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Comment by liamwestray | Hacker News Reader

It would be so nice if Apple reverted whatever regression they introduced in their Bluetooth stack 2 OS releases ago.

My AirPods don’t connect correctly about 20% of the time (at minimum) and switch connections for absolutely no reason to my Mac or iPhone despite those devices having no audio activity (in the middle of an active audio call on the active device, no less).

I turn off Bluetooth on the device I’m not using when I need to do a work call as a precaution.

Every headset I had before AirPods worked better than this.

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Glad I'm not the only one experiencing this. All of my Bluetooth headphones (Sony WH1000XM4, WF1000XM4, AirPods Max) have experienced higher than usual dropouts in noisy areas. This wasn't a problem when I had AirPods Pro several years ago connected to an iPhone 11 Max.

On its own Bluetooth works quite well, but where there are a lot of active devices it only takes one device to drown out others. I've got an old Magic Trackpad which reconnects often and most of the time that results in Bluetooth audio dropping out. Since there are lots of people using lots of BT devices now I guess it's a tragedy of the commons situation...

To tangent on the device switching. Are there any headphones that mix all active streams? Why not?

Some guesses:

1. Energy use? It should be pretty easy to avoid complex mixing when only one stream is active anyways. If multiple streams are active then it is probably worth the energy cost.

2. Bluetooth bandwidth? I can imagine that if you are using the same hardware to manage all connections you can run out of bandwidth?

Because this bugs me a lot. My headphones (non AirPods) usually get it right. But even then the switching is often slow. Of course they also sometimes connect to the wrong device and then it is a huge pain.

When Apple's top end headphones cost $600, and plenty of headphones saree in the $300 range, I don't think it's a cost thing. I wish there were headphones that did this, that would be a real game changer.

Genki Waveform is supposed to do this for two streams but it's still at the kickstarter stage so ymmv. (The pitch is primarily for Nintendo Switch users since they have successfully launched three other devices to that user base to date, including a USB-C-to-Bluetooth audio adapter.)

I remember Siracusa saying something on ATP about it's how they're transitioning the driver model in OS X/iOS away from kernel extensions or something, apparently the benefit is more robust drivers in the future but there are growing pains...

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