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Comment by leipert | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: Why don’t you answer the call from the Mac? Or do you have that continuity feature disabled?

I usually want to walk away from the computer. I sit at the computer enough already. If a call comes in, I want - sometimes need - to be able to walk away.

The long/short of it is, both devices 'know' about the airpods. Call comes in to phone, during an answer, having airpods switch to the phone quickly - like, under 2 seconds - is what I'm expecting. I'm not sure that's an unreasonable expectation (maybe it is?). At some point, I would think, given all the neural-core-AI stuff in the phones and ecosystem, it should know that I always switch airpods to phone to talk... maybe do it automatically at some point?

The phone now knows my daily routine, giving me traffic updates 10 minutes before I normally leave to hit the gym. Yet... the 'fill in your email' prompts on the phone suggest 'my' email address is something I have not actively used in 11 years. I don't understand the 'why' behind some of these things. If the device is going to learn... when will it learn I don't use that email address any longer? Obviously separate issue, but... as has gone on for decades - we get loads of new features, but often little attention paid to clean up and refine last year's new features.

Why have the Mac ring if you don’t answer from the Mac? I turned that off in settings. Still text via Mac though!

"settings" was vague. I looked in system settings - nothing there. Apparently, it's a 'facetime' setting? Will this make switching 'audio from mac via airpods' to 'audio from iphone via airpods' any faster?

You should be able to tap the speakerphone icon on your iPhone, choose AirPods, and they’ll switch immediately in my experience

“Immediately” is not the word. As the phone is answered, it’s trying to automatically switch. Pressing that key while it’s in the process of auto switch just confuses it, and typically stops the switch process altogether. Then you have to do it again.

Fwiw, this seemed to work smoothly two years ago. And then… updates. AirPod firmware updates. iPhone updates. macOS updates. Nothing works the same as it did 2 years ago for maybe … 2 months or so. And there’s no going back. :(

I've often said that Airpods are the best bluetooth headphones I've ever bought, and they still suck.

This "why" has been growing since Steve passed. I have been an Apple user for 20+ years. The experience has been slowly going downhill for the last 5 years. I think they survived on Steve's vision for the first couple of years after his passing. The brains behind Apple are still there, clearly, M1, M2... the vision is missing. The why's you mention seem to be those unpolished pieces Steve would never have allowed the release of.

This is why I (and many others) I think still have some fond memories of Snow Leopard, marketed as 'bug fix' release. That feels like the last time there was a united push to polish up existing stuff without throwing in 'new' things.

I just remember being glad it was only $29.

This is one of those lessons that we as a software dev community seem unable to absorb. Polish is universally better received than flaky new features, and the releases we view most fondly are the ones that are fast and reliable, and yet we never seem capable of holding off on the new features to fix existing pain points.

> Polish is universally better received than flaky new features, and the releases we view most fondly are the ones that are fast and reliable

It's far from universal. Most users never expect to understand their software in the first place, and so put a lot more value on new features. If anything I'd say developers put too much effort into polish, since we're the very small demographic that actually appreciates it.

That makes sense! I don’t use my AirPods with my work MacBook, as I have separate Apple IDs. So the continuity feature doesn’t work for me anyhow.

Also: I don’t get a lot of calls anyway. But when I do, I tend to wander around as well. So it makes complete sense.

While not a solution to your problem, you can answer the call on your Mac and hand it off to your phone.

This was one of the first things I disabled with Continuity. As for why, it's not that complicated.

1) It's a distraction. I am also one of those people who turned on "Silence unknown callers" to send everyone I don't know to voicemail. If it's important, you'll get a message there. My phone either lives in my pocket or is on the desk next to me, so it's very unlikely I'd miss something.

2) At least with AirPods, although I have "connect automatically" turned on, I will never intentionally connect them to more than one source at a time.

Therin lies madness and bugs.

Idk how you live without silence unknown callers. I get an upwards of 20 spam calls a day interrupting me otherwise while using the phone.

I do use it, not sure how that was unclear.

Ah sorry, My brain completely fumbled your sentence.

No worries,

I had to reread my own sentence to make sure I wasn't being a complete moron.

NOTE TO SELF: COFFEE COFFEE COFFEE

I disabled that as it has some very confusing and undesired behaviour. For example if you're listening to Spotify on your Mac, then get a call on your iPhone you hit pause on your keyboard media keys so you can pick up the call - and it hangs up.

I feel many objections to Apple’s products behavior are responded with “a suggestion “ to just follow Apple way.

Oh. I wasn’t objecting. I am not getting many calls, maybe one a week, but the explanation of “picking up and wandering around” makes complete sense.

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