- The AirPods Pro and AirPods Max generally work well. I've experienced most of the annoyances the OP lists occasionally, but not regularly, although the "autoselect the device want you want" outsmarts itself semi-regularly. (Not quite enough to make me disable it, but it's close.) I have never attempted to control the volume of the AirPods Pro using Siri because it sounds like a bag of hurt.
- My Bose SoundLink II will immediately say it's connected to the last device that it paired with when I turn it on, but sound won't come out of it. Depending on what seems to be random chance, either it'll start playing in ~15 seconds, or it will repeat its "Connected to [Device]" voice cue and then immediately be available for play, or once in a while it will put itself back in "I'm not connected!" mode and I will have to go into Bluetooth settings to manually connect.
- My Vanatoo desktop speakers have Bluetooth, and once they're connected to the phone they don't want to let go. I'll have successfully sent sound to the SoundLink, or the AirPods, or just the phone's own speaker, and then suddenly the sound will mysteriously vanish because the Vanatoos have woken up and grabbed the signal. (This sometimes happens before the Vanatoos have powered up their own internal amplifiers.)
- The Bluetooth pairing in my mother's car consistently has the weirdest behavior: I connect, it starts playing a podcast or music, and the audio just cuts out every four seconds or so at a regular cadence. It seems like it might be playing just a little too fast and there's a buffering issue. If I disconnect the Bluetooth and reconnect it, then everything's fine. But the first connection after the car starts will always be broken.
I mean, I know that's all anecdotal. But at least for me, the AirPods are the least broken Bluetooth audio devices I use. I get that "it works less frustratingly for many people most of the time" is not nearly as catchy as "it just works," but until Bluetooth gets properly sorted out in 2083 or whenever, I guess I'll live with it.
Requirements aren't crazy. It just needs to support uncompressed 96/24, full duplex.
Must work at 2.4Ghz--even in the face of 200 WiFi access points and 3 times that number of devices.
Must stay in sync to within a millisecond ... even though there is a large bag of RF absorbing water in between them.
Should work on a battery smaller than a thumbnail.
Should process audio but not generate enough heat that you notice it in your ear.
I can go on. The engineering requirements are quite severe.
... for something that we can do with a 10 cent wire, ironically.
At low range and less than 1/100 the speed of wifi.
> Must stay in sync to within a millisecond
If you have a working data connection at all, that level of sync is trivial. It only takes a few bits to align things, and they use pretty big buffers.
> even though there is a large bag of RF absorbing water in between them
That's hard.
> Should work on a battery smaller than a thumbnail.
That part is quite hard. But also it doesn't apply to over-ear headphones.
> Should process audio but not generate enough heat that you notice it in your ear.
I'm skeptical of that part being hard. How many milliwatts do those codecs take? Also once you add the battery constraints then the heat levels solve themselves.
Previously there hasn't really been much official support and implementations are messy and differ across platforms.
Source: have worked with various BLE stacks. Getting this stuff working well is difficult. I have much respect for companies that actually get it to work reliably.
Funnily enough, I try to avoid Bluetooth as much as possible and everything is wired on my setups.
My main problem with Airpods is the physical design, which simply refuses to stay in my ears at all, rendering them totally useless, even if I'm just sitting relatively stationary at a desk.
My Samsung Galaxy Buds have been doing pretty well, though I just started having a problem where the left earbud is extremely quiet.
At this point I’m starting to believe that even Linux has a better Bluetooth stack than windows and OS X.
iOS is okayish but I have random issues with my AirPods. Generally they just stop being recognized and I have to reset them and to setup then again. Boring.
With Pipewire, this seems to have come true in it's entirety. Connecting multipoint Bluetooth headsets to multiple Linux devices works astonishingly well, and I don't think I've ever had a connection drop or encountered a real "bug" with it. The only annoyance is that if you have one device playing audio and another starts playing, it will cut out for a fraction of a second while the headset negotiates it's connection. Besides that it's almost scarily flawless.
There's a whole tangent of complaints I could make about the unified "modern" settings application Windows introduced I think in Windows 10 (maybe 8.1).
I've tried many other brands (I had lost two pairs of AirPods from all the travel I was doing) and everything else was an awful experience for anything but simply listening to something. I have to manually disconnect from my phone then re-connect to my computer (AirPods solve this), people could never hear me through the microphones, and generally I was better off not using the "controls" the other brands offered.
I really wanted to like cheaper alternatives, but they're just not good. AirPods, however, are fantastic.
The Airpods are set to connect automatically to my macbook when I wear them AND THEY DON'T. EVER. And then calls on my iPhone will stupidly decide to connect and route audio to airpods that I'm not even wearing while they are just sitting on my desk when the phone was literally moments before using the handset speaker for a video. Know what bluetooth device does not have these problems? You guessed it, the one not made by Apple. Like...come on.
I really want to like airpods, but they're just not good.