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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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 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 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'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).

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

SO LOUD