I haven't personally tried it on a MacBook but I do know that colleagues seem to use their bluetooth headphones just fine with no clear quality drop.
Edit: actually there might have been some movement on this after all? Some comments in that ticket seem to indicate that this has been improved on master.
I've been using it for weeks (months?) with great results.
Super interesting, thank you!
So apparently this "mode" comes from the headphones switching to HFP. Interesting that in this mode the left button presses are ignored...
I'll try to notice when it's doing this. I have the feeling it's when I am on a call but not all programs do that. I use Slack, Facetime, and sometimes Google Meet via Chrome. I'm pretty confident only some of these trigger the switch, and whenever the call ends the phones go back to A2DP.
Instead every app seems to figure out their own behavior for this.
Once paired, two audio output devices are created - "Bose QuietComfort 35 Stereo" (A2DP) and "Bose QuietComfort 35 Hands-Free AG Audio" (HFP). The A2DP one is the default output source for the PC, so I get this behaviour:
* When I'm not in a call of any form, normal system audio (Youtube, Spotify etc.) comes through A2DP with good quality
* When I start a call, the headphones switch to HFP (you can tell due to increase in hiss) and audio quality drops. During this time you can't hear what the PC is playing over the A2DP output (unless I switch the default Windows output).
I'd be curious to know if you get different behaviour on Macbooks because the above "one profile at a time" always seemed to me to be a fixed limitation of the hardware and Bluetooth.