device. Sometimes I just give up and sometimes when I don’t feel like giving up I go up to even restarting devices. This is something that I don’t expect from Apple.

Tell me about it.

My last three MacBooks, including the new 16” M1, have inexplicably had issues syncing to iCloud for several days (sometimes weeks) until magically everything seems to just work as expected and I forget all about it.

It’s all part of the magic of owning Apple devices. They’re annoyances, but minor and usually easy enough to fix.

Yep. For one game, the launcher screen depends on an old version of a Microsoft .NET runtime that is no longer distributed by Microsoft, and the current version (theoretically compatible) is disallowed because the launcher has apparently hardcoded a dependency to a specific version.

Then there was another game where I had to install a different DLL to get it to run.

Then there was IL2 Sturmovik that was just plain broken for a long time on more recent versions of Windows. I of course didn't discover this until after the refund window...

i feel like i can't identify issues in my life because I am so used to doing workarounds. this is why everything needs to be tested by someone else that is completely separate from the work, their fresh perspective will point out such obvious issues and your first reaction should never be to balk and say "no but you just do it like this"

The more minimalist a system is, the less people seem to think in terms of "annoyances". In fact, simplicity fans seem to pride themselves on doing a bit more themselves.

Like, manual transmission people think of the constant need to manage it yourself as just how driving is supposed to be.

It's a big problem in Linux, where things can totally break and nobody bats an eye.

I guess I'm eligible to answer this as I'm both a Linux user and a stick shifter.

I hate Linux for when things fall-apart. But I also know most of the things are being made by devs because of their passion. My hardware doesn't fail because Linux is blindly arrogant, but because of the hardware vendors who don't support the platform or me (as I paid them money)

Manual transmissions are an extra level of engagement that's fun to drive and useful in many casses. My 86bhp car lacks torque and power, specially combined with its heavy metal body. When I need to overtake and I lack the power for it I can downshift and pass. Add in the rev matching, and it makes it sweeter and perfect.

In a country like India, you pay a good price for a reliable automatic. So that's money saved.

It's the same difference as a home cooked meal and a takeout.

Apple doesn't get slack from me because they know the hardware, the software and still manage to mess it up with loyal fans defending their bad decisions

This sentiment is seen in almost every response on http://discussions.apple.com, on Apple's subreddits and often in HN comments as well.

People are just too eager to jump on behalf on Apple - "but why you would rather not do this instead" (Why? Because I was looking for something else and I mentioned it for heaven's sake!) and these hacks and workarounds stack up while "Apple products and services just work" stays where it was in such Apple users' imaginations.

This is frustratingly weird and quite niche to Apple's user-fans.

For instance Apple's online services - the whole iCloud charade is a living and growing mess.

The SMS sync between phone and mac and in fact difference of basic UX options ("you can't select multiple messages on Catalina Messages app - not sure if it is added in later versions -- if you delete an SMS on phone it will still be synced to your mac Messages). And there apps are opaque in the guise of "simplicity" you just end up getting frustrated. I can go on for hours. Now as an Apple fan - but why would you not want those SMS to sync to mac as well? Yes, even if you delete them! What's the use of multiple message selection on mac Messages app - that's bad use case! Yes, yes, even though it is supported on iPhone - you don't get it!

The problem is the essential duopoly - Android and iOS - rock and a hard place.

Any time I search the internet for a solution to a problem with an Apple product or device, I intentionally exclude discussions.apple.com domains from my search results. I have never found a solution there, and the forums seem to be dominated — and I mean DOMINATED — by two or three ‘experts’ whose bottom-line is that Apple’s products work, so you must be doing something wrong.

One guy is convinced that uninstalling Chrome is the solution.

The go-to first response is “run Etrecheck,” after which they’ll chastise you for having installed anything they don’t recognize. And god help you if you’ve installed CleanMyMac. The only solution is to reinstall macOS and never do that again!

(They all seem to ignore that CleanMyMac X is now notarized and sold in the App Store...)

Stackoverflow > Apple’s community support. Every time.

> the forums seem to be dominated — and I mean DOMINATED — by two or three ‘experts’ whose bottom-line is that Apple’s products work, so you must be doing something wrong.

I've experience this first-hand, and it's annoying AF.

I wrote a post on Apple's forum about the years-old iOS celluar-draining bug[1], and one of these high-reputation "experts" (read: Apple apologist/shill) kept insisting that the OS corrupting its own settings and not handling the corruption gracefully was somehow all my fault - when I pointed out this was a clear OS bug (even linking to the Wikipedia definition for 'software bug'), his long-winded pushback reply boiled down to him essentially saying that "bugs aren't bugs". Beyond useless as a help forum with these clowns being allowed to earn those "reputation" points.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29764360

> The only solution is to reinstall macOS and never do that again!

Fuck the apple forums, they are usefulness. I'd like to add another type: return to apple for repairs alongside the 'reinstall os'.

There's gotta be a better answer than reinstalling the os! That's a nuclear option that should be a last resort. But it's recommended all the time.

Reinstalling macOS is no longer nuclear, in that it doesn’t materially touch your home folder.

Now it’s just a phenomenal waste of time.

I found the same about moving to GIMP from Photoshop. Granted, Photoshop has more conveniences and fancy features. But a good deal of the frustration is not GIMP's so-called confusing interface, just the habits I formed while using Photoshop. Now that I'm a GIMP user for a time, every time I go back to Photoshop, I find myself annoyed in the same way. I think this just boils down to people's natural resistance to change.

i don't know if it's limitations of the bluetooth protocol, or necessary optimizations in order to maintain battery life, but in my experience most battery operated bluetooth devices seem to have pairing issues.

i suspect that it's probably a combination of three things:

1) reliability is hard when on a power budget. if power was free, they'd just always be looking to renegotiate, but since power is limited, they probably are very miserly about this process which leads to getting stuck in states that require power cycling to force retries.

2) interoperability is hard with open standards, especially old standards that are complicated.

3) open standards come with limitations that sometimes cannot be worked around. (this is where i'm surprised apple hasn't just cheated as they usually do when open standards result in ux they find unacceptable, this leads me to believe the problem itself, of distributed consensus between multiple wireless low power devices with potentially noisy links, is actually very hard)

when you think about it, the technology behind wireless earbuds is nothing short of astounding. they're little battery operated wireless two node compute clusters that can literally fit in your ears, stream audio and maintain nearly perfect synchronization when rendering that audio in the most absolute basic use case.

I can say I have had all of the issues listed in the post with three different bluetooth headphones. Random disconnections, only left or right speaker working, drivers issue on anything that was not an android phone, having to turn off bluetooth on phone when using on pc, having to deactivate phone and mic to boost bandwidth for audio (night and day difference).

I don't think I will ever buy bluetooth earbuds or headphones again, also because those devices are terrible for the environment.

It's amazing that these issues are exactly the same on both Airpods Pro and Max. You'd think the Max would have a better software stack given the claimed sound improvements.

Most ridiculous bug I’ve encountered is that if you have Notes open in list view and with an external monitor, it will consume 100% CPU non-stop, killing the battery life and overheating the Macbook Pro and eventually physically damaging the device (screen connection fails).

I enjoy my wired headphones. The annoyances I face are one laptop without a headphone port. That's it.

It's weird to me how many people are like "yeah but every other bluetooth is worse". I have Airpod Pros and experienced every one of these issues and many more on the regular with them, but my several years old now Bose QC 35II never have any of these problems, still last like 5 times as long on battery after years of recharge cycles, interact better with two simultaneously connected devices, have better signal range before dropping out, and I can control the damned volume without trying a dozen times to get Siri to wake the fuck up because airpods have no built-in volume controls and Siri's voice activation is worse than terrible.

The Airpods are set to connect automatically to my macbook when I wear them AND THEY DON'T. EVER. And then calls on my iPhone will stupidly decide to connect and route audio to airpods that I'm not even wearing while they are just sitting on my desk when the phone was literally moments before using the handset speaker for a video. Know what bluetooth device does not have these problems? You guessed it, the one not made by Apple. Like...come on.

I really want to like airpods, but they're just not good.

Yeah, using my AirPods Max is one of the most frustrating experiences. In the past week I've had to force reset them so many times and it almost seems arbitrary when it actually connects. I can't imagine a non-savvy tech person being able to easily debug it.

With Mac / iOS devices? It should not behave like this. Consider swapping them out.

Yes with iPads and iPhones. It's not an uncommon experience if you google it. I imagine its a software issue not a hardware issue too.

That's even more weird given my experience with a pair of Beats Studio 3 headphones I have which are de facto a brand of Apple headphones. They've never given me Bluetooth grief once in years of very regular use, it's not like they can't do reliable Bluetooth equipment.

I don't know about "every other Bluetooth," but I certainly experience different problems with other Bluetooth devices. :) My regular experiences:

- The AirPods Pro and AirPods Max generally work well. I've experienced most of the annoyances the OP lists occasionally, but not regularly, although the "autoselect the device want you want" outsmarts itself semi-regularly. (Not quite enough to make me disable it, but it's close.) I have never attempted to control the volume of the AirPods Pro using Siri because it sounds like a bag of hurt.

- My Bose SoundLink II will immediately say it's connected to the last device that it paired with when I turn it on, but sound won't come out of it. Depending on what seems to be random chance, either it'll start playing in ~15 seconds, or it will repeat its "Connected to [Device]" voice cue and then immediately be available for play, or once in a while it will put itself back in "I'm not connected!" mode and I will have to go into Bluetooth settings to manually connect.

- My Vanatoo desktop speakers have Bluetooth, and once they're connected to the phone they don't want to let go. I'll have successfully sent sound to the SoundLink, or the AirPods, or just the phone's own speaker, and then suddenly the sound will mysteriously vanish because the Vanatoos have woken up and grabbed the signal. (This sometimes happens before the Vanatoos have powered up their own internal amplifiers.)

- The Bluetooth pairing in my mother's car consistently has the weirdest behavior: I connect, it starts playing a podcast or music, and the audio just cuts out every four seconds or so at a regular cadence. It seems like it might be playing just a little too fast and there's a buffering issue. If I disconnect the Bluetooth and reconnect it, then everything's fine. But the first connection after the car starts will always be broken.

I mean, I know that's all anecdotal. But at least for me, the AirPods are the least broken Bluetooth audio devices I use. I get that "it works less frustratingly for many people most of the time" is not nearly as catchy as "it just works," but until Bluetooth gets properly sorted out in 2083 or whenever, I guess I'll live with it.

I have to wonder if it's time to just say screw Bluetooth, and deploy a new standard that's specially oriented for audio.

Requirements aren't crazy. It just needs to support uncompressed 96/24, full duplex.

I know some people have experimented with WiFi direct for that, but I'm not really familiar with it's limitations besides "you have to be hooked up to a router for it to work". One thing's for certain though, if someone made a pair of lossless cans that could "find" devices over arbitrary WiFi networks, I'd probably switch just for the improvement in latency alone.

Wifi has an ad-hoc mode which doesn't require a router.

Ah yes, the famously well supported and not at all prone to weird bugs Wifi Ad-hoc mode.

I've long wished for a Wifi headset that you could Airplay/cast to

And zero delay, please. I'll take two.

Except that requirement IS crazy--when you put all the other stuff around it.

Must work at 2.4Ghz--even in the face of 200 WiFi access points and 3 times that number of devices.

Must stay in sync to within a millisecond ... even though there is a large bag of RF absorbing water in between them.

Should work on a battery smaller than a thumbnail.

Should process audio but not generate enough heat that you notice it in your ear.

I can go on. The engineering requirements are quite severe.

... for something that we can do with a 10 cent wire, ironically.

So true, we take the complexity for granted. It's actually a really hard problem.

> Must work at 2.4Ghz--even in the face of 200 WiFi access points and 3 times that number of devices.

At low range and less than 1/100 the speed of wifi.

> Must stay in sync to within a millisecond

If you have a working data connection at all, that level of sync is trivial. It only takes a few bits to align things, and they use pretty big buffers.

> even though there is a large bag of RF absorbing water in between them

That's hard.

> Should work on a battery smaller than a thumbnail.

That part is quite hard. But also it doesn't apply to over-ear headphones.

> Should process audio but not generate enough heat that you notice it in your ear.

I'm skeptical of that part being hard. How many milliwatts do those codecs take? Also once you add the battery constraints then the heat levels solve themselves.

You can hear 48kHz tones? Wow.

Why waste a bunch of bandwidth on 96 kHz when 44.1 is fine?

I don't think you need a new standard for that -- UWB radios, like Apple's already-deployed U1 chip, have the bandwidth to easily be bandying about 96/24 FLAC/ALAC files, at the least. (Personally, I'd settle for topping out at 48/16 lossless ALAC.)

Bluetooth / BLE 5.2 is bringing in a lot of functionality and standardisation for audio scenarios. Hopefully this will improve things.

Previously there hasn't really been much official support and implementations are messy and differ across platforms.

Source: have worked with various BLE stacks. Getting this stuff working well is difficult. I have much respect for companies that actually get it to work reliably.

Funnily enough, I try to avoid Bluetooth as much as possible and everything is wired on my setups.

My iPhone 8 connected to my Bose SoundLink II has the same issues! Glad it's not just me.

Agreed on Bose QC 35II being great. I hardly ever have any issues with them. The only issues I do have with them are when they connect to my work MacBook Pro. The biggest of these issues is that the MacBook refuses to let any other device be the active device. If my Bose QC 35II connect to both my MacBook and my PC or phone (Android), and I want to listen to audio from the non-MacBook device, I have to first disconnect the headphones from the MacBook. But for my PC and phone, I can be dual connected to those, and as long as I have nothing playing, I can start playing something on either device and immediately hear it. At this point I've given up on using the Bose with the MacBook.

I'm having exactly the same issue. Moreover, when you have multiple devices and want to switch to a new one, first you have to guess who hijacked the sound.

Yeah, I like my AirPods Pro precisely because I don't need to disconnect them from the previous device to connect to them from the next device. Bose NC 700s and Sony XM4s both have the problem where I need to disconnect from them on an old device before I can connect to them on a new device.

I think part of the problems you describe is the failings of the bluetooth stack in MacOS, not the Airpods themselves. I have had bluetooth device issues in MacOS on a brand new Macbook, and of course MacOS offers no advanced control options or access to underlying defaults it plugs into device and connection configurations, and there are forum posts about issues going back many years with no acknowledgement by Apple and seemingly no plans for a fix.

My main problem with Airpods is the physical design, which simply refuses to stay in my ears at all, rendering them totally useless, even if I'm just sitting relatively stationary at a desk.

My Samsung Galaxy Buds have been doing pretty well, though I just started having a problem where the left earbud is extremely quiet.

I have to reassure you, the Windows BT stack is actually a pile of garbage. And I’m talking about things like the whole audio system crashing when trying to use my XM4 on any videoconférence software, my Xbox controller randomly disconnecting for several seconds while in game (I play at a <1m distance) or my keyboard suddenly disconnecting while I work.

At this point I’m starting to believe that even Linux has a better Bluetooth stack than windows and OS X.

iOS is okayish but I have random issues with my AirPods. Generally they just stop being recognized and I have to reset them and to setup then again. Boring.

> At this point I’m starting to believe that even Linux has a better Bluetooth stack than windows and OS X.

With Pipewire, this seems to have come true in it's entirety. Connecting multipoint Bluetooth headsets to multiple Linux devices works astonishingly well, and I don't think I've ever had a connection drop or encountered a real "bug" with it. The only annoyance is that if you have one device playing audio and another starts playing, it will cut out for a fraction of a second while the headset negotiates it's connection. Besides that it's almost scarily flawless.

I have found for years that Linux offers the best Bluetooth experience. Does Android use their BT stack or do they have their own?

IIRC it’s a custom one. And it was rewritten quite recently, like 4-5 years ago.

Agree. Linux BT audio is relatively stable. Also it's the only desktop OS that supports LDAC codec.

Oh I fully agree. The Windows bluetooth experience is terrible as well. I truly believe the Linux bluetooth experience, through desktops like GNOME or KDE or really any of the bigger ones I've used, is objectively superior.

There's a whole tangent of complaints I could make about the unified "modern" settings application Windows introduced I think in Windows 10 (maybe 8.1).

Are the Galaxy Buds still under warranty? I've had mine for about three years now, and my biggest issue is that the right bud drains now faster than the left, and so after a few hours, I'll only get audio from the left.

Meanwhile my $30 versions work great. And look better IMO

I had my QC 35IIs stolen when I forgot them in a Sixt rental. I decided to get some Airpods as a replacement as most reviews I found online said they were comparable. God, I miss my QC 35IIs...

I've never experienced any of the issues you've mentioned and have been a user of AirPods since they were first released. My _only_ complaint has ever been battery life.

I've tried many other brands (I had lost two pairs of AirPods from all the travel I was doing) and everything else was an awful experience for anything but simply listening to something. I have to manually disconnect from my phone then re-connect to my computer (AirPods solve this), people could never hear me through the microphones, and generally I was better off not using the "controls" the other brands offered.

I really wanted to like cheaper alternatives, but they're just not good. AirPods, however, are fantastic.

I have a pair of Bose QC 35s that I've had for years and whilst I agree connecting to the iPhone is crisp. I have been to hell and back trying to get them to work well with my Macbook. Problems with them not pairing, the audio quality suddenly going terrible or them just dropping out.

Here's a few more:

- Airpods sometimes do not charge when in the case. Usually need to pull it out and put back in again.

- Knowing what airpod(s) and case are charging. The UI on the phone, the open the case sliding window, the widgets, and the case light itself are not very useful.

- Spatial audio working on some apps but you're not usually aware if it's on until you tilt an ear one way to confirm.

- Out of ear detection sometimes doesn't work well and will drain the respective airpod.

- No preference list of what devices should have precedence over others. Especially when working on 2+ devices.

- Hand-off calls is a weird UX. Why would I answer a phone on my iPhone by default when it's clear I have airpods connected and being used?

- The transparency / noise cancelling dance. Not sure if there's a preference, but it feels random which one is on by default. Always do a double check at the gym or when running as outside noise sounds loud.

Still the best headphones and experience in my opinion and have enabled me to achieve a hell of a lot more because of them. Easily worth the price for how much I use them.

Am I crazy or have Airpods gotten worse recently? I didn't get mine until recently (November?) and for the first month or so they kinda did work perfectly. The auto-pairing was annoying like the article mentions (switching from my Mac where I want it to my phone cause I pulled it out to look at something), but I turned that off and it was all good. But at some point in December I started constantly getting the issue where one doesn't have audio playing and I have to put it in the case to reset it, sometimes the tap gestures don't work, it'll pause when I pull one out (as intended) but doesn't unpause when I put it back in, etc. I wonder if they pushed some bad firmware.

Oh, also here's another complaint: when your Airpods are connected to your iPhone, they HAVE to be the microphone. Which is annoying because for one thing, their microphone is way worse than the one built into your phone, and the other thing is in winter I usually have my AirPods concealed under my toque so my ears don't freeze off, but that means literally no sound will make it to the microphone, and I'm just SOL if I want to use my microphone (and when it's freezing out, I'm less likely to want to try typing a message with the keyboard, so it would be nice to just send a voice message to someone, but I can't). Of course no one at Apple will ever experience this cause they're all in California!

Clearly, no one at Apple considered cold weather when designing the pinch based Airpod Pro interface. Just about impossible with gloves.

Yeah, that's actually one of the reasons I didn't go for the 3rd gen even though they were out when I got mine

I can't use that through a toque, whereas with the 1st gen I can double tap the side of my head through the toque and it pauses

Yeah: the tapping interface for the original AirPods is one of the most interesting mechanisms I'd ever seen, both obvious in retrospect and yet not at all obvious. I think of it as one of the more "inspired" mechanisms I've ever seen in such a product... and then they replaced it with "the kind of thing an idiot might have built".

And like, I know the pinch mechanism does have some smarts to it: it isn't even really a button, and the thing you think you are pinching is haptic feedback; but that frankly just makes it worse as the only reason why the pinch feature is better than the tap feature is because the tap feature had an unfortunate requirement that you had to have it in your ear to use it (and to the extent to which it would accidentally work when not in your ear was, fwiw, annoying)...

...but then, for some inexplicable reason, they decided that the pinch feature also shouldn't work if the AirPod isn't in your ear, only, due to the dynamic haptic feature, squeezing it suddenly isn't a button anymore and I find myself just squeezing it harder, twisting it around trying to find the button, until the part of my brain that knows how it works turns on and goes "there isn't really a button there" and I go into problem-solving mode to figure out I need to put it in my ear again for it to work.

The tapping interface was (/is, as I still have them) incredibly intuitive on that front: the part of my brain that wanted to interact with it fundamentally got that "you have to put this in your ear in order to tap it", and I don't ever use them wrong. But with the new pinch interface, I've had a pair ever since they came out (and now have a pair of the AirPod 3, which I don't like anywhere near as the old ones) and I continue to routinely attempt to pinch them when they aren't in my head.

What is crazy to me is that I've complained about this to various people and the response that I tend to get--both from people "in the know" as well as end users giving me this exact complaint back--is that a sizable number of customers apparently really really really hate tapping their head: they find the action annoying and the sound it makes in their skull / ear canal unfortunate. The pinch interface is simply sufficiently boring that everyone seems to be willing to do it without squinching. :/

Out of ear detection is my biggest gripe. If I take them out quick and place them on a table because I don’t have the case handy, they try to reconnect when I’m receiving a call or using audio in any way without them. I have to look for the icon in control center and manually remove them. It’s incredibly annoying.

I also noticed the membrane sounds like it’s getting blown out when they attempt to deal with loud noises in the environment.

There was a recall about a year ago for the membrane blown out buzz problem- if you report it to Apple theyplace them.

I really wish they'd add an LED per AirPod in the case, as an easy visual indicator that they're properly seated and charging. I don't know if I'm especially oily or something but both pairs of AirPods I've used have had charging issues in the case after just a few months, and it's so frustrating that it's almost impossible to tell if they're both charging in there.

Nothing like going out for a run and figuring out 50 feet down the road that your audio is only playing through one bud.

Same. I would be fine with like 3 LEDs where the left and right LED would turn green when fully charged airpod & green for the case as middle one.

While it's charging everything, you might see blinking/orange LEDs until they turn green.

Of course interactions for when the case is charging the airpods and when the case is plugged in, but that's not too difficult I think.

Ha, the preference list is interesting, I don't know how some stuff works for Apple when connecting the AirPods even with multiple apple ids. I had my girlfriend connect her AirPods to my iPad to watch a movie on the plane. A couple of weeks later I was using airplay to stream a game on the TV, while my gf was in another room wanting to watch something on her phone connected to her apple id. All of the sudden sound goes off on the tv, and after a couple of seconds stream is paused. She comes in that the game was playing on her AirPods. I have no clue how the AirPods connected to my laptop after 1 month of her using her airpods only with her devices.

Yeah, my big gripe is that I keep my computers docked/clamshelled and whenever you lift them, airpods will ALWAYS transfer. So I've had to learn to stop doing that with multiple devices and prevent them from going to sleep.

I thought I was going out of my mind, but I have all these issues as well. The “out of ear” detection failing and draining battery and the not actually charging while in the case issues are particularly annoying.

Strange that that happens to me is, every time I take out my Airpods and put them in their case, I get a Find My alert on my phone saying I left them behind even though they're in my pocket.

I think most of these annoyances can be taken broadly from the fact that everything about any Bluetooth experience is just absolute trash.

Why does it take several tries to pair sometimes? When paired, why does it sometimes auto-connect and sometimes not? Why does it just never pair at all? What's with that pair code that it says to enter, but auto fills (sometimes)? And only sometimes do you have to use that code (which is a security thing only implemented on things with screens I'm guessing). I'm sure there's more, but I've already dedicated my days frustration to this.

All that being said, I was very happy to "upgrade" to a Pixel 5a for the 3.5mm headphone jack. It's been a supreme experience to live in the past and future.

How have consumers let companies get away with "premium" phones being the ones with fewer features?

Maybe they don't mind putting the adapter on their headphone cable? If you aren't switching devices a lot, it's a one-time operation that's pretty easy to manage.

Because it is, statistically, an easier and more pleasant experience. I really get tired of taking twenty minutes to configure a bunch of settings for each marginally novel piece of tech I acquire.

I've never had to configure my wired headphones before in my life. What kind of headphones do you have?!

I think of it like USB A ports. You miss it for a few years. And then you don't. And the products generally continue to improve along other lines

I’ve never had the bit snap off a USB A cable when it was plugged in yet it’s happened to me twice with USB C. I’ve also had to replace ports due to the wear on the cable futon not being able to stay in place. Furthermore, I’m less certain if a cable I have lying around is going to be fully compatible. I also have to keep USB A around so there’s this big growth in the number of cables and adapters that are necessary.

In almost every way that is meaningful to me USB C has been a downgrade. I can’t think of anything that improved my experience beyond saving a minute when I plug the laptop into only the monitor and not the power cable too.

Haha what?? Look all over this thread, Bluetooth has just Stockholm-syndromed everybody, and the phone manufacturers are only too happy to drop the jack.

My anecdata is that as an exclusively wired headphone user, my shit ALWAYS works. Meanwhile my bluetooth zoom/discord counterparties are consistently making remote work a drag because:

- I can't hear the beginning or end of their sentence (some kind of bluetooth gating/noise cancellation that doesn't work)

- Connection drops

- 10-25 seconds of start-of-call fumbling (like in TFA)

- No backup if their P.O.S. bluetooth airpod whatever is really dying or even just having a fight with their device that the user gives up in disgust. I have a backup wired $5 headset ready to go anytime (and use it like once every two years).

Because I don't miss anything about old phones. Yes sometimes the airpods can work a little funny, but on a whole, they are so far ahead of the wired headphones I used to use that I can completely forgive the issues they have. Yeah it was cool to put an SD card in my phone, but it never worked that seamless and my phone now has more storage than I'll ever use.

Old? Phones still come with headphone jacks. They just cost less (and have slower hardware )

Wasn't that the entire selling point with Apple's W1 chip? That it's bypassing standard bluetooth handshake protocol and handling the pairing themselves?

Airpods seem to be more reliable for that than most bluetooth experiences I've had, but it's still not as good as I'd hoped given it's supposed to "just work"

> I think most of these annoyances can be taken broadly from the fact that everything about any Bluetooth experience is just absolute trash.

That's not my problem. That's Apple's problem. There are solutions around this, and they made a choice to use the technology they did. End result is their product. These annoyances aren't because they have wireless headphones. It's because of the choices they made.

Managing device connections with software is always going to result in a subpar user experience, period. When you use wired headphones, you don't have to rely on a UI to tell whether they're connected or not, and to manage that connection. To move from your laptop to your phone, you unplug them from the laptop and plug them into the phone. That simple. Impossible to mess up and works every time.

Yeah, but wires are also a subpar user experience, period. Rolling them up to store them, untangling them to use them, getting caught on things, routing them to the device, etc. There's a reason bluetooth headphones are still popular despite the downsides.

For me personally the wires are such a non-issue compared to all these software-related problems and having to run the whole thing through a noisy, unreliable, shared medium.

Subjective, so nope. It's more a tradeoff. Wires are reliable and "just work" (see title of TFA), so the small convenience issues you describe do not make them "sub-par". Indeed I think the terrible experience I see others having on meets/calls is "subpar" and in a remote world, IMO, unacceptable.

I've found the best compromise to be a Bluetooth receiver with 3.5mm input. I feel comfortably untethered to the desk, I can still use them while charging, and I can quickly switch between other 3.5mm devices.

3.5 mm jack

Nasty. Yes ;)

I'm sorry but it solves these problems and I think most of us have more prominent issues. Bluetooth - and even overpriced Apple products - are usually working well with one connection only. And the headset profile needs to sacrifice quality for voice input. This is to large degrees a question about priority of the user. If you need good or even excellent quality - opt for a good headset and a jack.

Yes. Some issues can be solved with higher priorities by Apple. Or Apple doesn't care because it is good enough. Maybe Apple need an argument for another bad proprietary protocol to make things worse. I would be happy if I can switch my mouse from Logitech (Bluetooth) between two laptops with coupling them entirely again.

Another option is 2.4 GHz wireless, which is common in gaming headsets, at least, for low-latency / high-quality audio. The downside is it requires a dongle.

>Another option is 2.4 GHz wireless

Sorry to break it to you but Bluetooth also operates on the 2.4GHz ISM band. Those 2.4GHz dongles you're talking about is basically a custom wireless protocol that doesn't follow Bluetooth or any other open standard or OSI stack but is most likely based on some internal protocol of what the three major chip makers in the 2.4GHz space offer (Texas Instruments, Silicon Labs, Nordic Semi) .

I think the world needs less proprietary standards, not more, where the dongle is paired to the device in factory and if you loose the dongle then most likely the headphone or peripheral is instant e-waste.

So I'll stick with Bluetooth for the time being thank you very much.

The reason "2.4 GHz wireless" is an option is the very proprietary standard right there, or rather the static pairing coming with it. The absence of Bluetooth connection negotiation/switching/… removes an entire class of bugs and annoyances.

>removes an entire class of bugs and annoyances

Bugs and annoyances which not everyone is having. Stripping out functionality to crush bugs is like removing your stomach to get rid of a stomach ache.

There are cases and classes of hardware where Bluetooth is not ideal and 2.4GHz proprietary standards are used (low latency audio, gaming mice, concert/conference audio. etc.) but those devices already exist on said proprietary standard instead of Bluetooth since they're usually not meant to be paired with changing hosts/clients all the time like most bluetooth devices, so what's your point? Do you want proprietary dongles to ship with every pair of earphones?

2.4GHz proprietary standards are no magic silver bullet either. Sure, compared to Bluetooth they can have the advantage of latency and bandwidth depending on how you implement said custom protocol in firmware, but it's ultimately the same damn overcrowded ISM band shared with the billions of devices everyone has everywhere (Bluetooth phones, smartwatches, headphones, cars, IoT devices, security systems, and, the 400 pound gorilla in the room, motha-friggin-Wi-Fi) . So due to pollution on the 2.4GHz spectrum you'll end up with potentially similar issues like Bluetooth devices except now you have a proprietary standard to deal with.

If you need good audio in one home location, then the dongle is just fine. My best audio, speaking and listening, is a gamer wireless over the head/around the ears thing with a microphone that can extend to where my mouth is that I bought off my son after he switched to some fancier thing with a YouTuber style mic. It has a base station that plugs into USB and also charges a second battery so I can talk and listen continuously. At work, sounding clear and not having your sound break is quite useful. Also for online games. If it’s just pod cast listening and yelling at kids to text when they get there or whatever, maybe it isn’t as important as these other features.

But also, in general, they say perfection is reached when there is nothing left to remove. Extra features often mean something is wrong with the design. Even with programming languages, it is vastly better for the default response to requested new features is “no.”

>If you need good audio in one home location, then the dongle is just fine

Well yes, for things that tend to stay in the same place no need use Bluetooth at all. Not denying any of that, but which of those are issue that have to do with Bluetooth?

>But also, in general, they say perfection is reached when there is nothing left to remove. Extra features often mean something is wrong with the design.”

Perfect is the enemy of good here. Bluetooth wasn't meant to be the perfect way of connecting devices, that's impossible, it was developed back in the late 90's for connecting millions of mobile devices to each other over a standardized, cheap (in terms of silicon die area) and most importantly, low power connection (batteries were small back then), and it does all that pretty decently. Sort of a jack of all trades master of none.

If you're looking for perfect solutions then you should be looking elsewhere and that's why proprietary solutions exist and there's nothing wrong wioth that.

They put the complexity in to the dongle which if done right, just works. It's why I choose to use the usb dongle for my mouse/kb even when they support bluetooth. Because bluetooth works most of the time while the dongle works all of the time and doesn't have compromises like "It doesn't work here because the OS bluetooth stack isn't loaded yet"

Bluetooth almost needs to be lifted from the OS and become part of the higher firmware so it works everywhere.

BT-W3 could be a solution.

>Sorry to break it to you but Bluetooth also operates on the 2.4GHz ISM band.

Right, but "2.4 GHz wireless audio" is what to search to find information and non-BT products.

It is interesting to see your comments about Bluetooth. I appreciate the standard. It's useful. But as a user I like things that just work, and Bluetooth audio has been subpar in my experience.

Sample size of one, but my experience with non-BT wireless headsets is superior to Bluetooth headsets in pretty much every way: no pairing issues and no BT profile switching madness with varying audio quality when I want to use a mic. I get low latency, high quality (even lossless) audio. On my particular headset, replacement dongles can be purchased and you pair it with the headset once (I've not had to do this myself yet though).

I would love to only use Bluetooth everywhere, but it is not without its shortcomings.

Nice! I love the 3.5mm jack solution.

All we gotta do is solve the “I got my cable caught on the door knob as I walked by” issue and 3.5mm will be perfect.

Putting the phone in pocket and wire under shirt helps but not 100%

What happens if I’m wearing a dress?

Selling me on going back to wired is like telling me to use an Ethernet jack on my laptop for optimal performance.

Haha I still use Ethernet for a bunch of computers in my room (5+) but only use wireless headsets.

Of course wifi is more than fast enough

None of the AirPod annoyances are as bad as having your headphones yanked violently out of your ears when the 3.5mm cable catches on a door handle.

For me, most of the AirPod annoyances individually are worse than cable yanking. Taken together, it's no contest.

If you're walking around, yeah, sure - wireless all the way.

But for desk use, I don't see the appeal of wireless, given all of the tradeoffs.

Even for desk use, wired headphones feel like being leashed to the desk. It's amazing to be in a meeting and then be able to just mute yourself and walk off to have a drink while still listening in.

Until you get just far enough away that they disconnect and your internal computer speakers start blasting the meeting conversation through the room.

Airpods connected to an Apple device have uncanny range compared to what I'm used to with other bluetooth pairings

The range on airpods is shockingly good.

Somewhere in my audio setup there is a ground loop. I don't know where, and I'm yet to be able to work out what is causing it. But that alone makes wireless appeal at my desk very much.

Those are a pain. I get around them by using optical or USB when possible. But, not always feasible.

If you have an IEM with a sturdy cable wrapped around your ear, snagging it on a door handle yanks the connector out of the Lightning to 3.5mm adapter instead.

1. A detachable cable will pull out easier than pulling your headphones off.

2. Run the cable of appropriate length inside your shirt or jacket with enough slack to move without restriction but without a bunch of extra slack.

I carry my backpack or have a jacket on me at almost all times, and having the headphone cable holes in each has prevented this from happening anywhere as often as it used to. Plus the reliability of wired headphones has reigned supreme that I sold my AirPod Pros a few weeks ago after they sat for about a month or two between use, while my corded headsets are used almost daily.

A true professional routes the cable through their shirt, from their neck down to their pocket, to avoid this problem.

A shirt provides too much friction thus there is a constant feeling of having the earphones pulled down (especially when moving the head)

The clips that let you fasten it to the collar of your shirt are life changing. Completely elimates the weight of the rest of the cord from your ears and any weirdness when you move your head. I wish more headphones and IEMs came with one in the box.

That's debatable. As far as I'm concerned I prefer being annoyed by my occasional lack of care rather than wondering what software quirk makes my phone call come out of the wrong device. At least I can identify the cause quickly and make my best to avoid the issue.

Meh, if they're $5 headsets/earbuds they at worst harm themselves (so I pop out another $5 headset to last 1-3 years without issues)

Ooof you could never convince me again to tether my head to my phone with a cord. No way!

Let's stop to admire the excellent UX of the 3.5mm jack * tactile feedback when connected (it clicks, you hear it & feel it). * "find my device" : just pull on the wire * quickly switch between devices * instant pairing

We just need a marketing guru to sell people on the 3.5mm wired headphones

It rotates and has no direction, so you can untwist your headphone wire without unplugging it, and plugging it in is foolproof.

It had some issues where in unplugging and plugging the cable would cause voltage spikes because the pins would get dragged across the wrong connectors and not all be disconnected at once. Which is why you hear that pop when using loudspeakers and (un)plugging the cable. This apparently lead to damage of the speaker over time as well.

Which many devices solved by not sending output to the connector until after it sensed resistance on the pins, then enabled the audio output. So, another problem solved by 3.5mm jacks!

God I miss having a real connector on my phone :(

iPhone SE 1st Gen here ^^

Handy in sense of being small enough for a pocket, I can keep it with me during sport and don't feel the need for a Smartwatch. WiFi, Bluetooth, Jack, Accelerometer and GPS. The new iPhones use the same case again, their just bigger, with breakable glas on the back and more expensive. I will not buy a new one - their degraded in all terms.

We really might need one if chip shortages are gonna be a problem.

You also forgot about not having one more battery to keep charged.

excellent point. and no one seems concerns about volatile lithium batteries in their ear canal

In the winter, with all the various layers over my ears and possibly tangling with the cord? Cord all over the place while I'm biking or running? I definitely do not miss cords.

3.5mm is not anywhere near as standardized as Bluetooth.

- no standard way to have a microphone

- balanced vs unbalanced cables are electrically different (and can damage the headphone)

- high and low impedance headphones are also electrically different (affecting sound quality and volume)

- phone can't implement safe hearing limit laws or any of the hearing health features because it doesn't know how loud the headphones are

Plus there's cable microphonics and the ports on both sides can wear out.

I have a $200-250 pair of AirPod Pros, and a $40 pair of Tozo NC7's that I bought for a backup. The Tozo's get way more use, to the point where I regret buying the AirPods.

Your ears may vary, but "dot" style earbuds are WAY more comfortable (and likely to stay put in my ears) than the "stem" style buds. The spatial audio thing turned out to be a pointless novelty that wore off quickly, and isn't even supported on half of my Apple devices.

I also get tired of the weird glitches, where my AirPods will spontaneously decide to drop my connection, and connect to a different device. With other earbuds, it's a mild annoyance having to manually tell one device to drop its connection so another device can connect. But the truth is that I don't have to do this THAT often, and the unwanted switchovers are far more frequent and annoying. Plus, there are a ton of bluetooth earbuds and headphones that accept two or more simultaneous connections, which eliminates the issue and is better than what AirPods try to do, honestly.

> a $40 pair of Tozo NC7's that I bought for a backup. The Tozo's get way more use, to the point where I regret buying the AirPods

Thanks for the recommendation... I almost lost one of my airpods in 18" of snow last week when snowblowing, and I decided it's not a good idea to wear my airpods when snowblowing anymore.

I have a pair of fancy Bose over-the-ear headphones. They have the "connect to 2 devices" feature you mentioned. And it inconvenient.

It will connect to my cell phone and computer at the same time. I'll be on a zoom call (computer) and something will make it decide to disconnect and reconnect from my phone - so I'll get a 10 second interruption notifying me of this glitch.

Also, if someone calls me, I haven't figured out how to force it to switch to my cell phone.

I have exactly the same problem! I’ve resorted to manually disabling Bluetooth on the device I don’t want to use… never had that issue with Airpods.

That doesn't sound like simultaneous-connection support is inconvenient. It sounds like Bose's buggy implementation of it is inconvenient.

Back when I used to lug around over-the-ear headphones, I mostly used a $50 pair of bluetooth headphones by Taotronics (a no-name, fly-by-night company that doesn't even seem to exist in Amazon's catalog now). And they work flawlessly with two simultaneously connected devices.

Taotronics were one of the brands banned from Amazon last year for inflating user reviews[1].

[1] - https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/1/22703276/amazon-banned-br...

Huh. Looks like the company behind my "Taotronics" headphones are the same people who made the "Vava" USB hub that I use with my Mac (and which has been more reliable than Anker's that I've paid twice as much for).

Stupid. They would have done just fine relying on organic reviews, but now they have the death penalty. It's like watching Richard Nixon get Watergated out of office, because he thought he needed an edge to beat George freaking McGovern.

You can pull the power button to switch between devices the headphones are paired to.

I've instead found it useful to disable the voice prompts. The connects/disconnects become a short beep that doesn't drown out anything else.

My counter point is that I have my AirPods paired with 4 different (Apple) devices, and I’m constantly amazed that they always seem to be connected to “the right one” every single time. The handoff is seamless and hasn’t made a mistake about guessing which device I want to be driving them in the two years I’ve owned them.

To me, that's an experience I only have with AirPods Max, Pros totally fail to achieve that.

Too bad the NC7s dont remember which state they are in. You have to toggle them every time you put them in you ears.

AirPods are held on ears similar to how a wine glass should be held in hand. There is a opposing pair of protrusions in human ears, between which the stem goes through, and the flexion of that protrusions works against the force exerted by the bulb and hold earphones in place.

I don't understand why Apple went with that as a default; that part of my ears seems to have evolved so as not to catch debris, and EarPods-style earphones just comes off as they should. And it is not that likely I have a million in one ear leaf genetic subtypes.

It does depend on ears, for sure. Most in-ear headphones are painful for me, including the "dot" ones. Stem ones tend to be far more comfortable, with the Apple ones the most comfortable. I've also never had AirPods fall out of my hears even when exercising. They seem to be made for my ears.

Automatic device switching is hell. These two anecdotes happened since I read this article 10 minutes ago:

I was listening to a podcast using AirPods and my iPhone. Someone reacted to a message I’d sent, which paused the podcast. When I tried to resume a second later, my AirPods had magically connected to my computer instead of my phone. WTF!

Still listening to the podcast and setting up a FaceTime call for my kid on an iPad. Before starting the call, I turned off Bluetooth, so my iPad wouldn’t connect to my AirPods. Regardless, it connected to them anyway.

Did no one at Apple test this ‘feature’?

This is a bad end-user experience but I can kinda see the flow.

You're listening on your iPhone but using your computer. Device switching then says "okay since they're using their computer if any sound comes from the computer they should hear it" and then iMessage made a sound.

Had the thing you did been playing a YouTube video or Spotify then it would be weird if your AirPods didn't switch. I think it makes sense for notification sounds to not trigger switching by default but IDK what they currently do isn't totally unreasonable.

This would make sense if I had been using my computer. But I was in the kitchen and hadn’t played any media on my computer all day.

Also, the distance from the devices should have been a giveaway: 3 feet from the phone and 25 feet from the computer.

I strongly disagree. These kinds of annoyances are not acceptable, as the no-nonsense alternative (switching manually) is just great in comparison.

It's even worse when you're on an active phone call (the standard iPhone phone functionality, not third party meeting/voip app) talking to another human being and an alert sound plays on the computer, stealing the audio from your phone call and you can no longer hear or speak with the other person. I can't think of a better example where "don't steal the audio" is more applicable.

Another similar annoyance: I'm on my phone using my AirPods and I wander in range (but still rooms away from) my Beats, which happen to be turned on. Even though I haven't taken my AirPods out of my ears, my phone switches over to my Beats. Why?

Surely the AirPods know they're still inserted and should be able to override any external switching cue. Also, the AirPods are still much closer to my phone than the Beats, so the signal should be stronger. Lastly, it's not like I just turned on the Beats, and they sent some sort of startup/activation signal. I literally just get home from a walk and my phone migrates to a different audio output. Maddening.

If device switching is more of an annoyance/issue than it is a pleasing feature, you can configure it. And it's configurable per-device.

When AirPods are connected, go into the bluetooth preferences, select "Options" next to the connected AirPods. Change the value for "Connect to This Mac"

That’s one configuration. Not configuring in general. There’s no priority list. Then for harder configs to do, there’s no priority list or white list of apps on specific devices for overriding.

Maybe this is me not looking into stuff enough. Is there a way without using your device to quickly switch back to the last used device?

I've actually tried this out, and it does not work. For example, when my Mac is set to connect only when it was the 'last connected to this Mac' it still hijacks my AirPods when I'm listening to podcasts.

I'm sure if I completely unpair the AirPods from my Mac that will stop happening, but then I would need to re-pair them in order to use them at all with my computer. It is crazy that a preference this simple (last connected to this Mac) does not work as described.

>Annoyance 4: Sometimes, only the left or right AirPod plays sound. Taking them in/out of your ears doesn't fix it, you need to put it back into the case and take it back out, which sometimes, doesn't fix it. So you need to put your AirPods in/out of your case two or three times to fix it.

I run into this too, anyone know what's up with that? Is there some "listen with only one headphone in" feature that I'm accidentally enabling?

Yes, there is a listen with only one headphone feature.

It’s not a feature it’s a bug that will affect nearly all Bluetooth in-ears that don’t share a receiver.

The design of Bluetooth buds is such that one of the buds is elected to be the receiver of data from the phone, it then propagates its signal to the second bud.

What you’re experiencing is a disconnection of one earbud to the other.

FWIW: apples AirPods Pro’s rehandshake (from the “slave” side towards the “master” side) every 10s- so you can have a lot of luck just waiting for it to reconnect; that is assuming that the slave device _wants_ to reconnect; it might believe it’s not in your ear.

I disagree, it's definitely a feature in my book. It allows me to keep listening or stay on calls basically forever.

The ability to listen with one headphone in is definitely a feature, but the issue is that sometimes that's happening when it shouldn't be. You pulled both Airpods out of the case, put them in your ears, but only one connects. And you can't get the one with no sound to play sound until you put it back in the case and try again (sometimes takes a couple attempts)

I don't think that's specific to AirPods .. I have Sony's bluetooth earbuds and that occasionally happens. Sometimes just waiting a bit and one of the ears will reconnect on its own. I chalked it up to the bluetooth standard.

I have a solution for that: with bare hands close your ears tightly with Airpods in them. Depending on the duration of such covering Airpods either just mute for a moment, or disconnect and reconnect right away. This helps to re-sync if one is ahead/behind another, or if one is not connected. I do that occasionally with my Airpods Pro connected to iPhone, Android or Macbook Pro - same outcome in all these cases. Such connection "reboot" helps in most described cases, though occasionally explicit Bluetooth toggle Off/On is needed, especially with the Macbook.

I imagine that hands and head create an improvised Faraday cage. Though 2.4GHz Bluetooth signal should nevertheless pass thought the body tissue, likely there is just a signa-to-noise ratio rapid drop which forces Airpods to re-establish the connection.

Yes, it's meant to reproduce the traditional one-earplug bluetooth experience for busy people. It also allows one to effectively bypass battery limits: if you hear the battery alert, you take one earplug off and put it in the case - it charges so quickly, it makes it doable to put it back on before the other dies, and then you recharge the other.

It even happens on AirPods Max because it has two chips internally for L/R. Buggy.

I would add to the list that it is environmentally negligent to allow for such a complex device to be near irreparable (specifically on battery replacement).

Unless you are selling medical devices your electronics should never be thrown away because after-sales cannot swap a battery. Then again Google just dropped the Pixel 3 after just 3 years so this is clearly an issue with the consumer electronics business model.

Consumer electronics will remain a vastly wasteful business unless governments force tighter environmental regulations.

At least Apple pays to recycle them, which is more than most companies making devices like this would do https://onezero.medium.com/what-really-happens-to-airpods-wh...

How many people do you see using 2010 smartphones with replaceable batteries?

Or put another way: people throw away phones after 3-4 years regardless of if you can replace the battery or not.

You can pretty cheaply replace the battery in any phone at a repair shop. But people don't want that, they want the new phone with new look and new features.

> How many people do you see using 2010 smartphones with replaceable batteries?

How many 2010 smartphones have security updates that you can safely use? It's a chicken and egg problem.

For every person that chases the shinny new thing there are plenty of people who don't care about that and just want to have minimal functions, phone, sms, video chat, some decent photos/video, and occasional online banking.

However due a broken business model from Tech giants and firmware lock-in from Mobile SoC manufacturers this is unattainable at the moment.

Vendors should be forced to maintain an LTS work stream to give the alternative to those costumers who do want to act sustainably. Unfortunately that will never happen unless they are forced by regulatory changes.

For the last 6 years, the average number of new smartphones sold per year was 1.5 billion. There are 6.5 billion people with smartphones in the world. So that's at most a 4 year churn rate.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone...

https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-w...

Aren't you kind of reinforcing GP's point?

Either your research is showing that people on average keep their phones longer than 4 years, which seems to line up well with the argument that they don't throw out their phones every 3-4 years for the best new features for no reason;

Or your research is showing that they do churn through at a 4 year rate, which seems to roughly line up with the average battery lifespan and security lifespan across the market. 3 years is right about the time period where I need to replace my phone battery. It would not surprise me at all to see stats that suggest that a lot of people keep their phones until the batteries are unusable or until they're no longer getting updates, and then swap to a new phone -- and across multiple manufacturers, I would not be surprised at all to see that work out to be a ~4 year churn rate, if not a little higher.

I'm not sure what this proves.

Anecdotally, I know more than a few people who prefer Apple devices specifically because of their longevity and support lifespan, so I don't think that the "we have to throw this out because a new phone got announced" characterization is universally true or even necessarily the most common consumer attitude.

I also know people who have bought new phones because the battery was getting weak. I have argued with them to take their phones to a repair shop and to pay $60 to replace the battery, but they felt weird doing that for whatever reason. I suspect some of that might come from the fear of having their phone broken during the repair process before a new one comes in, but that's pure speculation on my part.

And yeah, I also know a few people who have bought new phones just because they care about getting a slightly fancier camera. But I don't necessarily think they're the majority, and an average churn-rate of 4 years across the market would seem to reinforce that point more than anything else.

How many 2010 smartphones are still getting security updates, or updates that let them work with modern network standards? LTE was only barely available in 2010, and 3G is almost gone now.

LTE/5G is a hardware thing, you can't add it with a software update. Yet another point that it's not the sealed battery which is the problem.

You can't add it with a software update, but you could provide a modular phy (or continue support for older standards).

Not talking about you since I don't know, but a funny thing I noticed, is that people who are very loud about saving the environment are always the ones with the latest iPhone 13 Max/Macbook Pro M1 in their hands one week after it's released.

Notice that you just went from "people don't really want it", to "it's not really feasible", all the way to straight up ad hominem.

It was a side point, because it's always very rich people with iPhone 13 Max which are like "poor people should use 10 year old phones, but not me, I can't be seen on gram with that, I need credibility so I can speak out about the climate"

Modular phones were tried and were a complete market failure. Because they sacrifice thinness, robustness and water proofing.

Older standards are removed because they are not used anymore, so the bandwidth is freed for newer ones.

And "people don't really want it" remains just as true. Just like people didn't want small screens, until even Apple famously yielded.

> Always the very rich people with iPhone 13 Max ....

Funnily enough, I can name numerous people who use iPhone 13 Pros/Pro Maxes, just bought this past year and are certainly making less than median wage.

Part of it is fashion, 'not appearing poor', and they may only know iOS due to a history of using it. So no, the very rich aren't the only ones buying iPhones. The stigma that they are phones for the wealthy should go, just as the idea that Android phones are for the poor.

Many people I know who make well more than three or four times what I do use a variety of Android devices.

In 2010, smartphones were just taking off, every new generation offered significant improvement. 2010 smartphones are terrible by today's standards: small storage, underpowered, no 4G, bad camera, etc...

2015 smartphones are a different story. Things have stabilized, and a good 2015 smartphone should be perfectly usable today, a bit sluggish, but usable. And interestingly, that's when they stopped having user replaceable batteries. More generally, the market shifted from real obsolescence to planned obsolescence.

Airpods are insanely small and the outside casing is pretty much a single piece of plastic. I am all for right to repair, but it does not seem feasible or reasonable for AirPods - they’d have to be bulkier.

> they’d have to be bulkier

Then make them bulkier. What's worse, filling the planet with garbage, or a few industrial designers having slightly less impressive portfolios?

That's entirely fair, but the issue is the demand for the less bulky bluetooth headset isn't there. To think that this will be solved from the supply-side is wishful thinking at best; if folks really demanded repairable headsets, the supply would take care of itself.

I mean there was no demand for more expensive unleaded fuel but we still regulated leaded fuel out of existence. What consumers want and what is needed for the environment is not always aligned.

Consumer demand is not a very good guiding principle for environmental protection.

It's actually pretty bad for the airpods. The gen 3 airpods are bulkier than the 1 and 2 which now means they don't stay in my ears nearly as well. I never had issues with the originals falling out which I now do with the gen 3.

You can promote your TWS with detachable battery design. I think it's totally not attractive.

The airpods in entirety would be less waste than the packaging most spare parts come wrapped in. It just feels worse because they cost a lot more than a plastic foam pack your steak comes in.

Apple consumers don’t care about the environment, that’s why they buy products that need to be replaced yearly by choice or by design. So these arguments are lost on them.

Just as a gentle counterpoint, consider the magnitude of the problem. Let's say there are 300m AirPod units that have been produced (60m sales per year for the last 5 years). Each unit is about 2oz, mostly plastic and batteries. That's roughly 20,000 tons. Los Angeles County alone (to pick a place) generates about 100,000 tons of solid waste per _day_, of which about 20,000 tons makes it to landfill[0][1]. If they were all thrown away at once, all in Los Angeles, they'd hardly notice.

Semiconductors and consumer electronics are more environmentally sensitive than they were, and can be better than they are. With the lithium and trace metals, AirPods are more damaging pound for pound than bulk waste, and you're right to insist that Apple do a better supporting recycle and recapture. We should also focus on how those materials are mined in the first place.

However, even a repairable AirPod would generate lithium waste as the batteries wear out. If we're going to have consumer electronics, there's going to be a bit of waste. Let's just keep in mind that real problems are coal and SUVs and beef and so on. A business like AirPods (or all of electronics) that generates fractional ounces (or pounds considering everything) of waste per person-year while enabling environmentally-positive changes like remote work is perhaps not the first target for reprobation.

[0]: https://dpw.lacounty.gov/epd/swims/OnlineServices/reports.as... [1]: https://www.laalmanac.com/environment/ev04.php

Wholly agree that transportation and energy usage of coal/natural gas should be our primary target.

Apple stuff "just works" until it doesn't. As much as a fan I am of Apple, the lack of feedback when things stop working is absolutely infuriating.

Had Music.app completely hose my entire data plan last month because it was downloading about 12 albums I had in “Downloaded Music” then deleting them then downloading them over and over last month.

Not to mention Apple Music keeps turning itself back on when I turn it off.

All impossible to diagnose why and the only advice is reset and delete everything and start over.

I was wondering why my phone battery kept running down some days faster than others. Seems it randomly turns on Apple Music even when the volume is down to 0% and I don’t really notice that until I see it is actually playing on the notifications centre. I never, ever want it to play without me touching the play button on my phone, but that is not an option I guess.

And sometimes it "just works", but only if everybody is within the Apple ecosystem. Otherwise, it's just a net exporter of problems. See, for example, SMS message of "Liked an image.", email attachments converted into icloud download links, .DS_STORE files scattered everywhere, and so on. Any time Apple comes up with a new feature that would require improving capabilities at a lower level, Apple instead makes a new layer of abstraction on top. And oh how conveniently, that new layer of abstraction is transparent only to Apple users.

I overheard someone the other day ranting about Android phones and their broken SMS support. They apparently didn't realize it's actually Apple that has the buggy code/design and will try to send proprietary data to a non-Apple device.

Can you elaborate more on this

See my comment here[0]. Apple added application-level support for non-standard features not supported by SMS. When Apple sends message through the Message application, it selects either iMessage or SMS, based on whether there exists an iMessage connection, and whether the recipient has an iMessage account. This includes for things that are not representable by SMS. Reactions in the Message application, sent to a non-Apple device, show up as nonsense replies, such as "Liked an image", or "Liked 'The full text of the thing you just sent them.'".

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30085322

> Liked "The full text of the thing you just sent them"

Thank you: I was wondering where those inane 'Liked' SMS messages were coming from. The poor iPhone user is unaware of how rude that comes across.

> Apple stuff "just works" until it doesn't.

"Just works" is absolutely a statement that should be considered on a time curve! Some products work incredibly in the most trivial use case you test during unboxing, but fall apart when deeply integrated. Others are a PITA to set up, but stop requiring any unproductive attention afterwards.

This was incredibly clear for anyone WITHOUT AirPods during 2019-2020. Everyone picked them up with their iPhone 11 upgrade and immediately started talking about how they "just work". Three months later, you'd see people fiddling with extra devices to keep them charged, or complaining about sending them through the laundry or into subway grates. Then the pandemic hit and they became an entire category of Zoom fatigue due to multiple bluetooth connections.

This has been my observation as well. They mostly just work, but when they don’t they are indefinitely more annoying to fix than „regular“ BT headphones.

Aha, just experienced this yesterday when I couldn’t update or download any new app on my child’s iPad with the newest OS because it refused to ever finish accepting my iCloud password.

Through some obscure digging, I found that changing my region language on the ipad from English > UK English and back somehow fixed it…

I think a lot of this is down to the fact that all issues that the user could resolve have already been fixed and when you eventually hit an issue, its some low level problem you have no hope of fixing anyway. While on windows or linux you often run in to situations where its just "Oh don't press that button, thats the button that makes it blow up, press the one next to it" while apple removes the button that makes it blow up.

That isn't always the case, but it tends to be.

I've given up with AirPods Pro. I had to replace them several times during the warranty period (once was a recall). Even when working correctly they would have annoying connection problems, for several conference calls I had to switch back to an old school wired pair, which just always works.

My attempt to have the case (which only showed life while connected to power) resulted in Apple throwing away my working AirPods and trying to upsell me a whole new case + 2 AirPods (at above market price, with no charging cable, and a shorter warranty).

If you do still have AirPods out of warranty- a support adviser admitted to me that they don't actually service them, and they don't replace one component alone- if you send them in for repair they just toss the whole thing and sell you a new set. So if only one piece is broken just report it as lost and they'll charge you to replace it.

I usually dont buy AppleCare for my products, but I figured since this was a 1st gen AirPods Pro and they were so small AppleCare was justified this time. And boy am I glad I did, I've had my AirPods Pro replaced like five or six times now.

Issues I've experienced:

- Loud random static noise (usually for about .25 seconds). It's like someone screaming in your ear. I've experienced this now with TWO pairs.

- Noise canceling/transparency mode just stopping working when you touch them.

- "Hey Siri" just stopped responding (not usually a big deal, but that's usually how I make calls)

- One pair just stopped working entirely. Wouldn't charge or anything.

- Each ear would get out of sync until you took them out of your ears.

AirPods Pro are by far the worst Apple product that I purchased. I regret buying them. I suspect the regular AirPods don't have most of these issues since I think the issues were mostly related to feature specific to the Pros.

I can't imagine how angry I would be if I hadn't purchased AppleCare with them, so many defects.

My ex-boyfriend went through 3 or 4 pairs in one year, I could hardly believe he stuck around after the second replacement. Guy didn't even do anything besides sit in his office and type, either, I have no idea what could have caused their repeated failure besides bad QA.

I can believe it. I think it's a combination of buggy Software/firmware and hardware issues- they've tried to squeeze too much into too small a space and can't do it reliably.

What I was really annoyed about was that Apple was trying to charge me above full price without the option to add AppleCare for the 'repaired' set. If any product needs AppleCare it's these.

Another issue I had (replaced under AppleCare) was the stem squeeze just completely failing in one of them. So many bugs and failures in one product.

They seemed magical for the first few days/weeks. Now I use a $10 wired pair for work calls and cheap but solid Pixel Buds A for wireless. For noise 'cancelling' around machines I also got some hearing protecion- 3M WorkTunes. Total cost of all 3 is half of the AirPods.

Did you pay $30 deductible each time?

Annoyance 8: When I'm using the (good) noise cancelling of the AirPods to eliminate distracting background noise so I can focus, after a few hours the battery will run down to 15% and trigger the EXTREMELY LOUD "PING-pong-pong-pong" low-battery noise, right in my ear, without warning.

And it's Apple, so of course you can't turn it off.

You'd be no better off with a Sony Headphone that screams in your ear that a device connected, the device is turned on and the battery is almost empty. The flagship Sony headphone is so bug ridden it's a joke if you ask me.

I can't comment on the bugs (I'm actually not sure that I've experienced any), but those connected etc. Messages really are very annoying, partly because they feel like forever

I'm reasonably sure you can actually turn those messages off though. I did that for a while, but ended up turning them back on again as connecting them can be ... difficult ... and I'm never quite sure if they're connected until they tell me they are (and if I don't play any audio fast enough, they will also helpfully disconnect).

There should be an option to have this information shown as an alert on the device. iPhones already show the battery charge level of the headphones so why not make it an alert banner?

You can use the android app to disable the device connected/disconnected dialogue.

What bugs are you referring to?

> You'd be no better off with a Sony Headphone that screams in your ear that a device connected, the device is turned on and the battery is almost empty.

I have the WF-1000XM4s. On the iOS headphones app, visiting System and turning off "Notification & Voice Guide" gets rid of the power on and battery level announcements leaving only the connection/disconnection alerts (although I keep all of them on as I find them useful, and wouldn't characterise them as screams).

I have the same headphones and the main issue I have with it is their multi-device support is pretty much broken for me. If I'm on a zoom call and I get a phone call on my other device it takes over the audio (as expected), but then if I decline the phone call the audio doesn't switch back to my zoom call (computer). I end up having to turn the headphones off and back on for them to reconnect, which actually takes a good 10-15 seconds at least. The Bose QC35 I had before handled multiple devices way better, unfortunately they just didn't sound as good as the Sony.

I hate to say this but I mostly turn Bluetooth on and off as I use different devices. If I get a iPhone call during meeting that I can not listen to for a minute, then I will check mute, stop video, and then answer the phone on speaker. I try to have Bluetooth off when I am outside anyways for security and privacy reasons, so it is complementary to that.

I too have the WF-1000XM4 and I only have the function to turn off the notification & voice guide that will stop making the sound that tells me what mode it is in. But it will happily scream in my ear that its either connected, almost empty or on / off. Regarding the bugs I experience on a regular basis: - Every off week the Speak-to-chat is somehow activated and than it drops me out of the music with the sound amplified. - The standby function does no longer work since a month or two and I find it empty every time I forget to either manually turn it off or put it in the charger - The multi device is so odd that I need to disconnect all devices in the surrounding and start connecting one by one - The dual bluetooth sometimes struggle to work with both Windows and Mac. - The connection with Windows was something I actually needed to Google as I couldnt get the quality to work, I somehow had to read somewhere that I needed to wait for ±1min till the actual device pops up in the list (Its registered as two seperate devices) but for this I actually blame Windows - Teams often refuses to play with the main device, but rather prefers the crappy audio system one.

To finish off and it's not a bug, but the microphone they advertise is so laughably bad that roughly 80% of the people couldnt hear me properly on the other end of the line. But reading the reviews I find myself one of the few in this situation.

I have a pair of (I wanna say Honeywell? Maybe 3m?) hearing protection bluetooth headphones that I simply keep off my head while pairing and unpairing because it's loud enough that I can hear it clearly with the phones down in my hand.

I had JBL earphones and they had exactly the same problem. Also couldn't turn it off. Extremely annoying.

AirPod Pro 4, coming in 2025, will like have a feature to let you choose custom alert sounds, tied to ios 19. And it will be heralded with enormous classy custom Helvetiral fonts in a multi parallax scrolling site announcing "we've heard the future, and it's quiet". Or... "If you listen carefully, you can hear the future".

Or they'll provide haptic in-ear custom vibrations in AirPod Pros 5, and their slogan will be "Your ears never felt better".

I read way too much of this comment before I realised you were joking. Got me good.

I'm not actually 100% sure I'm 'joking'. I think we'll see some in-ear haptic feedback stuff in a few years, which take a few more years to get 'right', and will be confusing as heck, but will be useful. If it's customizable, there will be a small but fervent ASMR community around it. It will be pitched as accessibility-friendly, helping people with hearing issues or other sensory issues just 'feel' indicators. Wire it up to 'apple home' and you'll get little in-ear tinglings when certain people come home or leave, or when the garage door opens, and so on. Happy/sad emojis in iMessage will trigger certain ear vibrations, etc.

Having played around with very convincing binaural recording, I am all for subtle auditory haptics as an additional communication layer. I’d be surprised if it’s strictly coded rather than localized to specific objects/interactions within your specific environment.

Better yet, AirPods Pro 4 will allow you to adjust the volume of the warning tone, AirPods Pro 5 will allow you to customize it. AirPods Pro 6 will undo that but allow you to disable the tone and use haptic feedback. Then AirPods Pro 7 will allow you to adjust the volume of the warning tone, and customize it.

The one you called AirPods Pro 7 will actually be AirPods Pro 6s+

But they'll come in a new color.

Space Grey

Agree completely. My ears actually hurt when this happens, cannot be healthy.

The 'device connected' sound is pretty loud as well.

I can feel my ears tense when those "pings" go off (on the AirPods Pro and AirPods Max). This can't be healthy.

What's the big deal here, Apple?

People have been complaining about BEING CAUSED PAIN BY AIRPODS for YEARS and they are not doing anything about it!

This being the top rated comment here further proves it's a major issue for airpod users. What the fuck, apple?

I am absolutely terrified of that painful sound and will regularly check battery to ensure it won't hit me.

Same when switching noise canceling - why so loud?

Your comment made me realise that I actually never switch with the pods button (rather on the display of my phone) because of the loud noise. I don't get why they have not fixed this after years of complains from users.

Doesn't it still make the noise when you use the onscreen switch?

Either way it's horrible, all of these noises seem to be at a fixed or separate volume level than the media volume (which actually is common for apple). Siri used to have a separate volume than media (still might?), and then you also have ringtone volume, and sound in settings barely even hints that all these separate volumes exist.

Every. Body. I. Know. that has a pair of AirPods commiserate.

I can only assume they know but can't fix it.

In fact, why isn't there "adjust volume to surroundings" like there is for brightness? They should KNOW how loud is appropriate based on mic input.

Maybe it's for people who drop their earbuds? So it can be heard from a distance? That would certainly explain it...

A hack would be to put some foam or so inside to dampen the sound and then max out the volume. Then they physically cannot make loud sounds.

Clearly the problem is just with how your ears are constructed, or how you are using your ears. Apple only makes perfect products, after all.

Just to provide my own ancedata, I've been an AirPods users for a long time, and don't find the alert sounds particularly loud or annoying.

I think the volume of complaints and popularity of AirPods this speaks to wider variations in human hearing perception than one would expect. The main body of users have no problem, but enough people experience those sounds as painful to generate a volume complaints.

Conversely, it might just speak to the different kinds of music we listen to. "Dynamic range" is a pretty big phrase you'll hear in the mixing industry, and Airpods effectively have no way to determine how loud your music is before sending an audible notification. If you're listening to a song that's mixed at -12dbLUFS on Spotify or Apple Music, the alert will play at the exact same volume as it would when you're watching a Netflix show mixed at -25dbLUFS. The difference in sound is, quite literally, an order of magnitude apart, and could quite easily account for having such a loud and annoying sound blowing up your ears and ruining your listening experience.

Reminds me of my roommate’s Jambox bluetooth speaker years ago…I learned that it had this behavior while fully asleep at 4:30am after we’d had a party, when, every few minutes it started loudly blasting “BOOOOP. LOW BATTERY” alerts.

The trouble was that it was hidden somewhere in our messy living room, and the alerts weren’t frequent enough to find it quickly, so I was standing around in my underwear for ages, waiting for each subsequent alert and getting a bit closer each time, because it was too loud to go back to sleep.

Sounds like the small slice of hell that is a low battery in most smoke detectors: one short (and loud AF) beep every ~15 minutes. Fine when you have only one, but in a large house you never know which one of these f*ckers is actually the one complaining.

With Amazon Basics 9V batteries sitting at about $1.50 a piece, I've started the practice of just replacing all the smoke detector batteries when one of them starts getting low. When I get to the end of that supply, I'm going to switch to rechargeables and just recharge them all before they start chirping. One night of bad sleep from the option of laying awake, anticipating the next chirp, or going around the house changing batteries in the middle of the night isn't worth it.

The first time I had this happen I didn't know what the sound was and it took me weeks to work out because it's so hard to locate where it comes from.

I once had an EE friend that built these tiny chips he called Annoyers. They simply emitted a loud chirp at a random time interval. The interval was too long to effectively locate the chip, and the chirp was terribly annoying. It could take weeks to find the quarter-sides device hidden in someone’s home (or the battery would just die).

Of course, while he was explaining this to me, the chip slipped from my fingers and fell down an air vent of another friend’s living room. The comedic timing was perfect, and it really might have been the funniest thing to happen to me in 2012.

There's a commercial product called "Annoy-a-tron" that does that.

When I started a new job at a NOC, I was pranked with one of those. I didn't know what to make of the odd recurring ~12khz beeps, and figured it was some old device slowly dying. So I pulled out a stopwatch to see if I could suss out the interval on the beeping. I was too focused on timing the beeps to notice my coworkers exchanging glances with each other after asking them, "Does anyone else hear that?"

I found a pattern emerge. It repeated itself every 10 beeps or so, with irregular intervals between those beeps. Armed with that information, I could effectively predict the next beep within 3-5 seconds (intervals ranged between 3-10 minutes, if I recall.) So I started walking around the room, standing in different locations as I stared at my stopwatch. The farther apart the places I stood, the better chance I'd have of triangulating the source with each beep.

I got within 3-5 feet of it in the ~300 square foot room before the coworkers came clean about what they had done. I wasn't even mad, I was having a blast!

Cool story, your co-worker should've let you find it, so close!

This is the ridiculous experience with all blue tooth headphones. "BATTERY LOW CHARGE NOW!", or "DING DING DING". Your battery is effectively 10% or 15% because they become impossible to listen to once they get low.

SO LOUD

Your (and other's) complaints about the volume of the AirPod alert notifications makes me think either (a) your hearing is more sensitive than most or (b) I've lost more hearing than I thought I had. Either way, those alerts play at what seems like a reasonable and moderate volume to me.

I know a lot of people use airpods as like ambient sound, just keeping them playing super quiet all the time. I personally keep them at a moderate volume because I have no interest in hearing anything other than my music, but maybe the low battery sound is volume-independent, so people who listen at 10% would be jarred by it.

Those alerts are pretty loud, particularly with noise canceling on. One of the things I love about noise canceling is I can listen to my music almost at zero volume on the phone. With everything else blocked out, it's plenty loud. Then the 'bloop bloop' happens and it's like someone hit me over the head.

Annoyance 9: Misplacing or losing these tiny $200 devices is a lot more painful than when I used to lose $20 wired headphones.

Maybe I'm more prone to losing things than the average person. But after losing two of these things over the last couple years I'm not buying them again.

I don't use my AirPods Max below 25% charge anymore because I'm scared of being startled by the ridiculously loud noise. I can't believe this passed Apple's QA.

Apple engineers reading this: The painfully loud "PING" sounds on the AirPods Max hurt my ears when I switch from transparency to sound isolation mode. It's really unpleasant and I'm concerned this is damaging my hearing. The "ping" volume level should be customizable or at least quieter across the AirPods line.

I'm only an indirect user of AirPods and I really do not like them: Every time my team does a google meet / hangout the folks using AirPods sound terrible to the point that it's distracting. I don't know if it's in the microphone, the bluetooth connection, or the interaction with a google product, but it is much worse than (a) wired earbuds and (b) the folks using Bose QC 35s (which the company gave out a while back)

I was about to post this. People with AirPods really should know this - you sound like you're talking on a 1980s radio when you're on a Slack/Zoom/Teams call.

Wired headphones have the mic on the wire beside your mouth. Wireless headphones have them around the corner on the side of your head, which is an objectively terrible location for a microphone.

Dankpods did a pretty good comparison of wired mic quality with wireless: https://youtu.be/N6Y_Q7RYmmY?t=315

Two suggestions that might help OP with some of these annoyances:

- See the "Turn off automatic switching" section of https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212204, to take manual control of when they switch devices

- In System Preferences -> Notifications & Focus you can switch any apps notifications from "Alerts" to "Banners" which will make them go away automatically when ignored.

Unfortunately the nearby headphone notifications are not generated by an app, so you can't use the normal notification banner settings. The only way I've found to disable them is to go to Bluetooth preferences (while the headphones are connected), click options next to the headphones, and change the "Connect to This Mac" dropdown from "Automatically" to "When Last Connected to This Mac".

I'm not satisfied with this solution since I enjoy the automatic switching between devices, but I'm driven crazy by the notifications that pop up on my mac literally as I'm listening to music with those headphones on my iPhone. C'mon Apple - this is all within your ecosystem!

Bluetooth is so broken at a deep and fundamental level. We should really have a low-energy wifi protocol. The listed problems are just the tip of the iceberg.

The fact that my headphones can't be simultaneously connected to both my phone and my computer is ridiculous. The connectivity is awful. The latency of connection and disconnection is embarrassing. On top of that Apple has the worst UI to handle all of of the weird things that can happen.

> We should really have a low-energy wifi protocol.

HaLow? [0] It's been around since 2016, but never saw any great adoption. Which is a huge pity as it can actually achieve some crazy good speeds for such a low power draw. (300+ Mbit/s).

There's also LoRa [1], which _has_ a fair bit of things implemented using it, but unfortunately it's super slow, and has some serious issues around acks that make it unusable for something like wireless buds.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa

Bluetooth LE is a completely different protocol from Bluetooth classic.

A few commenters have mentioned the service program -- I think it's worth mentioning that if you're experiencing sound issues (buzzing, crackling) Apple will repair/replace AirPods Pro even if they're out of warranty (up to three years after the sale, which currently includes all AirPods Pro). I just sent mine in this week.

https://support.apple.com/airpods-pro-service-program-sound-...

In my experience, if you are clearly experiencing a Service Program issue, the Program cutoff dates are not set in stone.

It is my opinion that bluetooth headphones are garbage.

I have several - cheap, expensive, ear buds, over ear. They all suffer from issues between devices, one device out of range weird noises, can't decide which device to connect to. Some of the issues I blame on my phone (Pixel3a).

I spend so much time walking around my house turning BT off on all but one device so I can go outside and listen to something.

Much easier to plug my wired headphones into the device I am using. It is simple, reliable, and I don't have to charge my wired headphones.

For me BT headphones go mostly unused except for yardwork/woodshop time, where the wire poses extra annoyances.

BT is garbage except for very simple products like mice: poorly thought out, even more poorly implemented, generally brittle.

And the audio quality is compromised, although aptX Lossless may finally start changing that.

I'm a Bose QC-35 II convert. Slide forward on the power button and it'll switch the paired device. Also excellent sound quality and ridiculous battery life.

It's nice for someone like me who left the Apple ecosystem many years ago to see that an image for producing fancy gadgets does not mean you can eliminate common software issues.

Because this sounds just like any pair of BT headphones I've used in the last 2 years. Since I finally gave in and started using BT headphones

All in all I love them, I love being able to clean with headphones on and not snag on anything. I love being able to bike with them and not be tied to my phone.

But the BT issues are horrendous. After a year of just accepting that BT sucked someone finally said "install the app" so I did and the firmware update that resulted in solved most of the common issues actually.

So what's left now is weird stuff and quirks of Android. Like Android has a default setting to reconnect to connected speakers as soon as it sees them. Just like in OPs post this is supposed to be convenient but 99% of the time it's just annoying to me. Because I haven't even put my bike away coming home and already the speaker is blaring my audiobook in the kitchen, where I can't hear it.

The other issues are the slow connection when you get a call but that's a bit over demanding imho. Since it wasn't connected and you connect as you get the call so it's a bit short notice.

And then there are the rare unexplained issues like once a month I just disconnect and reboot everything because apps are playing, but no sound is coming out on BT.

Yeah, there's something comforting about a physical connection I can inspect for defects or just unplug, then plug back in if audio isn't working right. Even when I used AirPods/Pro for a while, I never really trusted the headphones. Sometimes I would take them out of the case and they just didn't connect to my phone. Sometimes they didn't seat quite right in the case and didn't charge overnight, and would be totally dead. Sometimes they would connect, play the sound, show up as the audio output on my phone... then refuse to actually play any audio.

I understand that wireless is a nice convenience for a lot of people. But BT makes wireless such a nightmare I just don't think it's worth it. Incredible that nobody has come up with a competing standard.

Logitech has had a competing standard for years (I have decade-old wireless G series headphones which work flawlessly).

I'm not sure why their low-latency/high quality system hasn't been more broadly adopted. Probably requires too much power.

Is it the same tech their wireless mice use, or some variation? I've had really great experiences with that on my MX Master 2.

Yup. The same thing happens with my car. I'm listening to something and the audio cut out? Looks like my wife is at home and Children of Dune is blasting in our driveway now.

I guess I like the fact that when I'm in the car I don't have to do anything for it to pair and work but... It seems like there has to be a better way.

Annoyances 1 and 7 can be solved by changing the settings for automatic switching. The instructions for that are at the bottom of https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212204, under "Turn off Automatic Switching".

For me personally, one of the most infuriating product design decisions that Apple made was the removal of the headphone jack from the iPhones and iPads. This is literally the only reason why I switched to Android, despite being a long-time Apple user.

I stayed with Apple, went through three of the super-fragile 3.5mm adaptors, and now am on a third-party ”heavy duty” adaptor. Let’s see if this lasts.

Too bad Android manufacturers want to emulate Apple even with bad decissions. Headhpone port is getting rarer with each new release. Samsung S21 line doesn’t have it in any model afaik.

Annoyance 1 - you can configure auto-connect per device. I have three computers and an iPhone that have been paired with my AirPods. I only have my iPhone configured to connect to my AirPods automatically.

Annoyance 2 - since you hear the "connect" tone when the AirPods connect to a device, my guess is the author's AirPods have connected to a device they are not looking at. This is what was happening to me before I realized the auto connection was configurable.

Annoyance 3 - this happens for my other Bluetooth headphones that have a microphone when using Mac OS as well. It's a Mac OS issue. I've noticed with a recent update that it happens less frequently. The fix is to set the audio output to the computer speakers, then back to the AirPods.

Annoyance 5 - yeah, switching takes time. Based on my experience with Bluetooth devices, I'm not sure how much this is AirPods specific. I ended up buying a pair of the Sony WH-1000XM4 headphones because they can connect to two Bluetooth devices. This solved the switching delay, with the caveat that the mic on the WH-1000XM4 is not great so I also bought a cheap USB mic for meetings.

And to add to this, i learned to not use the 'bluetooth' icon to manage the AirPods, instead use the 'triangle with broadcast signal'-icon found next to the volume in the control centre or on many other different locations on your ipad, iphone or apple tv.

Just turn off the auto-connect feature and start using that icon, all the mentioned 'annoyances' will go away :)

> triangle with broadcast signal

The AirPlay icon.

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

Ah wow! This is so obvious to use AirPlay to manage them. Thank you! Will see how this goes.

There is something weird about the AirPods Pro product line. I think a lot of us who are very technology focused can appreciate the marvel of engineering that they are. Long battery life, excellent noise cancellation, the right weight, water resistant, etc.

By many of my friends and my wife, all of who work in non tech fields but otherwise are 100% apple device people, all seem pretty much not impressed by them.

For Christmas I got my wife a pair of Nothing headphones. They are 1/3 the price and I figured it was worth a try since she basically just stopped using her AirPod Pros.

Now she raves about these cheap Nothing headphones. Tells her friends they are better. Less obtrusive, clear so they stand out less, good audio quality, and they don't try to magically switch devices, they just wait for you to decide what you want them connected to.

They support AAC on Apple, but have not great Bluetooth Audio support for Android.

The price of the AirPods Pro ($329 USD, though they go on sale for a significant discount quite a bit) might be a reason.

I purchased no-name Bluetooth wireless earphones for ~$55 USD before the AirPods Pro, and they were shockingly good for the price (super small, lightweight, long battery; similar observations that your wife reported about the Nothing headphones). I got the AirPods Pro after that, expecting a massive upgrade, but really the only significant difference was the noise cancellation (which is why I still use them primarily). The easier switching between Apple devices is nice too, but for my use case, I mostly use the AirPods on my phone anyways.

So for the price differential between generic headphones, I would expect a massive upgrade, but now it feels like a nice upgrade but pretty expensive for what it does (especially since I'll have to consider replacing them once the battery degrades).

Very similar story with cheaper no-name bluetooth wireless earbuds. Honestly..despite the other complaints in the thread here about regular bluetooth earbuds…I’ve had a MUCH better experience with them than the airpods at doing one thing: being wireless earbuds.

Thank you, I've had my eye on those and was searching this thread for just such a review!

I've had the polar opposite experience with the Nothing Ear 1:

- I can't seem to use them for extended periods of time without running into this issue where one earbud stops playing audio entirely and I have to fully reset them to fix it.

- The audio completely cuts out every 5-10 minutes for a brief (like under a second) moment, leading to these annoying gaps in whatever I'm listening to.

- After pairing, the audio will sometimes be extremely low quality, output in mono or not output sound at all; usually unpairing and pairing fixes this.

- Firmware updates have done nothing to resolve these issues.

I tried reaching out to Nothing support to try to return them but have been unable to get a response. These headphones are unusable and probably the worst tech product I've ever purchased.

>After several years of usage, my first two pairs of AirPods both developed a buzzing noise which became unbearable. The only solution I found was to buy a new pair.

Is that really acceptable for premium headphones? My Bose QC25s continue to work fine after almost eight years of daily use. I realise that there's more which can go wrong with the AirPods, but two (?) years isn't much at all. The author should've taken the issue further rather than just giving Apple more money.

It's acceptable if it's something you're used to the practice. Many Apple users use their products for seemingly infinite amount of time before retiring the device, but even more users keep buying the newest and greatest when it comes out because A) they want to have the latest and/or B) what they currently had broke and the accepted solution is to buy new.

Some of these problems are because of Bluetooth (see complaints in this thread about Sony headphones — a company that many consider to have a similar product design ethos as Apple).

Others are due to bad configuration defaults from Apple. Forcing AirPods to connect to the last device and turning off “pause music on removal” fixes two of the author’s problems.

This isn’t a defense of Apple or AirPods. They obviously don’t “just work.” But there are things that can improve the experience.

> Others are due to bad configuration defaults from Apple. Forcing AirPods to connect to the last device and turning off “pause music on removal” fixes two of the author’s problems.

I don't even necessarily think these are problems. I almost always want whatever I'm playing to stop when I disconnect my headphones, and there are times I don't want the headphones to connect to the last device (ie: I've been listening to something on my laptop, left the laptop behind somewhere, and want to start listening from my phone).

Ok, so the reason I said bad is because this happens to me. I’m playing music on my laptop. I go to the bathroom. Maybe an auto-playing video with sound pops up on my iPhone. The headphones switch to my phone. Now I’m back at my laptop and have to manually reconnect the headphones.

Perhaps this is what people want, but in my cases it’s two tech annoyances (auto play video and fumbling with the Bluetooth menu).

> Forcing AirPods to connect to the last device

If only it were that simple. Unfortunately this config option is not a property of the AirPods themselves, but to each individual device you own, so you can’t just set it once. You have to go to each device you have on your iCloud account and set “connect only when last connected to this device”.

But it’s even worse than that, because the option is only available to be changed when you have the AirPods connected, meaning you have to go to each device you own, connect your AirPods to them, then go to the menu, find the option for connection mode, and set it to “when last connected”.

And if you forgot a device, it will happily steal your AirPods connection “automatically” the next time it boots up or decided it wants to connect them. And you have to search around and figure out what the hell your AirPods are even connected to.

Did I mention Apple will occasionally release an OS update which changes this setting back to “automatically” again? Now you get to do this whole dance over again, but slowly, as your individual iDevices get rolled-out updates.

(I have 5 devices near my work desk that are potential AirPod connection thieves, this is a huge annoyance to me if you can’t tell.)

In my case I seem to just not be able to disable this option at all. Rather, disabling it prevents the AirPods from switching but they'll still pause the currently-playing audio every time they get in range of another device.

Every time I walk home with music playing it will pause because they're suddenly in range of my Macbook.

I encountered several of these annoyances myself. Turning off auto-switching removed some issues with them randomly jumping between devices but now it's just more manual labor to connect them.

Having had my share of annoying buzzing sounds I wrote these up a while ago, since I got them replaced 3 times I don't have any of these any more though:

- https://annoying.technology/posts/abea6876cf4f2e13/

- https://annoying.technology/posts/d3e6a4bce1e140b2/

I'm still using them every day and despite the annoyances the small form factor and the sound quality are just good enough to put up with it.

I got two pair of AirPod Pros replaced twice too. I wonder if OP knows about the defect and program that Apple will replace them?

https://support.apple.com/airpods-pro-service-program-sound-...

With one phone and one pair of headphones, many cheaper truly wireless Bluetooth devices will be comparable to AirPods and probably suffer some of the same related annoyances with losing audio in one of the buds.

Moving to multiple Apple devices, the AirPods are amazing, but still suffer the annoyances OP mentioned. I can pair AirPods to phone and then move them to Mac for zoom, watch for exercise, tv for listening to content in kitchen not appropriate for younger kids. Being available across all those devices was automatic.

That said, the annoyances are real.

The weirdest situation I have had recently was some how getting the left AirPod connected to one device and right connected to a different device with audio and mics simultaneously working. Luckily, mute worked on both devices and didn’t have to speak to both at the same time.

"It Just Works"... This is merely a tagline from Apple, an advertising slogan. As such, I have never taken it seriously - let alone the fact that it is also a hollow statement. Who does/did takes it seriously?

That members of the wider YC community do take it seriously, or worse actually believe and re-bark it in the first place, just shows that, in this instance, being fluent in 'tech' is not a panacea for gullibility.

Bluetooth audio is a mess with no way out.

I really think that Apple is going to just drop Bluetooth audio at some point and make their own protocol, with Bluetooth perhaps being the "green bubble" fallback option.

Wow. I do agree with some of the annoyances, now that I read them. But, to me, my feeling about my AirPods where the exact opposite. I only got them recently, because I didn't quiet see the point of yet another pair of earphones. But man, They Just Work, has been my feeling about them so far and I have not regretted getting them.

Maybe I have not had them long enough to actually start having them annoy me...

I've been using Airpods since day 1 and although they didn't quite deliver on the promise of "it just works" when it comes to connecting between multiple devices they have been my favorite new technology since the iPhone released. They feel like the closest thing to a fully realized "wearable" computing device to me. I bought the Airpod Pro's the first day they came out and haven't ever looked back to my wired headphone past. They are the perfect balance of comfort and features for me. Of course I'd like to see them improve and work out the general bluetooth issues, but I can't imagine living/working without them.

Basically, yes. That's been my experience. Even though I listed all of these annoyances, I still really like them :)

I don't have AirPods, but every time I've had a meeting with someone who does, the microphone quality has been terrible, even in quiet environments.

The sounds has been muffled to the point where, while I could still understand the person, it took me 50% more cognitive effort to make out what they were saying because of the low quality. It's almost always much better when I ask them to switch to the built-in MacBook Pro mic (which is decent).

It's an insidious problem. People like their setup because they can hear you well. But what they don't realize is that they are themselves barely understandable. They don't hear themselves and people aren't used to giving them feedback.

Is it just me?

It’s not just you, but please let them know. I was experiencing this as the AirPods user but wasn’t aware, it’s kinda hard to know because even if you turn on “listen to this device” it’s not quite what zoom/teams sends.

You know what always just works? Plugging headphones into a headphone jack.

It also uses significantly more well-developed technology which does not require the use of rare earth metals and eye-wateringly complex semiconductor manufacturing processes.

And those wired headphones will still be in use years or even decades after those AirPods have corroded to nasty plastic and metal lumps in a landfill somewhere.

You still have that option but you might need to buy an adapter which doesn't seem like such a big deal.

Those wired headphones with noise cancelling and transparency modes probably do require eye-wateringly complex semiconductors.

You'll never need an adapter if you never buy an audio-producing device lacking a jack.

Passive attenuation seems to be almost as good as active in my experience. And when you factor in that the headphones no longer need a battery, it's a net benefit in my book.

Most people aren't upgrading their phone for audio functionality (I believe cameras are the biggest driver of upgrades). The fact that you need an adapter to continue using your favorite headphones isn't going to raise many eyebrows among the general public, especially when they are mostly moving to wireless headphones anyway.

I absolutely love my AirPods, so much so that when my original AirPods battery started dying early during meetings I bought a new set of AirPod Pro without even thinking.

That said, I experience all of these issues too. Another one to add to the list that I really don't understand. If I'm listening to a podcast on my phone and remove an airpod for a moment (to speak to someone or whatever) the podcast pauses as expected. But then putting it back in my ear there seems to be only about a 25% chance the podcast starts playing again. Most of the time I have to open the Spotify app back up and manually resume.

I've noticed when it doesn't resume, often the music player also isn't on the lock screen. I'm wondering if it's getting kicked out of memory if it happens to be in a non-active paused state when the device decides it needs to free some memory up?

If I had to place a bet - my money would be on your theory. I've noticed the exact same thing, which makes it even worse as I then have to pull up the app drawer and go back to my player app. At least it never gets totally kicked out in that the state is preserved/not reloading like a fresh open.

I guess my question from there would be why does the device suddenly feel the need to release resources when the music/podcast pauses? I'm experiencing it on an iPhone 13 Pro which should have no shortage.

If it was a once in a blue moon thing I would brush it off as just unlucky timing, but it happens very regularly.

Apple doesn’t allow you to use ANC on AirPods when you have only one ear inserted.

But there’s actually a setting — buried deep inside the Accessibility preferences — that enables this feature.

Why wouldn’t they make this the default? Who would want ANC to work only some of the time? And what does this setting have to do with accessibility/disability?

I've had it run with only one ear, and it feels uncomfortably lopsided. Maybe if you could only hear in one ear or had a hearing aid in the other you would want to enable this. In general, accessibility settings seems to be a place immune from the simplicity police at Apple. There are often useful features in there.

I completely agree. I actually just wrote a blog post called The Best Accessibility Features You've Never Heard Of, which details some of these features that Apple, Google, and Amazon hide within accessibility settings. [1]

1: https://beelinereader.medium.com/the-best-accessibility-feat...

unless you were deaf in the other ear, why would you want to use ANC in one ear only?

I use one ear at a time, both for battery purposes, and so I don’t have the two AirPods communicating with each other through my brain.

I realize that we think nothing bad happens from the emissions from AirPods, but this may change in the future. Some have pointed out that prior studies involved devices that were not stuck quite so far into our ears.

Since I listen to podcasts and books, I have no need to use two simultaneously.

The question is that why you want to enable ANC even if you use single bud? Anyway noise is come from non plugged ear.

My answer is that ANC helps reducing playback volume to battle with noise so it still worth.

You're right that noise comes from the other ear. But I am able to listen at a lower volume when ANC is activated. I often listen while walking near traffic noise, which the ANC is fairly effective at defeating. With ANC — even in just one ear — I can preserve my hearing a bit.

if you instantly play the music you were listening to right before the call by clicking the play button on your keyboard, your music will play at a lower audio quality

I don't recall the names of the specific bluetooth profiles, but I wish Airpods and bluetooth headphones in general gave you more control over this. Sure, the older headset profile is noticeably lower quality but it's also virtually lag-free. I have a shitty old headset I use when gaming on my phone specifically because there's no noticeable latency.

It's AD2P vs HSP profiles. One gives you good (well, compressed but decent enough) stereo audio one way, one provides shitty audio but both ways.

I'm surprised as to why Apple couldn't come up with a better protocol that would manage to do both or switch number of channels & quality seamlessly.

Nobody seems to care, is the thing. Qualcomm is now deprecating APTX-LL in favor of APTX-Adaptive even though it's 50% laggier even under ideal circumstances.

I really hope Apple decides to improve things for their ecosystem within the framework of Bluetooth rather than go their own way as some people here have suggested. That route would almost certainly lead to a proliferation of proprietary PAN standards and allow cell manufacturers to tax (or just acquire) consumer audio companies, many of which are struggling to compete with AirPods already. Anyway, we're going to find out soon: Apple has all but confirmed that they're working on something to solve their Bluetooth bandwidth problem [1]. Could just be a new Bluetooth profile, and I feel for the Apple users because that would almost certainly just multiply these annoyances rather than fixing them (wider audio quality gap = more people notice when the connection is inexplicably stuck on the ultra-low quality voice call profile which happens all the time, causes the OP's Annoyance 3 and is one of the causes of Annoyance 4). But I think we'll be better off in the long run if Apple and others in the industry work on Bluetooth improvements that everyone can use without paying up to Qualcomm.

[1] https://www.whathifi.com/features/is-bluetooth-holding-back-...

The bluetooth standard seems to move very slowly though. We've had bluetooth headphones around for so many years and they usually leave a lot to be desired.

Annoyance 5 is the worst for me: the 5-7 second delay when switching from Mac to phone.

I'm usually on my Mac during the day, Zoom calls, Spotify, etc. Then I get a phone call. If I just answer, it doesn't auto-switch fast enough. And if I manually switch, it regularly doesn't switch at all on the first try. And even when it does switch, there's a 5 second delay while the other person is going "hello? are you there?"

I love the AirPods but stopped using it because of what I have been reading about EMF radiation emitted constantly even when not in use by AirPods. I still need to read-up more about it till then I am using the wired headphones.

https://www.macintoshhowto.com/hardware/extreme-emf-exposure...

Well, since we're ranting about Airpods

My Gen 2 Airpods work great. I tried Airpod Pro's and Airpod Gen 3. Both have the crappy "pinch" controls instead of the awesome "tap" controls. Pinching requires more fingers free so for example walking home from the grocery store with heavy bags in both hands and trying to control my Airpods (next song, pause), is much easier with tap (single finger, knuckle, palm) than with pinch (2 free fingers). Also while cooking, can tap with knuckle if hands are dirty but can't pinch with dirty fingers.

Otherwise, they've worked for me 98% of the time. A few times they've failed to connect to one device or another and the only solution was to re-pair them (only ever used them on Apple devices). The other is they suck in crowded places like busy trains and stations in Japan, they'll cut out OFTEN! (Shibuya, Shinjuku, rush hour).

My current ones cut out in my living room. No idea why but it's really annoying, I'm 1-2 meters from my M1X Mac and they're cutting out quite often.

But overall I like them alot.

For anyone who wants something very close to "just works" checkout the Jabra Elite 85t or 75t.

I have the 65t, absolutely love them, insanely solid, always seem to have charge, pair to everything instantly. I wear them during workouts and they get covered in sweat and chalk still sound beautiful.

Love them a lot and agree. Check out Jabra!

Had the 65T for years and can confirm. They are very solid and sound great.

I only upgraded when I lost them. And appreciate the smaller size on the 75 model.

I still very much recommend them to anyone on a budget.

I've never had a single problem with them besides the fact that they think that they are in my ears when they're actually in my pocket so they will unpause whatever you are listening to.

I use jabra 75t and personally I'm not that impressed with them. Connection to 2 devices at the same time indeed works fine, mic quality for earbuds is also very good.

But they have other issues like if you remove the right earbud from your ear the left one stops (due to their choice of tech for bud to bud connection), sound glitches randomly when paired to m1 macbook, in ear fit is ok but not great.

I never found AirPods convenient, there are just so many moving parts. There are just so many pieces you need to be mentally aware of, the left/right pods, the case and the charging cable. You need to then think about how this is going to connect to your device, you can't just physically plug them in and be assured they will just work. They run out of battery. The case will separately run out of battery. The BT quality isn't great and degrades depending on the conditions. You can't use one motion with your hands to take them out of their case and plug them in your ears like you can with wired headphones. You are more prone to losing the case or one of the disparate ear pieces since there are three different pieces. There is a bulge in your pocket if you keep them there, which is kind of even more visible and annoying if you wear something other than jeans.

I'm not saying there is a better solution it's just that this product is a massive failure in my eyes.

Annoyances 1 and 7, at least, can be solved by disabling the automatic switching logic. When connected to the AirPods, under Bluetooth -> (AirPods name) -> Connect to this {iPhone/iPad/Mac}, select "When Last Connected" instead of "Automatically". Repeat for each Apple device.

It's a simpler mental model and it works way more reliably. No more weird handoff prompts and no unexpected switching. Yes, you have to select the device manually, but that takes just seconds from the control center or audio output menu.

I definitely agree with some of the other annoyances, although my AirPods have been generally very reliable (and much more so than my other set of wireless buds!). The weirdest one to me is that Apple is still using the crappy HFP profile for bidirectional audio, leading to annoyance #3; I'm surprised Apple hasn't just engineered their own bidirectional audio profile, because the sound quality drop is so noticeable that it's laughable.

This is true... but I like the automatic switching when it does work :)

I try my hardest not to adjust Apple defaults too much because on the whole, I really like their design decisions and their UX. So I don't want to start straying too far away from their core defaults. It's a slippery slope :)

The "low audio quality after/during conference" problem as I understand it is because of the SCO codec used for Bluetooth microphone stuff (which is lower bandwidth but allows you to speak and listen at the same time). It takes a few seconds for the AirPods to switch back to their usual codec.

Is there a way to fix this without ditching Bluetooth?

I have the same issue with Samsung earbuds on Linux. My solution was to get a nice webcam with a solid camera, or to use an external mic. Win-win -- good quality sound, video, and mic.

Get a headset that has Faststream or bidirectional APTX-LL A2DP vendor codec, and use it with BT stack that implements these codecs (e.g. Linux/Pipewire). Such devices are very hard to find, and aptx-ll in most devices is not bidirectional. I know only some headsets by Avantree that have it.

Or, wait for a few years for Bluetooth 5.2 LE Audio be available in consumer devices.

AirPods are great when they work, frustrating when they don’t. Mine seem to be in a frequent pattern of not connecting to my phone automatically lately, and I couldn’t tell you why. I don’t feel like that was happening nearly as often a few months ago and I’m guessing it has something to do with the many updates and changes they’ve made to how Bluetooth connections between AirPods and iPhone seem to work.

I’ve also experienced my fair share of quality issues - static coming through when noise cancelling operates, which Apple replaced my AirPods under warranty for.) Now I’m experiencing a very tough to describe effect where one AirPod seems to cut in and out of transparency mode repeatedly and in a subtle way.

All in all they are a great product and I agree with some of the other commenters that for all their flaws they are miles ahead of anything else I’ve tried.

A list of a variety of bugs isn't what I expected from the title.

Airpods are nice, but outside the Apple ecosystem they're horrendous (and somehow still better than most alternatives...). The proprietary chip / protocol in use makes me sad, but what makes me even sadder is that they're not actually even working on supporting them as a good product on Android.

Maybe it makes economical sense but it's really sad that we got to the point that a company can release hardware and go out of their way not to support a significant amount of potential customers. This feels like what anti-monopoly regs try to prevent, but it's not a monopoly either so ...

Also, the microphone quality is a lot worse than people say it is (I'm using the Pro version). They are barely usable for calls in a loud environment.

Apple has always gone to lengths to prevent their products from interacting outside their walled garden. The last straw for me (more than a decade ago) was when a firmware update closed a gap I was using to load music onto my ipod without going through the hateful ITunes synchronization process.

My annoyance is that gen3 audio controls are significantly more difficult to use. With gen2 it was possible to simply tap the side of the airpod to pause, skip, or go back, and the user had the option to set which side controlled that functionality.

Gen3 has a sensor that has the same functionality, but it is more cumbersome to use. The sensor is small and angled in a position that makes it more awkward and difficult to access. It requires some precision and dexterity - a pinch rather than a tap. The sensor is on the stem of the airpod, so it feels less secure to press. There is also a small click when the sensor is pressed that gets annoying.

I live in a cold environment and frequently have to wear multiple layers of gloves, mittens, hoods, and hats when I go for long walks, so I lose that functionality.

Personally, annoyances like this is enough for me not to want wireless headphones. My wired headphones work 100% of the time. It's obvious what they are connected to.

(PS, I also prefer transport belts over robots in factorio, and explicitly constructed objects over dependency injection in programming)

Good to hear the gripes with AirPods are identical to my $80 earpods, nothing missed out on in other words :-).

Edit: I have a pair of JBL LIVE300TWS. They're good!

Or my $30 ones...

I had the same thought. These issues might just be issues with bluetooth in general, and not much apple can do about it.

I decided on the same pair of headphones vs AirPods: do not think it was a mistake.

It feels really good to hear that the expensive models have mostly the same flaws as the cheap ones. So the people who tell me it must be my 40€ anker models, because theirs always work fine probably just don't use them as much, but at the same time, spending more money would not have given me better functionality (except noise canceling).

I guess the real thing to take away is, that cable is still the most reliable option (and also saves a lot on battery!)

Airpods are by far the worst Apple product I've ever owned, for all the same reasons the author listed. I genuinely don't understand how they can still say they Airpods are "fantastic" and "wonderful".

I would say on average I encounter these issues 50% of the time. Most of my day is doing Zoom calls and either myself or the other party (using Airpods as well) will spend the first 30-60 seconds either switching out for another pair of headphones or trying to get theirs to connect.

I'm sure most of these issues actually have to do with Bluetooth, but the criticism still stands. Have we just convinced ourselves that they're great for some mysterious reason?

Airpods work wonderfully compared to previous headsets! Apple vastly improved the pairing process and reliability over previous products.

What Apple needs to polish is the multi-device support. If you're going out for a walk with your phone they will work (nearly) 100% of the time. If you have a Mac and a phone and are switching back and forth for Zoom calls, they will reliably annoy the crap out of you. Before WFH I assume Apple thought this was an edge case, not something we'd be doing for hours each day.

PS Google Meet deserves some blame here, too. I often end up with "Airpods for output, Mac speaker for input" and this is entirely due to Meet's burying these weird defaults in a Settings menu.

I have found HomePod (mini) to be not great. Doesn't work well with third party services like Spotify or radio providers, so it's content is limited. There's also a very large lag (5 seconds ish) for the sound to stream from my phone or Mac to the HomePod. Pausing or starting sound is delayed by 5 seconds (ish). The lag is so large you cannot really use the HomePod as a speaker attached to a Mac, if you watch a video, the sound comes in 5 seconds delayed. Bit of a pity. Hopefully the next versions will improve the lag. Even providing physical audio cable input would be good. As the speaker itself is fairly nice.

As for 1) You can configure devices not to auto-connect unless previously connected

That simply doesn't work for me. Regardless of what options I set, about 60% of the time, if I'm talking on an iphone with airpod pros, and I walk within a few feet of my mac (which does have a connection to the airpods), it will switch from the phone while I'm talking and... there's no reliable way to get that back. In the phone app, clicking 'airpods'... is slow as molasses and sometimes shows them as connected again, but... no sound. Speaker works - the call is still ongoing. If I walk far enough away, sometimes it will reconnect, but not usually. The only near reliable way is to disconnect the airpods in the bluetooth menu, then wait, then reconnect. This is annoying as hell for the person on the call to have to sit through.

Yeah, sorry Apple support... I've only got the ios 15.x from a couple weeks ago. No doubt upgrading to the very latest will definitely solve all extant problems, everything will magically 'just work' and there will be absolutely no new problems introduced. /s

When I describe this to some Apple store folks (2x last fall), they seemed 'shocked' (couldn't tell if it was fake or not). "Wow, never heard of that - no one's ever told me that before, that doesn't seem right. We have some training classes next week you can sign up for".

In case you don’t know this, since it isn’t obvious, you have to set them not to automatically connect on each device they are paired to. And if you unpair and re-pair them you have to do it again. This is annoying but not as annoying as auto-pairing.

I hope it works for the parent, but in my case even that doesn't work. Whatever extra protocol or other crap they introduced with this "automatic switching" feature is garbage and worsens the experience even if you disable the new functionality. The audio menu and connection/disconnection being slow as molasses is a new thing introduced by this change.

Yeah, doesn't work.

"Connect to this iphone" in bluetooth settings..

Options are "automatically" and "when last connected to thi..."

These don't even make sense as options, imo.

What I think they're meaning is "automatically connect..." and the options are "automatically" and "when last connected". But.. if the software is broken, and it 'magically' connects when I don't want it to, then that will be the last time it connected anyway.

"NEVER" needs to be an option.

“When last connected” is supposed to mean “if this phone is the last thing they were connected to when they were put away last time, connect to this phone when they are taken back out.” “Never” in that context would mean each time you put them in, you would have to go to your device and manually connect.

Of course if that’s not working, that’s a problem, but conceptually I think the options make sense.

Back to my $15 Xiaomi Mi earbuds after trying the Airpod pros. While not great for calls, battery life after a year of use is 10x better than the Airpods. Plus a better fit for my ears and 0 fear of loss.

Wow, this was a perfect description of my experience. An additional factor is the release date of the used devices. My experience improved by a large margin when I replaced my late 2018 Macbook and my 2019 iPad. Another example are calls which ring on multiple devices. I'm using my iPad and somebody calls me on my iPhone, but the iPhone sends the call also to the iPad. The same when I have MS Teams on my Macbook and my iPhone. Once I put the Airpods in my ears anything can and does happen. Sometimes one Airpod is lost in these situations.

Still loving my cords and headphone jack…

I'm not using Apple ear phones, but wireless head phones are seriously practical. Anytime I have to use my corded ones when walking the dog I get reminded of how they are actually pretty handy.

Still use cord ones in other circumstances. When lying down, for example. I like to have the choice at least.

Best thing: They are dumb. They don't even need a power supply! They don't have many ways to go wrong.

A million times. The "inconvenient" audio jack+cord does not run on batteries that will end in landfills. And it's barely an inconvenience at all.

The list of phones that still have a headphone jack is ever dwindling.

I do get some of the quirks, but not nearly that full list. If I'm on a call or listening to music through my AirPods when connected to my Mac, and then open my phone, they do connect to the phone, but it does not switch the audio away from the computer unless I tell it to on the phone.

I also have a pair of fancy Sony noise canceling wireless headphones, and they're much more finicky about connecting and staying connected than my Airpods are. Fundamentally the problem seems to be that bluetooth kinda sucks.

The most annoying thing about my AirPods Pro, which I generally like very much ... my phone starts playing music from its speakers when I take the AirPods out of my ears (and was not previously listening to music). Not all the time, but maybe 15% of the time, enough to be annoying. I have no idea what's going on. I've tried googling it, but nobody else seems to be having this problem. I've combed through settings but nothing seems applicable. I think I'm stuck with it.

I don’t have AirPods but this sometimes happens to me when I turn off my Bluetooth headphones. Usually it’s Spotify that begins playing on my computer. I agree that google searching has been unhelpful.

Do you use Spotify? There is a really annoying feature on IOS Spotify where it hijacks the system volume control, and syncs it with the Spotify desktop app running on another computer. Sometimes even when the mobile app is closed!

And inevitably because I don't use the desktop app volume adjust just the system volume, it syncs my phone volume to 100% every time.

Nope, Apple Music. You'd think if any music app worked properly with the AirPods it would be that.

My "it just works"-setup is the following: all devices are connected via a cable to a cheap audio mixer, including one Bluetooth receiver to which my phone can connect to.

The mixer has a long cable to a well positioned spot in the apartment and the cable ends with a Bluetooth transmitter. A small (4cm x 4cm x 1cm) Bluetooth receiver has wired in-ear headphones connected to it and that's it.

This receiver has small a magnet glued to it, and the desk has another magnet glued to it. The USB-charging cable also has a magnetic adapter so that the micro-USB end is left in the receiver, and when I leave the desk I just have to pull the receiver way, which stops the loading process since the USB cable is also easily separated. When I get back to the desk I just snap the receiver to the magnet of the desk, and if I feel that I should charge it (no issues with using it 6 hours without charging it), I just snap the magnetic end of the cable to the receiver.

Every device which wants to send me audio can do it, and I can move freely around the apartment without any interruption.

When I go out I use another Bluetooth headset connected to the phone.

The annoyances listed in the article would drive me absolutely mad.

---

Basically 3 of these: https://www.amazon.de/1mii-Bluetooth-Transmitter-Dual-Verbin... (one for phone, long cable sender, magnetic receiver)

one of these: https://www.amazon.de/Moukey-Mischpult-Mikrofon-Keyboard-B%C...

one of these: https://www.amazon.de/JEEREE-Magnetisches-Schnellladung-Magn...

and all the cables needed to connect the devices to the mixer.

I have this setup for some years now, so my gadgets are not the ones listed here, but an older equivalent. APTX-LL removes any noticeable delay between video and audio.

I would posit that the AirPods used to be the most magical "Just Works" Apple product I've ever owned, but over-time as Apple has added more features and complications to them, they've lost the magic.

Those first generation AirPods were a thing of beauty. Newer ones now are technically better--better sounding, longer lasting, ANC, etc. But I've experienced a lot of the same annoyances that OP is complaining about.

I still love them, but the experience is definitely a little fiddly these days.

> AirPods are wonderful products. But I just wish these annoying gripes would go away.

What's wonderful about all that? Our fanboyism is re-defining the word "wonderful", Annoyence 4 and 3 made me think AirPods broke and they happen so frequently, I also have the Sony wh-1000xm4 and I cannot configure the mic without degrading my audio quality. I'm back to wired, I have a Beyerdynamic DT 1990 PRO, and none of these overhyped products match its quality, I can live with the cables :)

    I'm back to wired

Same here. Absolutely don't understand the appeal of wireless headsets for people who are sitting at a desk.

I've snapped up a bunch of used Bose QC25s from eBay, their last model that used a removable standard AAA battery.

Great sound, solid noise canceling, the wired mic is fine, they work even if the battery is drained, sound is better than Bluetooth. I keep a little AAA battery charger on my desk so it takes 10 seconds to swap out a depleted AAA for a new one; IMO far less hassle than remembering to charge headphones with non-replaceable internal batteries.

I expect the QC25s to last more or less indefinitely, aside from occasional replacement of the (insanely comfortable) earpads.

Yea I went wired at the beginning of the pandemic, QC-35 wired with a wired antlion mic, works like a charm. 3 main reasons I went with this setup : 1- Reduce the audio lag (bluetooth comes with a noticeable lag in video conferencing) 2- Not having to worry about battery life (going wired vastly improved the QC-35 battery life) 3- Keep the stellar comfort (at least for me) of the QC-35.

I personally don't understand why people endure the sucky audio quality of bluetooth handset profile. Couple this with a very ordinary battery life for airpods (I don't care if it charges in 10 minutes, when it's out and you need it you're stuck), I don't understand why this product is so popular.

Another nice thing about Bose is that they're "somewhat" repairable.

They're not really designed to be, but because they sell in such huge quantities, there's kind of an "ecosystem" of replacement parts and YouTube repair videos etc. Replacement of the internal battery on the QC35 doesn't seem too terribly onerous. The earpads are shared with the QC25 too, which is nice.

I'm not nearly as eco-conscious as I should be, but it's nice to keep things out of the landfill.

Yep, back to wired for me as well.

Run the wire under the shirt. Need to switch from phone to laptop for a meeting? Unplug/replug. If I need to remove headphones to talk to someone, i just let them hang down. Never worry about charging them, loosing them, easily replaceable due to price (and with good sound quality as well).

Heh, I got my spouse a pair of AirPods, and long ago she went back to a pair of wired earbuds due to various issues with them. IIRC, noiuse cancelling didn't work well and causes a lot of sudio issues, there were connection issues all the time. The cheap wired heaphones work much better for her.

Out of curiousity, does anyone have a good recommendation for a good pair of 3.5mm wired headphones with a microphone? I still have an old pair of Bose Sport headphones, but they are only wireless now.

I generally like the QC20, but I think those were recently discontinued. The mic wasn't the best, but for regular conversations generally didn't have problems if I clipped the mic to a shirt. If it bounced around and rustled on a shirt that wasn't good, but that's going to be a problem with any mic on a wire, I'd think.

Yeah it seems that all of the (in-ear) Bose wired headphones were discontinued.

The market, that ill-tempered, irrational screwball, has spoken, and its says that everyone wants wireless headphones. The manufacturers have listened, and fervently believe that you’re wrong if you disagree.

Sennheiser Momentum.

Or if you want a boom mic, some of the “Pro” or “G” branded logitech headsets.

My favorite part is how on Monday mornings when I have a meeting I can just 100% count on one of these things happening:

-One of them will have a dead battery, even though they've been in a perfectly clean case that charged it yesterday and will charge it tomorrow. -They will no longer be paired with my phone for some reason. -They will pair with my phone, but just not recognize that they should be the primary audio output and calls will just play on speaker phone.

But sure, they "just work".

I've "enjoyed" most of these including the occasional loud blast of white noise when trying to connect, and my favourite; they disconnect immediately when there's no output for a few seconds and then take a few seconds to re-connect. Mac OSX also doesn't seem to enjoy that, immediately reconnecting takes a bit and often fails. They're nice but they suffer from "trying to be smart" but end up being annoying.

Meanwhile I’ve given them up since the charging contacts have gotten so bad at reliably touching. Most of the time I’ll pick them up and they’re dead or I’ll spend several minutes (not exaggerating) putting them in the case and taking them out to get them to activate properly.

No amount of cleaning or other finagling really helps.

And this has happened to me in the very first AirPods and the AirPods Pro.

I’m not sure how this bad design survives but fool me three times…

my personal complaint: sometimes the left earpod doesn’t boot

both are fully charged, but when i put them into ears, only the right one actually connects

i have to put the left one back into the case and take it out again to get it to connect

i assume this is a software issue

If you're within the warranty period (or have AppleCare) you should definitely bring them into an Apple store. It might be a hardware issue. If you describe the problem to them they will almost certainly take your word for it and give you a free replacement left AirPod. Even if it's not a hardware issue you'll get a fresh new battery for one ear :) I've done this several times between my two pairs of airpods.

Wow, annoyance 1 itself would lead me to trash the headphones. Is there no way to avoid that?

I’ve been using these Bose in ear noise canceling head phones for 5 years (actually, this specific piece for a bit more than 4 years…the one I bought was in the first batch and had a known defect where the outer covering would peel off, so Bose replaced it in my 10th or so month of using it…it’s a genuine recall and nobody had to sue them to offer the recall either!).

$300 headphones, working for the past 5 years, and Inhave no complaints whatsoever. There are a couple of random gym equipment I’ve occasionally had trouble connecting it to, but I suspect that it was the gym equipments fault.

Admittedly, the mic could be better, and Bose had a ridiculous issue of tracking the music you played on your phone, which thankfully they’ve ended.

But it’s a trustworthy device which actually “Just Works” and I see no reason it wouldn’t last another couple of years at least (there is no physical damage I can see, despite using it in the gym nearly everyday, and all day long to listen to music).

I only ever bought one pair of air pods and I ended up giving them away after that update was released where they were supposed to be able to switch seemlessly between devices but the feature was cumbersome. I don't think I managed to find eight distinct issues with during that time, but I can say I've switched to galaxy buds which I much prefer.

I regret getting my AirPods Pro. I have them for two years now and went through 2 cases and 4 earbuds. The quality just does not match the expectation and price tag. My Sony headphones work like on the first day after 3 years, however they don't share the same form factor. :) I wonder how the WF-1000XM4 perform especially in combination with iOS.

Most of the authors complaints are valid. I'm definitely guilty of the 10-second 'Hello? Hello?' dance at the start of phone calls. However, AirPods are such a good product I can forgive them all of those flaws and more.

One hidden feature: I was walking around my city listening to something on AirPods Pro. A truck in the lane adjacent to the sidewalk braked hard, making painfully loud squeal. Except I didn't hear it. The AirPod on the street side entered noise canceling mode quickly enough to silence almost all of the sound, and stayed there for a few seconds afterward before reverting to ambient sounds. I'm not sure if that was a purposeful feature, or just a volume limiter for the ambient-noise mode kicking in. Regardless, it was one of the most delightful experiences I've ever had with a product. The thing just quietly, casually making my day a little bit better, then getting out of the way again.

So if I'm understanding this correctly, you had the device set to let in ambient sound, but a motor vehicle slamming on the brakes was filtered out, and you consider this to be a good thing? Sounds dangerous to me.

It was still audible, but filtered from 'damagingly painful' to 'perceptible', and only on the side that was directly exposed. I don't find a lot of navigational value in listening to someone's poorly maintained brakes while I'm walking around.

I just upgraded to a pair of AirPods Pro after my old AirPods were slowly losing battery life until they can barely get through a single podcast ep. It was pretty cool and eerie putting them in for the first time and having the noise cancellation activate and just drop out all the ambient noise. I've never used active noise cancellation and it really makes you realize how much ambient noise you tune out.

Beyond that I'm not 100% sure how I feel about them yet. They definitely don't fit quite as well in my ears as the originals and anecdotally a couple coworkers mentioned returning theirs because they were falling out. And they definitely don't fit in their case in the same way as the original. The way the originals just magnetically fall into place perfectly is an amazing piece of product design. Really makes them feel like some otherworldly artifact. The Pros are definitely not the same in that regard.

My addition...

Annoyance 0:

The default behavior is to pause when you remove a single earbud while listening to music/podcasts. But, especially when working out, this is not what you want, because you just wanted to scratch or wipe off your ear. At minimum, this should be an option I can set ("only pause if both buds are removed"), but afaik it's not.

> I get that Apple is trying to be clever and anticipate your moves, which I genuinely appreciate, but when it gets in the way it's annoying.

I wonder how long until devices regularly do eye tracking to figure out which device we're currently paying attention to. I think that could both be useful and extremely scary...

Reviewer didn't say which ones he has nor which phone.

My view of "AirPods" has changed over the years - had them since the OG launch with my iPhone7. A lot of the gripes make sense with the older models. Then I upgraded my iPhone to latest, and got the AirPods3.

With the v3 I finally feel it's a great product. I turn off the "automatic connection" BT settings for all but one device (iPhone) and it works as I expect. The spatial audio is great.

I tried a non-Apple AirPods equivalent for a while (cheap now, $30) and really missed the "find my" feature, plus the sizing was off.

My favorite new feature is the Find My where you can play MarcoPolo with your missing AirPod. THAT was much better than with my OG pods. Of course, the "your AirPods have been left behind" is often spurious so that needs improvement but better a false negative than a missed positive.

It is a fashion and convenience tool. Poor sound quality. Comes with the general Bluetooth problems.

The funniest problem I had was on the subway and some bored kid next to me opened and closed the lid back and forth. For some reason this spammed my phone with connectivity messages to the point that I could not use my phone.

I think the sound quality is remarkably good given the size and form factor. It's not comparable to over the ear headphones of course, but that is a different use case.

Annoyance 1: Go into the AirPods settings (which are, paradoxically, in your phone's Bluetooth settings, and only when connected) and set "Connect to This iPhone" to "When Last Connected to This iPhone". This will disable the wonky automation.

I've never experienced 2, 2a, or 2b.

3: This is a Zoom problem, I believe. I find that Zoom periodically enables the microphone even though I'm not in a meeting, and you can see this in the latest macOS by looking for the orange dot in the upper right corner of the screen. The workaround is to quit Zoom, or go into Zoom's settings and change the microphone device to your Mac's.

6: You may have hit a hardware problem with early models. Happened to me, and I also often experienced a screaming feedback tone when I put the earbuds in my ears. Apple will replace them for free.

4, 5, 7: Definitely.

Annoyance 1 almost made me give up on the AirPods until I found that setting, I'd often have my phone at the very edge of bluetooth range and so it would keep reconnecting to it while listening to music from my laptop. I much prefer just explicitly connecting to the pods from the device I want to use, though this is more steps than it should be on iOS.

Annoyance 3 -- or something very similar -- is going to be the case for any bluetooth headset. There simply isn't enough bandwidth in a bluetooth connection to have a high quality audio stream and a microphone stream going at the same time, so a bluetooth headset switches between high-quality-headphones and low-quality-headset modes. You can experience this in action by listening to music via a bluetooth headset then performing something which toggles them to headset mode (e.g. navigating to a Google Meet page or whatever).

I suspect there is a brief delay when switching modes, so the AirPods don't switch while actively playing anything. So immediately firing up some music before the AirPods switch back to headphone mode probably keeps them in headset mode.

The absolute worst annoyance, IMO, is that if you are listening to audio with an iPhone, AirPods (Pro), and an Apple Watch, and set a timer on your watch (say, a 1.5 minute rest timer at the gym) it will disconnect from your phone to play the alert from your watch and then fail to play music from your phone again without sometimes requiring full Bluetooth cycling, or another 1.5 minutes of fiddling - removing any and all convenience of the device ecosystem. There are support issues open on the Apple forums going back years, but it’s still unresolved. To contrast, my Bose SoundSports can seamlessly achieve the above example just fine, so it’s not a fundamental flaw in the use case, just Apple’s implementation of some part of it.

I barely ever use my headphones with my laptop, but my Sony headphones on an Android phone work 100% perfectly all of the time.

I've never had a hiccup.

Okay, I mean, if I'm in an area with thousands of others using headphones, I might get some interference. That's it. Otherwise, totally fine.

>....if I'm in an area with thousands of others using headphones, I might get >some interference. That's it. Otherwise, totally fine.

Which imho is completely unacceptable because it annoys the hell out of me. I was using AirPods with an Xiaomi 8 Pro phone half a year ago. And this happended constanly and most of the time at street crossings in urban areas where 2-3-4 people would cross your way. Since I switched to an iPhone this never happened again.

PS: Why was I using AirPods with a cheapish android mobile phone? I tried lots of air pods like products from various vendors and each and any of them worked nicely for a couple of days until I would charge them overnight which killed the charging box where the headphones resided in or the headphones themself. Or like other useres in this thread described: one headphone would pair the other suddenly not anymore...

Yeah, they're great, but definitely not quite perfect / magical. Another thing I noticed is that using the noise cancelling ocassionally gives me terrible, luckily short-lived tinnitus. Never encountered that with other (over or on ear) noise cancelling devices.

Pretty sure I had that from my QC 35 II

Annoyance 1 actually has a setting. You can setup the AirPods to actively switch to a preferred source (your phone), or stay connected to your computer. This one bugged the hell out of me for months before I found the option.

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/switch-airpods-betwee...

> To prevent AirPods from automatically switching between devices, go to Settings > Bluetooth. Tap the Actions Available button next to the name of your AirPods, tap Connect to This iPhone, then tap When Last Connected to This iPhone.

Note that you have to configure that on each device separately.

Very true, and it's not very intuitive, but at least the setting is available.

I guess that's the problem with "it just works" magic -- when it doesn't work, you need to have a few settings available. And unfortunately, those are rarely included.

I would be a happy man if I could tell my AirPods:

“You only need to be paired to my iPhone. I don’t need you synced to all my devices via iCloud and you never need to accept audio from and switch to anything but my iPhone. That’ll do earbuds. That’ll do.”

I swear that the automatic switching feature was almost flawless when it first shipped, but at some point the "is the user paying attention to this audio source" heuristics were changed. It now seems very eager to switch to my phone and reluctant to switch to my Mac.

There was also a bug for a period of months–I need to check to see if this still happens, I've conditioned myself not to trigger it–where

1. I put in my AirPods

2. I click them in the audio drop-down in the Mac menu bar to connect

3. The "Connect to AirPods" notification appears

4. I click "connect" because I'm already connected and it's the biggest target to dismiss the notification

5. the AirPods DISCONNECT! Come on...

I have slightly the opposite problem. My AirPods are too eager to reconnect to my Mac.

If I’m in a phone call with someone, on my phone, using my AirPods, and my Mac decided to play a single alert for whatever reason (slack, mail, text, whatever) the AirPods IMMEDIATELY connect to the Mac to play that one single notification, and leave me trying to shout across my house to my phone to tell the other person to hold on.

Super frustrating.

Apple could get away with introducing their own wireless audio I/O standard the eliminated the need for Bluetooth for sound. This new wireless protocol would ideally:

1. Allow AirPods to be connected to multiple audio devices at the same time and eliminate the need to have to switch between exclusive audio sources.

2. Eliminate the problem where a Zoom call (or any call) downgrades audio quality.

3. Allow the playback of lossless audio wirelessly.

I know there’s a crowd that will absolutely hate this idea because it’s yet another step away from a standard (Bluetooth), but the protocol has so much baggage that it’s not delivering a great experience for people in the Apple ecosystem.

Expect this soon. There was an interview with an Apple manager in What HiFi recently and some of the stuff he was saying strongly suggested that they’re considering doing their own thing.

I highly recommend Jabra bluetooth earbuds as a replacement for AirPods. They stay in your ears well, they're comfy, have pretty decent audio quality, good connectivity, good battery life, ANC, wireless charging. If you watch their website, they sell refurbished units for pretty huge discounts. The Elite 65t's may be old but they're still really good and super cheap now: https://www.jabra.com/deals#?pfs=discountedprice-desc&pff=2f...

I have many of those issues mentioned in the article daily with iPhone 13 Pro and MacBook Air M1.

Whatever Apple advertised as AirPods Pro features, it's all false advertising. I can't get anything to work reliably. Anything. I don't trust them at all with any sort of serious meeting at this point, either, since they recently started to randomly switch from being actively used with my MacBook to an idling iPhone in another room. Seriously, Apple?

The experience is getting worse and worse. And I seriously wonder why isn't it yet another class action – they well deserve it.

I've only had bad experiences with Bluetooth devices so far, especially audio.

Speakers, headphones, keyboards or mice.

Drivers issues, spurious disconnect, hard reboot needed for no apparent reason, delays when connecting, sometimes even noise on the line, difficult to believe given that this is a purely digital channel AFAIK.

Lately I am relying on good old analog electronics for audio, and wires for keyboards/mice.

Not only those are more reliable and serviceable (I especially like dumb headphones in that regard) but without batteries, software update or even drivers, they'll probably last much longer.

> when clicking the active AirPods in the bluetooth list, there is a short 3~ second delay which makes you think they haven't been disconnected, leading you to click it again. But your first click did actually fire leading you to be confused as to what state you are currently in.

There is a known correct way to do this in UIs: no large delays for UI state change, even if the underlying function takes a humanly perceptible duration.

Apple used to be good at this stuff, it's just attention to detail in UX... it's not like this is an area of opinion.

It would be nice if audio from all your devices played at once through AirPods instead of it trying to switch by guessing which one you want to listen to. In exactly the same way you can hear all your devices at once if not using headphones, the advantage being only you can hear them and not anyone else.

Eg if watching TV on a laptop with headphones but you get sent a TikTok or short clip on your phone it plays over the TV and you just tune out the TV for a few seconds like you would if your were at home watching TV while using your phone.

I’ll add one: if you pair AirPods with one of your devices, it adds them to all devices attached to your AppleID. Remove them from one removes them from all.

This removes one possible solution to unwanted switching between devices.

I know you can turn off automatic switching, which makes connecting cumbersome.

Finally, if you have them in, iPhone will occasionally start a video, or music, at the conclusion of a call even if you weren’t actively listening to it before. Add to that the unremovable Lock Screen play controls and it’s a recipe for not doing what I want.

Yeah, I suggest trying -other- brands of bluetooth earbuds and then write a comparison. After experiencing more frequent and odd annoyances, for me AirPods really do "just work".

This is very good to know. I have all these issues with basically all my wireless headsets and was thinking: I should invest in Apple Airpods to get rid of this mess... Guess I'm not.

Annoyance 8: More for those on a call with people using airpods or listening to them be interviewed on a news show - the audio quality is akin to that of a a tin-can-and-string phone.

Regarding annoyance 6, Apple replaces crackling airpods for free. https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-airpods-pro-free-repla...

I've had my left one replaced twice now, no charge. But since my left pod is new, and my right is old, the right has a rapidly decaying battery life, which cannot be replaced free of charge.

My AirPods2 switch to low quality audio - they sound like a 5$ pair of phones, presumably on account of the microphone being activated.

I am very disappointed, already looking for my AirPods1 to replace it. It's just not as easy to use as the old ones. They fall off my ears, they die suddenly with no warning (old ones were better in this regard).

I mean, Apple makes the AirPods, Apple makes my laptop, so why don't they ... you know ... make sound? They fail at performing the main functionality.

I didn't read the whole article, and this is quite a conversation. However, I have to ask: Why oh why is digital voice quality downgraded to telephony quality, when the computer and buds both play crystal musical audio? This happens for me in Windows, and IIRC in Mac as well. What about the audio device being headset vs. speaker changes things at a technical level?

This only seems to happen for Bluetooth. Using a RF gaming headset or a wired connection causes no issue.

keyword: Annoyance 3

Mine play a high pitched prolongated shrill ping at the highest volume it can. It happened 3 times before I threw them away and went back to hard wired headphones. It hurt. The first time I reacted quickly to get them out of my ears.

I figure it has something to do with the noise cancelling feature. I also figure it has something to do with me using my AirPods to run, thereby being exposed to moist conditions for prolongated times. I no longer trust headphones like I did.

I bought a pair of AirPods Pro and I loved how they sounded but hated how they made me look, because my skin is very dark and the little white things stood out like sore thumbs on Zoom calls. I returned them for the Jabra Elite 85t which are less comfortable in my ears but which match my skin color much better. Apple lost more than $249 of revenue because they don't make them in black.

There's something to be said for considering the diversity of your market.

I turn off auto switching, it causes too many issues. Otherwise for me they have worked better than any other wireless headphone / earbuds.

They need double the battery life and they would be basically perfect for my use, I am hopeful ver 3's will do this along with maybe some crazy move away from bluetooth which I still believe is the root of all the issues that even Apple can't fully solve without just making some different wireless protocol.

I've had the sound on a video playing on my mac disappear, only to find that the mac decided to randomly connect to the AirPods... that are in their case.

> Annoyance 7: When moving from working on my iMac to my MacBook, I get a notification asking me if I want to switch my AirPods over to my MacBook. The notification isn't an issue, but the fact it doesn't go away after you ignore it is

I have the same issue with Do Not Disturb notification on Mac. There is no way to have it not show up if you have a set time for DND unless you completely disable all notifications.

I want so much the wireless headphones fad to go away.

When batteries deplete in the middle of a meeting, what are you supposed to do? Connect a spare pair via usb dongle?

I don't generally struggle with battery in meetings (I prioritize battery life when buying ear buds), but I keep a set of wired earbuds with a USB-C in my laptop case as a backup. They don't come out often, but they have gotten me through a couple of meeting marathons.

I had frustrating issues where they would halfway connect, then disconnect, and only a reboot of the Mac would fix it. Finally trawled through system logs to realize that Spotify was preventing it from fully connecting. Apparently, an app can register callbacks of some sort that get called during the connect/handshake/sync process, and those can cause it to fail?

Also, hate how sometimes only one side will charge.

For me, the most annoying "feature" of airpods vs other BT audio was that Siri started announcing incoming calls, and reading the contact name in full, or the full phone number, both of which take forever. I finally found a recipe to shut that off.

I don't recall siri being this invasive with my Bose BT headphones. I wonder why airpods got this special (annoying to me, likely wonderful to others) treatment.

> I don't recall siri being this invasive with my Bose BT headphones

I think it's just because Apple is intentionally gatekeeping the feature to AirPods even though it can technically work with any headphones, so in this case your Bose headphones were spared the annoyance because of Apple's anti-competitive practices, whereas AirPods have it on by default. Fortunately it's easy to disable in Settings -> Phone -> Announce calls.

Most of my frustrations with AirPods could be eliminated if they connected to multiple devices at once. The back-and-forth does not work well.

I just got Airpods for Christmas and I love them. Most of these annoyances revolve around the fact that you're using two devices at the same time. I do the same on a regular basis and run into some of these all the time. One that is not on this list:

Sometimes when I switch from my Mac to my iPhone, Spatialized Stereo does not kick in until I toggle the setting on my iPhone from off to on.

I seem to experience troubles like that with any kind of Bluetooth devices. E.g., sometimes they don't connect or disconnect or lag. At this point, I am suspicious of the entire Bluetooth technology. The same is with WiFi actually: it does work well most of the time but sometimes it does not (for whatever reasons, bugs? changes in environment?).

I find Bluetooth to be the flakiest of the common technologies I use. There are just way too many times that it just doesn't work for no discernable reason.

I have 3 cars with Bluetooth and they all have their quirks, but they generally work. The Ford Fusion, which boasts the Sync system "by Microsoft" is the worst, though. It will always show the little Bluetooth icon soon after starting the car, but when you try to switch to your device, it says there is no Bluetooth device and I have to connect manually by selecting the phone (which Ford lovingly places behind about 8 knob turns and clicks). And of course, sometimes it simply refuses to acknowledge there is a phone at all, so we keep an analog audio-in cord handy.

And I have had a couple of different Bluetooth phones. My previous phone was a Samsung Galaxy 4 Mini that I replaced about 6 months ago with an A52. Bluetooth always worked fine with both phones, but again, there are quirks. In my Honda Civic, the old phone would automatically connect to the car's system and start playing whatever music I'd left off within about 20-30 seconds, whereas with the new (and much nicer) Samsung A52, it takes 2 or 3 minutes... or until I get impatient and select the phone manually.

Not quite related to airpods, but is Apple's Bluetooth stack awful?

I got three pairs of iClever BTH-02s and they all connect fine to our hand-me-down LG android phones, but they fail to connect to a brand new (but low end model) iPad. It says they connect, but the upper left corner does not show the headset icon and the sound goes through the external speakers.

It's awful.

When one customer finds 7 gripes, and they aren't an outlier, the product is bad.

A good product would have 1 gripe found by 1 in 7 customers...

Had a problem with my AirPods just the other day trying to show someone some "cool features" they can use them for. I go to put them in, and they essentially disappeared from my iPhone's bluetooth list, and it was not possible to reconnect them until I restarted my phone. I just said "they're great when they work..."

If you have more than one iDevice or use ear security tips where the case lid can't close all the way, the iDevice fires a modal popup to show you battery info on half the screen.

Oh, and if you want to make a call with the phone itself, it switches to the AirPods twice, even when you don't want them and they're not in your ears.

If there are other runners here, with enough ear sweat the AirPods starts beeping, the noise makes you want to pull the AirPods away immediately. After some cool down they start working again, though my right AirPod now starts "hissing" sooner than it beeps. This is when I run at 100+ Fahrenheit. Still a great product though.

My original AirPods started to not charge reliably. It was corrosion from the sweat from running. I now have a pair of AirPods Pro which are supposed to be sweat resistant but I’m skeptical. If I do a long run in the summer there’s a lot of sweat.

Sounds like a lot to deal with, for the price. I’ve never had to replace the pair of wired earbuds that come with an iPhone.

I've had to replace...a lot of wired earbuds. I have an entire shelf full of dead wired earbuds, from all sorts of manufacturers (Apple, RIM, cheapo $5 earbuds, Sony, Shure, ...), which almost uniformly failed in the same weird way: the right earbud becomes intermittently staticky after a few months. I checked with multiple devices (phones, computers), so it's probably not the socket, but more likely something to do with the way I tug on the cord when I run or walk?

Anyway, after burning through a lot of wired headphones, I've had the current AirPods Pro for over a year with no trouble, and the sound quality is the same to me (plus, noise cancellation is useful).

Does any bluetooth gadget ever "just work"? Not in my admittedly non-Apple world. The rules for connecting/disconnecting, especially if a gadget is paired to more than one thing, seem to be too complex to understand. It's almost reassuing that even Apple can't make this look 100% simple and easy.

My first gen AirPods had the annoying habit of simply not playing audio about 5% of the time despite showing as connected in Bluetooth and everything. I still have memories of standing in the rain, at dark, after work, trying to un-pair and re-pair just to get them to play some damn music. Other than that they worked well.

Annoyance 4 is the one that really bothers me (although to be fair, I have Beats Studio Buds that have exactly the same issue). Also, they get _really_ dirty and are very irritating to clean. Really not sure how Apple hasn't produced a good cleaning tool (or at least identified one and listed it in the store).

More annoyingly for me they didn't show up in "Where is" or what that feature is called in English, even if they had power and were close to my phone and had been for hours.

I recently wasted an hour or so thinking I must have left them behind at kids soccer training while they were just out of sight next to me.

I have the "listen for Hey Siri" thing enabled on my iPhone and also my MacBook. I would like to be able to use this to start playing music on the Macbook. But when I say hey siri, and both devices are in range, they both answer, then the macbook shuts off, and siri proceeds only on the iPhone.

I hope someone at Apple listens to these things. There are a lot of little things that can be improved in general regarding Bluetooth devices. Currently, if my MacBook restarts, I can’t use my Bluetooth mouse and keyboard to input my password, I have to use the built in keyboard. Using Logitech devices.

I don't know if it's the same for third party peripherals, but I know I thought this was the case for a long time with my first party Apple wireless keyboard + mouse, but it turned out it just didn't automatically connect on the login screen, and if I just hit any button on the keyboard it would connect in a second or 2 (I'm guessing that hitting keys while it's disconnected sends out a signal to pair)

Within less than a year of use my AirPod Plus now makes very annoying buzzing sounds when the microphone is used or any other vibration happens. Its like having a wasp inside your ear. This only happens in transparent and noise reduction mode.

Assuming its broken not sure if I trust the product enough to buy another.

This happened to me on two separate pairs (!), and Apple replaced them both for free.

https://support.apple.com/airpods-pro-service-program-sound-...

BTW, you mean AirPod Pro (not Plus).

Annoyance: When I use AirPods Pro and turn on my car, my iPhone automatically switches to the car-stereo's Bluetooth as expected. If I take the AirPods out of my ears for the first 5-10 secs after the switch, the iPhone pauses whatever was playing. I need to wait, or resume manually.

Something I've found annoying is if I'm using the airpods with my iPhone, and I'm chilling on the couch and decide to Chromecast, if I have already started chrome casting to the TV and then take my airpods out it will pause the show despite audio already going through TV?

I have many of these problems plus: the advertised tap-to-control behavior never seems to work when I want it to. It only activates when my AirPods are misinterpreting my adjusting them as trying to pause what I’m listening to. And, of course, tapping again doesn’t restart playback.

I had AirPods since the launch day. The battery was not great to begin with and they decayed pretty fast. After that they're basically trash as replacing the batteries is about as expensive as buying new ones.

I'm back to EarPods now. Don't listen to music on my phone anyway.

I'm using AirPods Pro & Max and multiple Macs. They're frustrating sometimes, but still substantially better than most Bluetooth devices especially Bluetooth headphones.

Bluetooth is such a crappy technology that blocks for better wireless implementations we could have.

I also think these are overall the best wireless headphones on the market. Not just in Bluetooth connectivity.

Airpod Pros are great for running but that’s it. I’m genuinely surprised to see them used in meetings given battery life and well with my ears they would fall out immediately. I can’t chew or talk without them wiggling out. I tried beats fit pro and were worse.

I wish there was a "cast" (eg chromecast) style setup that could just connect to my headphones over wifi. Why cant I just stream music to my headphones and have the Mbps of throughput and range of my wifi? Similar to how I can with video to my TV

I’m curious if any of these annoyances are better when using with an M1 mac.

For example, plugging in my dock (with two 4K monitors attached) is always super slow and janky and takes several seconds for the monitors to display anything. Supposedly on the M1 this is instant.

Honestly, the whole Bluetooth pairing process is an industry-wide failure. I'd throw out all the pairing logic industry-wide and say "Connecting to Bluetooth peripherals requires NFC. NFC-tap a Bluetooth device to its host to connect".

This Bluetooth headphone trend I think is mostly just to sell more products and bundles. Remove the headphone jack and now people need to buy the matching headphones they don't really want but the OEM is offering a $10 discount. Then they all have their own proprietary "app" for configuration that isn't cross-platform (have a Linux phone? add this to the pile of "sucks to be you"). Said apps always include tracking and phone homing and more permissions than needed because the other part was to sell your user data as the side hustle to Bluetooth headphones.

I'm sad I fell for it after buying a newer ASUS laptop without a headphone jack and picking up a pair for my girlfriend too. The issues Bluetooth has caused me have wasted company money as I try to 'fix' my headphones for telecommunication. Active noise cancelation is nice, but not disrupting-my-work nice.

I also find the automatic device switching to be super annoying. In my experience it is both under inclusive and over inclusive. I have no idea how this passed muster for release at a company like Apple.

There is a way to turn off this feature in settings, BTW.

After replacing mine 3x and my latest Pros just shitting the bed (the left one has a weird echo sound in it, but the Apple Store says it's fine so they won't do anything) I'm done with AirPods

Hopefully the Samsung Buds I have ordered are better

Annoyance, today I left my airpods when I left the hotel, I didnt get the left behind notification because I had the case with me. Phone + Case (and airpods not connected) doesnt seem like a good proxy for "You have your airpods"

I don't have these issues with $8 wired earbuds. Manufacturers are removing headphone jacks from mobile devices, causing us to buy expensive buggy Bluetooth ones that are easier to lose. Our world is getting dumber every year.

Another annoyance I have is if you are working on multiple Apple devices using different Apple IDs, you have to go in Bluetooth settings, disconnect and set up the AirPods as new on other machine. Have to do it again to switch back.

You know what Just Work? The $10 Skullcandy headphones I plugged into my phone's headphone jack.

Forces greater than us have decided that something so simple yet so functional is obsolete so we can't have it on our phones without a dongle.

"Forces" didn't do it. The headphone jack on my phone is doing great. You can have one too if you choose to.

Most if not all cellphone manufacturers have decided to discontinue 3.5mm headphone jacks on their flagship, if not lesser, models.

So at some point your choices will be to either use a potato (often with a locked bootloader) or muddle through as best you can with an old phone that cease receiving security updates, including kernel updates, in the very near future.

It's the same forces that decided all TVs should be "smart" and have made dumb TVs difficult and sometimes expensive to obtain, especially if they are of any quality. The manufacturers want you to buy whatever drives their own and their partners' profit margins, and the buying public is too apathetic to care.

Phones seemed like they were basically solved a decade ago. Everything is so over-specced, that I'm sure a potato would handle everything I could conceivably do with a phone.

Except battery life. That still sucks. (or maybe it's worse than it used to be)

His gripe about the buzzing sound in AirPods is easily fixable and he obviously didn't even bother checking. Just went straight to blaming Apple.

Apple will replace AirPods with this issue. For free.

Several of the other gripes are spurious as well.

This is part of Apple’s problem right now.

They’ve lost focus.

TV shows, cars, VR headsets, six different iPad models.

So the small stuff suffers: iOS. OS X. AirPods. Airdrop.

Airdrop just stopped working for me recently. The clock app in iOS still only lets you have ONE reminder.

A fatal combination are AirPod Pros + an Amazon FireTV Stick 4k. You pay 250€ and can't even change the volume...

Other FireTVs have the ability, other headphones have the ability, but this combination is just madness.

Annoyance 4 is the biggest one for me, with the additional annoyance that "only one works sometimes" extends to charging, too. One of my AirPods will be dead when I go to use them ~10% of the time.

Annoyance 1 drives me insane. I don’t understand why it would switch when I’m actively listening to something. It should ask first on the new device instead of automatically switching.

I've bought 2 pairs of headphones and 2 pairs of earphones in my entire life so far (I'm 36). And guess what? They just work. Is it really worth it just to not have wires?

I recenty got the AirPods Pro and they're really underwhelming. Apart from their durability, everything they do can be found on headphones half the price e.g. Anker

Airpods Max are a disaster! I had trouble with bt range on my qc35 ii, switched to sony and will never go back. just wish I could return my airpod max, they’re engraved

My airpods broke so I bought some €25 Bluetooth earbuds and honestly they work just as well for my needs. The best thing is not worrying about losing or breaking them.

For annoyance 1 I use a bettertoutchtool shortcut to connect to my AirPods . I also noticed BigSur will have a notification pop up asking if you want to reconnect

I highly recommend the brand Jabra if you are an Android user. Basically all other bluetooth buds have horrible UX in my experience besides Jabra and AirPods.

I have the best Sony noise cancelling earbuds and headphones. I thought the AirPods are better but from what you describe. I feel Sony did a pretty good job.

I have the Sony XM4 headphones but it's not perfect. It takes nearly 30 seconds to connect to the computer with the voice saying "Power on", "Device 1 connected", "Device 2 connected". When I restart the computer, I must restart the headphones manually and wait. And Sony has not released a MacOS software to manage them.

Agree with the point of the blog, but the biggest hurdle for me:

If you do a short and intensive sprint, Airpods usually will register a click and skip to the next song...

My Bluetooth connection has become less and less reliable on my Airpod Pros, which tell me a new one is probably coming soon. Funny how that works :)

Annoyance 8: Apple Music desperately tries to make you use it by automatically opening the Music app (even though you use Spotify 99% of the time)

Annoyance 8: I get anxious when I get on a video call and see the other person is wearing airpods because they're always cutting in and out.

For the pros, I don't understand how anyone can use these air tips, they never stay in my ears :(

also no more volume and previous/next buttons :/

I'm reminded of Alan Kay's quote on the Mac. Similarly, AirPods might be the first wireless headphones worth criticizing.

You can disable that automatic connection behaviour in the airpod settings from each device, that resolves a few of the issues

Why is this article is dated 28th of January 2022? It is the 26th of January 2022, (maybe the 27th in a very eastern timezone)

I have a $20 pair of Sony wireless headphones that charge via USB C that have equivalent audio quality to my $199 AirPods pro.

My one mega-annoyance is no mute button. Not being able to mute a Zoom call (or a phone call) using just the Airpod hardware interface is... annoying. I don't use Siri that often and would honestly remap long click as mute/unmute. I'm willing to pay premium for that feature alone. Hell, I'm willing to subscribe that feature. Apple, "take my money", just give me a mute button that works without the phone (or watch, or laptop).

The worst part about the click is that it hangs up your call. I was on hold with the IRS for 3 hours and hung up on the representative when I adjusted my airpod. Rage inducing!

SIRI....disable it....plug in airpods...suddenly she is back and demanding your attention....

forget streaming.....mac m1 cannot Bluetooth

Not comparing Apples to apples, but my Beoplay B9 are a joy to listen to; I have no affiliation with B&O btw.

I wonder, does "just work" mean work perfectly 100.000% of the time. Or is 99% of the time close enough?

Annoyance 1 (the biggest one), and Annoyance 4 are the standouts for me.

ANNOYANCE 8: Updating the firmware. 'Nuff said...

It's so nice being able to bt connect to my Apple watch for the lovely ambience of tick, tock, tick.

If you think you have Bluetooth issues with AirPods, just try Apple Watch. It works, yes, but rarely.

In what way[s] for the Apple Watch?

I've experienced most of these issues. Also, it appears this blogpost is from the future?

AirPods Max _often_ just work. Anything else involves manual switching almost every time.

Try using them on Linux. Then they really don’t just work.

As headphones yes but good luck using the mic.

The date on the article is either wrong, or the article was made by a time traveller

28 January 2022?! First time in my life reading something before it was published!

Does no one else view "it just works" as an incredibly annoying phrase?

I wished they were using a low latency bluetooth codec, such ad AptX or Aptx-LL.

Too bad they didn’t turn in those buzzing AirPods for the buzzing noise recall.

Annoyance 0. Your blog post date is wrong

But you have a point, I share some of your annoyances

I had one pair of AirPods and left the charging case on a plane; getting a replacement case was a pain because I had to prove the AirPods were mine. When the battery died in them I gave up on them completely. Battery life too short, too easy to lose, and environmentally not sound.

Try getting another set of Bluetooth earphones, then weigh in the quality.

i don't find that any of my apple products "just work". they all have annoying "features" that sound great as a sales pitch but are crap in real life use

a lot of these annoyances can be solved if the author slightly changed their behavior. I still think AirPods Pro are some of the best new tech of the last 5 years

My airpod pros work better than my airpod pro max's but both buggy.

- if your listening to your airpods and answer a phone call on your apple watch the speaker it chooses is not the airpods its your watch! so I'm thinking wow they're speaking really quiet only to realise its coming from my watch!

- switching audio devices while on a call takes far too long

- when I switch my audio output on my iphone sometimes the whole phone hangs. Seems to be fixed now but it was a problem for such a long time that I'm too scared to change audio devices on my phone

- when I connect to my mac sometimes they just wont reconnect and I have to reboot

- when I connect to my mac, then my phone or I disconnect them for a while when they come back the audio jumps up to max. I'm scared to use them with my mac because of this!

Without Apple device a firmware upgrade is not possible.

Does anyone have the AirPods 3? Are they worth it?

CBB? Yes. Better than the alternatives? Also yes.

how the hell does a list of annoyances about a product makes it to the #1 of HN

oh Apple I get it

you people need to diversify

We also have Tesla annoyances and NFT haters. That's pretty much all I could hope for.

Are AirPods safe for audiophiles?

I use Airpod Pros (no Apple, I will not say "Airpods Pro"). Some of the gripes are familiar; some not.

The worst thing about AirPods—specifically the AirPods Pro is that they provoke tinnitus.

I can’t use them. And so it goes…

re: annoyance 1, there is a setting to disable this behaviour

e aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaadwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwws

relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2055/

Bluetooth is still a nightmare after being around for over 2 decades. Meanwhile, my wireless mouse with USB dongle just works.

Mine work great.

Two words:

Audio Jack.

Dumb-ass Mac people.

AirPods used to work. They no longer do.

I got AirPods shortly after they were released and they were great. They were basic Bluetooth headphones with a decent, minimalistic UI that "just worked". They wouldn't try to be smart and just remain connected to the last device they were on, which worked well 90% of the time and the last 10% wasn't a problem because the connection process was very quick. Under the hood it was presumably just bog-standard Bluetooth which is good enough and can actually be reliable given my experience.

But then Apple couldn't leave "well enough" alone and decided to over-engineer and fuck everything up. They tried to do the whole multi-device thing where it's supposed to automatically & seamlessly switch between them, and the problems in this article arise from this - presumably they've now overlaid an extra management layer & protocol on top of the existing Bluetooth. Even disabling the automatic switching feature doesn't help, as the extra complexity seems to still be involved in the background and makes once quick operations take much more time.

Connecting to AirPods from the audio menu on another device now takes much longer and doesn't always work - sometimes it'll keep spinning and eventually time out for no reason. Connecting via the Bluetooth menu always works and is faster - I wonder why the audio menu doesn't just do whatever the Bluetooth menu does? Same story on iPhone - connecting via the audio menu is now error-prone and I sometimes have to try again using the Bluetooth settings.

Also a problem I have which I suspect is an isolated bug but is still annoying is that since these new changes, I simply cannot get within range of my Macbook without my music playing though AirPods on an iPhone stopping. I suspect the automatic switching garbage they introduced, which despite being disabled, still plays a part. The AirPods don't even actually switch so it's not like the setting didn't apply, they remain connected to the original device but merely pause, so in the end it's the worst of both worlds as it's not even giving me the extra functionality and just ruins something that used to work perfectly.

Not to mention, in typical Apple fashion, all these overlay protocols have zero observability and you can't even tell what's going on beyond a spinner that eventually times out. Same with AirDrop, HomeKit, etc but at least those are used infrequently enough that they aren't too big of a deal in practice, but AirPods are particularly problematic especially in a post-pandemic, fully-remote world.

Of course, given the recent changes to iPhones, wired headphones are no longer an option either unless you keep dongles around. They should've either switched the new iPhones to USB-C or added a Lightning port to Macbooks so that wired headphones could be used without a dongle you'll inevitably be missing when you need it.

All valid annoyances, but I really think OP should try using another brand of Bluetooth headphones for a week just to get some perspective of how well AirPods "just work" compared to the competition.

Manually having to re-pair once in every blue moon, one earbud playing while the other isn't, no automatic device switching without having to go through the Settings app everytime, A/V desync, dodgy mic quality, earbuds not waking up correctly when removing them from the case, etc are all part of the non-AirPods Bluetooth experience.

I recently switched to a pair of Sony Bluetooth headphones as I don't like the too-neutral AirPods Pro EQ curve, and while they sound excellent, the UX really leaves a bit to be desired.

I use Android and bought the cheapest wireless/bluetooth earphones I could find. They "just work". When I open the charging case, they connect to my phone. The bad points are the sound quality and the lack of noise cancellation

Additional anecdote, I have Sony XM3s and they are constantly having issues on both Android and Linux while being expensive and having excellent noise cancelation. They just worked for like the first 2-3 months but after a year, they've seemed to have gotten worse in basically all aspects (although interestingly switching from Sony's app to GadgetBridge for pairing and config, I seem to get better battery life). The connectivity has gotten so bad and I've caused so many interruptions in telemeetings that I bought a new pair of wired IEMs because I know analog actually just works (though my laptop lacks a headphone jack because of OEMs follow Apple's trends regardless of if the idea was good or bad).

A laptop not having a headphone jack is irritating.

The 2021 MacBook Pro has a headphone jack. I can understand taking the jack out of a phone because it makes it more water resistant and frees up space, but in a laptop there's a much larger footprint to work with. And users are more concerned with plugging in peripherals vs waterproofing in a laptop.

All Apple laptops have a 3.5mm headphone jack though..not sure you can blame Apple.

Never said the laptops didn't, but Apple was the first major player to remove the standard of having headphones on a portable compute device with the iPhone. This caught on to other manufacturers first in phones and then percolated up to laptops.

Oof. I'm sorry. My XM3s have been going strong connecting to Android and Windows devices for 2 years. I have the Sony app on my phone, but it doesn't launch when I connect. I never use it. I just use the system Bluetooth with LDAC.

I used XM3 for 2 years on Linux, Windows, macOS and Android. I guess I used them for 4-12 hours a day most for most of these two years. I guess I spent at least 1/4 of this period with them on my head. And I dropped them many times, weared them during my runs on seaside in hot weather as well as walked in them inrain / snow.

They still work as good as new except for battery life, but this expected for device that had 500-1000 recharge cycles. I guess battery lost like 30-50% of original capacity.

PS: I only used Sony app a few times to update firmware and change settings though.

If you're connecting to one device most bluetooth headphones will work just fine, the biggest pain point is when you have multiple devices to switch between. I've got some nice noise cancelling headphones I like to switch between my TV and ipad, where you've got to dig into the settings of both, disconnect it from one before connecting it to the other (which takes an unlock and 4 clicks on the ipad and about 10 clicks on the TV).

The biggest pro of the airpods for me though is the non-pro version, for whatever reason I just cannot stand in-ear headphones. The gripes in the article are all valid though, personally I'd really like to be able to pair bluetooth headphones to as many devices as I like then have a button in the system tray (or anywhere where it'd be a couple of swipes/clicks maximum) that is the equivalent of "I want sound from this device now"

Some of the complaints OP lists are related to using the Airpods with multiple devices. While the complaints are correct, the Airpods are miles better than any bluetooth earphones I've ever used when it comes to switching sources. The dance to get my old earphones to move from my phone to my tablet was annoying and brittle by comparison.

> the Airpods are miles better than any bluetooth earphones I've ever used when it comes to switching sources

I think this just depends on Bluetooth version. My current FreeBuds 4 switch between devices seamlessly, no manual switching needed.

With my old headphones I head to switch manually, but it wasn't that much of a bother with a switching widget on the main screen (instead going deep into the settings).

Nice. What bluetooth version gets you the easy switching?

Found some info here: https://soundguys.com/bluetooth-multipoint-explained-28601/

Apparently it's in Bluetooth 4.0 which is more than 10 years old. But various devices support this to various degrees.

None of my bluetooth 4 things do a good job with that. Even the nice Sony and Samsung stuff. I don't doubt that some others work well, though.

No noise cancellation is better than bad noise cancellation. The ANC on every set of earbuds and headphones under $200 I've tried is just a blast of white noise that makes it feel like someone is ramming cotton balls into my ears with a jackhammer.

I guess it depends on the use case. ANC on my FreeBuds (which are open type) is certainly limited, but it's a make or break difference in e.g. public transportation.

I have 2 sets from Monoprice, both pretty inexpensive. The cheapest ones don't have a very good microphone and they are tinny, but fine for podcasts. They also switch ears and pair easily like a champ. I can Pair either one, pull out the other one and let it pair, then put the first away, or leave them both in. I've been really impressed. The slightly more expensive pair will only pair the right one unless I create a specific profile for the left one. Switching from one to two is hit or miss and forget about switching from right to left (or vice-versa) without pausing everything for a minute or so.

Maybe that audio jack wasn't such a bad idea after all.

It must not be - even Apple has kept it on their laptops and desktops.

Admitting past decisions were bad is hard.

Or maybe some people just need to fix their shit. Connecting audio devices to any OS, except maybe Android (dunno about iOS), is chaos. There is no inherently good reason to this.

As much as people hate wires, I have to say that I much appreciate the "just works" aspect of it. Even wifi, while it has improved an awful lot over the years, is not nearly as reliable as the (albeit annoying) ethernet cable.

I have the same issue with wireless keyboards and mice. The idea that I have to charge or put batteries into my mouse is infuriating.

Also (generally) better sound quality (mic) and no latency/artifacting issues. Much cheaper as well.

I usually keep my Magic Trackpad connected to USB because I know it switches to wired operation with no latency and 100% reliability. Also an option.

> not nearly as reliable as the (albeit annoying) ethernet cable.

I keep one plugged into an inexpensive USB-C "dock" at my desk, and it's wonderful. That and wired headphones mean I always sound decent, don't break up when the microwave's in use, and never have to play the "can you hear me now" game.

Opposite for me. The wifi in my office beats out my USB C adapter by a factor of 4.

Wifi is great, consumer grade routers are not though.

Beats... how? Bandwidth? Packet loss? Latency?

One, that wifi bandwidth is being shared by everyone around you. Ideally, you'll only have about 4 peers for your given hotspot, but most companies are a bit more... frugal... than that. Two, that WiFi is going through those same routers. Just sayin'.

Bandwidth is typically what I’ve measured. Never had a noticeable issue with packet loss. Or latency.

Edit: the difference between my work laptop (wireless) and my gaming machine (wired) in my office is a mere 5ms to the same external server. That’s in the “meh” territory for me.

Currently I have five APs inside and outside my house, and they’re averaging about 5-6 clients per AP. The really network intensive stuff is connected via Ethernet to avoid crowding out the airwaves. In my case that means the Apple TV and my gaming rig, both of which are conveniently non mobile and close to wall plates.

The issue for my work laptop is that the cheaper USB C hubs only pull 100mbps. So I can get 100mbps wired, 450mbps wireless, or the full 950 by replacing my hub. On the balance the wireless is more convenient, especially with a sit/stand desk like mine making more wires more annoying. If I replace the hub I’ll reconsider, but 450 is plenty for my needs.

Fair enough.

With as important as live calls have been for work, it was worth it to get a wired adapter to avoid the occasional latency spikes and to limit the packet round trip time. It is legitimately noticeable to me when I'm on wifi and not wired (I keep both active for simplicity's sake).

Anker offers a nice one that was only about $40, and provides both gigabit ethernet (1000baseT (or an incredible fake thereof)) and some USB-A connections as well.

Don't mind me over here with a Ethernet dongle that randomly disconnects intermittently.

> dongle

There's your problem. Dongles = cheap hardware to patch missing pieces of your expensive hardware. It's hard to find good ones even if you want to. One of the big reasons so many of us hated the TouchBar era of Macbooks was the reliance on dongles, which inevitably flake out at the worst times possible and cause weird bugs when you're trying to concentrate.

Heh, yeah, I had a Thinkpad with one of those PCMCIA cards that had the pop-out RJ-45 jack. It was great, but it was persnickety and would go "pfffbbblt" on the regular.

The best Ethernet dongle ever was the AAUI ones you used to have to use on old Macs.

Got some Samsung Galaxy Buds Live for my birthday and they're honestly one of the best tech products I've ever used. The case recharges them, the setup with a phone was very easy and worked well, they pair perfectly with my Ubuntu laptop as well. Taking them out of the case they automatically activate, put them in the case automatically shut off. And so on. They do just work.

Second this, Samsung Galaxy Buds just work. They fit comfortably and imo look good.

I have the Galaxy Buds as well as the 2nd Gen AirPods. I cannot get the Buds to stay in my ears with any regularity because all of the weight of the Buds, is out at the end that is not in your ear. The AirPods have all of their mass inside of your ear and stay put.

Feel the same with the Galaxy Buds Plus.

My SO has airpods pro and I find to be the main thing they have over the GB+ is their talk through is vastly superior and the noise canceling is also very good.

The thing it doesnt have is a decent battery life.

Y’know what headphones really did “just work” though? Wired headphones, circa 2017. Their battery life was infinite. You could “pair” them in seconds to any device with a headphone jack, aka any device, because we’re in 2017. Oh, and they were cheaper and better for the environment.

Courage, indeed.

And this is why I’m currently typing my comment on an iPhone 6S...

Honestly, the fact that I no longer snag my earphones on random protrusions, like doorknobs and bus ticket validating machines is a bliss. Cables inside at a desk: sure, why not. Cables outside: hard pass.

Ditto. And since we now wear masks at the office, one notices how wireless earbuds are "mask compatible" when you try using cabled ones.

Really? I always see them go flying when taking off a mask to eat or drink. The random protrusions to escape the faraday cage that is your head don't seem to interact well with elastic loops.

Wired earbuds are amazing with masks. If you put them on before you put on the mask, when you need to take one off to hear something, the mask straps hold it conveniently hanging near your ear. A fumbled airpod rolling across the floor is not an improvement.

I'd pass the wires through my shirt, keep them from snagging or pulling my ears too much.

Back in the day I made good use of those oversized jacket pockets to pop my CD player in - then you just run the cable up under your shirt and you're good to go.

It's surprising how little of a hassle headphone cables can be - I understand that the market is going elsewhere but I've stuck with wired and couldn't be more content. This does have the side effect that I've been soft locked out of Apple phones though, so I switched over to Android devices.

Back in my day I used my tape player the same way. Plus it was smaller and more compact than those new fangled cd players!

The lightning to 1/8" adapter is <$10 and very small. Works 100% of the time.

Seems so obvious, how could anyone not realise this after one time of snagging the cord when it's outside of clothing?

I used to wear my wired earbuds like this at times. They would still snag (though less frequently). The cord has to exit my shirt to get into my pants pocket and that’s where they would snag. That plus snagging on jacket zippers at the neck.

Plus the annoying telephonics that the wires cause was enough for me to finally buy wireless earbuds. Yes, I can try to route the wire under my shirt. Yes, I can try to wrap the wires around my ears to cut down on the telephonics. But all that is more hassle than dealing with Bluetooth.

This works but then all my music has a muffled rubbing sound from the cable that reaches my ears while I walk around. This is what I used to do, but wireless is still better IMO for headphones on the go.

Admittedly that is an annoying problem, but it's quite simple to arrange the cable as it exits around your neck to stop it happening. I guess it's just a personal preference thing in the end of the day. I personally find wireless annoying on the go, I only use them at my shared office space because they have noise cancelling, so I can keep music at a sensible level and blot out all the background noise; with wired I need the volume at a frankly stupid level to keep me from hearing the office noise.

I agree, but the awkward "omg an airpod fell off after bumping into something/someone" is also a real thing. They should have an optional cord between the pair.

This is exactly why I have the old-school style with a wire connecting them that sits on the back of your neck. I had my toddler rip an earbud out just once for me to realize that was a design feature I had to have. As an added bonus, I find they're way easier to throw on and off (just loop them around your neck and tuck them in your shirt) in between tasks.

Something like this: https://en-us.sennheiser.com/headphones-bluetooth-momentum-f...

> I had my toddler rip an earbud out

and then put it directly into their mouth right (airpods are the perfect choking size)? Yeah, i can totally see the need to have them attached together in that situation. heh what is it about toddlers that makes them constantly try to kill themselves.

Curiosity.

in-ear will never work for me. I feel raped when I have to put them into the ear canal.

I had the opposite experience - I had the ones with a wire between them when my kid was a baby and had to stop using them as soon as he was able to grab things. That wire was so tantalizing and the buds got forcibly ripped out of my ears every time! I switched to some very cheap (and relatively large = easier to grab out of a small mouth if necessary) AirPod knockoffs and only put in the ear on the other shoulder from where I was holding the baby.

Now he's older and when he gets hold of them he tries to put them in his ear rather than his mouth. I've been cutting down on wearing them when I'm around him anyway, since he's copying everything now.

The problem with this design is that anything that rubs or bounces against the cable transmits sound into your ear (like a children's cup telephone). This makes them annoying to use while exercising. I find that the style connected by a solid hoop mostly avoids this.

I use the "PowerBeats Pro" for this. I don't know if they've been updated with some of the newer features, I bought mine a couple years back when they came out.

The current version of the Powerbeats Pro has separate buds for each ear, but I have the newest revision of the regular Powerbeats for this exact reason.

They even have the H1 chip and all of the quick pairing/built-in Apple magic that Airpods do.

Beats Flex have the same BT chip as the AirPods and a different design that holds both ear pieces to the back of your neck.

Aftershokz Aeropex, silly name aside, is a decent product that gets you a Bluetooth device you can wear all day without losing

Agreed. They're pretty great.

I've got these, bluetooth on them works great, and the bone conduction is really interesting. It's really nice being able to hear your surroundings while having some kind of audio playing. Or if you don't want the surrounding sound, they come ear plugs. Really comfortable to have on too, I barely even notice them (if at all) when I'm wearing them.

Should be mentioned though, for the price the music quality is worse than what you'd get with other devices. It reminds me of a higher quality phone speaker. Definitely not bad compared to some headphones I've used, but it's not amazing. Hasn't been an issue for me though, I happily use them when working. Voice audio sounds perfectly fine. IMO you get them for the other benefits, not because they're the best sounding thing on the market.

Agreed. They're great for walking around outside while on a phone call, listening to a podcast, or listening to music while exercising outdoors – not for "getting into the music". Airpods are better at doing both, based on what I've heard.

Shure as well, one you use the over the ear loop style it's hard to downgrade to anything else.

Which ones are you referring to?

I love my aeropex, but i’d be half inspired to write a similarly styled article about the annoying uniform beep notification UX- especially if you’ve paired with multiple devices and one is not quite in range.

That's exactly what I use. I have a set of airpod pros I use most of the time, but I can't stand having my ears sealed all day, and having waterproof ones I an wear in the shower is awesome.

My only gripe with them is that the quality is way lower than even fairly cheap normal ear buds, so I mostly use them for podcasts and books.

From a sibling comment:

> Aftershokz Aeropex, silly name aside, is a decent product that gets you a Bluetooth device you can wear all day without losing

Make sure if you get bone induction headphones that you test them out in louder environments before running or getting them dirty. For me, I had to turn them up so high when outside with normal street noise that they gave me a pretty terrible headache.

>I had to turn them up so high when outside with normal street noise that they gave me a pretty terrible headache.

You have to be really careful doing that. It's very easy to screw up your ears with bone conduction headphones if you try to drown out background noise by increasing the volume.

Yeah, I returned them! Thanks for the heads up regardless.

https://twitter.com/search?q=airpods%20toilet&f=live

I have a pair which have a cord between them and hooks over the outside of the ears, because regular headphones don't retain in my ears. I don't think I could last even a day with airpods without losing one of them.

Do you have the model number?

An eyeglass strap works great for this. Put the loops around the airpod stems instead of the eyeglass arms.

I’ve thought about this, but y’know they won’t fit into the charging pod anymore with something (anything, really) on them.

I only endorse this approach for when exercising outdoors, riding the train etc.

And actually most of the time when I'm outside the house I prefer to be able to hear my environment, for safety reasons.

Don't know if Apple sells them but they do make third party neck things that slip around the stems and are basically what you're asking for.

Just got AirPods 3 and pro to try out and I have not had it just fall out that way with either.

I have fumbled with the 3s while trying to remove them while walking. I think it’s the stem and how light they are.

This cord works (although I found that they helped to pull the airpods out of my ear): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B089B5T9L7?psc=1

These hooks are a much better solution: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B089B5T9L7?psc=1 Despite their flimsiness, they have not failed on me once while running, etc.

Both of these "solutions" have the obnoxious problem of needing to be removed to charge the airpod. The Powerbeats Pro has built in hooks that are nice and sturdy, but the case is obnoxiously massive compared to the airpods case.

My problem is that I must have freakishly small ear canals, because neither of these earbuds actually fit into my ears - despite trying nearly every aftermarket replacement eartip.

The Shokz openrun pro doesn't need to go into my ear and kinda works, but the sound quality sucks for music and the head loop protrudes from the back of my head and isn't adjustable.

Over ear headphones don't work with hats or bike helmets, so those are only good sometimes.

My next step is to pay $150(!!) for a custom piece of silicon to attach to the airpods (which will still have to come on and off for charging): https://www.adv-sound.com/products/eartune-fidelity-custom-f...

I guess I could pay $500 for these: https://www.adv-sound.com/products/m5-tws-custom

Or maybe I could get surgery to enlarge my ear canal (haha)

If anyone reading this has any better advice, I'm all ears (hahaha) Sigh -

Yeah, and Bluetooth phones / buds are much better for running.

I used to jerk my wired earbuds out of the jack all the time.

Do you wear a headband or something else to secure them?

I haven’t tried running with my AirPods yet, as I feared they would eventually fall out.

I have Pixel Buds and I haven't tried running with them yet (it's been cold since I got them for Christmas).

I used to run with Bluetooth over-ear headphones, which was great in winter, and, uh, less great in summer (the foam would get completely soaked and foul-smelling).

The ear supports on the Pixel Buds are pretty secure, though, I expect it to be OK, especially at my pace.

Nope, if AirPods fit your ears they stay in. I have first gen set that I still use for biking and big drops or bumps have zero effect.

I can shake my head around like crazy and my airpod pros don't fall out. Never had them fall out running which I try to do 3 times a week either.

I used to run with AirPods multiple times a week, and used them while walking around and on public transit. I've done the same with AirPods pro borrowed from my S.O.

Did they ever fall out? Only a small portion of the time. Half the time I noticed it and caught them.

Was the idea of them falling out stressful? Hell yeah. Nothing like a $50+ bud to stress the hell out of you when you're trying to get a run in and it just will. not. sit. in. your. ear. correctly. Add sweat to the equation and things get messy quick. And the fact that in some places, like public transit, you have a good chance of losing the bud forever if it falls out.

I am much happier with the IEMs I've been using for a half a year or so now. They hook over my ears optionally, so they're never really in danger of falling out and I never have to mess with them. And they're wired to me anyway even if they do fall.

Yes. Mobility is why I got the Air Pods Pro to begin with. I don't use them with my Air and I don't even want them to pair with my Air; wired ear buds are fine (and cheap!) for that. But they're great for walking and working out. The Air Pods Pro even stay in my ears while erging.

Still, the OP's complaints are valid. But when they work, which is most of the time, they're great. Surprisingly (but not insanely) great.

Tangent but what’s “erging”? Never heard this before and the spellcheck has a red squiggly below it, so it has not heard of it either.

Indoor rowing

It refers to rowing on a stationary rowing machine, the kind you would see at a gym

Erging is rowing on an indoor rowing machine. They were originally called an "ergometer," which was then shortened down to just an "erg" over time.

It's a really great exercise, and pretty good training for rowing crew (though it's not quite like the real thing).

Shorthand for ”using an indoor rowing machine”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indoor_rower?wprov=sfti1

You can just run the wire under your shirt/jacket

For a while, most of the hoodies I bought for workouts actually had a cutout in the kangaroo pocket for routing headphones inside of them. The newer ones don't though, you'd have to cut it yourself.

Haha yes. I remember rocking my HD580's with their awkward 12' cable plus an adaptor for the 1/4" plug outdoors. Kids these days have it a bit more easy.

This is my approach. At my desk? Sure, wired is fine. Even have a full DAC/amp setup (JDS Labs Element II) that I plug my trusty old Sennheiser HD6XX’s into.

While I’m up and moving around, or relaxing on my bed watching something on my iPad with a cat that has an inclination to chew on cables? AirPods/Bluetooth.

This was such a big issue with my wired Sony headphones. Can't tell you how many I've gone through.

On another hand, I've a pair of Bose wireless headphones for close to 6 years now. Battery is still good enough for 2+ hours of workout.

There are pros to wireless headphones and the right choice for many people, but the choice has been made for all people who do not experience that. I personally use Bose over ear heaphones that have an optional cable you can attach and connect and it has come up an incredible number of times. There is so much pain if you switch for more than two devices, forget to charge, at unsure something is paired, etc that all goes away with having a cable option for when it is more convenient.

> but the choice has been made for all people who do not experience that

What are you talking about? Is someone stopping you from using wired earbuds?

You're not technically stopped, you just have to pay extra money to get an adapter, with the additional downside that you can no longer charge the phone while using those headphones.

Did they stop including the dongle in the box? I haven’t bought phone in a couple of years so I honestly don’t know.

I can understand the complaint about charging. Although the fanboy answer is of course wireless charging.

They stopped including it a while ago, I think they stopped with the XS.

They've stopped including it, but they sell it for $9 with free shipping.

The next thing to go will be the physical SIM card tray - takes up a similar amount of space which is better utilized for battery capacity or other features, and also makes for easier waterproofing if removed.

The old jack was also more solidly connected than the current inclement weather port (sorry, can't remember ifit's lightning, thunderbolt, or wizard strike).

Or, if you get a wired->BT adapter like the FiiO uBTR, it’s another device you have to remember to keep charged.

(Btw there are 3.5mm to lightning adapters that let you charge while listening, just not made by Apple)

For me, it's not the cost or the ability to charge my phone, but the fact that the adapter can get lost. I can't leave it plugged in because I use my headphones with non-iPhone devices too.

I perpetually loose my headphones anyway. If I had an adapter too, I'd find myself unable to listen to anything twice as often.

> get an adapter, with the additional downside that you can no longer charge the phone while using those headphones.

Shouldn't such an adapter have a female USB-C connector and pass that through to the male one, with the headphone jack being branched off? Do those not exist, or are they prohibitively expensive? Did the Apple "dongle" mentioned in sibling comments do it that way? (Sure oughta, IMO.)

The official Apple one, at least, does not do that. I don’t know if there are others which do.

Then one would think someone else has exploited such an obvious(?) market opportunity. (BTW, I deliberately didn't write "with a T-branch for the audio jack" or similar, because the stem of the T should obviously be the male USB-C going up into the phone, so the audio and the incoming USB-C go out to the sides. Then you can still stand the phone upright on top of them.)

Exactly. Removing the headphone jack is incredibly hostile to those of us who want to use wired headphones, and clearly motivated by the insane profits of wireless earbuds. And the worst part? It's working. Just look at the AirPods business and you'll see exactly why Apple does it.

For myself, I'm sticking with an older phone and IEMs with replaceable cables. Super happy with it because I'm OK with the tradeoff of dealing with the wire instead of dealing with batteries and replacements every 2-3 years. So sure, Apple has made some profit off of wireless buds. But they could make even more profit by adding a headphone jack and allowing folks who want wireless buds to use them. (no, dongles and lightning headphones do not solve this issue -- I want to be able to use the same connector for all my devices, and I want to be able to use it while charging) At least add it to the SE, for Pete's sake.

> But they could make even more profit by adding a headphone jack and allowing folks who want wireless buds to use them.

How would this generate more profit for Apple?

For one thing, I'd buy an iPhone again.

I wonder how many people have actually stopped buying iPhones due to the removal of the minijack. I bet it’s noise to Apple’s revenue. I also expect that they save more in the hardware simplification than they lose on sales.

Probably not a lot. But it's one of those "death by a thousand cuts" things I can't ignore in an iphone purchase. Between that and the fingerprint reader, I'm out. If they brought either back I could justify it.

The iPhone SE2 has a fingerprint reader. It's a lower quality device though.

Looking at my SE2 right now. What you mean lower quality? (Btw it has no minijack)

Not flagship. Non-OLED screen, single rear camera, no face recognition, smaller battery, etc.

GP's requirements were either a fingerprint sensor or headphone jack before switching.

Heequaet4geongeel1bag0xie9inaB4u

That is called less features, not less quality.

I really do miss my headphone jack. Not being able to charge and listen to music at the same time is dumb as hell.

However, my 6 was proper dying, so once they bought out the SE or whatever with a sensible form factor and fingerprint scanner I was convinced it was better than trying to switch

I'm sure it's 100% worth it for them financially. Me not buying an iPhone because it doesn't have a headphone jack means nothing to them.

I think what will hurt them in the long run is their pattern of user-hostility will start to affect their image. For instance:

* Right to repair gaining steam (Apple now introducing some basic form of parts availability)

* Apple eroding their image as a Privacy company (Apple had to delay their "child safety" tools after public outcry)

* iMessage lock-in (Apple users "bullying" Android users due to Apple's hostile UI choices).

Those are just the recent examples that come to mind.

It'll all add up until Apple has a PR problem that actually does start affecting their bottom line, and then they'll have to make concessions that'll make people happy again.

You could always get the dongle to support the wired headphones. My teen daughter is using it now that she has lost her airpods.

Tried it, Apple-made dongles fail with incredible frequency, and non-Apple made ones just don't work.

I used to just put the cable under my shirt.

I get that no cables can be nice and convenient, but routing the wire through a shirt/jacket helps avoid getting caught

edit: lol, an instant downvote - didn't realize I was on Reddit. It was at best a suggestion for when you have to get by with cabled headphones. I'm not on some holy war.

My go to solution for such annoyances is to pass the cable through the inside of my shirt. Not the most elegant solution but saved me a lot oh headache :D

I always feed the cable down the back of my neck and underneath my shirt or jumper. The bonus is that I can take them out of my ears and they'll dangle like a necklace, so I can tuck those under my shirt as well.

I know this comes off as sounding like an old man, but you could also just walk around without your ears plugged up and pay attention to your surroundings.

Just pass the cord through your shirt or under your jacket. #innovation #thinkdifferent #buymystock

I found that I could solve the snagging problem by just running by headphone cable through my shirt.

After using airpods I am never ever going back to wired headphones.

I am sorry but you must be downvoted to prevent your counter opinion from being seen.

Not to mention zero latency. Trying to have multiple people in a car play music/podcasts is a nightmare over bluetooth when you used to be able to just pass an aux cable around.

I bought a Sony that does BT and wired, I love the whynotboth movement personally. Why do we have to choose?

WH-1000xm3 sound much worse when wired. They are made to use internal DAC.

Wouldn't wired use the DAC on the device rather than the headphones? I thought the 3.5mm jack carried an analog signal.

Those Sony headphones do processing to the signal regardless of whether you're using wireless or a 3.5mm. They can still make sound with no power but it feels more like a backup in case the battery is dead. It seems like a sensible design decision given that most users will want them turned on for noise canceling even if they're wired.

That's his point. They're using the device's DAC when wired which is why it doesn't sound as good as when using Bluetooth through the headphones' DAC.

Sure but that's an issue with wired headphones in general, not specific to these.

I mean, I'm pretty sure that DAC on my MBP is better, but it does not fit those headphones well.

I use my xm3 daily and don't notice a difference. I use both methods of connection because sometimes it's quicker to just plug in on some devices, and others it pairs right away. Love these headphones.

That just means your phone's or PC's DAC is crappy compared to the internal one, and any other headphones would sound just as bad.

I have an older pair of JBL E55, which are about 50% cheaper than yours, and on a modern phone they sound slightly better on wire than on wireless, presumably because their internal DAC is mediocre.

In theory they could use an ADC to convert the analog input to digital then run through the same DAC as bluetooth goes

If the original device's DAC has produced a shitty analog signal, the best ADC in the world will only be able to turn it into a shitty digital signal.

The strength of a chain is that of its weakest link.

I have new MBP 14', and even external fiio E10k headphone amp. They work great with my Sennheisers HD 650, but suck with WH-1000mx3 compared to internal AMP.

You can turn them on, and they will use the wired input but pass it through the nice internal DAC.

But the jack output isn't digital. Are you thinking about it's amp?

I used to be like you. Then i tried, for real, a pair of bluetooth headphones.

The disadvantages of the bluetooth is by far outweighed by the wireless advantage. The mobility, flexibility and convenience of no tangles and accidental wire pulling and causing phone to drop - all worth it.

And wireless UX is only going to get better. Wired is dead.

The mobility, flexibility snd convenience of me still sitting on front of the same PC for eight hours?

Use the right tool for the job. Sometimes that's wired headphones. Sometimes that's bluetooth headphones.

Though being able to use the right tool, in circumstances where that is a wired set, can be a problem on some platforms.

The "right tool" might be an adapter or hub.

This is true (iPhones, iPads, and plenty of Android phones these days), but can be mitigated by carrying a USB-C to 3.5 mm audio adapter in the pouch that contains the IEMs. I wish people didn't have to, but it's a straightforward solution that widely improves wired compatibility.

> ... that widely improves wired compatibility.

"Wired compatibility" was ubiquitous before. It didn't have room to "improve". Removing the jack is what broke "wired compatibility".

Needing a dongle for sth is not an "improved" form of using it, when you could have just used it without a dongle.

Adding a small adapter to where you carry your wired headphones fixes the problem of the current reality where many devices do not have audio jacks. My assertion is to provide a practical solution to the current state of affairs, instead of claiming that the present is better than the past state of affairs (where there were ubiquitous audio jacks) due to audio adapters.

Due to forces beyond the individual's control, it's highly unlikely that audio jacks will once more become ubiquitous, so the second-best outcome is for wired headphone users to start carrying an adapter.

That's entirely besides the point.

I've got some Sony bluetooth / noise cancelling headphones, I don't like the lag but that's only an issue for videos and it switches to low latency (low quality) for voice calls. But I really appreciate not managing a cable, it's always in the way, or touching my arm or something (some sensory things really annoy me while sitting at a computer). Plus, great battery life.

And it Just Works. Although my Mac has a tendency to switch back to my speakers (also bluetooth) after ~15 minutes without my input, that's really annoying. Might have to do with the speakers turning themselves off?

> And it Just Works. Although my Mac has a tendency to switch back to my speakers (also bluetooth) after ~15 minutes without my input, that's really annoying.

So, what you're saying is, it doesn't just work!

I promise I’m not trying to be sassy! This is exactly the type of issue I always run into with wireless audio, and basically never experience with wired headphones. I hate these types of little, persistent annoyances.

I don't like wires either, to be clear, but I think they're a small price to pay for their reliability.

I agree completely. Little gnomes never sneak up on me and switch the wire from one device to another, then demand I go through weird unplug/plug rituals involving four levels of deep-presses to get the thing connected back to the device I want, all while 20 people are waiting for me to start a presentation. The signal doesn't randomly drop out or connect to the car that just pulled in the driveway. The batteries don't go dead.

The point is predictability. Wires have it, bluetooth doesn't. Yes, they predictably snag on things sometimes. In my experience, this annoyance happens far less frequently than any of the many annoyances that bluetooth brings.

There's one major annoyance with Sony headphones and earbuds - no way to mute/unmute yourself - you must walk back to your laptop to do it. Why, oh why, Sony?

Do you never get up to make a drink or something?

I have a wireless headset for my PC and it's hard to go back to wired. I have much nicer wired headphones, but I rarely switch to them. Being able to get up and walk around while not interrupting what I'm listening to is great (yes desktop speakers would let me do the same but they also let everyone hear what I'm hearing). Also with wired headphones I had a constant issue where no matter how I routed them, they would end up tangled in my chair. It was super easy to think they were resting safely on my desk, only to turn my chair and fling them to the floor.

I will stick with wired headphones for the overwhelming majority of usecases. There are just not enough downsides to cables compared to never needing to switch audio devices in a conferencing app, awkwardly change OS settings before jumping on a call, or ever charging my headphones.

It's also pretty much confirmed at this point that the next pair of AirPods won't be using bluetooth - which they will get a lot of shit for but is probably necessary to address a lot of these issues.

That also further increases the interoperability problem though, if I can't use my headphones with non-Apple devices even after going through the pairing dance. (Unless Apple uses some other open protocol, which I doubt!)

Yes, AirPods are currently surprisingly easy to switch from an iPhone to a Windows laptop (click open the Bluetooth menu and connect to AirPods), which is quite similar to the behavior I use to switch between AirPods and a Mac (I rarely use the "Switch to AirPods" notification on Macs that pops up seemingly-inconsistently).

I hope it's an open protocol that operates on WiFi spectrum. Every implementation of Bluetooth is horrible, and you start to wonder if the Bluetooth spec itself is the issue..

Fwiw, Bluetooth does operate on the same spectrum as WiFi. But I agree about the Bluetooth spec.

I hope you mean the 5 or 6GHz range. Bluetooth already runs at 2.4GHz, but that frequency band is cluttered as all heck.

An open protocol would be excellent though.

Yeah sure, I really don't know much about wireless spectrum. It just needs to be something that existing hardware supports.

If Apple does go proprietary you won't be any worse off, assuming they still support Bluetooth (and I'd be very surprised if they stopped supporting Bluetooth).

They’ll keep Bluetooth. The “find my” airtag eco system depends on it. Plus car audio and external speakers.

I always wonder if the removal of the headphone jack was a ploy to get iPhone users to use Bluetooth so the find my network worked better..

I don't think pushing users to Bluetooth is a ploy to get more users to use Bluetooth. Toggling Bluetooth off only means the user-land applications can't use Bluetooth, the system might still use it for location-based services, if those are enabled. The "Find My" network would probably do a similar thing of piggybacking on such a feature.

I understand it’d be an issue to many people, but I had Airpods for 5? years now and not even once paired them to anything other than an Apple device. I have non-apple BT speakers but don’t have any BT transmitting devices that aren’t Apple… my LG TV maybe (which I use with an Apple TV) but I assume pairing them would be a pain.

Is Apple working on their own proprietary Bluetooth or what are future AirPods gonna use to connect?

>The mobility, flexibility and convenience of no tangles and accidental wire pulling and causing phone to drop - all worth it.

You can thread the wired headphone/IEM cord under your shirt, or even over your ear and down your back [0] to prevent tangles and wire pulling that causes a phone to drop.

It's less convenient than wireless earphones, but it solves the problem, and comes with advantages (better noise isolation and sound quality with certain models, plus you don't need to worry about the batteries degrading and having to buy a new pair after possibly 2-3 years, so you save money). I'm considering switching back to wired after my current AirPods pair dies for these advantages.

>Wired is dead

Not at all. You can get high-quality, professional earphones (in-ear monitors or IEMs) that fit in a pouch in your pocket, which are great for people in loud environments (better than noise cancelling due to their noise isolation); who appreciate music (sound quality is noticeably better for any genre); or who do professional audio work.

[0] https://imgur.com/QOSNA9T

Sure, you can work around the limitations of wired head phones. But at the end it's just not worth the trouble for many of us. I ditched my wired head phones years ago and haven't regretted it.

Or you can work around the limitations of wireless headphones. At the end of the day both choices have advantages and consumers can freely chose one or the other (or both for different situations!) just so long as no manufacturer is stupid enough to remove headphone jacks from their mobile music devices we'll all be good.

It's a dying breed, but there are still many phones with audio jack. I don't think it will disappear completely.

Having cycled through WH1000XM3, XM4, AirPods Pro, I am back to my trusty Shure SE215 that I use wired.

— They never deafen me with connected/disconnected sounds (which can never be configured quiet enough) or music briefly playing at insane volume after switching or connecting.

— I know I get the source quality.

— I would never lose one randomly (always a chance with “true wireless” models).

— I don’t get weird phased low-frequency rumble from active noise compensation gone wonky.

— Most of all, their passive noise suppression with Shure’s black sleeves, depending on exact noise profile either beats or is on par with top-of-the-line active isolation (both according to rtings’ test benches and my subjective experience), and does not end when battery runs out inevitably at the most inconvenient time.

Addendum: 1) I connect them via a tiny Ikko Zerda DAC, which I started using way back when I still had a phone with a headphone jack (this is subjective, but with lossless sources I hear more detail—as in literally small instrument parts I didn’t hear before in complex arrangements—compared to built-in DAC). 2) I generally pass the wire under the top layer of clothing, and personally taking an earbud out and letting it dangle is about as difficult as switching on the transparent mode on AirPods (and without audio degradation inherent to such modes).

As far as their SE215 model goes, the sound, isolation, and ergonomics are great, but I've always had issues with the cable breaking at the ear curve next to the connection point to the earbuds.

Now that you say it, I’m not using the original cable, and I don’t recall what happened to it because it’s been so long ago (could’ve been a similar issue to the one you described).

I couldn’t find a Shure original cable to replace mine with right away, so I got a compatible one and been rolling with it ever since. It’s slightly thinner, more flexible and without the thicker malleable parts near earbud connections. I was cautious about those differences at first, but in the end grown to prefer it more than the original, these thin wires wrap around my ears just fine.

As a side note, one of the things I treasure about the design of these IEMs is the replaceability of the cable. The IEMs themselves can probably survive for ages, which gives a nice feeling among the increasingly disposable electronics—I just hope the model would still exist on the market when something eventually happens to my unit.

It's been awhile since I used Shure's in ear monitors, but they once sent me a kit with one of everything in that part of their product line. Nice stuff, and if you can tolerate in-ear stuff, incredible sound. But all the cables failed over time. Not heavily used either. They were great about sending replacements, but they were very aware of the reliability issues. And these were monitors that had MSRPs over $800.

Cables (as well as sleeves) are certainly the disposable part of IEMs like these. Earbuds themselves proved incredibly reliable to me (compared to AirPods Pro at least, which I had to exchange once and which still had problems after that).

Also, SE215 cost much, much less than US$800. More like $100.

Yeah, I have two pairs of SE215s for convenience. But, replacement OEM cables cost 20-30$, and maybe it's the geometry of my ears, but I've had to replace 3-4 cables by now, since the cables, OEM or not, kept failing at the same section, at that metal wire you bend over your ear.

I see. Well, YMMV but you could try a different type of cable. There are cables not using metal wires that you bend around the ears, but the same thin flexible cable throughout the entire length. I have not had problems with one in more than a couple of years of use.

Did you try putting the wire under your clothes or something?

That's incredibly inconvenient and often uncomfortable.

>Wired is dead

For as long as we both live, manufacturers will make wired headphones, and people will buy them. Latency and quality might not be important to the casual user, but for some wired headphones and speakers will be, and will always be, essential.

I am still like OP. I have tried three pairs of airpods and currently use a Bose Bluetooth headphones with an optional attachable wire. Airpods are very painful for more than two devices, get lost, go through the wash, forget the charging cable, etc etc. The problem for me is that apple removed the headphone jack even as an option, and many other phone manufacturers copied that on all but their budget models.

If one of your concerns is that you end up washing your headphones, you’re right - I don’t think you’re ready for wireless earbuds.

It's possible it wasn't your intent but this reads as condescending to me. It implies a progression where people can become "ready" to use a more advanced product rather than the product not being a good fit for the person which I think is a good way to blind yourself to real product problems. Instead of just saying "people drop their phones, maybe they aren't ready for expensive things" you can realize the incredible market that phone cases represent. Or in this case, maybe there is a market for waterproof wireless earbuds that survive the wash, that counteracts the additional manufacturing cost (probably not, but maybe).

Obviously the airpods are great for a great number of people, and I bought them too. I think it's safe to say Apple made good tradeoffs for their business. I ended up switching back to heaphones with a wired option and then switching phones to get a headphone jack because the dongle annoyed me enough. I am very much in a minority - don't get me wrong, apple will not miss my business. But that they lost it should be a conscious decision as "this won't work for everyone, but it will work for most people really well by default" - not, "when people are ready for it they will see the light". The former forces you to acknowledge and quantify who it won't work for when finding product market fit, and the later assumes you don't need to do that.

I agree. I only got a pair of earbuds because they cam free with my phone but I was surprised by how lifechanging they were. Not in an important way, but in a low key and pervasive way.

There are two situations where earbuds are far more convenient:

Getting ready in the morning - I can put the earbuds in once I'm out of the shower and dried off and listen to a podcast. They don't get in the way of getting dressed, moving around etc.. This is just not workable with wired headphones and my partner has already started work so I can't use a speaker, and even if I could I'm moving between different rooms and floors of the house.

Driving - getting headphones out of your pocket, untangling them and putting them in is basically impossible to do (safely) while driving. But earbuds are never tangled I can just open the case and put them in all while my eyes never leave the road. Means I can make phonecalls or listen to stuff easily and safely. This is a particular case of them just being quicker and easier to put in than wired earbuds - no having to thread it down your jumper just because you want to watch a 5 minute YouTube video.

>Their battery life was infinite.

However, the life of the cable was a few months at best in my experience.

Well, you had to pay more for better headphones with better cables. But wireless headphones are expensive anyway. (And have non-replaceable batteries which will also permanently die after a couple years.)

The best cables still break when they're moving a lot. The important thing is for the headphones to have replaceable cables. But only the high-end headphones and earbuds have that feature.

I can only speak from my own experience, but I've been using the same set of wired KZ ZSN in-ear-monitors for the past few years. They're nothing ground-breaking, but they cost under $25.

The wires loop back behind my ears so they don't get pulled out easily, the wires have yet to short out, and they are replaceable in case I ever want or need to replace them. I almost always use them with my phone, so the USB-C-to-3.5mm dongle that came with my phone is typically attached to the end.

I don't mean to shill for this or any other brand in particular, but I'm pretty sure there are several affordable, decent quality earbuds/IEMs out there with replaceable cables.

Replaceable cables are a game changer in this space. The buds will last for years and years, and make up the bulk of the cost of a set. The cable could get ruined by one unlucky event... but if you have a couple of backup cables like me, it doesn't really matter. You can buy replacement cables off of Aliexpress for <$10.

I mentioned this elsewhere, but I've never had a headphone cable fail. Including a cheap pair of airport earbuds that were used weekly for air travel (tightly wrapped, basically a worst case scenario for cable strain) for multiple years, and the detachable cable that sees daily use on my 598Cs.

And I can buy a lot of $17 wired earbuds for the price of one set of AirPods. At my rate of failure, literally a lifetime supply.

What were you doing with your headphone cables? I've been using the same one with my current pair since I bought them three years ago. Prior to switching to cans, I used the same set of cheap wired earbuds for five years - and they're still working

I've had cables go bad in multiple sets of headphones that I barely even used, let alone subjected to the expected rigors of travel or heavy use. As far as I can tell, a lot of cheap 3.5mm plugs have strain relief that's basically just ornamental, and even a modest amount of flexing or vibration will quickly break one of the wires.

>What were you doing with your headphone cables?

Getting them caught on door handles, mostly.

I'm smiling at this while enjoying music on my 20 years unmodified Senheiser HD25.

I wouldn't let the lack of a headphone jack deter you from upgrading a phone if you wanted. You can get one of those adapter things and just leave it attached to your headphones if you wanted. I know people think it's annoying that you even have to do this but it's an option. I bet you can get one for free from a friend even.

I do have a nostalgic feelings for the iPhone 4s and headphones. I wish there were products out there that excited me in the same way my first iPhone did.

> You can get one of those adapter things and just leave it attached to your headphones if you wanted.

The problem is that I’d have to unplug that adapter to use my headphones with a device other than my phone, including other Apple devices like my Macbook. I would subsequently loose the adapter, guaranteed.

If the world could agree to use USB-C for everything, that might work, but Apple—who started this mess—is a prime holdout there.

Yea I agree, just offering a solution. I am excited for Apple to switch to USB-C for the iPhone as well. It's quite irritating that it's not... one cable to rule them all! But then they went and added HDMI and SD back to the Mac, so now they have a better argument since they aren't actually doing the one-cable approach.

A combination is the best, got some cheap noise cancelling JBL BT phones and if you plug a cable it'll always use that (they even work as dumb headphones when turned off), pull the cable and they'll happily go for BT.

I think it goes to show how much “just works enough “ consumers are happy to tolerate for wireless over other advantages of wired.

I remember early consumer wi- fi was just garbage compared to wired and… we still used it happily.

Granted sometimes we go back… my cars Bluetooth is so maddening I use a cable instead.

FWIW, the proliferation of video calls over my laptop has pushed me back to wired internet at my desk. Combined with wired headphones - I have so much less latency than any of my co-workers. It's nice to not have to play the "can you hear me" song and dance.

I did that until I updated the wifi in my house. There’s a combination wired/wireless wire plate under my desk, but I don’t bother wiring it into my work computer, because the wifi is faster than what the cheap USB C adapter can offer.

Faster and lower latency are not the same things.

> the cheap USB C adapter

I have to ask, what kind of internet speeds do you have where even a cheap wired adapter can't beat it? That's pretty incredible.

You getting a lot of latency over wifi?

I find wifi almost entirely dies around the time I get wonky latency... but having said that everyone's wifi situation is different depending on network, building / home structure and etc.

950 down, 50 up. Wifi will pull 450 easy, but my hub will only do 100, despite claims to the contrary.

450 is good enough for my use case, so it’s easier to just not worry about it and avoid running another wire up the sit stand desk. If I upgrade my hub to something that’ll pull the claimed 1G, I might change. Or maybe not. I dunno. Literally nothing I do on the internet can get close to saturating it.

Edit: wifi adds a mere 5ms of latency in my office. I consider this beneath my notice for basically everything but gaming. And even there it probably is meaningless given my relatively low skill level.

> my hub will only do 100

Oof, that sucks.

5ms per round trip adds up, especially when you add in every other source of latency in your chain. I've also found that, thanks to general RF noise from everything being wireless these days, latency spikes occur much more often over wi-fi than wired.

YMMV, of course. Always worth measuring your own experience.

I went back to wireless specifically because I was noticing issues on that hub. I went to the trouble to setup control plane to disable wifi when Ethernet was plugged in, and zoom performance tanked. Going back to wifi solved it. I think that the adapter was dropping packets, but I never bothered to triage since wifi works great in this house.

It’s worth mentioning that my setup has very, very low latency. Lag between me and the speed test server in city is 5ms wired, 10ms wireless. My router is way overpowered for what I ask of it, so throughput and latency tends to be very good.

To be fair, my wifi setup is a bit … extra. I’m running 5 APs, two switches, a controller, and a dedicated router, with a dedicated AP for my office that’s a combo wired/wireless outlet. I’ve turned it down so that it’s basically only serving my office, and it has a dedicated cat6 backhaul to the network cabinet, no sharing airspace with other APs. If I hadn’t gone to all this trouble, I’d probably upgrade my hub and go wired.

If your dock is only able to negotiate a 100Mbit connection despite theoretically being 1000Mbit, and you're experiencing dropped packets, it might not be your dock. That sounds like an issue with ethernet cabling. Bad cabling will usually result in ports not being able to negotiate their max potential throughput, and sometimes they'll negotiate higher than what they can realistically do.

It’s not the cable. Same exact cable to other nearby machines gets the maximum throughput.

It might be the laptop. That machine has always been more finicky than other laptops I’ve had, and it’s way less stable than my Mac mini.

I agree, but I'm going to defend the wifi case a little. Ethernet doesn't work if you're using a laptop, because it defeats the purpose of having a portable computer in the first place. You either have to be able to work offline, or you have to stay next to an ethernet plug.

I said above that wired headphones have infinite battery life. I suppose I could say the same about a desktop computer versus a laptop, but I don't think that would be fair.

Not to mention how the wired apple earphones are way better in terms of audio quality during calls than airpods (own both, and airpod "pro" to boot). Heck, during most calls, my colleagues tell me that the sound is way better when I use my macbook air builtin microphone than when I use my airpods .. on zoom, ms teams, whatever. Not to mention how my airpods pro started discharging in a skewed manner - with one ear piece discharging faster than the other. None of these are problems with the wired earphones.

Some people hate to be physically tethered to their desk from their head. Maybe wireless headphones have to be paired and charged, but that beats standing up an pulling your laptop to the floor while your headphones are jerked off your head. And nothing is better than being able to pace around while on a call.

Wired headphones have an amazingly simple, reliable, and consistent pairing method with devices. Little kids and senior citizens can operate wired headphones with ease.

My wired headphones had a frustrating tendency to pair with unwanted devices like elbows, chairs, desks, and other protrusions. This tended to unpair them from either my device or my ears.

edit: Oh, and to themselves. Knotted up cords leading to wires failing caused more than one set of mine to only work in one ear.

> Their battery life was infinite.

That's true, but only because they used your device's battery.

It takes more power for your phone to drive headphones than it does to transmit a bluetooth signal. This is not such a big issue any more since recent phones have crazy long battery life as do recent bluetooth headphones. In 2017 it was a bigger issue.

> It takes more power for your phone to drive headphones than it does to transmit a bluetooth signal.

...are you sure? And, is that still true even once you consider the extra encoding the phone’s CPU has to do?

I was under the impression that conventional 3.55mm jacks output exceedingly little power...

It's true but there are a bunch of little caveats. How big are the drivers, at what volume are you listening, headphone impedance, etc...

These days it really don't matter. Phone have ample battery capacity.

As someone who falls more in the "wired4life" category, the power draw of headphones has never been an issue, Even back in the naughts. That place of honor is reserved for websites, apps, and cell radios.

Ironically, with the loss of the 2.5mm jack power has a greater chance to be an issue, since your headphones and power have to occupy the same jack.

I prefer not being at the end of a leash. To each, their own.

A hook is so much better than a leash?

Cars these days are the same -- you know what didn't need fancy pants computer tools to diagnose? Horses. Let's bring back horses.

You might love your car, the horse will love you back.

I've broken at least three or four pairs of wired headphones in the gym/while working out getting them caught in something and then the cable being jerked and broken, not the mention the intense annoyance of the cable always ending up in a horrible knot in my pocket.

With my Airpods Pro, my original pair are working great, no breakages, amazing for working out with, no cable to get tangled. I love them.

Don’t forget the super fun untangling puzzle that you get to solve before each use! Or the eardrum damaging fun of having the buds ripped out of your ears every time the cord catches on something. “Just works” indeed!

I love wired headphones, but I have never had a pair whose cable didn't short out within a year; I got to the point where I'd buy replacement cables with the headphones. I've got B&O's, NAD's, and Sennheisers, both open and closed, and: I might as well keep them in a lighted display case, because I never use them anymore. Once Apple came out with the Max AirPods, I was done with wired headphones. I don't want to be! But they're too much better a product.

I think this is a fascinating aspect to the overall wired-vs-wireless debate. Some people simply have a problem with wires and some don't. I have three pairs of over-the-ear wired headphones that have been with me for 7, ~10, and >20 years, respectively, and none of them have ever had any cable damage. I've never ended up with flaky wiring on a cheap pair of apple earbuds, either. The very cheap earbuds that came with my HTC G-2 did end up with flaky cables but they're an aberration in my experience. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, I really don't have any grudge against wires, but I do loathe the fidgety connectivity of bluetooth.

Of course, I'm also baffled about how everyone I know and hear about seems to be unable to keep their macbook power cable from self-destructing, and I just keep accumulating them because they never die. My favorite one is still a MagSafe 1 from, I think, 2012.

[edit: in retrospect, perhaps the fact that I have a "favorite" power cable is some kind of red flag. Re-evaluating my life...]

Agreed, but I wonder why all the complaints about wired headphones using a lightning\USBC 3.5 mm adapter. I don't find it obtrusive, and the iPhone (and many phones now) can be charged wirelessly when the adapter is in place.

It's a problem when I need to plug my headphones into anything that isn't an iPhone. Based on past experience, I expect I would loose the adapter.

Yea, but can you just get up and use the bathroom while still listening in a meeting with wired headphones?

if they're plugged into my phone, sure

if i'm on the laptop, by the time i take five paces away the sound quality on bluetooth is so bad it's basically unusable anyway

lol

Wired headphones also switch between devices almost instantaneously. Or at least, when you unplug from one device and plug into another, you're guaranteed to have it switched to the right device.

That being said, I use my Airpod Pros almost all the time, because I'm hooked on wireless and being able to stand up and walk around, etc.

I found I was just getting sick of the faff and bulk with my wired ATH-M50x + FiiO A3 amp. I have tried most of the big bluetooth buds (Airpods 3, Buds Pro, XM4, Audio Technicas), I absolutely hated them.

I've ended up using the FiiO UTWS5 (over ear bluetooth hooks that connect via standard IEM connectors) + Moondrop Katos, the setup is sublime. Fantastic sound quality, very reliable and great battery life with no faf and can fit it in my pocket.

If you still want wired, the Apple dongle actually has a DAC/amp that is regarded surprisingly highly in the audiophile headphone community. Just remember to charge your phone.

I think most of the mainstream options for wireless stuff will make hi-fi enjoyers miserable, you just have to look at something a bit more interesting.

The only disadvantage is you don't get so much of the supporting features. Ambient mode isn't great, there's no ANC (I don't really care about these things), and it doesn't have the fancy pair-switching integrated stuff, so wouldn't be great if you switch between laptop and phone.

But for audio, we've reached a point where it is absolutely excellent.

> Y’know what headphones really did “just work” though? Wired headphones, circa 2017.

And you know what's a major annoyance right? Untangling wired headphones.

I upgraded my 6s finally.. and the lack of headphone jack is frankly painful. I can’t just plug into my car, home office, and office headphones.. I lost the little dongle..

I think I’m going to buy 3 of those adapters and leave them where I use my headphones. What a waste.

Wireless changing helps the charge while listening though, so that’s a plus.

You may be interested in the Senheisser Momentum 3’s which have excellent connectivity and a fallback audio cable.

You know what just works? Natural sounds from your environment. No need for equipment, no wires to snag, no pairing or plugging, you could even do it in your sleep. Oh, and it is zero emissions.

Courage, indeed.

And this is why I am not even typing this. I’m just imagining things, because it’s free and good for the environment.

Hahaha perfection. I love you.

https://www.theonion.com/i-have-an-ipod-in-my-mind-181958401...

I, too, have a 6S and my travel headphones are wired. Partly because they work with any device with a headphone jack, partly because of the battery life issue, but mostly because of my phone slips down the side of the aeroplane seat I can fish the bugger back up again with the headphone cord!

For out of the house, I would never go back to wired in-ears anymore. Untangling cables and the occasional yank out of your ear is not user friendly.

For outside, I actually find wireless headphones to sound better for three main reasons:

- Better fit. Proper fit is essential for good sound and I rarely get a good fit on wired in-ears due to the constant pull on the cord.

- Microphonics (cable rubbing noise). Microphonics is very obvious and annoying. It is far more obvious than for example the difference between AAC and lossless. Audiophile reviewers hardly ever evaluate microphonics, because they test under ideal conditions behind their desk. Cable noise is not considered part of the driver's sound signature, but in real life it has a huge impact of what comes in your ear.

- Noise cancelling. Music sounds better without bus engine sounds.

> Noise cancelling. Music sounds better without bus engine sounds.

That's nothing to do with wireless though?

I'm a bit of a convert to (Anker .. 'SoundCore P2' I think) wireless earphones (AirPod style, not sports-style-round-back-of-neck), but for ages I used noise cancelling wired earphones, with a little Bluetooth receiver when I wanted them wireless that I thought was the best of both worlds. I now think no wire at all is nicer though. (But probably not if I had to pay Apple prices! These Anker ones were £30.)

You can do both tbh. Wireless headphones are great because if you charge them relatively frequently, they're a light, painless pack. I'm pretty into high fidelity audio, but I'm not going to be walking around w/ my DT 990 pros. But if I'm out running errands, being able to break out the AirPods is amazing.

And realistically, it's not that significant to just buy an adapter and keep it permanently affixed to your headphones. Will be better if/when apple fully moves off of lightning to usb-c but I have found that when I want a high fidelity experience w/ music I'm more likely to be sitting and plugged in anyways.

What's a headphone jack?

> And this is why I’m currently typing my comment on an iPhone 6S...

You can get aux adapters for newer iphones for around $10 - great for when you can’t find your airpods

I thought this was a pretty reasonable compromise, except that whenever I need mine I can't find it. Today, I know exactly where it is, but that's 15 miles away. The funny thing about this problem is that the experience only suffers on Apple devices when I can't find the dongle. I can use my nice fancy favorite headphones everywhere else with no problem. Apple is not about to convince me to toss my favorite headphones just because they are stubborn about headphone jacks; sorry.

Note that it also causes a problem that bugs me daily, which is that I can't use my headset when my power is low and I need to plug my phone in. They make those little "splitter" dongles that allegedly allow you to do both, but in my experience, they only work about 50% of the time, and while you're on your call, your phone secretly stops charging and goes dead, or sometimes the moment you plug it in, it puts up an alert that says "unsupported device" and neither the power nor the headset work at all. I've tried three or four different brands on three different iPhones and they're all so flaky I've stopped even trying. I wish Apple would just make one and stand behind the quality and make me pay $10 for it. I'd be grumpy about it, but at least it would work.

You can use a wireless charger for this exact scenario

My phone doesn't support wireless charging.

Wired headphones took forever to put on though. You’d have to untangle them when taking them out your pocket. And when commuting I’d tuck the wire down my shirt so it didn’t flap everywhere and get caught on things, but that meant taking your phone out your pocket pulled on it.

I misplaced my AirPods for a bit a while ago and switched to wired headphones and couldn’t believe I had put up with it for years before I got AirPods.

My laptop headphone jack is 1-2ft away from me during every video call and I still prefer AirPods (on Linux no less!)

Sound quality via wired audio is also much better, unless your particular phone doesn't have decent DAC/analogue circuitry. I can't bring myself to listen to music on wireless. I don't even know that Apple takes advantage of their walled garden to do better than the usual Bluetooth protocols.

> From https://9to5mac.com/2021/12/30/apple-airpods-bluetooth-limit...

> One of the most notable comments in the interview came from Geaves when asked whether Bluetooth could be “holding back” the AirPods hardware and “stifling sound quality. In his response, Geaves danced around criticizing Bluetooth directly, but acknowledged that Apple would really like a wireless standard that allows for more bandwidth.

I own a pair of Airpods for work, and they're fine for a couple hours of Zoom calls every day. For non-work, I have a pair of headphones with a lightning input. It's still annoying, because I can't charge my phone or transfer data while listening to music, and I still disagree with Apple's courageous decision to remove the 3.5mm jack, but it's an okay solution.

They also snagged on everything, got tied up in knots in your pocket, the wires would give out all the time requiring you to buy new ones, were obnoxious to use when exercising, and limited the physical distance you could move from the device you were using to about 2 feet.

There are issues with wireless headphones, but they also solve a lot of genuine problems with wired ones.

That's just not true. They never just worked for me at least.

- Cables would get cluttered in my clothes

- Cables would eventually all break at one point

- The cables were a mess in a any jacket / bag

- The microphone was making weird sounds when they hit my face and and people would complain

- etc.

I’m surprised you are not using a typewriter.

Yeah, I thought wireless headphones were a gimmick I didn't need, I didn't want to worry about having to charge headphones, etc.

I ended up with a pair and turns out wireless headphones were a giant QOL improvement. I can run around do chores while my computer/phone charges upstairs and listen to music at the same time. I'd never use earbuds though, I absolutely can't stand anything inside my ear canal.

I still want my phone/computer to have a headphone jack in it, and mine does.

I still just my ath M50xs for everything, its lovely, but its very annoying to use with my newer phone

> Wired headphones, circa 2017.

I hope we never go back to those days. That constant struggle with the wires, having to take the phone with you, too short wire for desktop usage, the wire getting in the way when moving/jogging, etc...

Caveat: This reply got a longer than intended and broadens a bit, but please indulge me because I think you are also onto something I have been scratching my head about for decades now, amidst outrage for questioning tech dogma.

I agree with you to an overwhelming degree. I also had an iPhone 6S until about a year ago and I have to say the upgrade to the iNext Pro was pretty underwhelming in many, if not most ways when objectively evaluated.

I have also had AirPods for however long they have been out and even though I would agree with the rebuttal to your point that many other BT headphones are notably even more glitchy, I also paid about 5 times less for some of them that work almost just as well in most ways and aspects.

There seems to be an odd kind of self-delusion going on where somehow whatever is new, is assumed to not only also be better, but significantly better, when if one just takes a first principles approach to evaluating that proposition, at best you find marginal or incremental improvement of diminishing returns.

The 6S was released over 6 years ago, is it even doubly as good, let alone exponentially more capable? There is a huge hurdle in overcoming the reality that the answer is no.

There is all this lamenting about sustainability and environment this and climate change that, but for some reason, e.g., an old Apple device (picking on them because I believe they are the highest standard bar) cannot perform as well due to simple UI and UX changes?

There is seriously something wrong with the whole matrix and I have not been able to get any kind of satisfactory answer as to why, e.g., an old 1st (or 2nd) gen iPad Air all the sudden cannot perform †h same simple, core tasks it performed exceedingly well when it was new, that being loading safari and less than demanding website like HN.

What has changed in the 9 years since the 1st gen iPad Air came out that all the sudden browsing is now an extremely demanding task on the device? It seems like intentional and fraudulent designed obsolescence. Where are the environmentally concerned drawing attention to this like I am?

Just imagine if your car got updates every year, and then you find that 9 years later all the sudden the same engine has 100 less horsepower and can't get up a moderately sized hill anymore. That's not suspect to anyone else?

Again, I would love for someone to explain how I am wrong, that I cannot expect a product I buy to retain the same performance for the same actions/tasks when nothing else has changed. Does the CPU age and die off?

We should all be demanding that a device must retain its performance in all aspects of the original function. Everything else is fraud. Please for anyone compelled to, refrain from your "you don't know how it works" comments, that is not the case, nor helpful, and rather blind to reality.

And also, you could pair them with your handheld device in 1980.

MPOW M30 just work for me.

> OP should try using another brand of Bluetooth headphones for a week

Extensive user of various BT headphones on Android for few years now - went through everything from cheap Corwin E7 to Galaxy Buds to Bose QC to latest one Sony WH-1000XM4 - had minor issues with the Galaxy Buds - had to wiggle them in the case to get the charging going but other than that all of the other ones work really well - Sony being the king of the hill - even two devices work as expected and the sound quality is good.

I’m a huge fan of the Sony high-end line, and am currently using the WH-1000XM4 myself. They’re excellent, but they do share quite a few of the annoyances listed in the OP article (in particular the delay when going from call to audio and vice versa, and the audio quality degradation; though, truth be told, I believe that’s a macOS issue), and they have their own annoyances. Most prominently, the utterly useless “second device pairing” audio message that plays for a full four seconds and drowns out whatever else you were listening to. I routinely need to ask people on a call to repeat what they said because of this. Yet Sony arrogantly states that this message is somehow “important” and therefore can’t be disabled.

Oh yeah I forgot about the second device pairing message - definite annoyance! I actually have used it with work macOS laptop (Big Sur) a few times but did not notice anything odd.

I believe the audio quality degradation when using the mic is a limitation of Bluetooth bandwidth. It switches to a different profile capable of sending and receiving audio instead of only receiving.

Yes, it switches to a different audio codec, that’s unavoidable due to bandwidth limitations. However, macOS insists on using a worse codec than necessary (SCO instead of SBC) and, at least with my MX4 headphones, this badly scrambles audio, at least intermittently. I’ve stopped using the headphone microphone because it was unbearable. I’ve tried playing with the bluetooth settings but nothing seems to fix this.

It's definitely not an issue with bandwidth, instead it's an issue of standardization. There just doesn't exist a bluetooth profile that supports high quality duplex audio communications between two devices. It's pathetic.

It doesn't exist because of bandwidth...

I struggle to believe that Bluetooth 5, which supposedly allows for a total of 2mbit/s transfer can't allow for a better codec to be used when a stereo stream of SBC is about 300kb/s. However, I'll be the first to admit that bluetooth is not my area of expertise, and my statement here is mostly driven by disbelief about the fact that we can't get better audio quality out of a bluetooth headset these days.

EDIT: Oh wait, the reason HSP uses low bandwidth codecs is because the standard makes a trade-off in favor of latency and non-blocking comms. Clearly, there are good reasons.

There are vendor A2DP codecs that support duplex audio (faststream; aptx-ll optionally) but very few devices implement them. Software support is also fairly bad, although on Linux Pipewire does support them.

Also iirc CSR has a vendor codec (Auristream) in SCO transport that supposedly provides higher quality. Not sure how much better it is, or what software supports it.

So certainly better duplex quality is achievable. But there may be some licensing, hardware, or software support constraints that have prevented them from becoming more common.

I have a pair of XM4s, I could never get two devices (Ubuntu laptop and Android phone) to work right without getting atrocious sound quality ("headset/handsfree profile") on one.

Adding another voice in the choir of "just use wired headphones" -- I have never had a pair of wireless Bluetooth earphones that make sense from a usability standpoint and at this point I am pretty soured on the whole asset class. My wired headphones just work and give me none of these issues!

I have a cheap pair of SoundPEATS I got off of Amazon for $23. They don't suffer these issues. They "just work" with my Android phone and Thinkpad running Windows.

I had these $20 pair of Anker bluetooth earbuds and they just worked. I paired them once and they were effortless to use for years on my iPhone. Just hold a button down for 3 seconds and they're on and ready in seconds.

They even went through the wash, twice. But then I lost them.

Yes, I am daily struggling to connect my Sony MX4 headphones in a way the microphone also works so I can use it with Google Meetings. I have re-paired them already more often than my AirPods.

I have Google's Pixel Bud A series and they have none of these issues to be honest. By far the biggest issue is that they don't let you connect to more than one device simultaneously. Fine if you only use them with your phone, but a pain if you want to use them with a computer too.

Same here. I love my Pixel Buds. However, they are setup on all my devices, I just have to go and pick to connect depending on which device I want to use it with. Not sure if there's a way around that, for any Bluetooth device.

I don't see why it couldn't just maintain connections to two devices simultaneously and mix the audio. I'm pretty sure there are Bluetooth headphones that do do that. Battery life is the only reason I can think of but they should still give the option.

Get some jabra 75Ts. Problems solved.

Agreed, Jabras work great without the issues listed here.

Also agreed. I have been using Jabra earbuds daily for about four years and they would perfectly.

I had to return mine because the kept popping out, regardless of tip size or material. Now I have the Galaxy Buds Pro, which not only sound better to me (Jabras have IEM sound that I dislike), but also have none of the problems described. And while the do back out, they don't pop out, so it's manageable,

Almost all of the issues you described I have also experienced with AirPods.

Sometimes going into the Bluetooth menu and selecting them is not even enough to convince them to play audio from my phone. I had to get out of bed and turn off the Bluetooth on my laptop.

So your argument for why Airpods suck is that "hey, everything else sucks too"? I thought Apple was supposed to be a shining beacon of simplicity, hence they should absolutely "just work".

I bought my first pair of Airpod Pros recently. The previous two years I was using Bluedio T Elf 2 that I paid $17 for on Amazon. The sound quality and feature set is obviously much better with the Airpods, but not 10X better despite costing 10X the price.

The Bluedios were better for podcasts than music due to their middling sound quality, but they paired properly most of the time and worked without issue.

Funny, I've had all those problems and more with my Airpods Pro.

The most annoying one is that if I pair my Airpods to my mac, they stop auto connecting to my android phone even when they are not in range of my mac. Probably by design

Hopefully all those problems will go away one day. Apple is rumoured to be working on a new wireless connection to achieve lossless quality, which would mean a more modern interaction. The Airpods don't solve any Bluetooth problems, they hide them.

I've had a pair of Huawei FreeLace Pro for about a year now, using them with an iPhone, and the only issue out of those you described, I experienced, was the "re-pair once in every blue moon", which is an issue that seems to be pretty universal across bluetooth devices.

They support multiple devices, but no automatic switching, it's just a button short-cut to switch between them, works quite nicely for switching from my iPhone to my iPad and back.

My airpods have constant issues. Maybe you should take notice that Apple's products don't have the simplicity of setup they were once known for...

i dont have any of these issues with galaxy buds pro...

I actually don't have any of those problems with galaxy buds live but absolutely hate the touch controls. They are so inconsistent. Sometimes it registers a touch. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it does but doesn't actually perform the action to I have so do it again.

Sony bluetooth is wonderful! The pair is lasting me the longest any earphone every have

Owning Sony XM4s, Galaxy Buds Pros, Bose QC, and Airpods Pros: that's an extreme take. All of these devices "just work" and "don't just work" in nearly the same ways.

The microphone quality is a tin can on all of them. Among my friends in Discord, anytime someone logs on with a shit mic the meme is "dude are you using airpods?!" They usually are. Or any earbeans. Because they're all bad.

The AV desync is an equal issue on both of them. BT headphones are basically useless for any realtime application (think: playing a digital piano).

This may just be me, but: I have no idea what the "automatic device switching" airpods feature is. I have a Mac. I have an iPhone. If I want to switch my Airpods from iPhone to the Mac, I have to go to the bluetooth menu in the toolbar, and click the Airpods on the Mac... just like the XM4s. To go back, I go into the bluetooth quick settings menu and click Airpods Pros. Its exactly the same. Like, ever since they announced this feature, I feel like either the world entered a collective psychosis on what this feature does, or I'm getting old and I'm missing something, but its exactly the same (and, not that bad; exactly how many steps I'd expect to switch an audio output device). The Airpods are certainly very nice during the initial pair process, but that's a one-time thing on both devices.

The scary part to me is: the APPs do have slightly better UX on Apple devices. And it isn't just the value-add features like "automatic" switching and spatial audio; I do experience slightly more AV desync on the XM4s on iPhone. The XM4s sometimes won't connect to my Mac. But these issues are entirely and totally Apple device specific; I also regularly use the XM4s with a Galaxy S21 Ultra and Windows 11 PC, and they're just where I'd expect BT headphones to land there. I really think this is an "Intel Mac situation", where Apple is intentionally ruining (or ignoring, and thus leaving to languish) the experience of integrating non-Apple devices so they can sell their accessories. Then, even educated customers start saying "the APPs just work better" even though what's really happening is, the iPhone is just working worse with non-APPs, and Apple is pushing their monopoly once again.

And I say all that coming to the conclusion: If friends ask me what earbeans to buy, if they have an iPhone, just buy APPs. They have better UX, in very small but nonetheless extant ways, even if I'm convinced it's because of Apple's monopoly control over consumer devices. Maybe more-so: they have a very neutral, unoffensive sound profile. Its boring. But the quality is competitive with any other bean out there, which is to say: great. It works for nearly any type of music, and no one will complain about it.

None of the other "tech company beans" can compete with the APPs. Some are cheaper. All of them suck. This meaning: Samsung, Microsoft, Google beans.

But if you're on Android; the APPs are still a top 3 choice. However, I'd add: if you want a neutral sound profile, the Bose QC beans (non-sport) have better noise cancellation and comparable audio quality. If you'd welcome or accept a more bass-heavy sound signature and larger (yet still comfortable) in-ear profile: the Sony XM4s are the best beans money can buy.

Bluetooth is such a fussy, unreliable protocol.

I’d love to have a new, modern protocol that simply requires some kind of basic, physical connection to pair two devices. That way, I’d always know exactly which two devices are connected and a third couldn’t break it so easily.

Of course I expect that it would lead to something with the unreliability of Bluetooth and the requirement that you physically touch the devices together every time it loses its connection.

Right, for sure. I was thinking more like a wire or cable that physically connected the two devices. If the wire is connected, then they can share audio, else they can’t.

I don’t know, my experience with Samsung’s buds plus and buds live has been flawless.

> I recently switched to a pair of Sony Bluetooth headphones as I don't like the too-neutral AirPods Pro EQ curve, and while they sound excellent, the UX really leaves a bit to be desired.

I, personally, don't understand this. I'm a bit of a stickler for making sure my audio quality is good. I validate the products I'm using sound good using local device recording as well as HD echo test numbers before I use them during real life meetings. I'm on the phone at least a couple hours a day and it's baffling how many people assume that their AirPods sound good. The TL;DR of it is - they don't.

But with respect to the "UX" side of the house, I'm curious what you really need? I own a number of Jabra and Sony products that I can - pull out of their cases on any day at any point in time and they will work with no input from me. Do people fiddle with EQ and other settings often? The only thing I really do once I get the audio setup is make sure the firmware is up to date from time to time.

How many devices do you use your wireless headphones with? If it's >1 (or maybe 2), the experience is horrid in my experience even with the AirPods unless (in the AirPods case) they are all Apple devices with logic in the OS for handing off the connection.

I could not use my AirPods with my old Windows laptop because everytime it got in range it would steal them away from any device, even sometimes when in sleep (the Surface Pro's crappy sleep mode may have had something to do with it).

> Manually having to re-pair once in every blue moon, one earbud playing while the other isn't, no automatic device switching without having to go through the Settings app everytime, A/V desync, dodgy mic quality, earbuds not waking up correctly when removing them from the case, etc are all part of the non-AirPods Bluetooth experience.

Many of these have been part of my experience with both my Airpods and Airpod Pros.

My AirPods Max pair horribly with my iPhone 13 mini, much worse than a pair of $20 Bluetooth earphones that of course sound much worse.

I have cheapy TOZO from Amazon, and honestly have none of those issues. At my desk, I toggle between the laptop and phone without issue...

I have a couple pairs of other "quite cheap" BT earbuds from Amazon and they're all quite good ergonomically. They paired easily, stay paired, charge automatically, etc.

I don't use them as a microphone very often (as I have an arm-mounted Blue Yeti), but when I've had to use them, they also worked without me getting complaints from the other side.

Maybe Airpods are wildly better somehow, but I can't see how much better they could be versus the totally acceptable experience I've had with the cheap ones.

That's all part of the Airpods experience for me. Randomly have to reinsert into the case to get both earbuds working, devices I've connected to won't work if I've connected more devices, if I reboot from Linux to windows I have to drop them and re-pair them (I assume they pair based on a device id?), sometimes they don't charge but it's impossible to tell because when I open them it just shows yellow. Maybe it's because I have the first gen and no apple devices, but I really don't care for them.

My wife's soundcores work great.

My Bose over-ear are a much better experience.

Pretty much all multipoint Bluetooth headsets these days "just work". Hell, the only real upgrade they could make is muxing multiple audio channels from multiple devices. Beyond that, I honest to god don't see how Bluetooth headsets could really be improved.

> one earbud playing while the other isn't,

Funny, i deal with this nearly every day with my AirPods Pro. Often the pods do this when switching from high bandwidth listening to low bandwidth for mic/headset usage.

One of my past coworkers worked on AirPods hardware.

One thing he could've said under gazillions of NDAs: software came much behind the hardware.

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> My bose headphones that used to work great now don't work as well as airpods.

My AirPods experience has also declined the past couple of years so I think it's just over-engineering and ruining the perfectly functional Bluetooth and/or audio stack rather than an intentional attempt at ruining non-Apple headphones.

Can people stop overusing and throwing the word “monopoly” every time they’re not happy with an Apple service or product?

What’s next? Apple is monopoly on ARM? Smartwatches? Monitors? Touchpads?

It sounds like a cheap internet attempt to bash a company using a lately popular but completely irrelevant word in relation to AirPods.

I use both AirPods and Bose QC35 II for years, everyday for hours, without any issues. I haven’t had my Bose quality of experience degrade, so I don’t know what you’re on about.

You enable pairing mode, select your headphones in list of Bluetooth devices, that’s it.

They even swap between Mac and iPhone without much issues.

Apple has not degraded 3p Bluetooth - that is bullshit. My Bose work just the same as they did years ago and behave similarly to my AirPods.

You cannot expect Apple to not develop better features in their own products.

This is not anything close to monopoly and it’s wild to say that.

> …Airpods have a ton of extra UX settings in iOS that are not available to other bluetooth headsets.

To be fair, AirPods have "a ton" of hardware capabilities built in that are also not technically available, but that's kind of exactly the point, right?

Oofta. Is anyone having trouble with white text on black background? That was a design anti pattern that I thought died out in the early 2,000's.

How’s that an anti-pattern? With dark mode, it’s more in style than ever now.

It's an accessibility problem, especially for people (like me) who have astigmatism. But y'all don't look away from white text on black background to a bright light source (like a page of black text on a white background) and get a "burned in" impression of the previous page in your vision? Lucky you.

Dark mode is fine, please let the user choose to have dark mode when she wants to.

I wish HN had a dark mode option.

Whip up some css to your liking and inject it into hn's HTML - there's lots of examples of people doing things like that.

I only browse it on Safari in iOS when I am wasting time.

Out of sheer curiosity, is it just the white on black and would a "softer" light-grey on dark-grey be better for you? Or just generally light on dark?

The problem in general is the stark contrast between white and black. My editor is set with a grey background with grey text (or low chroma colors), and it works great.

I actually prefer it. It's easier on my eyes.

This is called "dark mode" nowadays, and it's a feature.

Same for me. It produces some glare for me and I use dark mode almost everywhere.

I also don't like the huge font. Looks almost what I'd expect an h2 to look like.

There IS also a difference (as well) between Dark Mode and pure white text (or close to it) on pure black background. Usually a Dark Mode will have the contrast be slightly less (both text and bg are grays).

Sorry to point this out, but it IS a UI design site, and the person is griping about the minutia problems of an Apple device, so: fair game.

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