And it's Apple, so of course you can't turn it off.
Or they'll provide haptic in-ear custom vibrations in AirPod Pros 5, and their slogan will be "Your ears never felt better".
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.
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.
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!
> 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).
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.
The 'device connected' sound is pretty loud as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.